A Kapital Idea

“There is no wedding, no romantic interest and no plot to speak of. Instead the reader of Karl Marx’s epic work, Das Kapital, is treated to a lengthy treatise on the division of labour and capitalist modes of production, offered up in long, convoluted sentences. Yet none of this has deterred a German theatre group from achieving the seemingly impossible: bringing the huge classic on economic theory to the stage.”

The Internet Sucks? Not So Fast.

A Canadian magazine recently published an article laying out a long list of ways in which the Internet has supposedly failed to live up to the lofty expectations set out for it. The article “implies that a world without the Internet would be a world free of pornography, gambling, copyright violations, plagiarism, fraud, infidelity, pedophilia and partisan political bickering.” But is such a blanket declaration of failure missing the point?

Finally, Someone Making Money From The Internet!

One of the stiffest challenges facing radio stations is how to embrace new technologies without losing gobs of money on them. Even something as simple as an internet stream of live programming costs more money than the listener will ever know, and those streams usually generate little to no additional income. But for Seattle jazz station KPLU, online streaming has opened up unforeseen avenues of new listenership and, by extension, new revenue.

Underground Classical

New York’s classical music scene is moving out of the concert hall and into some unlikely locales. “Spurred on by a growing number of offbeat performance venues and enterprising young classical musicians, New York is experiencing a boom in small, largely below-the-radar concert series. There are opera nights at a Lower East Side dive bar, chamber music concerts at a boxing gym beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, contemporary music at a cabaret in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and avant-garde fare in a silo on the banks of an industrial canal.”

Cleveland Arts Tax Passes

A cotroversial ballot measure dedicating money raised by a new cigarette tax to arts and culture in the Cleveland area passed comfortably in Tuesday’s election. “The measure will raise the county cigarette tax by 1.5 cents per cigarette starting in January, generating about $20 million per year for 10 years for arts and cultural organizations and individual artists.”

IMPAC Long List Released

“Fourteen books by Canadians made the long list for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award yesterday, including works by Margaret Atwood, David Bergen, Camilla Gibb and David Gilmour. The prestigious prize is worth about $215,000. A shortlist of up to 10 novels will be revealed in April, with the winner announced in June.”

Borat May Be Banned In Russia

In a presumed show of solidarity with its neighbor, Kazakhstan, Russian film officials are threatening to prevent the satirical movie, Borat, from screening in Russia. The film, in which actor Sacha Baron Cohen portrays a bumbling, anti-Semitic Kazakh “journalist,” has been denounced by Kazakh politicians, who are upset at the portrayal of their little-known country as a backwards backwater.