Golden opportunities

Question: Why don’t either of the two massive banners for the Lincoln Center 50th Anniversary at the Time Warner Center tell us how or with whom we will be celebrating?

(The second banner hanging to the right of this one is identical.) What kind of programming and which artists will the festivities include? Are we not excited enough about this to put an exclamation point after “Anniversary”? That’s too bad. Was there not space to maybe list some of the features of the new plaza? What’s my motivation for going to LincolnCenter.org/50? Lots of “50s” in something resembling the 9 to 5: The Musical font doesn’t exactly spur me to digital action.

For the sake of the blog, I did in fact go to the anniversary website. Yes, I would like to hear Plácido Domingo singing “E lucevan le stelle” from Tosca in 1969, “Interactive Timeline”.  But no! I do not want to hear Plácido over Fanfare for the Common Man, which starts playing automatically when you go to the site with no option to turn it off. The lesser-known Tosca/Fanfare mash-up! Unable to figure out how to turn off the sound on the main page of the site, I muted my computer and messed around with the timeline in silence.

Now I want to hear Leontyne Price on the timeline. Un-mute. But wait – here’s Audra McDonald singing “Some Days”, presumably at…American Songbook? Or is it with orchestra? How would I know, since there’s no audio player with credit information in sight.

Tom Brokaw’s voice emerges from the ether. Ah – now I see what’s going on: there’s a “Commemorative Ceremony” tab and the audio is coming from video that begins but is hidden when the website launches. So you have to figure that out before you click on the “Interactive Timeline” tab, which is your first option, if you want to hear the audio on said “Interactive Timeline” without the “Commemorative Ceremony” audio playing simultaneously.  

According to my friend Alex, “This is a case of a sloppy element on a site. The problem is that the flash video player starts on page load, but the actual video isn’t viewable until a user navigates to the Ceremony tab. While this is annoying on its own, it gets even messier when a user clicks into the interactive timeline. This causes a Javascript ‘lightbox’ overlay to appear, but all of the elements on the site continue to operate as if nothing had happened so there is overlapping audio from the Ceremony video. The easy solution – don’t auto-start the video. It would also be nice to not use the ugliest out-of-the-box Flash video player…” 

I love Lincoln Center. The buildings are my favorite in the world, and the Vivien Beaumont is my favorite theater in the city, and when I was ~7 I wanted to be proposed to in front of the fountain (but upon rethinking, that’s pretty lame). Just this morning, I wrote the following in an e mail to my friend Shree, “OK, then the new Hard Rock Café at Lincoln Center at 6pm, and then onto more freebasing fat at the game.” She wrote back, “Um ‘Lincoln Center’? Slip of the type?” (I meant “Yankee Stadium”). So I love Lincoln Center, but come on: figure out the audio on your website.

Some gentle readers may think I pick on Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center too much on this blog. First, I live here, so I see what they’re doing. But second, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center (along with maybe the Kennedy Center and now Disney Hall?) are two of the only arts presenters that people outside the industry have heard of. There are many reasons they have reputations as the best in the world; I just want their marketing and media to be some of those reasons. Much should be expected.