“When the English-spoken media in India clamour for a better quality of cinema, what they desire is a cinema that is forged in the Western tradition of storytelling and narrative. What this ignores is the fact that, today, urban and small-town India are the main consumers of Bollywood because that is the only entertainment they are offered.”
Tag: 11.22.11
Do We Need New Definitions Of Plagiarism In An Online World?
“When does a mash-up become an infringement of copyright? When does playful anonymity become insidious disguising? The speed of technological change often outstrips legal and philosophical discussions of the impact of those technologies. I don’t think it’s too much to suggest that there is an almost pathological relationship between “online” and “real world” mental modes: the internet hysterically polices the contours of its own distorted reflection.”
Classical Music Is Undergoing A Revolution
“Welcome to the revolution – the Classical Revolution, that is. Across North America, classical players are returning chamber music to its origins: informal performances among friends in intimate settings. It’s a loose network that now has a presence in many U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago and Washington, and also in a few places in Europe.”
Are We In The Age Of The Boring And Bland?
“The unwillingness to engage, to risk argument, to risk fun is everywhere. Conform or shut up is the theme. What happens in these circumstances is a withdrawal to the bland and innocuous.”
Penguin Suspend E-Book Library Lending
“We have always placed a high value on the role that libraries can play in connecting our authors with our readers. However, due to new concerns about the security of our digital editions, we find it necessary to delay the availability of our new titles in the digital format while we resolve these concerns with our business partners.”
Do Successful Artists Have More Sex Than Less Successful Artists?
After tiptoeing through all their data and computations, the artists-and-sex researchers decided that “more successful male artists had more sexual partners than less successful artists, but this did not hold for female artists”.
Pay For Digital Editions Of High-End Art? Welcome To The Shopping Channel
“The art market works through snobbery and sleight of hand, but here it becomes a bit like a TV shopping channel – watch out, the dead-eyed determination to shift product is showing.”
After Renovation, A New Take On History
“After a multiyear, $70 million reconstruction, the New York Historical Society has been transformed from a fusty attic into an intellectual powerhouse.”
Stephen King Nominated For “Bad Sex” Award
“Now in its 19th year, the award, organised annually by the Literary Review, was set up to mock the gratuitous and often excrutiatingly embarrassing descriptions of sex in literature.”
Choreographers Have Always Borrowed (So Quit Hatin’ On Beyoncé)
Alastair Macaulay observes that countless Nutcrackers make far bigger unacknowledged borrowings from Lev Ivanov and George Balanchine than Beyoncé did from Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker – and that Balanchine himself, who borrowed freely from Petipa, said, “God creates – I assemble.”