“The recordings were made in February 1980 by Larkin and his Hull University colleague John Weeks, a sound engineer, but remained on a shelf in the garage in which they were recorded for over two decades, until they were discovered in 2006 when Weeks’s son was clearing it out.”
Tag: 12.12.08
Muscovites Turn Against Solzhenitsyn Street
After Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s death in August, President Dmitri Medvedev named a street in Moscow after the Nobel laureate as a tribute. Now residents, along with Soviet nostalgists, are campaigning to get back the thoroughfare’s old name – Big Communist Street.
‘A Cubist Opera’
Director Jay Scheib and composer Anthony Gatto had the brilliant/daring/foolhardy idea to make Stein’s famously inscrutable “Cubist novel,” The Making of Americans, into an opera. Their effort had its world premiere this past weekend at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Two Aubrey Beardsley Drawings Discovered In Bathroom
“An auctioneer who had carried out a routine valuation at the man’s bungalow home only found them when he asked to use the lavatory before he left. He was stunned when he realised the pen-and-ink drawings above the sink were the work of the English artist Aubrey Beardsley.”
Musician Finds His Stolen Bassoon On eBay
“A member of the National Arts Center orchestra spotted the 1955 German-made Heckel contrabassoon on the online auction site and contacted police, said an Ottawa police news release Friday. The instrument is worth between $60,000 and $100,000, and went missing between August and Oct. 17.”
Remembering David Foster Wallace
Wallace was “wary of ideas. He was perpetually on guard against the ways in which abstract thinking (especially thinking about your own thinking) can draw you away from something more genuine and real. To read his acutely self-conscious, dialectically fevered writing was often to witness the agony of cognition.”
Crusading Against Starchitecture
“Joshua Prince-Ramus is waging a holy war against the sculptors, starchitects, and fey theoreticians of his profession. And in the process, he’s actually building things.” He tells students: “I’ve never seen a client give a shit about my personal vision. I had to figure out how to piggyback what my vision was onto their issues.”
The Five Most Terrifying Local TV Christmas Commercials
“People always lament the decline of those quaint mom-and-pop stores as big chains like Target and Wal-Mart dominate… But here’s something no one considers: What if mom-and-pop are total lunatics?”
Where The Movies Need To Go
“One reason Hollywood has fared better than record labels in the digital age is that they sell their content in so many different ways — from expensive in-theater showings, to premium cable, basic cable, and eventually, free, ad-supported television.”
Edinburgh Fringe Gets A Bailout
“It follows problems at the box office this summer which affected tickets for hundreds of shows. The funding package includes a loan of £125,000 from Edinburgh City Council and a one-off grant of £65,000 from the Scottish Arts Council.”