“While some underwriting announcements come awful close to resembling the commercial networks’ ubiquitous 30-second spots, the FCC does draw the line when it comes to public TV’s flagrant promotion of for-profit products and services, like the sale of insurance, cars and airline tickets, as well as running spots for political campaigns or certain issues.”
Archives for June 2014
Successful Designers Today Have To Design For Things They Don’t Even Know About Yet
“Today’s innovations demand that we design with the unknown, the conjectural and the hypothetical in mind. Think about it: even the more complex interactions and interfaces made possible by mobile in recent years focus largely on real-time moments; one frame in the movie of someone’s life. But as personalization and predictive analytics work to anticipate what’s next, the emerging ecosystem will extend into the user’s future.”
David Byrne: Pop Musicians Can’t Just Stand There And Sing. There Has To Be More Of A Show
The live shows don’t have to be a musical, but something more going on than someone standing up there singing. A lot of them are not inclined to that and it’s going to be hard for them. I got to hear a fair amount of music and there are so many who turn their back on the audience and the stage lights are dim, maybe some colored lights are playing, and you go, “I’ll just go home and listen to the record.”
British Regional Theatres May Begin Cinemacasting
“Regional theatres are being targeted by a new live broadcasting scheme that will transmit shows from outside London to cinemas across the UK.” Organizer Quantum Digital “estimates that venues taking part in the programme could expect to earn up to £30,000 per broadcast.”
Mary Rodgers, Composer Of ‘Once Upon A Mattress’ And Daughter Of Broadway Royalty, Dead At 83
“As the daughter of a famous musical theatre composer (Richard Rodgers), a musical theatre successful composer herself (Once Upon a Mattress) and the mother of a musical theatre composer (Adam Guettel), [she] held a singular place in the history of the American theatre.”
Spain Returns “Small Museum’s” Worth Of Artifacts To Colombia
“Spain returned 691 artefacts, spanning nearly 3,000 years of history, to Colombia on Tuesday. The pieces were recovered by Spanish police during a drug trafficking and money laundering investigation in 2003. Since then, the works have been kept for conservation in Madrid’s Museum of the Americas, where 885 recovered pieces were studied.”
Why Are Orchestra Salaries So Much Lower In Britain Than In America?
“The average pay of a sample of US orchestras in 2013 and 2014 makes jaw-dropping reading for anyone in a British orchestra.” Tom Service argues that the problem is not that U.S. musicians are overpaid.
Is This The Strangest Job In Retail? Staff Organist
For 25 years, Peter Richard Conte has playued two 45-minute recitals a day on the Grand Court Organ (said to be the largest musical instrument on Earth) in the old John Wanamaker department store, now a Macy’s, in center city Philadelphia.
‘Anti-Amazon Law’ Unanimously Passed By French Parliament
The legislation – actually nicknamed the “Anti-Amazon Law” by the French media and lawmakers, and intended to protect the country’s many independent bookstores – forbids any bookseller from offering free shipping along with a 5% discount, already the maximum allowable in France.
Sinkhole At Corvette Museum Is Now Its Top Attraction
In the 4½ months since the sinkhole opened up at the Kentucky site and swallowed eight vintage cars, attendance is up almost 60% over the same period last year. So the museum’s directors (following AAMD deaccession guidelines, no doubt) have decided to preserve the sinkhole, or at least part of it.
John Lithgow On The Single Greatest Challenge Of Playing King Lear
“[It’s] modulation. For Lear, the first half of the play contains four titanic temper tantrums of near bipolar intensity, and the second half tips over into dementia, bottomless grief and (spoiler alert) death. In rehearsing these opening scenes, I need to constantly remind myself how far I still have to go, like a marathoner husbanding his resources.”
Shia LaBeouf Arrested For Disrupting Broadway ‘Cabaret’
“The former star of the Transformers movie franchise was smoking and yelling during the performance, the police said. Officers escorted him out of the show during intermission. … [He was seen] handcuffed and in tears as six officers surrounded him outside the theater.”
Tampa Bay’s Florida Orchestra Names Next Music Director
“The global search went on for three years, but in the end it took just two key performances for Florida Orchestra leaders to know they had their conductor. On Tuesday, they named British musician Michael Francis as the orchestra’s new music director. Leaders were so wowed by Francis, they ended their hunt a full year earlier than expected.”
Tamara Rojo And Carlos Acosta On Innocence, Aging, And ‘Romeo And Juliet’
Acosta: “In the beginning when you see Romeo and the other kids they just want to fight and joke around with harlots. … But then you witness a transformation inspired by powerful love. When I first played this role I was too young to understand that complexity.” Rojo: “I think life experience gives you things but it also takes away. It takes away naiveté. And it takes away belief.”
There Actually Was A Real-Life Mary Poppins
She was the great-aunt of P.L. Travers, the writer who created Poppins, and Travers wrote about her in a 1941 short story, originally intended as a private Christmas gift, which will published this holiday season.
The Five Ingredients That Make A Great Movie Showdown
“Yet despite $200 million budgets and A-list actors and auteur-ish directors and world-class composers, editors, set designers, and writers, [the supposedly climactic scenes of big Hollywood films] rarely thrill. In fact, they generally disappoint.” T.R. Witcher looks at what’s missing – and which movies get it right. (includes video clips)
Top Posts From AJBlogs 06.26.14
Boston MFA Gives Up Eight Nigerian Antiquities.
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-06-27
Music in the Age of Streaming
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-06-26
NEA 2015 Jazz Masters – who stretched “jazz”
AJBlog: Jazz Beyond Jazz | Published 2014-06-26
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Julius Rudel, 93
“Mr. Rudel was the maestro and the impresario, the principal conductor and the director of City Opera for 22 years (1957-79), working in the orchestra pit while running the company on shoestring budgets, signing contracts, casting productions and nurturing young singers like José Carreras, Plácido Domingo, Sherrill Milnes and Beverly Sills.”
Unlocking The Puzzle Of What Makes Brains Creative
“What, in short, is the essence of creativity? Over the course of my life, I’ve kept coming back to two more-specific questions: What differences in nature and nurture can explain why some people suffer from mental illness and some do not? And why are so many of the world’s most creative minds among the most afflicted?”
Milestone: For The First Time, More UK Residents Get Their News Online Than From Print Newspapers
“The number of people using websites and apps to find out about the news has overtaken the number reading printed newspapers for the same purpose in the UK, according to the country’s media watchdog.”
College Education Is Under Attack. But Maybe The Debate We’re Having Is The Wrong One
“The fact is that by focusing exclusively on monetary issues, the current conversation prevents us not only from remembering the higher objectives of an undergraduate education, but also from recognizing just how bad a job our institutions have been doing at fulfilling them. Colleges and universities have a lot to answer for; if they want to regain the support of the larger society, they need to prove that they are worthy of it.”
Rare Strad Viola Fails To Find A Buyer At Auction
Whatever the reason, the “Macdonald” viola — a rare Stradivari viola once owned and played by Peter Schidlof of the Amadeus Quartet — failed to attract a buyer when a sealed-bid sale came to an end on Wednesday and no one had offered to pay the record $45 million asking price.
Touchscreens Are Shaping The Ways Our Kids Interact With The World (And A Design Revolution Awaits)
“As the touchscreen itself increasingly merges with its environment, and embedded technology goes mainstream, this raises questions around design for the next generation of digital experiences and services. Designing for Generation Moth is going to require very different skillsets and ways of thinking beyond what we do now.”
Fight To Save A Failed Architectural Masterpiece That Went Terribly Wrong
“It was going to be a shopping mall and hotel on a scale never seen before, where people could drive right up the sides of the building to their destination, whether it was the swimming pool, the heliport, or even the top dome designed by Buckminster Fuller.”
Data’s In: Technology Is Widening The Education Gap, Not “Leveling The Playing Field”
“While technology has often been hailed as the great equalizer of educational opportunity, a growing body of evidence indicates that in many cases, tech is actually having the opposite effect: It is increasing the gap between rich and poor, between whites and minorities, and between the school-ready and the less-prepared.”