“Rare is the human backside that hasn’t found solace and support in Mr. Day’s most famous creation, a molded polypropylene shell fastened to an enameled bent tubular steel base that has become familiar seating in schools, churches, offices, auditoriums, home patios, kitchens, dens, bedrooms and basements around the world.”
Tag: 11.20.10
A New Ballet Based on Nabokov’s Unfinished Final Novel
The Original of Laura was only published (against the dying wishes of its author) one year ago, and already it has been adapted into a dance work: Laura premieres this week in Moscow. (Just how a stageable story was made out of the somewhat inscrutable 138 catalogue cards Nabokov left behind is not revealed.)
David Hare on Sarah Bernhardt’s Activism
“Working from exactly the same motives that now attract such scorn towards Angelina Jolie and Sean Penn, she chose, during the Franco-Prussian war, to turn the Odéon Theatre into a military hospital, ministering with great effectiveness and dedication to the injured, the maimed and the dying.”
Can a Plucky New Venture Interest the World in Canadian Poetry?
London-based expats Todd Smith and Evan Jones “are on a personal mission to change the way the world sees Canadian poetry – bluntly speaking, they want to combat the notion that it’s boring and second-rate.” And with their new anthology, they’re trying to do that “without including such well-known Canadian names as Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen.”
Existential Nonchalance: Who Cares If Life Is Meaningless
“New quantitative psychological research suggests a considerable percentage of the population can’t be bothered by these ambitious if ambiguous questions, and when pressed don’t really care that they feel their lives, in the big picture, are meaningless.”
Royal Shakespeare Company Opening New Home
“The Royal Shakespeare Theatre will boast a new 1,000 seat “thrust stage” auditorium, where the audience will be wrapped around three sides of the stage, designed to bring the actors and audience closer together. It will also feature a newly-built 36 metre-high tower.”
A Birthday For The Best-Selling Book Of All Time
“Any day now the English-speaking world will start to celebrate a number one bestseller of unprecedented literary significance. That sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s actually a quatercentenary. I refer not to the collected works of William Shakespeare but a contemporary rival volume that has not only sold non-stop for 400 years but also shaped our imaginative landscape: the King James Bible.”
Surprise – Two New England Theatres Merge
“As a practical matter it is expected that the Colonial Theatre and Berkshire Theatre Festival will create a new nonprofit organization that will connect the two entities, while preserving their identities, and adding a new dimension to the Berkshire theater arts heritage.”
Police Arrest Dance Group In Lincoln Tunnel
“The dance troupe made two big mistakes – they were wearing camouflage shorts and vests and should never have ditched their cars in New York’s Lincoln Tunnel.
Armed police from the FBI swooped and pulled their guns on the group because they thought they were terrorists.”
Why Did The Beatles Finally Land On iTunes?
“Part of the hesitation on the Beatles’ part may have been that the band have always been heavily protective of their music, keen never to devalue the brand by giving away their songs too cheaply: when the disruptive effects of the internet were first felt within the music industry, one common response was to start selling CDs at heavily marked-down prices, but McCartney and co never succumbed to this pressure.”