Tag: 11.07.06

What Rosie Did For Broadway, Maybe Dave Can Do …

Peter Gelb has been sending every possible signal that the Metropolitan Opera is a new place under his leadership — the kind of place where great art intersects with mainstream American life. And now this: “Opera buffs can get a sneak peak at the Met’s upcoming production of Rossini’s ‘Il Barbiere di Siviglia’ (that’s ‘The Barber of Seville’ for all of you barbarians) tomorrow on, of all places, ‘Late Show With David Letterman.’ It will be the first time Letterman, an opera fan, has had an opera production as his musical guest.”

Ho Hum, A Prize For New Classical Music?

Why does contemporary classical music have such a bad image? “Compare this to the pull of contemporary visual art – the Turner Prize, for example, or the equivalent award for modern fiction, the Man Booker Prize. Both events generate reams of newspaper copy and huge public interest, leading to vast increases in the commercial viability of the prizewinner.”

Hollywood’s Must-Read Right-Wing Site

L.A.’s conservative Liberty Film Festival, now in its third year, “still seems a few years away from being a real cinematic force,” Patrick Goldstein writes. The festival’s website, on the other hand, “has emerged as a must read for anyone who cares about film and enjoys seeing Hollywood blowhards and hypocrites take a few jabs to the head. I couldn’t agree less with most of its politics, but in an era in which most movie sites are dominated by gossips and geeks, Libertas is one of the few websites that actually takes movies — and their cultural influence — seriously.”

Pictures? Words? It’s All Literature

Should we take graphic novels (comics) seriously as literature? “Studies have shown a link between comics and increased literacy skills. Often, comics readers are just plain readers, and many fans of prose literature attribute their love of reading to comics. We also can’t forget that we describe the act of reading comics as just that: reading. There’s no other word that can adequately describe how we interact with stories told in that medium.”

Speaking In Tongues: And The Brain Scan Says …

“The passionate, sometimes rhythmic, language-like patter that pours forth from religious people who ‘speak in tongues’ reflects a state of mental possession, many of them say. Now they have some neuroscience to back them up. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania took brain images of five women while they spoke in tongues and found that their frontal lobes — the thinking, willful part of the brain through which people control what they do — were relatively quiet, as were the language centers. … The women were not in blind trances, and it was unclear which region was driving the behavior.”

Chlorine May Be Darkening Pompeiian Frescoes

Pompeiian wall paintings colored with cinnabar have darkened since their excavation. “Art preservationists have been uncertain why the degradation occurs, but have suspected that sunlight causes the mercury sulfide to change crystalline phases, to a form called metacinnabar. But an analysis using the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, shows that there is no metacinnabar to be found. Instead, Marine Cotte of the synchrotron facility and colleagues found two other degradation processes at work, probably caused at least in part by chlorine.”

Chicago’s Architecture Endangered By Condos?

“Fiercely proud of both its architecture and its distinct neighborhoods, Chicago is losing entire tracts of older buildings. Many areas bordering downtown where immigrant communities flourished a century ago have experienced a rush of residential development, leading local preservationists … to worry that before long, the only architecture left in this inner ring of neighborhoods will be condominiums.”