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links for 2010-04-07

• “Publishers have virtually no standards” – Roger Ebert’s Journal
  “But the reality is that our jobs are at stake. Failure to meet state standards exactingly will lead to a book not being adopted, which leads to losing out on huge amounts of money–money that *has already been spent to produce the books.* To give you some idea of the scale of this issue for us: When a math book I worked on was in danger of missing a deadline for California adoption, there was serious talk about shutting the entire department down. *The math department.* Department after department has gone down in some companies. We are already in a situation where budgetary constraints are causing states like Florida and California to put off buying more books, threatening jobs across the entire industry.”
  (tags: textbooks publishing education texas economy)
• William Shatner Captain Kirk: Celebrities: GQ
  ” His ongoing role as joke-within-a-joke grows ever larger and funnier, ever more self-referential and -reflective, the cosmic snake eating its own tail, until 2004. It is then that Shatner begins a five-year stint, first on The Practice, then on Boston Legal, in a role—as a blustery, buffoonish lawyer named Denny Crane who trades on long-lost greatness—that is so frankly a point-on mockery of William Shatner’s career and symbology, that is William Shatner, that it’s at first embarrassing to watch. It is also in 2004 that Shatner follows up on his 1968 LP, The Transformed Man—a compilation of spoken-word cover songs unlikely to be supplanted as the most ridiculed album ever made—with a CD called Has Been, a collection of original prose poems set to music by Ben Folds. Anyone ever subjected to The Transformed Man gasps, “How dare he?” Yet something about Has Been, a combination of the acid wit, self-laceration, and unabashed yearning Shatner exudes, makes the album great…”
  (tags: acting celebrity inspiration personality shatner)
• Program Notes May Hamper Music Appreciation | Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. | Miller-McCune Online Magazine
  “A study just published in the journal Psychology of Music suggests his experience was far from unique. It finds that reading a what-to-listen-for guide before hearing a piece of music seems to make the actual aesthetic experience less pleasurable.
  “Descriptions may interfere with the directness and intimacy with which listeners are able to experience a work,” writes Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis of the University of Arkansas. “It may distance listeners, or place them at a remove — as if they were listening through someone else’s ear.”
  (tags: musicappreciation concert artmusic programnotes)
• David Mamet’s Master Class Memo to the Writers of The Unit | Movieline
  “THERE IS NO MAGIC FAIRY DUST WHICH WILL MAKE A BORING, USELESS, REDUNDANT, OR MERELY INFORMATIVE SCENE AFTER IT LEAVES YOUR TYPEWRITER. YOU THE WRITERS, ARE IN CHARGE OF MAKING SURE EVERY SCENE IS DRAMATIC.”
  (tags: screenwriting davidmamet drama)
• L.A. Consequential – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com

  “At times, Los Angeles still feels fragile, a sprawl of hubristic nature-defiance, unable to shake its noir sketchiness. If a half-inch of rain calls for breathless TV updates and canceled social events, what would a serious earthquake do to the hard-won stability of the new civic order?

  Chief Beck has his fingers crossed. “Absent some huge social disorder, this will be a golden age of policing,” he predicted. “I have been to every neighborhood of this city and the most popular piece of government now, by far, is the police officer.”

  (tags: crime la losangeles predictions)

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Related posts:

1. links for 2010-04-05
2. links for 2010-04-04
3. links for 2010-04-06
4. fall 07 del.icio.us links

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 at 12:01 am. It is filed under Uncategorized and tagged with crime, los angeles, program notes, screenwriting, textbooks, william shatner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.