“We need to go back to the era of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, when choreographers worked with designers and great musicians to create masterpieces. If people stop having visions, ballet will not evolve.”
Tag: 07.10.07
Will New Haymarket Rejuvenate West End?
“The West End, as so often, is in crisis; only today the crisis is artistic rather than financial. Twenty-six musicals dominate the scene in a grisly simulacrum of Broadway. Straight plays, unless equipped with a mega movie star, are an endangered species. Risk is rare.
But there is light on the horizon.”
Monica Arac de Nyeko Wins “African Booker”
“Known as the African Booker, the annual Caine prize is awarded to a short story published in English by an African writer whose work has reflected African sensibilities. It is the second time that Arac de Nyeko has been in the running for the award, after she was shortlisted in 2004 for her short story Strange Fruit. That year Brian Chikwava from Zimbabwe won with Seventh Street Alchemy.”
The Bill Gates Museum
The Gates Foundation is building a new headquarters in Seattle, and it will have a museum. “The foundation, the largest in the world with $33.4 billion in assets, has given museum design firm Ralph Appelbaum Associates the task of creating a 15,000-square-foot center that explains the nonprofit’s work in global health, development and education.”
What If You Could Record Every Second Of Your Life?
“We’re only a few years away from the cost of data storage dropping so far that we can record “everything” that happens to us: our location at any given time, what we are hearing, what we are seeing, and what we are saying or doing. With your phone converting all the speech it hears to text (and storing that, too, and indexing it by time and location it becomes possible to search it all – like having Google for your memory. You don’t ever need to forget a conversation again, even if all you can recall about it is that it was with a stranger you met in a given pub about two months ago and someone mentioned the word ‘fishhooks’.”
Travel (And Be Entertained) Your Way
Increasingly consumers want to have control of their own entertainment. Now planes and hotels are stepping up to try to cater to this. “While it is too early to say that the offerings have significantly changed, some companies are starting to compete with — or at least cater to — the average consumer’s entertainment arsenal.”
Doug Marlette, 57
“A Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, Marlette was also a comic strip writer, novelist, librettist — and a Southerner through and through. Not the calm, genteel, conflict-averse kind of Southerner, mind you. He was a prickly pear, a stubborn and restless rebel. With countless causes.”
Volume Of Inuit Throat-Singing Rising In Canada
“Traditionally, Inuit women would throat-sing to entertain themselves and their children when the men were off hunting. Like many other centuries-old Inuit games and traditions such as drum-dancing and ice-hopping, it was discouraged and sometimes banned in the Central and Eastern Arctic when missionaries arrived in the early 1900s. … However, many young Inuit in communities around the Arctic are proudly reclaiming these fledgling arts as a way to connect with their past and with nature.”
Other Times, Beloved Of L.A. Literati, Shutters
“Among all the possible reasons people have for shuttering bookstores these days, slipping into a diabetic coma does not come up terribly often. Andrew Dowdy, owner of Other Times Books, was about as invulnerable as anyone could be in this storm-tossed trade: Here was a guy who could make his rent, who didn’t worry about Amazon, who offered something that Barnes & Noble never could. Still, when he was awakened by his landlord after four days and nights passed out on his apartment floor, he realized … that it was time to hang it up.”
The New York Times Crosswords: The Video Game
“The video game that’s been dominating my life lately doesn’t have drive-by shootings, alien invasions or any more animation than the typical business card. There are no human voices, and the soundtrack resembles 1980s elevator music. If a single explosion appeared during the game, it was the result of the clue: ’17 Across: mushroom cloud, for one.'”