Alain de Botton envisions elders recounting how “passengers, who had only paid the price of a few books for the privilege, would impatiently and ungratefully shut their window blinds to the views, would sit in silence next to strangers while watching films about love and friendship … Those who had known the age of planes would recall the confusion they had felt upon arriving in Mumbai or Rio, Auckland or Montego Bay, only hours after leaving home.”
Tag: 04.17.10
Canada Gives Ottawa Museums $15M In One-Time Funding
“Marc Mayer, director of National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, called the funding ‘a huge relief’ and an example of the Conservative government being ‘responsive to our needs in the short term.'” But what of the long term?
George Washington, Library Scofflaw
The New York Society Library, the city’s only lender of books at the time of Washington’s presidency, has revealed that the first American president took out two volumes and pointedly failed to return them. At today’s prices, adjusted for inflation, he would face a late fine of $300,000.”
CBC TV Ratings Are But. Has Programming Dumbed Down?
Canada’s national broadcaster has new hits but producers say the network is only interested in safe, warm and fuzzy…
Bitter Public Fight About Nasty Anonymous Book Reviews
“The row has sent shock waves through the normally genteel world of academia as claim and counter-claim have been circulated by email to other top writers.”
Reinventing Shakespeare For The 21st Century
“If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be in comic books,” says Del Col, a clean-cut young businessman who has attended the Stratford Shakespeare Festival religiously every year of his adult life. “He’d be in films, he’d be in TV, he’d be in mobile content, he’d be in video games. He’d be James Cameron, basically.”
Canada Lets Amazon In – Is It The End Of Cultural Protectionism?
“What hasn’t been bandied about very much are terms such as “cultural sovereignty” and “national identity” – political vocabulary that to some ears sounds anathematic in 2010. Yet now might be exactly the time for that discussion.”
Enough With The Who-Wrote-Shakespeare Thing!
“I am, as should be apparent, poking fun at those benighted souls who believe that someone other than William Shakespeare–the most prominent candidates being Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford–wrote “Hamlet,” “Macbeth” and “Romeo and Juliet.” In a saner world, nobody would need to poke fun at them, for nobody would give them the time of day, there being no credible evidence whatsoever to support their claims.”
Of Theatre And Critics And Who’s Got The Power
“Some people have understandable nostalgia for what then felt like a common culture, even if, over the years, bitter experience left few practitioners with much trust in those delegated to be its guardians. In fact, the growth of diversity both in the audience and in the places it sharpens its opinions has brought only benefit to any dramatist whose first love is experiment and innovation. And newspapers that once enjoyed such power are themselves discovering what it is like to live with the threat of working in a minority form.”
LA’s MoCA Ordered To Clean Up Its Budget Practices
“The California Attorney General’s office determined that the Museum of Contemporary Art skirted state law for years enroute to financial meltdown in late 2008 and ordered the museum to hire a consultant to help improve its financial management.”