01.18.15 – ArtsJournal Wayback

Why It’s Important For Canadians To Protect Their Own Culture

Canadian programming matters; that we should want it to exist. This isn’t about “telling Canadian stories to Canadians.” It isn’t about seeing pictures of beavers, Mounties and canoes on our screens. It’s about participating in a living culture, and recognizing that a living culture is often a local culture.

Why Preserving Video Games Is So Difficult

“Video games are more prone than other media to obsolescence. With each new generation of hardware and software, scores of titles are made unplayable. Music has suffered similarly, of course: vinyl morphed into cassette into CD into digital audio. But music, like films and books, is easily transferred to new formats. Video games, which rely not only on audiovisual reproduction but also on a computer’s ability to understand and execute their coded rules and instructions, require more profound reconstruction.”

This Year’s Winner Of The Superbowl Of Linguistics

“If wordsmiths had a Super Bowl, this would be it, a place where the nation’s most well-regarded grammarians, etymologists and language enthusiasts gather to talk shop.”

E-Book Growth Has Stalled. Here’s Why

“Despite the embrace of e-books in certain contexts, they remain controversial. Many people just don’t like them: They run out of battery, they hurt your eyes, they don’t work in the bath. After years of growth, sales are stagnating. In 2014, 65 percent of 6 to 17-year-old children said they would always want to read books in print—up from 60 percent two years earlier.”

Merriam-Webster Ponders Redefining A Dictionary

“Now Merriam-Webster is pushing into the future by making an audacious nod to its past. More than half a century after it was published, the company’s landmark book—Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, known in lexicographic circles as Webster’s Third, W3, the Unabridged, or the Third—is getting an overhaul. The Third is a behemoth—4 inches thick, 13½ pounds, 2,700 pages—that falls like a crashing wave when opened. A fourth edition, by contrast, might never exist as a physical object.”

Absence Of Satire – Has America Become A Parody Of Itself?

It’s a stunning moment, although it hardly seems satirical any longer, in a world where people obsess over the Kardashians and “Duck Dynasty.” This, in turn, suggests a bigger problem — that, as the literary critic Harold Bloom once insisted, “In the United States, satire is no longer possible. America has turned into a satire of itself.”

Florida Grand Opera’s Ft. Lauderdale Season May Be Saved

Two weeks ago the company announced that, due to a sharp drop in support there in recent years, it was no longer viable to travel from Miami to perform at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. Now an anonymous donor’s matching grant may make the difference.

As An Orchestra Turns More Professional In Tennessee, A Patron Laments The Loss Of Local Talent

After a patron writes a letter (which you can read here) calling West Tennessee’s Jackson Symphony “random good musicians hired from all over” and lamenting a lack of local music teachers on stage at the concerts, the Symphony responds with a letter that involves donors, standards, and football.

The Oscars Are Finite, Which Is Why The ‘Selma’ Omissions Matter So Much

“The nominations of the director this time around, and a British actor, David Oyelowo, playing a heroic black figure in the American narrative — not the victim of white oppression, but a corrective to it — would have had particular resonance at this moment. This year is the 50th anniversary of both the Selma marches and the Voting Rights Act. And after months full of tragic news from Ferguson, Mo., Staten Island and all over America, race remains a persistent and complex issue that still has the capacity to divide.”

Tag: 01.18.15