“Outstanding young violinists or chess masters or tennis pros are common. Conducting prodigies are extremely rare, however, because leading an orchestra is a cumulative art that’s rewarded by life experience. It’s about persuading 100 independent-minded virtuoso musicians to take direction and inspiration from the tip of a slender little baton. … Now meet Ilyich Rivas, 16.”
Tag: 08.06.09
Racial Outrage Prompts New Cover For Children’s Book
Justine Larbalestier’s Liar, to be published in October, is getting a redesign. “Bloggers, commentors and the author herself had criticized the publisher’s choice of a white girl with long, straight tresses for [the cover of] a novel about an African-American girl with ‘nappy’ hair.” Bloomsbury Children’s Books said the original design “was intended to symbolically reflect the narrator’s complex psychological makeup.”
Cash-Strapped UK Cities Seek To Sell Art
“Art is in danger of being sold off by councils across Britain, as economic circumstances open the window of opportunity to every hard-faced philistine.”
Media Companies File Briefs To Allow Publishing In Salinger Case
JD Salinger’s son sued to prevent publication of a book that imagines a story sixty years after Catcher in the Rye. “The brief acknowledges Salinger’s desire may not be financial, but rather to stop any creative re-use of his works, but argues that copyright law does not favor such strict controls.”
Record Year For London West End Box Office
“Audiences in the 12 months to 18 July were up 2.5% on the similar period last year, with box office takings up 3.5%. Nearly 7m visits were made to shows in the first half of the year.”
Architect Will Alsop, King Of ‘Blobitecture,’ Chucks Concrete For Canvas
“Will Alsop, the Stirling prize-winning architect who carved a reputation as the profession’s enfant terrible for his blob-shaped buildings and disdain for conservative planning, today quit his practice to spend more time painting.”
Revisiting John Cage’s Symphony For 12 Radios
“The piece was scored for radios because Cage had absolutely no idea what sounds would come from their speakers. This was one of his first works that used chance operations to determine structural elements. His idea was to liberate music from his own taste, his concerns and his ego.”
John Hughes, ‘The Steven Spielberg Of Youth Comedy,’ Dies At 59
Richard Corliss: “Hughes generated successful movie-comedy franchises as fast as other people wrote postcards. First the National Lampoon Vacation films … Then the teen movies” – Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – “not strictly a series but with more or less the same rep company of kids. And then the blockbuster Home Alone” and its sequels. (Not to mention the movies about Beethoven the enormous dog, written under a pseudonym.)
‘Leave It To The French To Stick Tarzan In A Semiotic Jungle’
“Edgar Rice Burroughs’s famous ape man is the subject of a [highly popular] summer show at the Musée du Quai Branly … Its organizers cogitate, with Gallic élan, on Tarzan’s proto-environmentalism; his philosophical roots in Rousseau and the 19th-century nudist movement; his literary antecedents in Kipling and H. M. Stanley; and his mythological reliance on the stories of Hercules and Romulus and Remus.”
Rediscovered William Inge Scripts Could Change Views Of His Work
“In a small Kansas town that inspired some of William Inge’s most melancholy characters, about two dozen never-before-performed plays are poised to become the found treasures of his collected works. These plays were not hidden in the proverbial cedar chest in a dusty farmhouse but languishing in a college library in obscurity and solitude, like a tragic Inge heroine.”