Unless your internet service has been down over the past 24 hours, you’ve probably read the piece in the 7/8/2009 edition of the Times Online (UK) by Richard Morrison that reports on a patron suing a The Wizard of Oz production for failing to use live music. In essence, the patron turned plaintiff was miffed over the fact that the production was billed as a “magical family musical” but failed to mention that the singers were performing to a recorded instrumental soundtrack. Although these events have transpired across the Atlantic, US ballet and opera companies should take heed…
Month: July 2009
“A Ship Is Safe In Harbor, But That’s Not What Ships Are For.”
A short while ago, Joe Patti posed a question over at Butts In The Seats asking whether or not orchestras should confine their programming to just a few genres. The first thing that popped into my head when I read his original post was a quote from Mark Twain: “I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.”
Duck Walk In Your Underwear
The Jul 2–8, 2009 of Time Out Chicago published an article by Doyle Armbrust that features fellow Inside The Arts blogger Jason Heath and his myriad of blogging activity. What’s especially interesting is how Jason recounts his path into the cultural blogosphere. It’s a well written feature and it goes a long way at demonstrating new media’s effectiveness when wielded by someone with the skills and fortitude.
I Just Might Throw My Dictionary Away
Over the past week I’ve been up to my eyeballs in writing reports and anyone who is used to tossing out tens of thousands of words in a short time span knows that after awhile, a traditional thesaurus or online synonym resource can feel awfully limited. Enter visuwords.com, a refreshingly useful online resource that functions as a sort of graphical dictionary/thesaurus. What I found particularly useful is how it uses diagrams to illustrate word relationships that actually helped me break out of the tunnel vision writing style instigated by marathon writing sessions…
Putting A New Face Forward
A bit of new media oriented discussion today. Smashing Magazine published an intriguing article last week about what it defines as best practices for effective “about” pages. The article starts off with a simple but powerful statement: The “about me”-page is one of the most overlooked pages in development and one of the highest ranked pages on many websites. They’re correct, next to the home page, Adaptistration’s “About” pages are the most popular but for years now, they haven’t been meeting their potential…