“We will simply know that we are not alone. This will permanently change the trajectory of our world view in ways similar to the Copernican revolution, discovery of the New World, or Darwinism.”
Tag: 02.24.11
Opera Singer Thrown Out Of Cab In Vienna
The 27-year-old from California currently is currently starring in Benjamin Britten’s opera “The Rape of Lucretia” at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien opera house. “The driver said: ‘I don’t drive black women – get out!’ I did so – and started to cry. All I wanted in that moment was to get away from here.”
Just How Should We Behave In A Museum?
“Very few people leave college these days with the kind of well-developed reverence for high culture that would make it easy to know how to behave in a museum. Most students go to college to learn technological, financial, or managerial skills, and can acquire culture capital outside the traditional ensemble of highbrow pursuits. And those few who do end up majoring in English or art history will likely learn that reverence toward high culture is no longer so fashionable.”
New Look: NEA Redefines Participation In The Arts And Finds More
“Expanding the definition from “benchmark” activities (like going to the opera) to the creation and viewing of art or art-related content digitally has yielded a radically different picture of American’s relationship to the arts.”
SF State University Unveils Plans For Big New Performing Arts Center
“The $268-million Mashouf Performing Arts Center will include five separate performance spaces ranging in size from 60 to 1,200 seats. While the faceted, block-like geometry and bright white palette of the project will be familiar to anybody who has followed Michael Maltzan’s work, the scale won’t be.”
A New Dance Boom?
“In ballet circles, a tantalizing question has generated much excitement and speculation: Is Black Swan the new Turning Point, the 1977 film that helped to popularize ballet and ushered in the high summer of “the dance boom” when Americans seemed to fall in love with dance? Could Black Swan ignite a second great love affair between Americans and classical ballet in the 21st century?”
The Stradivarius Pact
“At the same time every day, in a chapel-turned-museum in Cremona, a musician named Andrea Mosconi plays a selection of fine violins, including a 1715 Stradivarius, in order to keep their unique sound alive. He says that if they aren’t carefully looked after, including being played every day, the wood becomes stiff and unresponsive and the instruments will lose their rich sound.”
Anthony Hopkins, Composer
The Oscar winner “will participate in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s summer tour of Britain, on which the orchestra will perform the original scores he created for his films August and Slipstream, as well as a new work by the actor.”
The Quiet Performances That Make Loud, Oscar-Winning Ones Possible
“It’s no secret that awards for best acting often go to those who do the most acting – thus the Oscar love for stars who play crazy, sick, disabled, foreign, or trashy. … What’s rarely acknowledged is how such a grandiose performance would be unbearable without a straight man to balance things out, to maintain a baseline of identifiable reality.”
What Killed Hollywood’s Femmes Fatales?
“Among her many singular contributions, the femme fatale enabled a cut-the-crap directness between men and women that’s virtually extinct in contemporary American cinema, not only in romantic comedies but in dramas as well, both of which thrive on miscommunication between the sexes. … By the early 1950s, the femme fatale all but disappeared from the big screen, displaced by the politely swooning housewives of Douglas Sirk and, later, empowered ass-kickers like Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde.”