The Recording Industry’s Stupid Victory(?)

“The message, apparently, is this: ‘We’re idiots.’ The RIAA, after all, is the guardian of an industry so antiquated and oppressive that having sympathy for these guys is a little like feeling sorry for a Georgia slaveholder after watching Sherman’s troops fire his mansion and scatter his livestock. So when their first victim, Thomas, turns out to be a single American Indian mother of two making a measly $36,000 a year — latte money for the RIAA boys — you have a hard time picturing these guys nailed to a cross.”

Nobel Lit Prize To Lessing

Doris Lessing has been awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. “Lessing is only the 11th woman to win the prize, considered by many to be the world’s highest accolade for writers, since it started in 1901. And she is the second British writer to win in three years, after Harold Pinter was honoured in 2005.” Lessing, who is 87, will receive $1.85m in prize money.

Busking For A Cause

Musicians with thriving professional careers are not often to be found busking on street corners. But David Juritz, “solo violinist and leader of the London Mozart Players (Britain’s longest established chamber orchestra), he has taken a leave of absence from his day job and is travelling around the world, busking to raise money for the charity Musequality, [which] is raising money for music projects in disadvantaged areas of the world, starting with South Africa and Uganda.”