“With luck,” Rhode Island theatre owner William Hanney “will offer a road map for other struggling arts organizations in Massachusetts, injecting some business savvy into enterprises that suffered from an excess of vision and a deficit of common sense.”
Tag: 11.30.09
In Praise Of Audiobooks, Which Have Not Died After All
“It takes a good three days to record a medium-sized novel. Just you and the words, for hour after hour. There are pitfalls you really only discover when you’re reading aloud. … And then there are other problems.” Such as some actors’ notoriously “loud stomach noises.”
Actors’ Equity Executive Director Resigns
John P. Connolly has left the union “four months before the end of his term. Longtime Equity officer Carol Waaser, who had been set to retire in February, has assumed the role of acting exec director, serving in the post until a new exec director is selected next year.”
Art Collectors In Installments
Set up in 2004 by the Arts Council, Own Art enables people to take home a piece of contemporary art straight way but then pay for it in 10 monthly interest-free instalments, borrowing anything up to £2,000. So far the scheme has made over 14,500 loans to purchase art valued in excess of £11.6 million.
E-Books Are Catching On
In a recent holiday outlook report, Sarah Rotman Epps of Forrester, a research and business-consulting firm, predicted yearly sales of 3 million e-readers by the end of 2009, noting that e-reader sales reached 1 million in 2008. “With 30 percent of sales occurring in the holiday season,” Forrester’s report added, “we expect sales in 2010 to double.”
And This Year’s Nominees For Bad Sex In Fiction Awards Are…
“A trap people fall into is an earnest anatomical description of sex. The difficulty with the anatomical is that it can read like a bit of a textbook. “To stop it doing so, they will put in flowery metaphors from the animal kingdom, but you don’t need that detail.”
What Does Borders’ Failure Mean For Publishing?
“It’s tempting to see the end of Borders as another consequence of the hurricane that is hitting the usually tranquil boulevards of the British book world. Tempting, but wrong.”
German Composer Wins Grawemeyer Award
“Spheres,” by York Hoeller, has won the 2010 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music. Hoeller is professor emeritus of music composition at the Cologne University of Music.
Royal Society Puts 350 Years Of Amazing History Online
“The letters to the society record the march of science from the earliest blood transfusions, and attempts to capture lightning, to the confirmation of Einstein’s theory of relativity, the discovery of DNA and Stephen Hawking’s first musings on black holes. The letters reveal a history of failure eclipsed by success, and the maturation of science from a haphazard amateur pursuit to the systematised professionalism of today.”
Nutcracker Smackdown (New York Awash In ‘Em)
“American Ballet Theater is announcing on Monday that it will establish a “Nutcracker” franchise at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December 2010. The performances will go head to head with City Ballet’s longstanding “Nutcracker” run, the Balanchine version that has been around since 1954. To make matters more interesting, the Mark Morris company plans to stage its own run of Mr. Morris’s version, “The Hard Nut,” at the Brooklyn Academy, to close three days before the Ballet Theater version opens.”