“Fans have long suspected that Forsyth, 77, acclaimed for his highly realistic spy novels, may have been involved with British intelligence. He told the BBC it started when he was asked to send information from the Biafran War in Nigeria.”
Tag: 08.30.15
Garrison Keillor Explains Why He’s Leaving His Radio Show (He’s Not A Radio Guy)
“No, no, I’m just a writer. I’m just a writer who looked to slip into radio as a way of supporting myself. … I’m at the end of a very long and pretty happy detour. … You invent a town with all these characters in it and story lines, and it’s been interesting, until you realize that you have created [wry laugh] an obligation to keep it going, for the listener. And it’s at that point that your inventiveness wanes. And you feel restless.”
Six Questions About The Future Of Television
With ever more material out there, how do viewers find what’s good? How do you get people to keep paying for what they watch instead of getting it from torrent sites and/or blocking ads? And what will and won’t constitute success?
Philip Glass’s Children’s Opera (Yes, He Wrote One)
The Witches of Venice, an opera-ballet based on the children’s book by Beni Montresor, had its premiere at La Scala 20 years ago. It will finally have its U.S. premiere next summer, in a production directed and choreographed by Karole Armitage.
Lucinda Childs Revives Her Legendary 1983 Collaboration With Frank Gehry And John Adams
The choreographer originally created Available Light, now seen as a Minimalist milestone in both dance and music, as a site-specific piece for Gehry’s Temporary Contemporary at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art. This past spring at MASS MoCA, she and Gehry revised Available Light for a proscenium stage; the work was just presented in Berlin and (finally!) makes its East Coast premiere this week at the Philly Fringe Festival.
LA’s New Broad Museum – Ideas And Compromises
“The result is a streamlined ratio of exhibition to ancillary space, something increasingly rare in an age of museum bloat. The Broad has 50,000 square feet of gallery space — 35,000 on the third floor and 15,000 more on the first — in a building totaling 120,000 square feet. Renzo Piano’s new Whitney Museum in New York has the same amount of interior exhibition space in a building covering 220,000 square feet.”
Sculpture Of Chaliapin As Mephistopheles Vandalized By Russian Orthodox Radicals; Protesters Demand Restoration And Cossacks Fight Each Other
“Hundreds of St. Petersburg residents and cultural preservationists gathered on Sunday to protest the destruction of [the] bas-relief … The sculpture is offensive to Russian Orthodox believers according to a letter sent to Russian media by a Cossack who initially took credit for the removal. Another Cossack leader denounced him as a quasi-Cossack and said he would take revenge for the sculpture’s destruction.”
The True Value Of Contemporary Music
“Musical performances are among the few that demand you sit still and turn off your phone, and in the realm of the avant-garde, where there is rarely a narrative structure or a song, those can sometimes seem long. But art that forces you to sit and experience something, even if it makes you impatient, can be valuable in the same way that meditation and quiet spaces (churches, libraries) are valuable, in the same way that any inactivity is valuable.”
Netflix Film Premieres At Venice Film Festival
“When it is commercially released in October, Beasts of No Nation will be immediately available to see not only in selected cinemas but also to subscribers to the Netflix home entertainment service – which now boasts more than 50 million international subscribers.”
Some Oliver Sacks Reading Lists
“Over the course of his life’s work, Sacks approached his many questions with rigorous intellect and, above all, empathy. The best word for this, maybe, is grace. And it’s everywhere in the elegant body of work he left behind—his many books, but also his shorter essays and interviews.”
(Also, here’s a link to all of Sacks’ work for the New Yorker.)