“In 2003, the Brazilian government [under culture minister Gilberto Gil] created an initiative called Points of Culture: thousands of community and arts projects of all sizes and types that would work to strengthen people’s involvement in the life of their neighbourhoods and the larger society.”
Tag: 07.23.10
Ballet Nouveau Colorado Seemed So Healthy – How Could It Have Come to the Brink?
It’s three years since artistic directors Garrett Ammon and Dawn Fay arrived, and the company “has garnered a lot of fans and friends in that time as its sophisticated, energetic choreography and genre cross-pollinations have caught the attention of the national dance scene.” Now Ballet Nouveau need to raise more than $150,000 in the next week to avoid suspending operations. What happened?
Library of America’s New House Blog on the Classics
“The Library of America, the nonprofit publishing house dedicated to creating an in-print library of editions of America’s greatest works, launched its first blog Friday. Called Reader’s Almanac, it focuses on joining the current online discussions that touch on the works and authors in the publisher’s catalog, such as William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman.”
‘Towering Ambition’ – Recreating Emblems of Architecture in Lego
An exhibition at DC’s National Building Museum features facsimiles, by “Lego master” Adam Reed Tucker, of such icons as the Empire State Building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the Gateway Arch, Fallingwater, and Calatrava’s never-built Chicago Spire. “The Lego brick … [is] the perfect toy for the age in which it was introduced, which helps explain why Tucker’s models have a cultural power that ordinary architectural models might not.”
Elton John Writing Animal Farm Musical
“Elton John and Lee Hall, who wrote the musical Billy Elliot, are teaming up to create a new show based on George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Lee, who won Olivier and Tony awards for his book and lyrics for the stage Billy Elliot, and an Oscar nomination for the screen version, told me Orwell’s novella was perfectly suited for the stage.”
Why Todd Solondz Says, ‘My Movies Aren’t for Everyone, Especially People Who Like Them’
Of a college student who had just seen Happiness: “He was a little drunk and he came up to me and said, ‘Oh I loved your movie, it was awesome. Wow! Man, when that kid was raped, that was hilarious!’ And I knew then that I was in trouble, and that I was playing with fire, and that I couldn’t control the way in which the movie would be experienced.”
America Really Is In Crisis Now (But We’ve Been Here Before)
Author Neil Howe “suggest[s] that throughout the 500-year span of Anglo-American history, a more or less predictable cycle has played out, a cycle in which generational types are in a certain stage of life at any given time.”
Pasadena’s Design Biennial Finally Includes Architecture
“In a what-took-them-so-long bit of news, the California Design Biennial at the Pasadena Museum of California Art has added an architecture category for the first time.”
Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire,’ The Poem – Can It Stand on Its Own?
There’s a longstanding disagreement among Nabokov fans about the eponymous 999-line poem at the center of the novel Pale Fire: Can the poem be taken seriously as literature by itself or is it inseparable from the annotative footnotes (putatively by the madman who stole the manuscript of the verse) that form the rest of the novel? This fall, a publisher is releasing a freestanding version of the poem – as a book-cum-objet d’art – that’s certain to reignite the controversy.
Warning: Long-Term Harm Will Follow British Arts Funding Cuts
“The concept of equal misery for all is a flawed one. A cut of 25 per cent in the arts budget will destroy all kinds of good work, particularly at a grassroots level, and yield savings of a miserly few million pounds. It cannot be in Britain’s long-term interests.”