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Poetry Magazine Windfall Sows Some Discord

“While initially hailed as a blessing, the $100 million gift from drug-company heiress Ruth E. Lilly is sowing discord in the normally harmonious realm of verse. Poetry is embroiled in a lawsuit with a bank over alleged mismanagement of funds. The journal’s editor of 20 years, Joseph Parisi, quit over the summer amid a battle with a newly assertive board. Rival poetry groups complain the magazine is gaining too much influence and will stifle the more-creative elements of the craft. Even Poetry’s staunchest supporters wonder how the monthly journal will survive its sudden windfall.”

Knowledge For Wisdom, Not Acquisition

Academia screwed up, writes Nicholas Maxwell, and we need a revolution to fix it. “We urgently need to bring about a third intellectual revolution, one which corrects the blunders of the Enlightenment revolution, so that the basic aim of academia becomes to promote wisdom, and not just acquire knowledge. Every branch and aspect of academic inquiry needs to change if we are to have the kind of inquiry, both more rational and of greater human value, that we really need.”

When Art Went To War Against AIDS

“If art had often tried to protest prejudice, encourage compassion and console the grieving, it had never tried to provide safe-sex information, lower drug prices and stimulate the development of antiretroviral therapies. I remember thinking, early on, that this was not only unseemly in some way but also too much of an agenda for poor little art to shoulder.”

Zagat On Classical Music? Yikes!

The new Zagat guide rating culture has some flaws when it comes to classical music, says a letter writer to the New York Times. “Classical recordings, unlike those in other categories, are usually identified by at least three criteria: composer’s name, title of the work and performer’s name. In the Zagat guide, classical albums are typically listed alphabetically by composer name, perhaps followed by title, with little or no indication of performers. But a recording of a Tchaikovsky piano concerto with Van Cliburn as soloist is listed under “V.” I suspect that this is a little joke. Or perhaps not.”

A New History Of Dance

A new history of dance in the 20th Century takes an unusual line for a history book. “Although everyone will be using the book for reference, Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick have produced a work that is completely unlike a standard reference book; you don’t just look things up in it — you read it. Here is a coherent, reasoned and entertaining chronicle of dance performance in the West over the hundred years that are unquestionably the fullest and most complicated in the long history of this fragmented and elusive art.”

What Happened To The “Angels” Effect?

Back in 1993, “Angeles in America” was a miraculous thing, and it promised a generation of new plays that would follow. But, writes Frank Rizzo, “the plays that followed, on Broadway at least, were largely more of what had come before: naturalistic or tiny-cast shows centering on family crises or issues of personal identity. They examined the characters as individuals; some were wonderfully done, but few explored who we are as a community, as a country and a member of the global village. They…furthered their canons but did not necessarily stretch their art. But nothing compared to our being touched by Angels.”

Movie Studios Losing Fight Against Piracy

Hollywood studios’ latest attempts to combat piracy seem to be a miserable failure. “A major source of movies online is an underground network of groups that specialize in bootlegging films, piracy experts say. These “ripping crews” – which recruit members around the world to obtain, edit, transfer and store films – compete with one another to be the first to obtain a movie, the experts say. They frequently are assisted by people connected to the movie industry, whose numbers include cinema employees, workers at post-production houses and friends of Academy members.”

The Problem(s) With Chicago Theatre

The hit musical “Urinetown” had its origins ten years ago in Chicago in a tiny storefront. But the show never got traction there, and it took a move to New York and a decade for the show to morph into a hit. “And yet had ‘Urinetown’ become a fringe Chicago musical – which it was inches away from becoming – it likely would have run here for a month and then sunk without a trace in a city that still seems woefully unable to propel its homegrown properties to national prominence and longevity – unless those artists involved ship out for the coasts and start all over.”

Labor Fight Tearing Up Touring Shows In America

“Labor strife is the most contentious dispute in touring theater today, a battleground that could create aesthetic and financial casualties for audiences as well as producers and presenters. Using non-Equity actors can greatly reduce a producer’s costs of putting a show on the road: Union actors in major productions earn $1,252 a week plus $742 in expense money, which covers lodging, meals and other incidentals of life on the road. Non-Equity producers generally don’t disclose their payroll figures, but the union asserts that non-union performers’ earnings hover around $500 a week, with an additional $250 for expenses.”