London book stores are slashing prices as Christmas approaches. “The stores usually try to restrict discounting to slower-selling books, keeping chart-toppers at the full price, particularly in the peak month of December. But this year they have been forced by competition from supermarkets to slash prices of their most popular titles.”
Tag: 12.08.03
Steve Jobs: Recording Companies Need To Be Educated
How did Apple get recording companies to buy in to the iTunes download store? “We told them the music subscription services they were pushing were going to fail. MusicNet was gonna fail, Pressplay was gonna fail. Here’s why: People don’t want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45s, then they bought LPs, they bought cassettes, they bought 8-tracks, then they bought CDs. They’re going to want to buy downloads. They didn’t see it that way. There were people running around — business-development people — who kept pointing to AOL as the great model for this and saying, ‘No, we want that — we want a subscription business’.”
Criticism Of Disney’s Eisner Growing
Is Michael Eisner vulnerable as head of Disney? After Roy Disney quit Disney’s board last week, more public criticism of Eisner has surfaced. “Despite a charm offensive by Mr. Eisner in response to the board uprising last year – wooing anxious or skeptical directors, institutional investors, partners and members of the news media over cocktails and in interviews – many say he has just papered over a lack of substantive change at the company.”
The Changing Balanchine
“Once upon a time it was easy to defend the orthodoxy of the Balanchine style in practice. It was on stage with the master’s imprimatur at the New York State Theatre. Things are not that simple anymore. Suddenly, Balanchine is everywhere. And his dances simply don’t look the same on Martins’ New York City Ballet, Tomasson’s San Francisco Ballet, Mitchell’s Dancer Theatre of Harlem, the Suzanne Farrell Ballet or in Villella’s own Miami City Ballet.”
What Is Matthew Bourne, Exactly?
“When Matthew Bourne was on the way up, it was generally accepted that what he did was choreography. When his 1995 Swan Lake became a huge success, however, dance critics began to say that he was not a choreographer but a director. The (sniffy) implication was that London is full of mere directors, whereas the world has few true choreographers. That Bourne was proficient at arranging a piece of theatre was not to be denied; but how efficient was he at making a dance?”
Some NBC Affiliates Refuse to Carry Saturday Night Live
“Over the weekend, half a dozen or so NBC stations refused to show “Saturday Night Live” because Al Sharpton, a presidential candidate, was hosting. They objected either because of the equal time rules or out of fear the 90-minute program would embarrass them by amounting to more political coverage than most TV stations offer in six months.”
Coetzee Shows Up For Nobel
JM Coetzee turns up in Stockholm to accept his Nobel. “Although he did not turn up to collect either of his Booker Prizes in 1993 and 1999, he delivered this year’s Nobel Lecture last night and will receive the prize itself on Wednesday. What Coetzee will not do is make himself available for interview. He belongs to that small band of heroic writers who – without being as reclusive as Pynchon or Salinger – have declined to make themselves available for publicity purposes.”
Why “Angels” Is So Powerful
“Angels in America is, like any good funeral, more for the living than for the dead. That’s where “life beyond hope” comes in. Even if an AIDS cure were announced tomorrow, survivors and caretakers couldn’t simply block out the last quarter-century and groove on the latest Rufus Wainwright disc. You’ve seen the purple leg – in the flesh – and there’s no going back.”
Kennedy Center Honors
Comedienne Carol Burnett, country music star Loretta Lynn, soul legend James Brown, film and stage director Mike Nichols and violinist Itzhak Perlman get their Kennedy Center Honors. “In time-honored style, each was enveloped in adulation, encomiums supplied by a parade of fellow celebs.”
Why “Angels” Don’t Fly On TV
The TV version of “Angels in America” has been well-hyped. Jan Herman watched and came away disappointed. “The common complaint that big films come off poorly on the tube applies doubly in this case to big plays. It’s hard to imagine how Nichols spent $60 million when the production looks like a routine TV drama, despite the special effects. Actually, in contrast to the play, which largely dispensed with realistic scenery and left most of the design to the imagination, Sunday night’s “big event” often looked so set-bound and old-fashioned in the way it was shot that routine TV dramas have more edge.”