Tag: Arts and Humanities

Media and Marketing

Forget about extra-crispy Col. Sanders; here comes another DC Comics’ superhero version — a bucketful of them

Produced with KFC itself, the newest comic in the series is “The Crisis of Infinite Colonels,” wherein the KFC founder we know must defeat the evil Col. Sunder from Earth-3.

Harland Sanders
Sanders

“To pull it off, he teams up with a whole host of Colonels from across the DC multiverse, like Bizarro Colonel, Steampunk Colonel, and the one and only Col. Arla Sanders from Earth-11,” says The Verge.

The comic echoes the current KFC campaign of multiple Sanders’ impersonators, including the most recent: professional tanner and actor George Hamilton.

Last October, DC and KFC teamed up for “Kentucky Fried Chicken Presents: The Colonel of Two Worlds.” Based in the Los Angeles area’s Burbank, the 82-year-old publisher is best known for its Superman, Batman and other characters.

Sanders launched his iconic Kentucky Fried Chicken chain in 1930 from his roadside restaurant in Corbin, Ky., during the Great Depression. He died in 1980 at 90 years old. Read more about KFC and corporate parent Yum.

Diversions

Ali Center: Visits will jump 50%, to 150,000, this year after prize-fighter’s death

Ali Center logoThis year’s surge would follow several previous years when attendance stagnated at around 75,000 to 80,000, spokeswoman Jeanie Kahnke told The Courier-Journal for a story this morning.

Some 25,000 people have visited the center since June 3 alone, the day the prize-fighting Louisville native and humanitarian died in Phoenix after battling Parkinson’s disease for decades. CEO Donald Lassere said the steady stream of visitors will be “the new norm for the foreseeable future.”

The center opened in 2005 at a cost of $80 million after years of planning and fundraising.

Diversions

Sound the cannon! Ring those bells! Sunday brings Abrams, the orchestra — and the ‘1812’ Overture to Waterfront Park

Music Director Teddy Abrams will lead the full Louisville Orchestra at Waterfront Park Sunday in the city’s annual July 4th celebration. All the cool fun starts at 5 p.m., with fireworks sponsored by the Louisville Bats. More details here.

Here’s the orchestra last year performing Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, written in 1880 and now a staple for Fourth of July celebrations:

How did 1812 become the orchestral community’s answer to ballet’s Nutcracker? Credit Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops’ televised performance in 1974, replete with cannons, an expanded bell choir and fireworks, according to the Houston Chronicle.

Latest Headlines

Kentucky Opera names Dallas’ Derrer as new general director, in 2nd recent hire among big local cultural groups
Madame Butterly
The 2016-17 season starts with the classic Madame Butterly.

Ian Derrer, artistic administrator at Dallas Opera for the past two years, started his career at New York City Opera in 2004, after receiving his masters degrees in opera production, voice and performing arts management from Northwestern University and Brooklyn College, and a bachelor’s of music in voice performance from the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University.

Kentucky Opera announced his appointment yesterday, effective Sept. 1. Derrer, 41, will oversee a 64-year-old organization with a $2.4 million budget. He succeeds David Roth, who died unexpectedly last July.

Ian Derrer
Derrer

In 2006, Derrer moved to Chicago’s Lyric Opera, starting as rehearsal administrator and moving up to production director and head of the rehearsal department. In all, Derrer spent eight seasons there, with one summer as rehearsal director at Santa Fe Opera.

As artistic administrator at Dallas, Derrer oversees budgets for the orchestra, chorus, and principal artists as well as members of the artistic staff, orchestra librarian, orchestra manager, chorus secretary, and scheduling department. The company was founded in 1957, five years after Louisville’s. Its budget is considerably larger, however: $14.2 million for the year ended in June 2014, according to its most recent annual IRS tax return.

Dallas Opera CEO Keith Cerny praised Derrer’s work, telling The Courier-Journal that he “guided important artistic and patron relationships, in addition to serving as advisor to both the music director and me.”

Louisville’s 2016-17 season of three productions starts Sept. 23 at the Brown Theatre with Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Dallas Opera’s upcoming five-production season also includes Butterfly.

Shifting artistic leadership

Derrer’s is at least the second appointment this year Continue reading “Kentucky Opera names Dallas’ Derrer as new general director, in 2nd recent hire among big local cultural groups” →

Books

A UPS aircraft mechanic, her ‘Dark Brown Lies’ book, and a very expensive advertisement on the CJ’s front page today

Many Courier-Journal readers were no doubt left totally confused this morning when they saw an advertisement on the front page — one of the most expensive you can buy — for a three-year-old book written by a former UPS aircraft mechanic.

CJ June 26 detail

Debbie Simpson’s “Dark Brown Lies” doesn’t show up in the CJ’s database, which means a lot of readers were learning about it for the first time. The book, which she self-published through a company she apparently incorporated in Arkansas in 2013, is about her 19-year-career at Louisville’s biggest private employer — one that ended very badly.

Debbie Simpson
Simpson

“This true story,” she writes on her website, “is about a female aircraft maintenance technician that worked for one of the most powerful companies in America and the consequences she faced for standing up and speaking out against harassment within the workplace. The consequences were: employee entries, warning letter(s), retaliation, intimidation, suspension, the constant real threat of termination and termination.”

What exactly happened isn’t detailed. But her beef with UPS, which employs 22,000 people at its hub here, may stem at least partly from a whistleblower case she lost in 2008 before the U.S. Labor Department.

Simpson’s advertisement this morning is only indirectly about her book. Instead, she’s drawing attention to another legal case where a pilot, Douglas Greene, has sued the Frost Brown Todd law firm in federal court in Louisville and two of its attorneys. Simpson says she’s dealt with one of the attorneys, Tony Coleman, in her own legal fight against UPS.

The Jennifer Lawrence Diary™

In auction frenzy, producer Legendary wins Lawrence’s ‘Bad Blood’ project with $3.5 million bid

Jennifer LawrenceBoulevard reviews the latest media coverage of the Oscar-winning Louisville native in our exclusive Jennifer Lawrence Diary™. Today’s news, rated on a scale of 1-5 stars:

Four starsLegendary Pictures emerged victorious last night, landing the pitch package “Bad Blood,” with Lawrence starring as Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of controversial Silicon Valley blood-test company Theranos, according to Deadline.

Legendary will pay around $3.5 million for the script to be written by director Adam McKay, who just shared a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for “The Big Short.” McKay will direct as well. Universal will distribute through its deal with Legendary, according to Deadline.

The trade site had reported earlier that the project featured all the requisites for the big packages studios are responding to right now, including a hot-button subject matter and Oscar winner Lawrence, 25, who’s found herself in the Academy Awards mix on prestige projects, most recently another film about an entrepreneur ‘Joy.’”

The mania around the latest movie cements Lawrence’s status as one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars — and highest paid, too: a reported $20 million per film.

Hunger Games Mockingjay 2
The last of the series.

The “Hunger Games” series star pulled in $52 million between June 2014 and June 2015 alone, ranking her No. 34 of 95 on Forbes’ magazine’s latest list of the world’s highest-paid celebrities. No. 1: professional boxer Floyd Mayweather, at $300 million.

“Bad Blood” is Lawrence’s fourth project in the works. She’s now filming an untitled Darren Aronofsky project; “Passengers” is in post-production with a Dec. 21 release date, and “It’s What I Do” is in pre-production. There’s also been speculation she might star opposite Sandra Bullock in an all-female reboot of “Ocean’s Eleven.”