Month: August 2003

First Words… 2.5 Million Years Ago?

“Recent evidence suggests we may have started talking as early as 2.5m years ago. There is a polar divide on the issues of dating and linking thought, language and material culture. One view of language development is that language, specifically the spoken word, appeared suddenly among modern humans between 35,000 and 50,000 years ago and that the ability to speak words and use syntax was recently genetically hard-wired into our brains in a kind of language organ. This view of language is associated with the old idea that logical thought is dependent on words.”

Edinburgh Sticks Up For Itself

The Edinburgh Festival requires a public subsidy of about £2 million to survive. This compares to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which gets about £64,000. “In recent days, the International Festival (EIF) has been attacked by some arts commentators for lack of artistic ambition and for its relatively high level of public funding, in comparison with the Fringe.”

Treasure Bazaar

“These days, the crisis of looting in Iraq has brought the freewheeling world of art smuggling into the spotlight. But long before the turmoil in Baghdad, the clandestine art market had established itself as a multi-billion-dollar international business. By some estimates it ranks in profitability right after the illegal market for arms and drugs. In Italy, as in Iraq, layers of civilization have graced the landscape with a seemingly unending supply of salable treasures. “

A Hit After Death

Crowds are thronging to Jessica Grace Wing’s new musical “Lost” “Ms. Wing’s death so close to the production’s debut — she was said to have finished the musical’s final song just a day before dying — has created an unmistakable sentimental momentum for “Lost,” which is based on the children’s tale “Hansel and Gretel” and has a book and lyrics by Kirk Wood Bromley. Like the Broadway musical “Rent,” which also started in the East Village and whose composer, Jonathan Larson, died just after the show’s final dress rehearsal, “Lost” is selling tickets to those who knew Ms. Wing’s work and those who suddenly want to discover her. “

When You Can’t Even Give Away The Opera Tickets…

“Scottish Opera’s ambitious complete Ring cycle at this summer’s Edinburgh Festival sold out as long ago as October, but the organisers of the Festival held back one performance of Götterdämmerung for people under 27. Faced with frequent attacks that it was elitist, “out of touch”, and aimed only at the “middle-aged upper middle class audience”, the heavily subsidised Festival hoped that the free ticket offer would help to reverse its demographic. But only 237 young people turned up for the performance on Friday, leaving a staggering 1,660 seats empty in the flagship Festival Theatre.”

Defending The Vision

Daniel Libeskind is fighting for his ideas at the World Trade Center site. “The revisions. The redesigning. The new studies. The jockeying. Not just an architect, Libeskind has emerged as a tough defender of his vision, amid the high stakes tug of war that threatens to pick his design apart. Sometimes he wins. Sometimes he loses. And the battle is far from over. “

Gregory Hines, 57

Actor/dancer Gregory Hines has died of cancer. He was best known for his roles in films such as The Cotton Club (1984), based around the seminal 1920s New York jazz club, in which he played Sandman Williams. He was also cast alongside Mikhail Baryshnikov in the thriller White Nights (1985), and alongside Billy Crystal in the comic cop thriller Running Scared (1986).”

A Life Wasted On The Fringe

Critic Dominic Papatola takes in an orgy of theatre at this year;s Minnesota Fringe Festival, and comes away disappointed. “Consider my batting average: In one 36-hour period, I saw 13 shows. Two of them were quite good — the kind of thing I would recommend to friends and readers. Three of them were so-so; flawed but with enough merit to make them worth $10 and an hour of my life. But fully seven of those shows — nearly 60 percent, for those of you who like statistics — resided in the oozy quagmire between not-so-good and positively rancid: odious, smarmy, meandering exercises in precious self-indulgence that, even by the somewhat lower standards of the Fringe, were experiences that, at the end of my theater-going life, I will mourn as time utterly squandered.”