Tag: 10.26.05

Museum Reopenings Spark A Bit Of American Self-Adulation

“To celebrate the reopening of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery next July, a coalition of cultural organizations is organizing a salute to America’s originality. The two museums, which share the historic Patent Office Building, will open July 1 after a six-year, multimillion-dollar renovation. A special 24-hour preview of the massive building, with 30,000 square feet of additional gallery space, will be held that day.”

A Forever-Distant Author Gets Personal

Joan Didion has always been known for her famously refined literary voice, her sentences so polished and buffed that they almost seem to come from another literary era. But when tragedy struck Didion’s family, writing became a way to deal with her grief, and to work through her conflicting emotions. As she puts it, “This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.”

A Series Of Fortunate Career Moves

“As Daniel Handler and his editor, Susan Rich, laugh together and share anecdotes about how they launched A Series of Unfortunate Events, it’s apparent that they’re both still gobsmacked by their success. The Lemony Snicket books have sold 46 million copies, and the total is ballooning every day with the release this month of the 12th of a projected 13 in the series, The Penultimate Peril.” Handler actually didn’t start out with the intention of being a children’s author, but after several failed attempts at getting publishers interested in his adult fiction, he pitched his “terrible” idea for the Lemony Snicket series, and in no time, he was one of the hottest commodities in young adult literature.

Still, It Beats The Usual Political Memoir (zzzzz…)

Politicians do not generally make great novelists. (Heck, for most of them, getting through a speech without falling all over themselves constitutes a minor victory.) So one could be forgiven for sneering a bit at California Senator Barbara Boxer’s debut novel, which pits a liberal senator (surprise!) against an arch-conservative nominee to the Supreme Court. But wait – Boxer wrote the novel over a year ago, long before the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and the subsequent death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The parallels to the current dust-up over Court nominee Harriet Miers are palpable, and make the book worth a look. Of course, Boxer is a blue-state pol first and foremost, so red-staters looking for a sympathetic (or realistic) portrayal will be sorely disappointed.

Cuban Choir Members On Tour Defect To Canada

Members of a Cuban choir on tour in Canada have defected. “In all, 11 of the 41-member choir managed to flee the hotel between 6 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, when Digna Guerra, the choir’s manager, discovered the absences. In an emergency meeting, she warned the remaining singers that the Cuban government would retaliate against their family members if they tried to seek asylum here.”

Siminovotch Award To Half Life Author

Playwright John Mighton has won Canada’s richest theatre prize for his entire body of work, which includes this year’s breakout hit, Half Life. The Elinore & Lou Siminovitch Prize, which pays CAN$100,000 to the winner, recognizes “a body of work by an artist in mid-career,” but there’s no question that the popularity of Mighton’s latest play was a factor in his win. “Last week, it was short-listed for the Governor-General’s Literary Awards, for English drama. Audiences have also embraced Mighton’s play, set in a nursing home and exploring memory loss as a natural and necessary part of human evolution.”

Paris’s Gehry Gets A New Life

To read many of the stories written about Frank Gehry these days, you’d think that one of his buildings was all that was required for a destitute city to leap into the forefront of global metropolises. But in Paris (which gets along just fine on its own merits,) the one Gehry-designed structure has sat abandoned for a decade, “a sad monument to a failed American dream. It was planned as a new headquarters for the American Center of Paris, which was founded in 1931 and had long drawn crowds to its rambling Left Bank home as a place to discover American culture and to learn English. But the dream of a dazzling image went sour. The new center opened in June 1994 – and closed just 19 months later… Now, thanks to the French government, the building has begun a new life, this time as the headquarters of the Cinémathèque Française.”

iPod Porn? Not Bloody Likely

Admit it, men. When Apple rolled out the video iPod last week, your first thought (possibly your second, after “who would possibly need such a thing?”) was, “I wonder if that baby is porn-capable?” After all, every other new technology eventually seems to become fodder for the frighteningly large adult-entertainment industry, so why not the little jukebox that could? Well, don’t hold your breath. “With a couple of exceptions, porno producers are in no hurry to provide stag movies for the iPod, thanks to fears of a public outcry and a government crackdown.”

Ravel & The Deaf Man

Michael Chorost would like to listen to Ravel’s Boléro. But since 2001, when the last of his already feeble hearing left him lost in a soundless world, he hasn’t been able to. Chorost has been a guinea pig at the forefront of the cochlear implant industry, which uses surgical implants and computer technology to allow deaf people to “hear” by stimulating certain parts of their nervous system. But while such technology can allow the deaf to decode human speech, music is a wholly different (and far more complex) matter. Still, Chorost is a determined music lover, and years of trial and error eventually lead him to a breakthrough. “It’s like going from being able to tell the difference between red and blue to being able to distinguish between aquamarine and cobalt.”