Category: today’s top story

“Hundreds of visitors to the J. Paul Getty Museum and dozens more at Mount St. Mary’s College were forced to evacuate Wednesday afternoon when a brush fire swept through the hillsides and canyon walls in the Sepulveda Pass, fire officials said.”

“During the campaign, Obama billed himself as a ‘champion for arts and culture,’ and now, a White House spokesman says that he is committed ‘to ensuring that the arts community has an open line to the White House.’ … [A]rts watchers are following Obama’s personnel and budgeting moves for clues as to how seriously he plans to showcase and support the arts on the policy front — and some say the early moves suggest that he won’t be taking any big, bold steps.”

“[Brad Pitt’s] Make It Right Foundation recently revealed the new designs that are part of [a] multimillion-dollar initiative to help rebuild the city’s Lower Ninth Ward, devastated in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina.”

Michael Kaiser: “What we really need is a debate over federal arts policy. Most people do not know that no fewer than nine government agencies provide support to arts in this nation. That is not a typo. … The problem is not that federal funding for the arts is unwarranted; the problem is that we need to be assured, as citizens, that we are getting the most value for our money.”

“Australia and Japan are developing together a Utopia Project that would present an arts Olympics every two years in an Asia-Pacific centre. They have enlisted the potential support of eight other countries in planning to stage non-competitive arts shows that would include artists, works and performances from across the region.”

“Does the notion of ‘freedom’ really mean the same thing in Baghdad as it does in Boston? Newly published research suggests the answer is probably no. It’s a question of whether one is more oriented toward independence or interdependence — an attitude that is largely conditioned by one’s cultural background.”

The Everyman actor, who earned cinematic acclaim in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront as well as television stardom in The Streets of San Francisco and decades of American Express commercials, said, “I learned in my second year of drama school that I was not a leading man – I was a character actor. So I thought, I’d better be the best character actor around.”

“In a victory for the reclusive writer J. D. Salinger, a federal judge on Wednesday indefinitely banned publication in the United States of a new book by a Swedish author that contains a 76-year-old version of Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ … While the case could still go to trial, [the] ruling means that [Fredrik] Colting’s book cannot be published in the United States pending the resolution of the litigation, which could drag on for months or years.”

“The former head of finance for the Dutch national arts funding body, the Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (BKVB), is the subject of an international police hunt after the discovery that he had siphoned around €15.5m from the organisation’s accounts.”