“The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide the global reach of U.S. copyright law, in a case testing whether an overseas purchaser of a copyrighted work may resell it in the United States without the copyright holder’s permission.”
Month: April 2012
Is Public Sentiment Making Our Culture More Shallow?
“Changes in culture tend to change our ‘modal type’ of character like this. In other words, a culture finds (in fact creates) its ideal person. What, then, is ours going to be? What modal type matches our culture as it has shifted in the early years of this century?”
San Antonio Opera To File For Bankruptcy
“Facing a federal lawsuit by a local musicians union, San Antonio Opera plans to file for liquidation bankruptcy within 20 days, the opera company’s lawyer said Monday.”
Will E-Books Kill The Book Cover?
“A digital book has no cover. There’s no paper to be bound up with a spine and protected inside a sturdy jacket. Browsers no longer roam around Borders scanning the shelves for the right title to pluck. Increasingly, instead, they scroll through Amazon’s postage stamp-sized pictures, which don’t actually cover anything, and instead operate as visual portals into an entire webpage of data.”
Pulitzer Board Declines To Award Prize For Fiction; Book Publishers Are Angry
“Days after the Department of Justice made the blockbuster announcement that it was suing five of the biggest book publishers in the business, the Pulitzer Prize board dropped its own bombshell on Monday: for the first time in 35 years, there would be no Pulitzer winner for fiction.”
Boston Globe Film Writer Wesley Morris Wins Pulitzer Prize For Criticism
“Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for criticism Monday, for essays and reviews that embodied what Pulitzer judges called ‘smart, inventive film criticism, distinguished by pinpoint prose and an easy traverse between the art house and big-screen box office’.”
Paralyzed Ballet Dancer, Now Recovered, Set For Return To Stage
Jack Widdowson, 19, was mugged and beaten last November on a vsit to Cardiff; the attack initially left him paralyzed from the neck down. Last week, “[he] performed his first jump since being injured – and was invited to perform with the English National Ballet” next month and again in June.
Kevin Puts’s Opera Silent Night Wins Pulitzer For Music
“Puts’ opera is adapted from the 2005 movie Joyeux Noël, which was nominated for an Academy Award for foreign-language film. Like the movie, the opera depicts an unexpected truce negotiated by Scottish, French and German officers on Christmas Eve [in 1914].” The work’s premiere was at Minnesota Opera in November.
Barnes Foundation’s General Counsel Brett Miller Found Dead
“Just weeks before the opening of the Barnes Foundation’s new museum in downtown Philadelphia, the institution’s general counsel Brett Miller has died. His body was found this weekend at his home, a spokesman for the museum has confirmed.”
English National Opera Moves Partly Back Toward Resident Company Model
“From next season, this group of a dozen of the best of our younger singers – all British or British-trained – will become a sort of core resource for ENO, each of them assigned a bespokely tailored [sic] programme of roles over two or three seasons.”