Category: today’s top story

“One of the lead actresses in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, Natalie Mendoza, who is still recovering from a concussion sustained during the musical’s first preview performance, is leaving the production.”

“On Tuesday, a judge will hear arguments over whether the orchestra should be granted relief from paying its musicians for approximately 90 days. The orchestra filed chapter 11 earlier this month as part of a massive financial overhaul.”

“While KCET officials contend they were marginalized by an institutional bias within PBS toward an elite group of East Coast stations, critics are adamant, at times withering, in their view that the local station squandered its potential, surrendered its ambition of becoming a national player and never truly connected with its viewing public – who after all were counted on to largely fund the endeavor.”

Last month, the paper’s longtime feature/arts editor left his job, and management has cut off the Weekly‘s two contributing art critics, Doug Harvey and Christopher Miles.

“The editor of the London Review of Books, Mary-Kay Wilmers, has decided to drop the paper’s ‘personals’. For 10 years now these cheeky afterwords have raised naughtiness to new levels of wit. Even highbrows, they reminded us, have low desires; the difference is, the highbrows do it cleverer.”

“The three new rules, which will go into effect early next year, force ISPs to be transparent about how they handle network congestion, prohibit them from blocking traffic such as Skype on wired networks, and outlaw “unreasonable” discrimination on those networks, meaning they can’t put a competing online video service in the slow lane to benefit their own video services.”

The company, a hit at alternative theater festivals in London and New York, was scheduled to return to the US in January. But “both founders of the troupe are now in hiding, and another member is in jail, as the result of a government crackdown on protests against a presidential election that human rights groups have described as rigged.”

“There are few great compositional figures who aren’t already vastly aged, from Steve Reich to Elliott Carter, from Philip Glass to Pierre Boulez, there’s no single path for younger generations of composers to follow, it’s all been done before in every context you can imagine, and there are no sounds to discover that haven’t already been heard.”

“The good news is that the Federal Communications Commission has the power to issue regulations that protect net neutrality. The bad news is that draft regulations written by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski don’t do that at all. They’re worse than nothing.”

“Music is getting harder to define again. It’s becoming more of an experience and less of an object. Without records as clearly delineated receptacles of value, last century’s rules–both industrial and creative–are out the window. For those who can find an audience or a paycheck outside the traditional system, this can mean blessed freedom from the music industry’s gatekeepers.”