There’s only one consolation for an author who hears that her book has been remaindered: the knowledge that it’s secure at the library. “Were it not for libraries, there would be no safe harbor for characters and stories, nowhere for them to wait out disasters and economic storms.”
Tag: 10.11.09
ArtPrize – Lotta Fears, But…
“I believe there was something magical about how ArtPrize saturated the city with more than 1,200 pieces of new art and galvanized public conversation, and I think the competition’s uniquely democratic ethos has a valuable role to play in a world filled with juried art contests and fairs. But I was still concerned that a gimmicky work was going to win.”
Is This The End Of Indie Films?
“The winnowing down of specialty divisions may be a marketplace decision, but it’s also starting to feel like the acquiring of this year’s trendy handbag — the thing one has to do because everyone else is doing it. And the cruel truth is that from the standpoint of short-term profits, this particular handbag makes a terrible kind of sense.”
A Revolution To Create The Perfect Camera?
Developers have created “a program that instructs the camera to take two rapid shots if a frame has both dark and light parts. One shot exposes correctly for the dark; one shot exposes correctly for the light. The program then merges the two images into one, taking the best parts from each. And what if a camera could do the same thing for focus — take three shots, focusing on different things in each frame, and merge them into one crystal-clear shot?”
Opera Theatre Of St. Louis Thrives Despite Economy
“In his first season as general director, Timothy O’Leary seems to have followed his predecessor Charles MacKay’s playbook, cutting expenses where possible without affecting artistic quality. Also assisting with the bottom line were increased sales at the box office, with 92 percent attendance in a popular season. That’s an increase of over 5 percent from 2008, with a sizable new cohort of ticket buyers: 15 percent of them hadn’t been to OTSL before.”
Whitney To Go Ahead With Second Museum
“Three years after reaching a tentative agreement with the city, the Whitney Museum of American Art is forging ahead with plans to build a second museum at the entrance to the High Line, the abandoned elevated railway line that has recently been transformed into a public park.”
Broadway’s Longest-Running Solo Act
Usher Sylvia Bailey, 84, “has been taking the bus to and from her home in the Jersey Shore town of Union Beach to the Port Authority Bus Terminal for 50 years, and who knows how many thousand round-trips.”
Tenor Roberto Alagna Dishes About His Fees For Singing
“I live in Switzerland but I pay my taxes in France. I don’t know the exact extent of my fortune because I am not a businessman. For a gala concert, I get 60,000 euros. If I need money, I go to Abu Dhabi or Japan, where I can get 100,000 euros. I get 25 centimes for every CD sale, but I don’t get anything for DVDs or broadcasts or cinema transmissions. …. In the opera house, I get roughly 13,000 euros a performance.”
Berkeley Students Protest Library Cuts
“Several hundred UC Berkeley students took over the anthropology library for 24 hours this weekend to protest UC-wide budget cuts, in particular Saturday closures of small campus libraries that students use for studying and research.”
How Juggling Improves The Brain
Juggling boosts the connections between different parts of the brain by tweaking the architecture of the brain’s “white matter” – a finding that could lead to new therapies for people with brain injuries.