“He also is one of the last great feuding writers, since Truman Capote died and Norman Mailer appears to have mellowed. The three of them — but especially Vidal and Capote — engaged in savagely entertaining literary dust-ups, in lengthy battles rife with high-toned insults and sophisticated put-downs that those of us with lesser imaginations file away for later personal use.”
Tag: 10.02.05
Parental Advisory
How do you recommend theatre to children? It’s not an absolute. There are many things to account for: “how mature he is relative to others his age, what gives her nightmares or whether the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber would make them start speaking in tongues or spit up.”
Shostakovich Centenery Calls For A New Look
“Shostakovich subtly manoeuvred his way round the Soviet system and enshrined in his music a message that could be interpreted in different ways – optimistic, despondent, crushed or defiant. With the advent of his centenary year in 2006, there will be ample opportunity to consider what the music meant to Shostakovich and what it still means to us.”
Moscow’s Art Fair Steps Up
“The Moscow World Fine Art Fair was set up by its Swiss-based organisers Art Culture Studio last year to tap into the huge amounts of money being made by Russia’s capitalists, but in 2004, regulations prevented anything from being sold. This year’s fair moved to a new and better venue and attracted more dealers, and Art Culture Studio persuaded the authorities to let dealers sell art rather than merely hold an exhibition.”
Opera Central – Why Don’t They Care?
Colorado’s Central City Opera is a terrific company. But it is neglected when discussions of great American opera companies come up. “The perplexing question is: Why? It certainly is not because of any lack in production quality. The diversity and daring of Central City’s programming easily competes with any summer festival in the country. Part of the problem lies with geography. The company is not only a bit isolated, it is also a long way from either of the two coasts, where nearly all the major classical-music critics live. And travel budgets are being cut everywhere.”
Paris Review’s New Look
“The magazine’s design — size, paper, type font — has been updated for a new sleeker look, but its contents have only slightly changed. No drastic moves here. As has been the case since the magazine’s inception, fiction, poetry and author interviews remain the central focus. But to that mix, Philip Gourevitch has added non-fiction writing and photographic essays.”
An Ex-Child Actor Tells Of Her Trauma
When she was 10 years old, Sarah Polley starred in Terry Gilliam’s “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen”. Seventeen years later she recalls the experience as terrifying, and, upon hearing that Gilliam is shooting another movie with a young Canadian actress, writes to tell him of her traumas back then.
Music Downloader… er Aggregator Expands The Music Pool
A new music aggregator on the internet feeds you music from a data store of 3 million tunes. “Listening to Mercora is like tapping into a million iPods all at once. You can control what you listen to, returning to the search engine after each tune to select your next cut, or you can open yourself to the choices and discoveries of whatever random music lover happens to have been playing the tune you first sought.”
Avoiding The “M” Word
A venerable superstition has struck again — that it’s bad luck for theater artists to utter the name “Macbeth.” Amanda McBroom’s solo show opening off-Broadway has had the word deleted from its title. “People are afraid of the word. The arcana is intense.”
In LA: A School Building Boom That Disappoints
The Los Angeles School District is in the midst of an enormous building campaign – spending more than $17 billion on schools. “Certainly the district deserves praise for confronting, after years of official neglect, the twin problems of overcrowding and aging facilities. The building campaign’s central goals — to move every student back to a traditional two-semester calendar and into a neighborhood school — are finally within sight. But as the district has become more aggressive about asking for money and tackling new lists of educational problems, on the design front it has shrunk into caution and insularity.”