Category: issues

There’s been a big hike in the fees Australian clubs have to pay for playing music. “The perception was that while clubs and raves were making a mint from drinks and cover charges, they were hardly paying for the music that drew crowds. On top of DJ fees, each punter was only indirectly contributing seven cents a night to the Phonographic Performance Company of Australia for the music they were experiencing. Instead of collecting seven cents per person, the collection body will now demand a $1.05 fee for each patron.”

The school controls the Barnes Collection. “Summer break is normally a time of respite, a pause in the scholastic action to allow administrators, faculty, and students a little timeout and a chance to get the batteries charged. But it seems the only things being charged at Lincoln University in rural southeastern Pennsylvania this summer are highly publicized allegations of fiscal mismanagement and misconduct.”

“In a move that some coin collectors fear could eventually make it difficult to pursue their passion, the United States government has imposed import restrictions on ancient coins from Cyprus. It is the first time the United States has limited trade in a broad category of coins as part of an effort to guard the cultural heritage of another country.”

Dallas’s Arts District, which counts the Dallas Symphony, the Crow Collection of Asian Art, and the Nasher Sculpture Center among its resident groups, has become the cultural destination its supporters hoped it would be when it was first conceived more than 30 years ago. But for small and medium-sized arts groups headquartered in the district, it can be an uphill battle to even be noticed by the larger public. An advocacy group is hoping to change that.

The Kresge Foundation has pledged $6 million to Detroit-area arts programs as part of “a new grant program that promises to funnel $2 million annually for three years to orchestras, museums, theaters and other groups… The news could not have come at a more critical juncture for local arts groups, which have struggled to raise corporate and private dollars in Michigan’s stagnant economy and replace the millions lost to severe cuts in state arts funding.”

“In an urgent effort to save a critical mass of scholars unlike any initiative undertaken since World War II, the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund is finalizing plans to rescue hundreds of Iraqi professors beginning in the coming months. ‘We consider it to be the first large-scale effort of its kind since the 1930s, when IIE’s Emergency Rescue Committee rescued over 300 senior European scholars and brought them to safety in the United States’.”

America’s urban public universities are being starved for resources. “Many of our urban secondary schools are abysmal, it’s true. Equally unjustifiable, but perhaps no surprise, is that urban institutions of higher education have begun to endure challenges and inequities that mirror those faced by our feeder schools and districts.”

Fans and critics frequently disagree. The tension between them, more acute than ever in the Internet age, seems ripe for exploration. So what exactly is a critic to do?

“Our prolonged crises over multi-culturalism, inspired by the rise of Islamism – threatens us with the loss of our culture. The western world could become a civilisation devoid of culture: exactly what, in 1922, Oswald Spengler forecast in his book The Decline of the West. For Spengler, we were about to find ourselves in the depraved, cultureless condition of the late Roman empire.”

In New Orleans, “tourism is still in the doldrums and only 60 percent of the pre-Katrina population has returned nearly two years after the hurricane and flooding devastated the area.” But the region’s casinos are raking in the cash at record Levels.