“Tacoma Actors Guild, Tacoma’s only resident professional theater company, ceased operations last week,” citing insufficient funds to continue with its current season. The company had been thought to be turning its fiscal fortunes around in recent months, but a cash shortfall forced the shutdown.
Tag: 03.08.07
Philly Museum Moving Art Around
This week, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will pack up literally millions of books, documents, and artworks, and carefully move them across the street. The move marks the beginning of “the museum’s looming $500 million expansion that aims to increase public space in the main building by 60 percent.”
The Russian Dance Tradition, As Seen From Maine
Okay, so a Marine and a former Soviet ballet star walk into a dance school… no, wait, it’s not a joke. “The choreographer and the combat veteran perform a unique pas de deux as artistic director and executive director” of a small but intense dance academy in small-town Maine, which “carries on the art’s much-revered Imperial Russian tradition yet aspires to become America’s preeminent school for training dancers for the professional ballet.”
The Art! It’s… it’s… ALIVE! (And Dangerous?)
The relatively new field of bio-art, in which practitioners “use live tissues, bacteria, living organisms and life processes to create works of art that blur the traditional distinctions between science and art,” is growing in popularity and visibility. But some animal rights activists object strongly to the genre, which they consider exploitation, and at least one bio-artist is being prosecuted by the U.S. government for his use of certain restricted bacteria that could be used to make biological weapons.
Chicago Spire Plans Head To Civic Review Group
“Final design plans for the twisting, 2,000-foot Chicago Spire, designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, will be presented at a public meeting of the Streeterville Organization of Active Residents (SOAR), an influential neighborhood group, March 26… The proposed skyscraper would rise on a site across Lake Shore Drive from Navy Pier. If completed, it would be the nation’s tallest building.”
Poetry To Get A Sweet Home In Chicago
The Chicago-based Poetry Foundation is planning a “national home for poetry” in the city’s River North district. The new building would be home to the offices of Poetry Magazine, “a library to house the foundation’s 30,000 volumes… as well as resources and reading rooms for scholars and poetry enthusiasts, and spaces for public forums, conferences and performances.”
Bush Order Keeping Scholars From Presidential Papers
Historians are up in arms over a 2001 executive order issued by President Bush which made it much more difficult for the public to gain access to historical presidential records than ever before. “[The] order restricted the release of presidential records by giving sitting presidents the power to delay the release of papers indefinitely, while extending the control of former presidents, vice presidents and their families.” Congress is considering a bill to overturn Mr. Bush’s order.
Before You Could Even See His Rise, He Fell
“The journey of Henry Winterstern is a classic Hollywood tale: of this town’s irresistible lure, the particular hunger it breeds and the hubris that so often leads to a sudden demise. But this rapid rise and fall came with some trendy hedge-fund trimmings. A gravel-voiced, Canadian-born investor with a flair for turning around ailing companies, Mr. Winterstern arrived two years ago, aiming to remake a tiny distributor… By last Friday he was gone, done in by a disastrous 2006 at the box office and a taste for spending.”
Legendary Superhero Assassinated
Captain America is dead. The legendary superhero is shot to death outside a courtroom in the latest issue of his comic, as part of a larger storyline about a government ban on superhero vigilantism. The hero’s adventures have been published by Marvel Comics since 1941.
Fingerprinting Photographs
“A suite of photo-authentication tools under development by Adobe Systems could make it possible to match a digital photo to the camera that shot it, and to detect some improper manipulation of images.” The new software should make it much easier to detect news photos that have been faked or embellished, a problem that has intensified in recent years.