A bracket-style competition by public vote to choose the Smithsonian Institution’s “most iconic” object has led to a barrage of competitive tweeting and Photoshopping, as a Pullman train car races against the original “Star-Spangled Banner” flag, and a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton battles the National Zoo’s young panda (“Bao Bao may be small, but at least she’s not extinct.”) and the space shuttle Discovery (“What is black and white AND has been to space? Not Bao Bao.”).
Author: Matthew Westphal
Do Black Composers Still Face A Racial Divide? If So, Where Does It Come From?
African-American composers of three generations weigh in, as does Detroit Symphony music director Leonard Slatkin.
Publisher Of Harper’s Stands Firm In Defense Of Online Paywall And Dead-Tree Magazine
When a group of young people demanded that John R. MacArthur make Harper’s available for free online, “what he told them was ‘essentially, forget it.’ The web, to him, ‘wasn’t much more than a gigantic Xerox machine’ designed to rob publishers and writers. He was mocked as neo-Luddite. But the fight only hardened his convictions, which are reflected monthly in his magazine.”
We Have Too Many Bogus Plagiarism Scandals
Laura Miller argues that few of us realize “just how commonplace plagiarism charges are, how thin most of the evidence is and how poorly the average person understands the nature of the transgression. … We’re a plagiarism-obsessed society, partly because we know how much damage we can do to someone’s career and life by accusing them of it, but largely because so many of us don’t really grasp what plagiarism is.”
What Does It Take For Content Creators To Get Some Royalties?
Publishers, record labels, digital distributors, streaming music services – these days it seems like everyone involved in creative works can earn some money except the creators themselves. (Rosanne Cash earned $114 from 600,000 streaming audio plays.) Here are the stories of two struggles – by John Steinbeck’s descendants and by one particular singer-songwriter grand-nephew and his partner – to claw some income back.
The First Domino? One Of Italy’s Crisis-Ridden Major Opera Houses Goes Dark
Bari’s Teatro Petruzzelli, the country’s fourth-largest opera house, is simply out of money. With both the city council and the regional government having slashed funding, the Petruzzelli has cancelled the two productions it had scheduled for this fall, and no one is sure if or when it will reopen.
Hachette CEO’s Response To Amazon’s Email Campaign: Why We Price Books The Way We Do
“Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch has received ‘a few emails’ in response to a call earlier this weekend by Amazon to contact the executive, demanding he and his company give in to the retailer’s demands for lower ebook prices. In response to those emails, Pietsch is sending the below note.” [full text provided]
Top Posts From AJBlogs 08.11.14
Dmitri Shostakovich, Yuja Wang, Cultural Drift and Cher
AJBlog: Condemned to Music | Published 2014-08-11
“I did my best work there.”
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-08-12
A Playwright and a Composer Meet in a Forest
AJBlog: Dancebeat | Published 2014-08-11
“Is Spotify Killing Music?”
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-08-11
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Robin Williams Dead At 63 In Apparent Suicide
“The Juilliard-trained actor and uncontainably exhibitionist comic who became one of the most dazzling all-around talents in show business … was found dead Aug. 11 at his home in Tiburon, Calif. He was 63 … The cause of death was [apparently] suicide due to asphyxia … His media agent said he had been battling depression.” (includes slide show and video clips)
The Tragedy Of Robin Williams’s Career
David Edelstein: “He never found a form that would capture the genius of his stand-up act or his early appearances on The Tonight Show, when his mind worked faster than anyone alive and very possibly dead, when he seemed to be channeling a fleet of circling UFOs containing the galaxy’s best comedy writers.”