Category: issues

“In a chilled and snow-shrouded Catskills landscape, hundreds of people get together every December to try to breathe some warmth into a dying culture. For almost a week at a hotel here, organizers immerse the group, which calls itself KlezKamp, in Yiddish and the folkways of the Eastern Europeans who spoke that language until Hitler extinguished their communities.”

“The English village is lodged in the public imagination as the great good place where nothing changes, a refuge from the rat race and a retirement dream.” But the histories of these little settlements have often been harsh. “What happens to them for good or ill is so often not the result of natural growth or decline but of some economic bonanza or hammerblow or some landlord’s benevolence or greed.”

“A House of Commons committee studying Canada’s proposed copyright act agreed Thursday that balance is the key to protecting the rights of artists, while not handicapping consumers in their use of digital technology.”

Since starting his month-long Internet-puppetry project on Nov. 1, which involves posting polls online to let strangers direct the course of his day (www.theadviceofstrangers.com), the performer Marc Horowitz has discovered a few things.

“A construction team is poring over hundreds of bids from companies hoping to begin building the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, but there’s not enough money to finish even the first phase.”

“Over the last several weeks, Lincoln Center has presented the White Light Festival, billed as an exploration of the spiritual in music. … How valid is that goal? Is it possible to make works spiritual just by calling them that? Has this festival achieved the otherworldly aims expressed in its marketing?” A discussion among the classical music writers at The New York Times.

“In just a handful of years, the food blog has taken off faster than a runaway sushi train. In Australia, the uptake of blogging — along with tweeting and Facebooking more recently — speaks volumes about this country’s obsession with food, and it seems ardent foodies are jumping aboard the new media express in droves.”

“What began as a self-styled cultural revolution is now slipping into a culture war of sorts. On one side is a self-assured elite from Moscow, here to instruct the provinces on what is new, cool and cutting-edge. On the other side are the guardians of a local culture, who feel threatened and belittled by the implication that they are a bunch of rubes.”

“Most of Italy’s cinemas, theatres and concert halls closed for the day on Monday in protest against culture budget cuts, amid ongoing outrage over poor maintenance of the country’s major ancient monuments. The government is cutting a total of 280 million euros (382 million dollars) in culture budgets over the next three years, including 58 million euros a year from the culture ministry alone.”

Including a thriving popular dance form and a semi-commercial nutritional idea that’s about 60 years old “in the same list together with disappearing skills or ancient religious rituals doesn’t harm anyone, but blurs rather than clarifies the varieties of cultural experience, and turns the initiative into an endless and futile enumeration.”