“The Copyright Board of Canada has given the green light to a controversial extra fee on the sale price of MP3 players including iPods, two years after the Federal Court of Appeal struck down a similar levy. The fight centres on an oft-misunderstood piece of copyright legislation that permits people to make personal copies of music recordings they have purchased.”
Tag: 08.02.07
Will Getty Settlement Be A Win-Win Situation?
Christopher Knight says that the Getty’s deal with the Italian government could actually benefit the museum in the long run. As part of the settlement under which the Getty agreed to return 40 works of art to Italy, “Italy announced it would loan important works of ancient art to the beautifully refurbished Getty Villa, overlooking the Pacific Ocean at the edge of Malibu. Collection sharing among art museums is an idea whose appeal has been growing. Agreements like this will only accelerate the interest.”
Everyone Loves The Outsiders
It’s been 40 years since author S.E. Hinton’s landmark novel of teen rebellion, The Outsiders, was first published. It wasn’t an immediate bestseller, “yet the book has now sold more than 13.4 million copies, is requisite reading in schools worldwide and Hinton receives far more fan mail than she can respond to. Truth be told, she doesn’t always feel deserving of it.”
Do The Ends Justify The Filmmaking?
A new documentary about Arctic wildlife is aiming to bring the important message of climate change to kids, but critics are raising questions about some of the filmmakers’ tactics. For their part, the film’s backers “are unapologetic about the fact that the occasional anthropomorphism is there to make the global-warming message as commercially accessible as possible.”
The One Tenor
There aren’t many classical music luminaries that could qualify as pop culture heroes these days, but tenor Placido Domingo is unquestionably one of the few. “While Luciano Pavarotti and Jose Carreras have eased into retirement, Domingo at 66 remains at his artistic peak. Since his debut in 1959, he has sung a record 128 operatic roles. Next year, he celebrates the 40th anniversary of his debuts at the Metropolitan Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago.”
Plot Is Overrated, Anyway
Apparently, plot concepts that would be considered far too stale and cliched for even a hackneyed TV sitcom are thrilling audiences in London theatres this summer. Ben Brantley can’t quite explain the appeal, but he knows it’s real: “If any of these premises reared up on my television screen, I’d change the channel before the first canned snicker could be sounded. But I have to confess that I, along with hordes of other London theatergoers, experienced an almost childlike pleasure watching these crude concepts translated to the stage.”
New Poet Laureate Named
“Charles Simic, a writer who juxtaposes dark imagery with ironic humor, is to be named the country’s 15th poet laureate by the Librarian of Congress today. Simic, 69, was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and immigrated to the United States at 16. He started writing poetry in English only a few years after learning the language and has published more than 20 volumes of poetry, as well as essay collections, translations and a memoir.”
Silence Is Golden (If You’re A Brain)
Music stimulates the brain, according to a new study, but it’s the silences between the phrases that really make us think. “A one- to two-second break between movements triggers a flurry of mental activity, researchers found. When the music resumes, the action shifts to a different part of the brain, then subsides… Stanford’s snapshots of this pause may have implications beyond concert halls, nightclubs and honky-tonks.”
Good News, Bad News For City Ballet Summer
The annual residency by New York City Ballet at upstate New York’s Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) made more money this year than last. But attendance was down 10%, and “compared to 2005, the most recent year in which the ballet gave 21 performances, attendance this summer was down by 21 percent.”
The Corporate Book?
Corporations such as BMW are commissioning and publishing books. “Writers have had patrons in the past, but I fear the day when multinational corporations sponsor academics and publishers and authors to frame things from their point of view, and manage not to slap their logos all over it like a warning. Who am I kidding? That day is already here. So what can we do about it?”