Blog

What Happened To Cultural Theory?

“While Theory has become a humdrum intellectual matter within the humanities and a nonexistent or frivolous one without, it has indeed acquired a professional prestige that is as strong as ever. This is the paradox of its success, and failure. Intellectually speaking, twenty-five years ago Theory was an adventure of thought with real stakes.” Now?

Kimmel Cuts Staff, Budget

Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center (home to the Philadelphia Orchestra, among others) has a $3 million deficit and is cutting 11 staff. “Part of the financial drain is long-term debt. The Kimmel took out a $30 million loan to help bridge the gap between the time pledges to its construction campaign were made and the time they were fulfilled. But only $3 million of the loan has been repaid, and each year the debt costs the Kimmel about $2 million in principal and interest payments. Now Kimmel leaders are trying to raise $90 million to reduce the debt and build an endowment.”

It’s The Theatre That Has Gotten Small…

“There’s been a predominance of television realism and of a section of the critical culture that demands a moral message from new writing. This is in danger of making theatre about as interesting as muesli. Why would anyone write stage plays now? If you can write dialogue and you can hit a deadline you can write TV. You can write about your south London council estate or your middle class swingers and you can make more money and reach more people and therefore have more impact. Apart from anything else, the denial of the larger stages to living playwrights has made it harder and harder for them to earn a living from writing, as they see their income from royalties dwindle to insultingly low levels.”

Hunting For That Lost Musical Theatre Gem

Marshall Fisher is a hunter of lost musicals. “In the middle of his career, Orson Welles said to Cole Porter, ‘I want to write a musical’ – Around the World in Eighty Days – ‘I want to direct it and I’m going to be in it.’ Truman Capote wrote House of Flowers with Harold Arlen. John Steinbeck wrote with Rodgers and Hammerstein, who had wanted to make a musical out of Cannery Row. But Steinbeck, classy John Steinbeck, said, ‘No, I’m gonna write a sequel specifically for you,’ – so he wrote a little novel called Sweet Thursday.”

Billy Elliot – Feet In Two Cultures

John Lahr finds himself intrigued by the new “Billy Elliot” musical that has earned raves in London. “The British love musicals; they just don’t do them very well. The problem, it seems to me, is spiritual. The jazz of American optimism, which lends elation and energy to the form, is somehow alien to the ironic British spirit. At its buoyant core, the American musical is the expression of a land of plenty. England, on the other hand, is a land of scarcity—the Land of No, as a friend of mine calls it. Billy Elliot is fascinating because it situates itself precisely on the cultural fault line between the two traits.”

Rich: Castrating Public Broadcasting

Frank Rich writes that “the right’s new assault on public broadcasting is toothless, far from it. But this time the game is far more insidious and ingenious. The intent is not to kill off PBS and NPR but to castrate them by quietly annexing their news and public affairs operations to the larger state propaganda machine that the Bush White House has been steadily constructing at taxpayers’ expense.”

Supreme Court Ruling Will Have Implications On Tech We Can Use

Monday’s ruling by the US Supreme Court that tech companies can be liable for copyright infringement by those who use their technology will have serious implications for tech development. “While entertainment companies touted the victory as a crystal clear decision about right and wrong business practices, technology groups said they are left with a murky, unclear standard of what it means for a company to encourage, or induce, its customers to infringe copyright, and this will lead to more litigation. ‘This really has given a tremendous amount of leverage to content owners to dictate the kind of technology that consumers will have available to them’.”

Supremes’ File-Sharing Decision Isn’t The End…

Sure, Monday’s file-sharing decision by the Supreme Court was unanimous. But it’s clear the Big Media companies “didn’t win anything like what they had been asking the Supremes for—a rule that would penalize any company that made money off a product widely used for infringement, regardless of what the company intended. And though the technical companies and consumer groups are troubled by the outcome in this case, there’s still much to encourage them.”

The Dallas Symphony’s New Ticket Club

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s “Impromptu ticket program aims to fill empty seats while also giving time-starved music lovers the flexibility to catch a show on short notice. But rather than buying deeply discounted tickets online or through Web-based auctions, patrons would pay a monthly fee in exchange for getting the “best seat available” at the 2,056-seat Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center – seats that went unsold or were turned back to DSO at the last minute by subscribers.”