Lawrence Lessig thinks that a copyright law that declares that millions of people are criminals is wrong. “I think artists should be allowed to decide what the rules are under which their content is made available in a good copyright system. Sometimes that means their content is made available under compulsory license, which means they get paid but not a price that they set, sometimes they’ll give it away. Sometimes their copyright expires, at least that’s what was supposed to happen. And copyrights that expire [go into] the public domain.”
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Urban Pioneers With A Stake In The Theatre
The historic 3,600-seat Chicago Theatre is being restored and revived – by a couple of theatre entrepreneurs with an impressive track record. “We are going to be the on-the-ground, in-the-theater general managers of the Chicago Theatre. And if you look at our entire careers — our entire lives, really — you will see people who have been interested in taking old downtown theaters, reviving them and contributing to the after-dark lives of this country’s great and historic cities.”
A Revolution To Transform Music As We Know It
“The music industry stands at an historic crossroads — almost every aspect of the way people consume and listen to popular music is changing, dwarfing even the seismic shift in the 1880s when music lovers turned from sheet music and player pianos to wax cylinders and later, in 1915, newfangled 78 rpm phonograph discs. The one thing all of the experts agree upon is that these changes — which are already under way — will be dramatic, quick and inevitable.”
Media Obscenity: We Object! (Don’t We?)
Linda Winer wonders why the media obscenity crackdown currently underway in the US isn’t being objected to by more people. “The vise is tightening again on freedoms that, at this late date, a grown-up country should not be forced to keep defending. The FCC, temporarily distracted from efforts to allow even further consolidation of Big Brother media companies, is zealously pursuing the revival of standards-and-practice departments – you know, the old in-house decency police – for radio and network TV.”
Catholic Churches Close Massachusetts Churches That Dominate Local Architecture
The Catholic church is financially devastated in Massachusetts after the chuch’s sex abuse scandals, and closing many churches. “The architectural landscape of Eastern Massachusetts, dominated in so many communities by church steeples and bell towers, is at risk of being diminished as the region’s largest religious denomination, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, prepares to shutter a significant number of parishes, preservationists say.”
Sorting Out The Look And Sound Of Opera
“We are told all the time that the audience’s expectations for opera have changed because our society is visually oriented, educated by films and television, even by opera on television. We now expect opera to be theatrically vital. One problem with this view is that our visual society has not been well educated by films and television — media that even now often ignore the “visual” reality of the society they are supposed to reflect. People come in all sizes, shapes, colors, ages, and types of behavior; they engage in passionate love affairs and die nobly or ignobly, regardless of their outward appearance. In a way, opera is a more honest art form than the movies, because people look the way they do rather than the way film fans expect heroes and villains to appear.”
Disgraced Journalists Fail To Find Book Audience
Disgraced journalists Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass have had a flood of publicity for their books. But despite the free promotion, neither one has sold very weel. Blair’s book had an “announced first printing of 250,000 but had sold only about 1,400 copies as of last week, according to Nielsen BookScan. Glass’s effort came out in May and had a first printing of 75,000. Nielsen BookScan has reported sales of 3,400 copies.
Balancing The Composer/Conductor
Many conductors start out as other brands of musicians. It used to be that composer/conductors were common. There aren’t so many today. “Musicians who genuinely straddle that divide — whose talents and personal commitment are equally devoted to composing and conducting — have been the rare exceptions. Mahler was one, Leonard Bernstein another. Salonen is the pre-eminent case in our time. What it means, for him and for his audiences, is a constant, painful assessment of competing priorities. For a listener located outside Los Angeles, it’s hard to look at Salonen’s small catalog of compositions and not begrudge the time and artistic energy it takes to run the Philharmonic.”
Sound And Fury Of A Size
Does size really matter in opera singers, wonders Justin Davidson? “There is a rough, unofficial consensus that in some operas size matters more than in others. Companies will bend over backward not to cast a fat Carmen or a slow-moving Zerlina in Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro,” but all of Wagner, some Strauss and much Verdi are open to singers of any dimensions. As we whittle down the options for large singers, we also deplete the pool of people who can sing these demanding roles. Voices like Deborah Voigt’s are a precious resource.”
Does Media Consolidation Equal Obscenity?
“For years, media consolidation was one of those issues considered worthy of debate only by policy wonks and public interest groups. The general public rarely stopped to read sober-minded studies, such as the one done after the 2002 elections, which found that 60% of the top-rated local news broadcasts had failed to devote one second to campaign coverage. But after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl antics shone a spotlight on Viacom’s MTV-CBS hegemony, people began to connect the Big Media dots. The Super Bowl had more of a galvanizing effect on the media and the FCC than it did on grass-roots America. Ordinary citizens were already upset. For the past three years, when I boot up my computer each morning, I see dozens of complaints about what was on TV the night before. We’re just catching up.”