The Hub Review: "It's very difficult to explain, but it's very funny."

What have people kept reading?

Google analytics allows you to track the readership of individual posts, and I've noticed over the last few months the development of what I guess marketing analysts would call a "long tail" at The Hub Review. That is, articles that people keep reading, via search engines or what have you. Most of these have had to do with pop culture, and I'm not sure they really represent my best writing. But several have been read by thousands of people by now - a few, like "Naked white men and others," probably just because they contain pictures of naked people. Others, however, have had remarkable staying power without any extra help - "Exit through the Banksy Effect," for instance, is read by thirty or forty people every single day. And can thousands of people be entirely wrong? So I thought I'd just share what people keep reading on The Hub Review - so without further ado, the most popular posts of its "long tail:"

Exit through the Banksy Effect

Sex and Kansas City

The minstrel goes meta

Lost in the labyrinth with Christopher Nolan (Part I)

Shakespeare on YooTube

The madness of "Mad Men"

When he says "heroic," he means "Harvard"

Opening the curtain on Emily Glassberg Sands, Part I

Bum rap

Naked white men and others

Kael, Bonnie and Clyde

You know I get free tickets, right?

Some bloggers have been huffing and puffing over a new FTC regulation that requires disclosure of freebies. The rule doesn't bother me much in principle (as many bloggers are, indeed, fundamentally dishonest) and I guess technically it extends to press tickets - so can I just use this space as a blanket declaration of the fact that, in case you didn't know, I get free tickets to much of what I review.

Ah - but not all. Thanks to the schemes of Kati Mitchell at the ironically-titled ART, and Company One's Shawn LaCount, a protest has been mounted against my rather provocative honesty regarding the moral and aesthetic lapses of people like Diane Paulus. So I'll be paying for more shows. I'll try not to let that make a difference in my review . . . but it could be hard . . . .

More evidence for the death of theatre (if you wanted any)

Only not as fast as everything else!

The LA Times highlights an interesting fact about the recent NEA arts survey that no one else has mentioned. Yes, attendance at the performing arts has declined somewhat - it's shrunk 4.4% since 1982. What's surprising is that attendance at everything else has fallen off even faster. Movie attendance dropped at twice that rate; sporting events at four times that rate. Surprised? I'm not, not really. Technology is killing off all live interaction, it seems, but as the arts offer something you really can't get via instant replay or Tivo, they're more resistant to its corrosive effects. Not that we shouldn't be worried about civilization in general. We just shouldn't feel that the arts are the biggest losers in this ongoing war.

Attack of the Audience Member from Hell!

Ah, the cell phone! Did the performing arts ever encounter a more baleful enemy? We've all had our encounters with crass texters, or those who've "forgotten" to turn off their cells or pagers, but I've never come across someone who actually made a call during a performance until this weekend. At Dawn Upshaw's recent concert (which was wonderful, btw), some old bag in a designer suit took out her cell just as Dawn was launching into her final encore, and yes, made a call. To her limo driver, no less, telling him she wanted to be picked up NOW. Let's just say I'd never encountered till yesterday a Schubert lieder that included the lyrics, "JORDAN HALL, Louie. Yes. She's almost finished, I wanna leave now!" Cell phones are a pet peeve of my partner's, and when the audience began applauding, he turned around and let the old bag have it. "You should be banned from concert halls for the rest of your life!" he screamed, while I mentally added, "Which we hope is short!" But the rich old bitch began shouting back, believe it or not. You just can't reach some people. We saw her limo on the way out. If there had been some rocks handy, we would have stoned it.

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Thursday, April 15, 2010

"It's very difficult to explain, but it's very funny."