The recording industry says it will begin prosecuting music downloaders who violate copyright. But some users are defiant. “I don’t think they’ll get much money from us. I don’t see it being enforceable. They threaten us, but we just find a different program, and other computer savvy kids will find new programs. It’s an empty threat. I don’t consider it a big deal. Sometimes I only like one or two songs and I’m not going to buy an entire CD for that song.”
Blog
Remembering Kate Hepburn
Katherine Hepburn was “admired not only by audiences but by her peers as well as critics. Her four best actress Oscars are an academy record for a performer, as are her 12 best actress nominations. And when the Manchester Guardian polled critics around the world a few years back to name the best ever on screen, she not only handily won the actress category but got more votes than the male acting winner as well.”
Understanding Beethoven Nine
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is one of the most famous pieces of music in history. But “what can be said about the Ninth with reasonable certainty? One is that its position in the world is probably about what Beethoven wanted it to be. Figuratively speaking, everybody knows the Ninth. But has anybody really understood it? The harder you look, the odder it gets. In a singular way, the Ninth enfolds the apparently contradictory qualities of the epic and the slippery.”
In Search Of LA
Why has it been so difficult for writers to capture the identity of Los Angeles? “Although it is the second-largest city in America, in the literary imagination it is still a colony. Instead of speaking for itself, the city is spoken about. Our classic descriptions of Los Angeles were written by visitors who spent only a few weeks or months in the city; or by imported slaves of Hollywood, who act out their rebellion against the city at large; or even by natives writing mainly for an audience somewhere else. What is missing, with a few notable exceptions, is a Los Angeles literature unconcerned with the outside world, intent on explaining the city to itself—as Dickens did with London, or Balzac with Paris.”
Ask Me If I’m An Idiot
Why do so many interviews with authors seem so stupid? “Part of the problem,” writes Gene Weingarten, “is caused by the publishing industry itself, which caters to the laziness of the media. Here at The Washington Post, we constantly get promotional packets for new books in which the publicity departments declare that their authors are available for interviews, and then actually suggest questions to ask. As you might guess, these are not Mike Wallace-type questions…”
The First Great Fight Over Modern Art
In one of the great libel trials of the 19th Century, James Whistler sued the great art critic John Ruskin, author of Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice, over a review that dismissed him as a fraud. “There had been rows about modern art before. But none that are so uncannily familiar, none that speak our critical language in all its odd mixture of the extreme and the banal. It is easy for us to laugh, with the condescension of posterity, at the sexual hysteria of French journalists distressed by Manet’s Olympia (1863). But Ruskin’s denunciation of Whistler is the template for a thousand denunciations to come: it is the definitive rejection of modern art as fraud, and every subsequent diatribe against beds, bricks or the lights going on and off reproduces it.”
Art Of The Pooch
“With pets holding court as favored members of the family, pup art has become big business. Dozens of artists advertise their talents on the Internet. Pet parodies in the style of famous artists depict everything from a cut-up geometric Picasso beagle to a tabby frozen in Edvard Munch’s “Scream”. Getting your pooch’s picture with Santa has been popular for years at vets’ offices and animal shelters, and photography studios report a brisk business in non-human shoots. Given this flurry of furry activity, museum-quality custom paintings were inevitable…”
Book City Opens With Throngs
An experiment in bookselling is a stunning success in Blaenavon as nine new bookstores open and crowds throng to this formerly blighted industrial town. “The new shopkeepers, many standing behind counters for the first time in their lives, struggled to cope. Visitors were rattling the doors of the new bookshops while they were still closed for the official opening. Once the doors opened change ran out within half an hour, paper bags within an hour, the piles of maps showing the new bookshops by mid-afternoon. By evening yawning gaps were opening up on the brand new shelves.”
Reinventing As A City Of Books
“Today, Blaenavon relaunches itself as Booktown Blaenavon. Nine new bookshops will open simultaneously, specialising in subjects from cookery to psychic healing, six more shops are in the pipeline, and the Castle Inn has put up a shelf of 50p books. The small town in South Wales launches its greatest experiment since 1787, when three businessmen leased seven square miles of rough, heathery land to build an ironworks equipped with dazzlingly modern steam technology.”
Shakespeare In Translation: Harder Than It Sounds
Translating plays from one language to another is always a difficult task. Translating Shakespeare, whose constant use of puns and linguistic tricks was uniquely English, is nigh onto impossible, particularly when the language needed is as far afield from the original as Japanese. There have been many Japanese translations of the Bard’s works, of course, but many have made the mistake of trying too hard to stick faithfully to the original dialogue. The resulting mish-mash of words and sounds can be grating on a Japanese audience’s ears, says Miki Takashima, but a new Tokyo production of Hamlet seems to have risen above the usual awkwardness.