The medieval English city, devastated by World War II bombing, has seen a surge of innovative buildings go up near architect Basil Spence’s admired 1956 Coventry Cathedral, a landmark of 20th-century church design and symbol of the city’s rebirth.
Tag: 01.07.09
Public Broadcasters Propose Stimulus Of Their Own
CPB, NPR and PBS wrote a joint letter, sent Jan. 2, and “suggests federal aid for six projects involving public radio and TV that will create jobs and ‘produce sustainable improvements to the nation’s communications infrastructure’.”
Redefining The Museum To Suvive
“Several of our veteran museums are doing by undoing: loosening up the rigid values and temple-of-art models that shaped them, and replacing these with a new ‘people’s museum’ model, unsacred in atmosphere, fluid in values, with complicated answers to the question of what museums are. The results of this thinking range from great to work-in-progress gauche to soul-selling bad.”
Charting LA Weekly’s Downward Track
“The slow-motion collapse of L.A. Weekly also coincides with a radical shrinking of the L.A. Times, the implosion of The Daily News and the continuing downward descent of smaller papers like City Beat and The Daily Journal. If there was ever a time for an aggressive, irreverent, credible metro weekly to take on the Gray Lady, it’s right now, right here.”
New Opportunities For Chamber Opera?
So the economy is forcing opera companies to cut back. So why not literally cut back? Small-scale operas have not had much play in the US, and there are some good ones…
Vienna’s Albertina Museum Faces “Catastrophe”
One of Europe’s great museums has lost well over €2m in support in just the past few weeks…
Iraqi Theater, Once Vibrant, Begins To Revive
“With security improving throughout Iraq, once-ubiquitous theater groups are starting to reappear. The National Theater led the way in October when it staged a series of evening performances for the first time since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003.”
New Orleans’ Mahalia Jackson Theater Rises From Katrina’s Mud
“While other theaters and arts organizations around the country are downsizing or closing due to the stormy economy, New Orleans’ storm-damaged Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts will reopen this week after a $22 million renovation, the first of the city’s three major theaters to reopen since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.”
An Autistic Savant Explains How He Thinks
Danniel Tammet, who knows pi to more than 22,000 digits and learned Icelandic in a week, tells how he connects numbers the way most people connect words, why the number 37 is “lumpy, like porridge,” and more generally how his mind works and what the rest of us might learn from it.
Lament For The Local Critic? (Not So Fast…)
“Dailies are sinking themselves under the weight of their own (possibly deliberate) ignorance of what constitutes distinguished writing these days–and by thinking that “distinguished” is the goal. Editors don’t even realize that the cultural critics they have (or once had) on their staffs–minds paid to be analytical–are the people best suited to help them think through the complex issues that have been raised in the last 20 years of print journalism, from declining readership to the internet.”