Category: today’s top story

“In a sensational plot line that could have come straight from the pages of one of his own novels, the acclaimed Czech-born writer Milan Kundera has been accused of denouncing a Western spy to the Communist secret police when he was a student. … The reclusive Kundera, now 79, categorically denied the accusation yesterday, accusing [a Czech state] institute and [the] media of ‘the assassination of an author’.”

“In the third King v. King legal dispute in four months, two of Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.]’s children are refusing to provide a biographer of their mother, Coretta Scott King, who died in 2006, with a collection of her photographs, letters and personal papers. Their brother, Dexter King, chairman of their father’s estate, has asked a judge to force them to comply. At stake is a $1.4 million book deal with the Penguin Group — as well as the reputation of one of America’s most famous families.”

“The extreme of regulation that copyright law has become makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, for a wide range of creativity that any free society — if it thought about it for just a second — would allow to exist, legally.”

“The first round of bidding has begun for the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, the privately held company that controls what is probably the most valuable back catalog in the theater business. Gag orders seem to be all over the place, but word is that the bidders include Disney, Sony, Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Ambassador Theater Group, a London-based company.”

Playing to determined crowds who travel to the National Theater after dark, Ali Hussein’s cabaret-style two-act Bring the King, Bring Him “portrays Iraqi politicians as petty, corrupt and detached from the people they govern. […] So out of touch is one politician that he proposes (just like a real-life legislator) erecting a huge Ferris wheel ‘so people can cool off in the summer heat’.”

“Amid debate over purported bias against American writers, the Swedish Academy on Thursday awarded it’s the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a French novelist, children’s author and essayist regarded by some French readers as one of the country’s greatest living writers.”

“Those in both the for-profit theater industry, which depends on wealthy investors, and the nonprofit world, which depends on corporate donations, are anxiously watching to see just what kind of fallout will land on them” from the current economic crisis. “How do you maintain the momentum and at the same time cut your exposure down to the minimum? Where do you cut and where do you stay the course?”

“The former state funeral parlour at 104 rue d’Aubervilliers in north-east Paris will reopen this weekend after being transformed into the city’s most daring modern arts centre. […] Not only are Parisians attracted by the macabre past of the building – known only by its street number, Centquatre – the centre will also bring artists and tourists into the 19th arrondissement best known for its high-rises, poverty and gang culture.”

“The company is scrambling to find new space that a nonprofit organization can afford. The search is complicated by the special needs of a dance company. Dance studios need to have wide-open areas without columns, and the ceilings must be at least 14 feet high, to preserve the foreheads of dancers being lifted into the air.”

An Australian researcher is claiming that he has convincing evidence that several of J.S. Bach’s better-known works were, in fact, composed by his wife, Anna Magdalena. “Dr Jarvis has used forensic analysis to examine various Bach scores, bar by bar, focusing on the musical structure and language, handwriting and the musical calligraphy.”