Joseph Hokai Tang, 29, a pianist and violinist who was arrested last year for shady doings in his violin dealership (he was apprehended backstage after a concert), has been convicted of international fraud and sentenced to three years’ prison and $436,000 in restitution; he faces almost certain deportation upon release.
Tag: 10.21.08
Are Humans Biologically Unsuited to the ‘American Dream’?
“Our built-in dopamine-reward system makes instant gratification highly desirable, and the future difficult to balance with the present. This worked fine on the savanna… but not [in] the suburbs: We gorge on fatty foods and use credit cards to buy luxuries we can’t actually afford. And then, overworked, underslept and overdrawn, we find ourselves anxious and depressed.”
Are Art Sales the Best Free Theatre in London?
“Even in the intervals at the Royal Opera House, I’d never seen such a bunch of well-groomed, glossy, bouffy-haired folk, and that was just the specialist art-market journalists.”
Italian Government Privatizing Cinecittà
“Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi-led government is selling off its [24%] stake in Rome’s Cinecittà Studios, completing the privatization of the historic facilities and ending an era in Italo film.”
Leeds To Get £12M Dance Center
“The six-storey building [scheduled for completion in summer 2010] will feature seven dance studios, a 200-seat theatre, office spaces, a health suite and costume workshop. Alongside the two professional companies [Northern Ballet Theatre and Phoenix Dance Theatre], the site will eventually house a full-time classical dance school and Leeds Metropolitan University’s dance degree courses.”
Kansas City Symphony’s Lawsuit For State Funding Thrown Out
A Missouri judge has rejected the orchestra’s claim to dedicated monies from the state’s arts fund. He ruled both that the Missouri government is protected by sovereign immunity and that laws dedicating funding are not binding. “While there are many statutes with seeming ‘promises’ by the Legislature as to how revenues from a particular tax will be spent, these ‘promises’ are but empty words that have no legal consequence.”
James Gleeson, Australia’s Leading Surrealist Painter, Dies at 92
“[He painted] a completely new kind of picture: large imaginary landscapes, set in the littoral zone that had always fascinated him, and executed with a rich painterly fluency… hard mineral forms, like teeth, seem to grow out of slimy viscera or tender mucous membranes. These pictures could be construed either as visions of genesis or of apocalypse, but the tone is less of menace than of wonder at the sublime spectacle of life.”
Clive James On Pat Kavanagh’s Bluntness And Brilliance
Clive James, one of the authors who followed Pat Kavanagh to her new firm last year, pens an elegy to the literary agent, who died Monday. “I would have gone with her even if I had known that she was soon to grow fatally ill. Every minute of knowing her was valuable.”
Pondering An Artists’ Parliament
“[I]s it time artists got together and elected their own parliament? That’s the issue under public debate at the Young Vic theatre tomorrow night.”
Wood Makes Case For Mimesis; Vicious Backbiting Ensues
“It’s one of the most contentious debates in the literary blogosphere, but its roots stretch back more than 2,000 years. Is realism, ‘lifeness’ or verisimilitude a necessary quality of good literature? … James Wood argues forcefully that it is, and in so doing has trampled on and trounced some glamorous, bulgy, iconic American novels.”