“Pending the approval of the City Council, Mayor Villaraigosa has named Olga Garay to head the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Most recently, Garay, 54, has been a New York-based independent producer and performing arts consultant.” A former program director for the arts at the Doris Duke Foundation, Garay said “that the mayor’s commitment to increasing cultural funding was part of the package.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Feds Have ‘Character Qualifications’ For Broadcasters?
“The Federal Communications Commission has renewed the license of Los Angeles Spanish-language television station KAZA-TV Channel 54, denying an unusual protest brought by rival broadcaster NBC Universal. In November, NBC Universal … asked the FCC to deny the license renewal by invoking a rarely used morals clause,” arguing that the station’s management “was corrupt and thus lacked ‘the character qualifications’ required by federal law.”
If We Are What We Watch, Many Are Cheeseheads
A large round of cheddar, ripening in England, “has not been impeded in its rise to fame by the modest nature of its accomplishments. As the star of Cheddar-vision TV, a Web site that carries live images of its life on a shelf (www.cheddarvision.tv), the cheese has been viewed so far more than 900,000 times. … Compared with the cheese-cam, the old Yule Log on television was a roiling hotbed of nonstop commotion.”
Amnesia Isn’t Only An Author’s Device
“Every so often, seemingly normal people suddenly walk out of their lives and disappear, with no recollection of who they are, where they are from or what their previous life was like. It is the stuff of fiction, but it happens in real life too. … On the fictional side is a play called ‘Fugue,’ now on stage at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York.” So what is fugue, really?
Impressionists’ Failing Eyesight, Reconsidered
“The later years of both Claude Monet and Edgar Degas were marked by failing vision and corresponding changes in the style of their paintings, creating an ambivalence about their later work among both their contemporaries and today’s critics. … In a recent article in The Archives of Ophthalmology, Dr. Michael F. Marmor, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford, used computer simulations to create images of what these artists might have seen as their vision declined.”
Joffrey’s Leader To Step Down; Troupe Enters New Era
“When the Joffrey Ballet’s Gerald Arpino steps aside July 1 as head of the troupe he co-founded 50 years ago, it will signal a momentous change for the world-renowned company, based in Chicago for the last 11 years. When the new artistic director is in place, which could be this fall, the Joffrey will be led by someone other than a co-founder for the first time in its half-century history.”
Actor Roscoe Lee Browne, 81
“Roscoe Lee Browne, a stage, film and television actor known for his rich voice, died early yesterday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. … Mr. Browne came to acting somewhat late, after gaining fame as a track star in the early 1950s. But he soon became part of a vanguard of leading black actors in the traditionally white New York theater world.”
Edgar B. Young, 98, Dies; Helped Build Lincoln Center
“Edgar B. Young, the behind-the-scenes administrator who smoothed the way for the construction of Lincoln Center in the 1960s by juggling the demands of government agencies, donors, architects and artistic organizations, died on April 6 at his home in Medford, N.J.”
Why Vonnegut’s Indispensable In Youth (And Later, Too)
“If you read Kurt Vonnegut when you were young — read all there was of him, book after book as fast as you could the way so many of us did — you probably set him aside long ago. … (T)he time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. He is the indispensable footnote to everything everyone is trying to teach you, the footnote that pulls the rug out from under the established truths being so firmly avowed in the body of the text.”
Why Do We Laugh At Smashed Pianos?
“There are moments that really remind you that different people see the world in vastly different ways. Take the £45,000 grand piano that fell off a truck and smashed to bits this week. … Why are piano mishaps so hilarious? Partly it’s run-of-the-mill schadenfreude at seeing expensive objects smashed to bits. But mainly, I suspect, it’s because we have been trained by the movies to find shattered pianofortes, in particular, funny.”