1. A record exec from Taylor Swift‘s label tries to defend her lackluster Grammy duet with Stevie Nicks, and only makes things worse. [via ArtsBeat]
2. Why was Martin Scorsese‘s new Leonardo DiCaprio thriller Shelter Island pushed back to the dead of winter? [via E!]
3. The dates for the fifth annual Pitchfork Music Festival have been announced; look for ticket sales and a lineup announcement tomorrow. [via Pitchfork]
4. Lincoln Center is building a new black box space on top of the Vivian Beaumont Theater; it will feature work by emerging artists, with all seats priced at $20. [via NYT]
5. Bruce Springsteen is suing a bar in midtown Manhattan for copyright infringement. [via NYDN]
Bonus link: The Internet Meme Hall of Fame: The Venn Diagram
Tonight, the 47th NYFF opens its grand lineup with Wild Grass, a rapturous flight of fancy by 87-year-old French master Alain Resnais. Venerated the world over for his deconstructive, narrative-be-damned opuses Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, Resnais’ latest tale of romantic obsession is based on Christian Gailly’s novel The Incident, but takes off on the inspiriting belief that “after the cinema, nothing surprises you. Everything is possible.” And, oui, he directs with such-minded freedom — totally, tenderly, tragically. Read More »
On Monday night Moby and Wall Street Journal Personal Technologies columnist Walt Mossberg will discuss music and entertainment in the digital age in a special event at Lincoln Center. To help prep us for the discussion, the gadgets guru hopped on the phone to chat about why we’re obsessed with certain brands, where the music industry missed the tech boat, and who we can look to for innovation next.
Flavorpill: What do you think makes the tech consumer so prone to fetishizing certain brands or objects?
Walt Mossberg: That’s a fascinating question. I think it’s more than fetishizing. There’s something I call “tech theology” and I think there are a couple of things at work here. People do fall in love with tech products — could be something like Twitter, which is a service, or something physical like an iPhone or BlackBerry. They fall in love with these things because they enhance their life in some way. It feels like they give them both power and pleasure, which is after all why we fall in love with most things. Read More »
Book: We find it interesting how quickly authors nipped this text-to-speech thing on the Kindle 2 in the bud. Any SAG members paying attention? [Guardian]
Dance/Opera: An “opera about the history of opera as the most important genre in European culture” ends up being “banal and pretentious, not an easy combination to bring off.” But if you go to see Vita Nuova, you will get to hang out in the pretty new Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center… [NYT]
Design: “When I build on a site in nature that is totally unspoiled, it is a fight, an attack by our culture on nature.” Pritzker-winning Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn dies at 84. [Newsday]
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We find Richard Lacayo’s interview with Elizabeth Diller of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro about her firm’s Lincoln Center redesign funny — not intentionally so, there’s just something about bringing Lincoln Center “to the streets” that makes us giggle and hear that Doobie Brothers’ song in our head. Yes we laugh, but we also think it’s a good idea; we used to live on the opposite side of Central Park and waited many a night for the M66 while glazing over at the building’s rather unfriendly facade.
It has never been the kind of place you’d hang around just for the ambiance, unlike say, London’s Royal National Theatre.
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Imagine, if you can, a time when dance companies had their own specials on network television. They weren’t competing for votes, and shrieking judges and smarmy hosts were not part of the equation. They were just there to… perform.
If you’d like to revisit that simpler era, and catch some rare footage of one of the country’s top dance companies while you’re at it, we recommend checking out Alvin Ailey Day at the Film Society of Lincoln Center this Sunday. The event, part of the company’s 18-month-long 50th anniversary celebration, includes screenings of the first televised performance of Ailey’s signature piece, “Revelations” (aired on CBS in 1962), and a 1974 CBS special featuring dances inspired by Duke Ellington.
Non-New Yorkers will get their chance to see Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in the (impossibly buff) flesh starting on Monday, when the company kicks off a U.S. tour that will take them to more than 25 cities over the next four months.
In Busby Berkeley’s classic production number “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat,” the arrival of an army of chorus girls wielding life-size bananas always struck us as slightly sinister. But when the camera pans up and over to capture a kaleidoscopic shot of legs and fruit, you forget to question the implications of women dancing with enormous bananas and instead relish Berkeley’s over-the-top magic.
Berkeley is one of several dance luminaries who will be spotlighted in the 2009 Dance on Camera Festival, which launched yesterday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater. Dance on Camera runs through January 17 and includes 39 new, classic and experimental features and shorts.
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How does an organization like Lincoln Center become relevant to the MTV generation?
By launching LCT3, a remote branch on 42nd Street that will showcase emerging talent at a distance that’s comfortable for the white tops.
First up on their list of upcoming shows, CLAY, Matt Sax’s new one-man coming-of-age story about a boy in the ‘burbs turned hip-hop star.
To test his MC skills, we challenged Sax to name one song that he could adapt into an entire play; read his response after the jump.
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