Category: issues

Zeb and Haniya, a pair of US-educated sisters, are getting a lot of attention as the first all-female band in the troubled Muslim nation. Perhaps more noteworthy is the fact that the two young women are Pashtun – the conservative ethnic group that dominates the Taliban.

During the 1930s, tens of thousands of Americans emigrated to the USSR, driven by the Depression and promises of plentiful jobs. As Stalin’s purges became more severe and sweeping, many of those Americans were sent to starve and freeze in labor camps. And among the Westerners who abetted this situation were Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Moscow and his heiress wife.

“Ho-ho-ho, hold that flight. There’s a holiday surprise for travelers – and aspiring performers – passing through Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport this month. There it is, just past the security checkpoint, set atop a small stage: a karaoke machine adorned with Christmas lights and stockings shaped like cowboy boots.”

“The idea of charging a premium for desirable seats, as Northwest and U.S. Airways do for aisle and exit-row seats, is catching on with symphonies, ballets, operas and theater companies trying to get greater bang for the buck from ticket sales.”

“In a generous act perfectly suited to the holiday season, four major arts organizations – the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Washington National Opera, Centerstage and the Hippodrome – will offer a gift of free tickets to patrons of the Baltimore Opera Company, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Dec. 4 and canceled the remainder of its 2008-2009 season.” Of course, the offer is smart marketing as well.

“Politics has been very, very good to late-night television in 2008. During what turned out to be the most closely followed election since at least 1968, nothing was more appealing to late-night viewers than watching regular helpings of ridicule being dumped on the candidates – unless it was guest appearances by those same candidates.”

A Durham University professor claims that the Christmas carol “Adeste Fideles” (“O Come, All Ye Faithful”) was originally written as “a coded rallying call for Catholic supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie,” with the “faithful” being those who remained loyal to the Stuart dynasty.

After Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s death in August, President Dmitri Medvedev named a street in Moscow after the Nobel laureate as a tribute. Now residents, along with Soviet nostalgists, are campaigning to get back the thoroughfare’s old name – Big Communist Street.

“January 2009 could be the start of a new era for concert-ticket buyers who are fed up with exorbitant prices, extraneous service charges and a lack of competition in the marketplace. That’s when Live Nation will start taking on Ticketmaster in the United States – with plans to do the same in Canada by 2010 – and there are already promises being made about how the new competition will empower the consumer.”

“A half-dozen structural revamps of [Italy’s] culture ministry during the last decade haven’t really done much except to shuffle around the burden of a creaky and defensive bureaucracy. The country is paralyzed by contradictions. Italians say they identify deeply with their cultural patrimony, but they actually don’t visit their museums much. They talk about collective Italian artistic heritage but remain, at heart, profoundly divided by ancient regional differences… differences that fracture cultural policies.”