The bloggers over at Vulture must have drunk the Kool-Aid. Or maybe they just LOVE Andrew Stanton. But their not-so-hidden agenda to stump for Wall-E's Oscar nom is getting the best of their senses. Lane Brown has been closely following Wall-E's Oscar future for some time. Then it started getting heated when Jessica Coen became annoyed at EW's Dave Karger for not predicting a nomination. Then it somehow morphed into the hottest film story of the month. Jan. 2 Brown writes a headline: "Jeffrey Wells Finally Relents, Predicts a Best-Picture Nomination for Wall-E." Then yesterday two posts: one claiming Wall-E's EVE had a single vote to be considered for a nomination and then later that Wall-E's director, Andrew Stanton, was snubbed by the Directors Guild. Then more on the subject today.
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The Women's Project and Anne Bogart's SITI Company are presenting Virginia Woolf's only play, Freshwater, for only 34 performances beginning Jan. 15. And it may be a world premiere decades in the making. According to the press release, "Women's Project Producing Artistic Director Julie Crosby has wanted to produce Freshwater since first she discovered the comedy a dozen years ago while teaching at Columbia University."
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We don't usually pay much attention to Mad Magazine, but when we saw their cover for their "20 Dumbest People, Events and Things" featured a version of Heath Ledger's Joker, we had to laugh. Although Ledger himself doesn't make the list (the complete 20 can be seen after the jump), accidentally killing yourself when you are about to star in one of the biggest movies in history should certainly get you ranked as one of the dumbest people. But in a year with so many other dumb dumb details, I guess he didn't make the cut. He nearly made it on our first "Naughty & Nice List" but again, not quite.
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The Chicago Tribune reported that disc sales fell nearly 20 percent, to 362.6 million, "the seventh decline in eight years, according to SoundScan's report, which was released Wednesday." At the same time, online downloads reached a milestone: Over 1 billion songs were bought online. But that doesn't mean the music industry isn't still fucked. Overall, album sales were down 8.5 percent and "every musical genre reported across-the-board declines in album sales, and holiday sales were off by 19 percent."
This isn't probably surprising news to most of us. Can you remember the last time you visited a record store? When you actually paid money to purchase a NEW CD, packaged in a jewel case? We didn't think so. My situation is abnormal since we are sent review copies of most albums and so don't feel compelled to rush out to buy anything (yes, I know, it sounds so horrible). So I've asked friends about it. People who remember how a leisurely Saturday would be spent at the Virgin Megastore, putting on those clunky headphones and listening at the displays to music that you may not have heard otherwise. Of course, now you can do that from your computer: Mp3 tracks are everywhere you look and friends recommend myspace pages and link to favorite new acts via Facebook. We wonder how much longer the Virgin Megastore at Union Square will be around and have started the Virgin Death Watch, expecting the clock to expire sometime later this year. We've already been dreaming up what would replace the anchor store that has evolved into a meeting destination for so many folks. Will it be another big box retailer? Or will there be some more radical transformation, as shown in the Big Box Reuse book that came out recently.
This apathy to music consumption doesn't just present a problem for the labels and musicians. We at the paper also wonder what our place is in the musical firmament. Where alt newsweeklies like ours were once the barometer of taste, able to give coverage to emerging artists, helping kickstart a career and raise them from obscurity, now a band can get more exposure just from being featured in an iPod commercial or as incidental music for a tween TV show.
Jon Pareles recently touched on this in his excellent piece "Songs From the Heart of a Marketing Plan" on Dec. 24. In it he talks about how "selling out," once anathema to musicians looking for street cred, is now the industry standard and expected from even the most "radical" sort. Take for example Santogold, who blew up this year and whose "bohemian manifesto," as Pareles calls the song "Creator" from Santogold's self-titled album released in 2008, is now in a beer commercial and a hair gel commercial. Pareles asks the question: "What happens to the music itself when the way to build a career shifts from recording songs that ordinary listeners want to buy to making music that marketers can use?" And that's exactly right. The music industry is already transforming.
The Chicago Tribune story admits that no one is tracking how much money is made from licensing music or from these "360 deals" that LiveNation and others are concocting. Labels may not be making money from actual music sales, but they are now racking up big bucks by licensing songs and selling the music as a lifestyle brand. So much of the indie music now doesn't seem to be much more than entertaining distraction that reminds us of something we liked when we were teenagers. Oh, that sounds like the Cure! I can listen to it until that band that reminds me of Paul Simon comes up with something new. Music is rarely challenging anymore and that may be due to the fact that it needs to be palatable to be a catchy new Mac advertisement. Musicians have one mission: Create hooks, not history. Hmm. Maybe it's about time for some renegade movement to crash the party and fuck with the system. Wasn't that why punk was originally created in the first place? A non-professional, noisy, non-musical affront to all these capitalist sensibilities. But are there kids these days who can fathom doing something and it not turning into a profit-making machine. That's my wish for 2009.
Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper have been developing their on-air schtick for some time now. She's often pushing his buttons for being uptight, WASPy and generally rich and gay. Yeah, Kathy is perhaps the one person who has gotten the closest to outing Anderson on-air and still gets invited back. They did their second New Year's Eve duo routine this year. And it would have just been more rough-talking Kathy and giggly Anderson if it weren't for a slip that happened in the hour after the ball dropped in NYC. Check out the clip here.
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This summer New York magazine ran a long feature about Alanna Heiss, the founder of P.S. 1. The article discussed how the Museum of Modern Art had assumed control of the contemporary art center and had decided it was time for Heiss—the powerful force that put the former schoolhouse on the cultural map as an experimental, edgy art destination—to retire. Today, a press release from MoMA announces Heiss' retirement from her position as the director of the curatorial department.
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Who imagined Hairspray would ever end? After its six-year run on Broadway (something that seemed implausible when a John Waters movie was adapted into a family friendly musical), the show is set to close Jan. 4. So we went for a final farewell performance now that Harvey Fierstein and and Marissa Jaret Winokur have returned for the final weeks of the show.
While both have them have noticeably slimmed down (and aged) their passion for the project seems to remain.
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Yesterday we received a DVD screener of the first few episodes of United States of Tara, the new Showtime drama that stars Toni Collete as a woman living, unmedicated, with multiple personalities. It's a bizarre premise on the surface, and the biggest question seems to be: Is this gonna be depressing or funny? I mean, if you've seen Sally Field's portrayal of a woman suffering from the disorder in the 1976 TV movie Sybil, you know this reality can be freakin horrific. Instead, Diablo Cody (yes, the over-hyped Juno scribe) has managed to take the modern dysfunctional family with unusual sidelines that have been the latest bread-and-butter of HBO and Showtime and make Dissociative Identity Disorder (the new classification of multiple personality disorder) seem like crazy hi-jinks for the whole family.
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