So what you hear might not always be what it seems…
Tag: 05.31.12
Judge Allows Authors’ Class-Action Suit Against Google Books To Proceed
“In a major development in the long-running case over Google’s unauthorized book-scanning,” US Federal Judge Denny Chin has ruled “that groups representing authors and photographers could go forward with a class action.”
Johannesburg Set To Build Africa’s Tallest Skyscraper
“The structure, part of a development known as Centurion Symbio-City, will soar to 447 metres, or 110 storeys, more than double the Carlton Centre – and higher than the Empire State Building. It would become the 14th-tallest freestanding structure on the planet.”
Ballet Comes To Your T.V. – In A Big Way
Television embraces classical dance, from dramedies to flat-out dramas (“The Black Swan effect”) to reality shows. Why? “The area is ripe for exploration. … The ballet world is also filled with hierarchies, rivalries, romance and heartbreak, which mirror the fictional story lines of scripted dramas.”
Hey, Art Schools: Time To Stop Training Artists For Exploitation?
“For cultural workers, more than just food and rent, work is bound up with desires around creativity, ego, authorship and individual performance. These also circulate within the pedagogies of art. In fact often, art school training puts the emphasis on the work coming first over and above everything else including individual subsistence.”
A Successful DIY Touring Career For Composer/Cellist Zoë Keating
Keating: “You have to give yourself permission to play your own music. It doesn’t seem valid somehow; it doesn’t seem like real music. It’s like, ‘Well, I’m just playing. I’m making up this stuff.’ And I had a really long period of that, of feeling like there were all these different buckets. There was the music that I would play that was classical–the stuff that I was learning, or that I was being judged on, or graded for. Then there was music that I listened to, which was mostly popular music, that I would sometimes try and work out on the cello. And then there was the music that I would improvise or that was just my own. And they were all very separate.”
UK Library Closed In Midnight Raid
“It seems to me abhorrent that library disputes have become mixed up with midnight police raids. We have moved suddenly into the realm of secrecy and force, an alarming step. The dismantling of a library system that was one of the glories of Victorian enlightenment and the envy of the world is happening across the country.”
The Language Wars (Sigh)
“Define the 1 percent however you want–the upper echelons of commerce, government, culture, academia, even the British royal family–and you’d be hard-pressed to argue that they are paragons of correct usage and good style. For quite some time now the language connoisseurs have been schoolteachers, writers of letters to the editor, and ink-stained wretches on Grub Street (and their digital descendants).”
Cy Twombly Museum To Be Built In Manhattan
“On Tuesday, a foundation he set up paid $27.75 million to buy a 25-foot-wide Beaux Arts mansion on East 82nd Street, with a plan to turn the five-story space into an education center and a small museum to celebrate the artist’s work and burnish his reputation.”
Bamiyan Buddhas, Destroyed By Taliban, Will Not Be Rebuilt
“Here the Muslims strictly oppose images; to recreate the Buddhas would be an insult even to non-Taliban Afghans. We must show good manners.”