“The new museum would be twice as high as buildings usually are in that area. It would disturb the visual experience of the part of [Oslo] where medieval and the later parts meet.”
Tag: 12.16.09
Milorad Pavic, 80, Form-Shifting Novelist
“Dreamlike, playful and formally unorthodox, his novels were like hardbound hypertext in their insistence on offering readers alternate, nonlinear ways of navigating a story” such as dictionaries and crossword puzzles. His best-known book was the 1988 Dictionary of the Khazars, which, some observers said, prefigured the post-Yugoslav wars.
Kushner’s Latest No Longer Sprinting Toward Broadway
Guthrie Theater artistic director Joe Dowling says Tony Kushner’s “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism & Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures,” previously on a fast track to Broadway, “is not happening in the spring” in order to ensure “that Tony wouldn’t face another deadline like he had in Minneapolis.”
Choreographer Calls BBC Reversal ‘Silly’ And ‘Dangerous’
A Javier de Frutos work, whose “deformed pope, pregnant nuns and wild sex” ignited controversy at its London premiere, was set for broadcast, in a pre-watershed slot, until the BBC changed its mind. The choreographer “is angry at the ‘naivety’ of the BBC for assuming that ‘they could broadcast it before the watershed just because it was ballet.'”
The Best Books We Didn’t Read This Decade
Publishers, translators and agents on the titles that “should have gone on to take the world by storm. And never did, quite.”
Shepherding Dramatists Through The UK Playwriting Boom
“According to a recent report by Arts Council England, the amount of new writing produced by mainstream, subsidised theatre has more than doubled in the last six years. … With so much new work in circulation, how do script departments forge strong relationships with writers, to help them produce their best work?”
The Songs Of Blue Whales Are Getting Lower
“For decades, blue whales have been singing with increasingly deeper voices, reports a new study. In some cases, the pitch of their songs has dropped by more than 30 percent. Frustrated researchers cannot yet explain why.”
Alice’s Adventures In Algebra
“The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community. Putting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the [fanciful] scenes to satirise these radical new ideas.”
Werner Herzog: ‘I’ve Always Made Mainstream Movies’
“Because when you have a real good story to tell, real good actors, it’s always mainstream. Sometimes in a way it was secret mainstream. But a film like Aguirre, the Wrath of God, made 40 years ago almost, is mainstream today. It was not at the time.” (Also, “I don’t even know what irony exactly is, but I think it’s always hilarious.”)
Prime-Time TV’s First Counterculture Hero: Mr. Ed
“[T]here was the … comedy of seeing a gawky animal enjoy the sacraments of postwar culture. Ed submits to psychoanalysis, goes to costume pageants, orders shoes over the phone. The joke is not just that he acts human; it’s the implication that the better part of early-’60s home life could be managed, quite adeptly, by a horse with a vocabulary.”