Category: today’s top story

“With activists against Proposition 8 — California’s ban on same-sex marriage — turning to threats of boycotts, attention is focusing on a surprising target: The Sundance Film Festival. The festival has been fielding calls and emails from activists calling for Sundance to pull its films from a Park City fourplex operated by Cinemark Theaters…. Other activists have called on a boycott of Sundance altogether, merely because of its ties to Utah, where the Mormon Church is headquartered.”

“We need to do for the 21st century what FDR did for the twentieth–invest in worn-out highways, our frail electrical grid, our public transit, brittle bridges, and water supplies. … This late-model WPA would take advantage of a moment when great architecture, buoyed by a long construction boom and debilitated by the bubble’s pop, is looking for a purpose.”

“After years on the run from Shiite and Sunni militias and morality police, Iraqi musicians are slowly returning to the streets of Baghdad, looking to fill the silence left by the fading civil war… Under the strict interpretation of Islamic law imposed by Al-Qaeda on the areas it controlled, musicians were considered a threat to morality, along with alcohol vendors, barbers and women who did not cover their hair.”

“Cutting costs in the wake of the economic downturn, the Met[ropolitan Opera] is dropping next season’s highly anticipated revival of John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles that was to feature the company debut of Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth. Angela Gheorghiu and Thomas Hampson, who also were to appear, instead will sing in a less-costly revival of Verdi’s La Traviata, Met general manager Peter Gelb said Thursday.”

For now, that is. “Why officials are willing to avoid obsessive worrying can be attributed to the way formal grantmaking is calculated. Though assets and endowments determine the level of giving, endowment size is generally determined by taking a multiyear average. Such averaging – which is based on an endowment’s market value on a specific date, such as the end of the third or fourth fiscal quarter – tends to ‘smooth out’ market highs and lows….”

The author of The Tipping Point and Blink may be a pop-intellectual rock star who rakes in “stratospheric” speaking fees, but he says, “At the end of the day, I’m just a journalist […] I spend my time talking to people who tell me things, and then I write them down. I’m necessarily parasitic in a way. I have done well as a parasite. [pause] But I’m still a parasite.”

Boyden’s Through Black Spruce, a novel narrated by a Cree bush pilot in a coma and his niece, who has left the subarctic wilderness to find her missing sister in Manhattan, has won this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, which carries a C$50,000 cash award. The jurors were novelist Margaret Atwood, former Ontario premier Bob Rae, and Irish author Colm Toíbín, the first foreign judge in the prize’s 15-year history.

“In the summer of 1962, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was scanning his morning Washington Post when an item on Page A15 caught his eye. Norman Mailer’s most recent article in Esquire magazine had mocked Jacqueline Kennedy for, among other things, being excessively soft-spoken for a first lady. Hoover scribbled a note: ‘Let me have memo on Norman Mailer.'”

The Detroit Institute of Arts “lost $17 million in 2008, the latest in a string of annual operating shortfalls that totaled nearly $100 million in the past 10 years. The DIA is art rich and cash poor.Without major changes in the way it does business — soon — it risks slipping into second-class status, mortgaging its spot in the front rank of American museums and its mission as an encyclopedic venue that represents the depth and breadth of all cultures.”

Conductor Riccardo Muti has apparently pulled out of a lavish birthday celebration for the Prince of Wales after members of the royal family, including the Queen, attempted to change Muti’s planned program for the evening. Muti was to lead the Philharmonia Orchestra in a program that the royals thought “inappropriate” and “overlong.” As a result, Muti “absolutely refuses to have anything to do with the party now.”