“Readers reacted strongly to recent news that they would no longer see three longtime columnists in the paper. The movie critic, it turns out, held unusual sway in the region.”
Tag: 11.11.07
Where Would Money For Striking Writers Come From?
Good question. A bleak new report “concludes that much of the income — past and future — that studios and writers have been fighting about has already gone to the biggest stars, directors and producers in the form of ballooning participation deals. A participation is a share in the gross revenue, not the profit, of a movie.”
Tim Page’s Bad Day
The Washington Post’s longtime classical music critic and Pulitzer-winner got one too many spam emails. Irritated, he fired back at a flack from city councilman Marion Barry, demanding to be taken off the councilman’s email list. “Must we hear about it every time this Crack Addict attempts to rehabilitate himself with some new – and typically half witted – political grandstanding?”
Study: Entertainment Choices Correspond With Politics
“It turns out that — just as there are conservatives, liberals and moderates — there are people with red, blue and purple taste.”
The Uncompromising Kurtag
“A strange, uncanny force seemed to loom behind each bar, as if the notes on the page were pinholes burning with light from a place unseen. This curious power is an essential quality of the stripped-down, urgent art of Gyorgy Kurtag. He writes music of extreme concentration and searing existential honesty. Each piece costs him dearly.”
A Lear Who Talks (Doesn’t Fight)
At 64, Ian McKellan is playing his first King Lear. “I’ve only begun to get a grip on it after 30 performances. Every speech, every word can be mined. It’s so rich, so fraught; it makes such sense.”
A XM-Sirius Merger – Good For Consumers?
“Would a single satellite radio company produce more or less interesting and entertaining content? Would the menu of music, news, sports, comedy and talk programming get longer or shorter — and at what price? Wouldn’t reducing the satellite field to one company lead inevitably to service cuts and price increases?”
Theatre Of The Right (Where Is It?)
There’s plenty of liberal theatre in Britain. But “where is the theatre that challenges that liberal consensus, which makes those of us who consider ourselves a part of it think a little? Where is the theatre of the right?”
A TV Show Exclusively For The Web
“MySpace will promote the show by serving 500 million Web pages that include ads for ‘quarterlife’. Widely thought to be the most expensive Web-only TV show yet, ‘quarterlife’ is financed by a combination of venture capitalists and advertisers.”
Norman Mailer – The Force Of Personality
“In the late `60s, that personality made him the most vivid presence on the American literary scene, an outspoken, two-fisted, eloquent, occasionally profound commentator on an America shaken by war, riots and assassination. In later years his notoriety dimmed – he was a novelist destined never to write a great novel, an apocalyptic visionary whose apocalypse never arrived.”