“General Director David Gockley acknowledged the obvious truth in a brief address to the audience before Sunday’s opening performance of ‘La Bohème’: The financial picture at the San Francisco Opera isn’t pretty. … There had been a small drop in ticket sales, he said, but the more pressing problem was the decline in the value of the company’s endowment and fears about possible future shortfalls in contributions.”
Tag: 11.18.08
Miriam Toews Wins Canada’s $25K Writers’ Trust Prize
“Miriam Toews’ The Flying Troutmans, touted early on as a possible candidate for several major Canadian book prizes, ended up earning a single nomination. But the popular Winnipeg author’s bestselling novel made good on that one nod, claiming the $25,000 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in Toronto yesterday.”
Smithsonian Regents Meet The Public
“At its first-ever public meeting, the regents of the Smithsonian Institution sat around a red-covered table and announced they wanted ‘a lively dialogue.’ The audience did not hold back. The first volley from the public, gathered in an auditorium at the National Museum of Natural History, was essentially this: Why didn’t all of you resign, since you are the people who picked the last secretary?”
Covering Classics Is Safe, But It Doesn’t Help Young Writers
If established singers “don’t have to pay attention to new songwriters, what happens to the great American songbook? Even modern pop songs need interpretation. … Performed at a different tempo, transposed to another key, given a new arrangement or sung by a gifted singer, a song takes on a new life.” But older singers looking for cover songs tend to look to classics, not new work.
Lab Project: Making Movie Storytelling Meaningful
“The movie world has been fretting for years about the collapse of stardom. Now there are growing fears that another chunk of film architecture is looking wobbly: the story. In league with a handful of former Hollywood executives, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory plans to do something about that on Tuesday, with the creation of a new Center for Future Storytelling.”
A President Who Reads? What Does That Mean For Sales?
“When President-elect Barack Obama appeared on ’60 Minutes’ on CBS on Sunday in his first interview since winning the election, he mentioned having read ‘a new book out about F .D. R.’s first 100 days’ without specifically naming a title or author. … The publishers and authors of at least three such books that could fit Mr. Obama’s description each spent much of Monday wondering whether they had just gotten a plug from the soon-to-be leader of the free world.”
The World’s First Superscraper (Final Height Unknown)
“When you stand under the Burj Tower it doesn’t look that tall at all. Bizarre. Alone on the flat desert landscape of Dubai, apart from the generic glitzy towers of the Sheikh Zayed Road, it seems slightly abstract, with nothing for your eye to compare it with.” Nonetheless: “This is literally a step change in the future of skyscrapers. Welcome to the world’s first superscraper.”
Lee, De Havilland, Ford’s Theatre Get Arts Medal From Bush
“Stan Lee, who helped create hundreds of comic book superheroes, including ‘Spider-Man,’ and Olivia de Havilland, 92, who was nominated for an Academy Award in 1939 for her portrayal of Melanie Hamilton in ‘Gone With the Wind,’ were among the recipients of the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal at the White House yesterday.”