“Union BECTU is demanding a rise in the hourly rate that tour guides working at the venue receive, claiming that collectively the employees help make the Globe thousands of pounds. According to the Globe, tours generate a turnover of £3 million a year, and a net profit of £200,000 annually.”
Tag: 02.16.15
When A Pack Of Puppets United The TV Viewers Of America
“In 1951, NBC trimmed the show from a half hour to 15 minutes, and a national storm of protest erupted, a story that dominated headlines for days, even weeks. … When ABC canceled the show in 1957, viewers again responded passionately. Many threatened to throw their television sets out the windows.”
50 Essential African-American Independent Films
Now here’s a good way to celebrate Black History Month: four dozen-and-change movies to revisit or to discover, from all the way back in 1920 (Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates), through the landmarks (Nothing But a Man, Sweet Sweetback, New Jack City, She’s Gotta Have It, Daughters of the Dust) to this decade (Fruitvale Station).
Sure Our Alphabet Is Our Alphabet (But All That Could Be Changing)
The power to spread and transform the alphabet — once concentrated among medieval scribes, British and French printers, or Christian missionaries spreading words to spread the Word — has been democratized. Now with tablets and smartphones, “the smallest building blocks of the shared written language (i.e. print) are more in your hands . . . than they have ever been.”
UK Report Warns: Our Lack Of Audience Diversity Is Unsustainable In The Arts
“We are particularly concerned that publicly funded arts… are predominantly accessed by an unnecessarily narrow social, economic, ethnic and educated demographic that is not fully representative of the UK’s population”.
What Happened To Our Public Intellectuals? (And Where Did We Go Wrong?)
“If you ask the conditions that allowed Partisan Review to reach greatness—broaching an inquiry into what is necessary for the creation of “public intellect” in general, in the mid-20th century past—you face some unruly historical particulars.”
Austin Radio Station Doubles Down On Classical And Becomes More Local
Now the station features 22 hours of locally hosted or produced programs on weekdays. And while it kept popular national shows such as “From the Top,” “Concierto” and the live Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, KMFA has dropped Classical 24 entirely, even from the convenient overnight slot.
Princeton Gets $300 Million Donation Of Rare Books
“Highlights of the collection include a Gutenberg Bible, a first printing of the Declaration of Independence, a run of Shakespeare folio editions, and important autograph manuscripts by Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.”
What Made Philip Levine’s Poetry Extraordinary
“Della and Tatum, Sweet Pea and Packy, Ida and Cal. You met a lot of unpretentious people in Philip Levine’s spare, ironic poems of the industrial heartland. … Mr. Levine’s death is a serious blow for American poetry, in part because he so vividly evoked the drudgery and hardships of working-class life in America, and in part because this didn’t pull his poetry down into brackishness.”
The Creative Class, “Culture Crash”, And Cinema
Richard Brody praises Scott Timberg’s recent book – and then argues that its points don’t quite apply to movies or narrative video and the people who make them.