“Author and journalist Lynn Barber has withdrawn from a literary festival after the local council refused to include a photograph of her smoking in its brochure for the event. Her ferocious interview technique earned her the soubriquet Demon Barber, but this is the first time she has been branded a potentially corrupting influence.”
Tag: 08.24.09
MaestroCam Reveals The Secrets Of The Podium
“To audiences for whom the art of orchestral conducting remains a mystery, … there is now the enlightenment of MaestroCam. At five televised Proms this summer, if you press the red button on your remote control, you can spend the whole evening focused entirely on the man on the podium. Even better, you get a discreet and informative commentary from experts….”
A James Wood Evening From Three Narrative Perspectives
“Too tired to cook, Justin ate 5-10 Oreos, called it dinner, leapt into his filthy car, and sped to Politics and Prose Bookstore. The muggy August air stuck to him, or he to it. He slipped into the bookstore a little before 7 p.m., smelling of Camel cigarettes and eyeing his mp3 recorder skeptically. He listened to James Wood speak about character – what it is and why it’s so hard to decode — for an hour.”
Bayreuth, Salzburg Sponsor Cuts Jobs But Not Patronage
“Siemens AG, which sponsors the Bayreuth and Salzburg music festivals, said it will maintain an annual budget of about 50 million euros ($72 million) for aid, education and arts patronage, even as orders for the company’s products tumble.” The engineering company has slashed thousands of jobs and reduced hours for thousands more workers, but a spokesman said that its “social activities … are not a dispensable quantity in an economically difficult environment.”
Greek Wildfires Spare Archaeological Site, Museum
“The two sites that the inferno neared are about 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of Athens, the country’s capital: the Marathon Archaeological Museum and the site of Ramnous in the prefecture of Ramnounta, [a Culture Ministry] spokesman said.”
As City Opera Ails, Artists Suffer In Contract Concessions
“[U]nion negotiators were faced with the hard choice of penalizing their members or threatening the existence of a company whose problems are both self-inflicted and exacerbated by the recession. … Like many New Yorkers who have watched the goings-on at City Opera with sorrow and anger, I want the place to survive. But how that will happen with the same unapologetic folks at the top is hard to imagine.”
Is There Any Point In Portraits?
“To champion portrait painting is to hark back to a 19th-century view of what matters in art, just as to visit the National Portrait Gallery is to enter an archive of social history rather than an art gallery. But isn’t there something perverse about this view?”
The Architects Of New York
“The New York Five came to represent the idea that architecture could still express and advance our values as a culture. To some, the group embodies the last heroic period in New York architecture.”
Julia Child Hits The Bestseller Lists
“The book, given a huge lift from the recently released movie “Julie & Julia,” sold 22,000 copies in the most recent week tracked, according to Nielsen BookScan, which follows book sales. That is more copies than were sold in any full year since the book’s appearance.”
The Future: Venice Under Water Almost All The Time?
“By the end of the century, Venice – Italy’s City of Water – could face daily floods, and according to a new study, the costly and controversial flood barriers now being built might not be able to protect it.”