Category: today’s top story

“The county retains the right to shutter a property for up to a year for violating ordinance 13.90.010 and also gives local authorities the right to bring a civil action to ‘temporarily restrain, preliminarily enjoin, and/or permanently enjoin the person or persons intentionally conducting, or knowingly maintaining or permitting the public nuisance from further conducting, maintaining, or permitting such a public nuisance.’ Property owners who knowingly permit such activity can also be dinged $1,000 for each counterfeited work produced on the property.”

“We are used to hearing about globalisation and the Americanisation (and therefore the Englishing) of popular culture. Opponents of these forces perceive the spread of English as linguistic imperialism; it erodes traditions and cultural identities. Those who fear this spread connect it with Christianity, colonialism and America’s political and military interventionism. But is this right?”

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers statement blamed “SAG’s continued adherence to unreasonable demands,” citing the union proposals to increase the “residual” payments actors earn for DVD sales as one of the key stumbling blocks.”

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association has named maestro Riccardo Muti as the next music director of the CSO. He’s the tenth conductor to hold that post.

“As consumers use the internet to isolate and refine their particular interests – whether news and entertainment, or bomb-making and pornography – they create a fragmented world of ‘echo chambers’ isolated from the public space in which a healthy democracy thrives.”

Last season, Broadway theatre contributed $5.1 billion to the New York economy. The “figure is up slightly from the org’s 2006 study, which pegged the cumulative fiscal effects of the 2004-05 season at $5.09 billion.”

“Businesses hold creative-thinking seminars, universities teach creative writing, ministers makes speeches puffing our ‘creative industries’. Even the splodges and squiggles that children daub in primary school are deemed creative. One could even say that the idea of creativity has become thoroughly debased.”

“Everyone loves the idea of the libraries: they are the ‘envy of the world’. The many endowed by Andrew Carnegie at the turn of the century have frequently been cited as the inspirational and practical source of both culture and education for many, and especially those who describe themselves as self-made. But despite their often grand appearance, somewhere along the line they lost their allure.”

“In 40 years of opera-going in London I cannot remember a moment when new work was so hot except, perhaps, the double world-premiere week in May 1986. I remember people running from one to the other proclaiming, like believers at Easter, ‘Opera is risen!’ Such visions can be illusory. There was no general resurrection of opera after the mid-1980s and there is unlikely to be one now.”

“The urgency to find new formats is driven by audience research that can be read as glass half-empty or half-full. The 28 million weekly public radio listeners recorded by Arbitron in spring 2007 topped the previous high of 27.5 million in 2004. But the research also showed that the listeners were tuning in for shorter periods.”