In 1896, the famous inventor Thomas Edison won the patent for the Latham Loop, a device that prevented the film inside a camera from snapping. Thus ensued a series of conflicts, lawsuits, pirating, and armed confrontations, as would-be movie producers struggled to attain independence from Edison’s attempt to monopolize the movie industry. As the more fanciful story goes, these renegade producers chose Hollywood as a base because its proximity to the Mexican border offered a safe place to hide from Edison's bully-gangs. Ultimately, the renegade producers won the day, and the Hollywood studio system was born. From the 1920s through the 1940s, if a movie was to be made, you can bet that a Hollywood studio made it. The studios not only controlled most of the people and talent of the American film industry, they also regulated artistic vision, theme, content, and subject. But no matter how stifling such control became, there was no alternative sour

Sometimes we like things loose, unstructured, in blue jeans. Sometimes we like things precise, brilliant, and entrancing. This is the heart of ballet. By all logical assumptions, it should never have survived the French Revolution. An art form developed out of the formality of court life, it boasts an almost mathematical vocabulary of steps and gestures. Ballet in the past few hundred years has both evolved and remained still. Any city worth its charter supports a ballet company and at least one annual production of "The Nutcracker." Productions of nineteenth-century classics have been a staple of "high" culture to a small but devoted audience. But the art form has witnessed some radical experimentation, as well. One of the half- dozen verifiable geniuses of the twentieth century, George Balanchine, blew the dust off traditional ballet. He made generous use of composers such as Bruckner, Gershwin, and Stravinsky. Balanchine realized, like all great choreographers, that the true soul of ballet is music.

Some topics in this essay:
Joseph McCarthy, Latham Loop, Andrew Sarris, Jacques Derrida, Elizabethans Jacobeans, Barefoot Modern, Beastie Boys, Music Staid, Mozart Beethoven’s, Dance Modernism, modern dance, classical music, twentieth century, art form, american film, forms expression, modern form, modern dancer, renegade producers, kool herc,