Category: today’s top story

Gérard Mortier has withdrawn from his contract to be New York City Opera’s artistic director beginning next season, saying that the company’s board did not come up with the budget he had been promised. His move leaves City Opera without artistic leadership and with only a skeleton staff.

“Charity leaders can expect President-elect Barack Obama and Congress to push for changes in the federal tax structure that could spur giving and add new regulations for charities and donors, tax experts say. With Mr. Obama and Congress facing a recession and grappling with establishing a new strategy for the war in Iraq, those changes aren’t likely to come quickly. Nonetheless, they could be significant.”

The writer whom Kurt Vonnegut called “the smartest man who ever lived” died Wednesday night of lung cancer. He began his career monitoring the left-wing press for National Review; he gave Pauline Kael her start at Pacifica Radio; from 1971-75 he served as editor of The New York Times Book Review, where he was an early champion of Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston and Gabriel García Marquez; he wrote about books for The New Republic, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly and Salon.com, among “countless other publications”; he was even a television critic for CBS and New York magazine.

The immensely successful author/screenwriter/director – responsible for The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Westworld and the television series ER, among dozens of other properties – died Tuesday “after a courageous and private battle against cancer.”

“Three days after its final performance of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, Santa Ana-based Opera Pacific, [Orange] county’s only major opera company, announced Tuesday that it will cancel the remainder of its 2008-2009 season and will likely close down operations for good.” The lost productions include Ricky Ian Gordon’s The Grapes of Wrath and Strauss’s Salome starring Deborah Voigt.

“Much of today’s political humor requires a smart and savvy audience that keeps up with current events — if only in order to mock it. … But has any of this smart political humor had an impact on the candidates, the election or our politics? It may be safe to argue that comedy changes the national mood, but can it change the national political climate in more fundamental ways?”

“If the invention of derivatives was the financial world’s modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, evokes the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism.”

“In what could be the region’s most ambitious, broadest-based artistic endeavor since the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival,” more than 50 SoCal institutions (including the Getty Museum, LACMA, the L.A. Phil and Mark Taper Forum) are joining to stage a 10-week festival around L.A. Opera’s 2010 production of Wagner’s complete Ring cycle.

“George W. Bush’s reign has been controversial from the start, but they say troubled times yield great art. As Americans prepare to pick his successor, we look at movies, books, music, theatre and visual arts and ask: what is his artistic legacy?”

If only real life were like Hollywood, George W. Bush might have turned out to be a great president. “In an ideal world it would be great to have a president who can kick some ass,” wrote one film critic after seeing Harrison Ford in Air Force One. In our non-ideal world, of course, nuance is more valuable to presidents than ass-kicking skill, but nuance doesn’t make for very good Hollywood cliffhangers, does it?