“What keeps Sherlock Holmes alive? As is customarily the case with serial literature, the most important element of the appeal of the Holmes stories is the personality of their principal character, closely followed by his relationship with his amanuensis.”
Month: October 2015
When Bar(n)-Storming Cellist Matt Haimovitz Colonized Columbia University Campus
“Students eating at Columbia University’s John Jay Dining Hall, an airy den reverberating with undergraduate chatter, were in for a surprise last Wednesday. When they walked in for dinner, they found Matt Haimovitz – the cellist who helped to start a trend by performing in places like an East Village punk club and a pizzeria in Jackson, Miss. – playing Bach.”
Bolshoi Ballet Gets New Director, Replacing Acid Atttack Victim Sergei Filin
“Bolshoi Theatre general director Vladimir Urin appointed Makhar Vaziev, who has led La Scala Ballet for seven years and, before that, spent 13 years at the helm of the Mariinsky Ballet. Many Russians are relieved that the choice is a former dancer with leadership experience and good taste. But questions surround this appointment.”
The Thorny Situation That The Bolshoi Ballet’s New Director Is Dancing Into
It’s by no means only the drama surrounding the acid attack on outgoing director Sergei Filin, as bad as that was. Ismene Brown explains.
More Female Producers And Directors Mean More Female Crew Members, Study Finds
“Data crunched by researchers … at San Diego State University found that on films with female directors, women accounted for slightly more than half of the films’ writers. On films with male directors, by contrast, women made up 8 percent of writers. The ripple effect extends to other jobs: across the board, having a female director greatly increased the number of women in editing and cinematographer positions.”
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Selects New Director
“[Peggy] Fogelman, who currently serves as the director of collections at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum, has broad experience on both the curatorial and educational sides of museums – knowledge that could well position her to expand the Gardner’s audience and further its multidisciplinary programming.”
Beirut’s Art Scene Remains Lively Despite The City’s Never-Ending Tumult
“The creative ferment is happening even as unrest in the region and domestic political instability have ground the economy and tourism to a near halt and threaten to embroil Lebanon in new conflicts. Beirut is also a city where luxury towers are redrawing the skyline while the arrival in recent years of an estimated 1.5 million refugees from neighboring Syria has strained the infrastructure of a country of 4 million. A crisis over garbage collection recently plagued the city, but seems to have subsided.”
What’s Up With The Lowline, The World’s First Underground Park
Meant in part as a counterpoint to New York’s wildly popular High Line, and conceived by architect and “urban archaeologist” James Ramsey, the Lowline (if it really does get built) will be a landscaped public space reclaimed out of a derelict three-block-long underground trolley terminal on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
What Libraries Can Still Do, Even As The World Becomes Digitalized
“The library has no future as yet another Internet node, but neither will it relax into retirement as an antiquarian warehouse. Until our digital souls depart our bodies for good and float away into the cloud, we retain part citizenship in the physical world … In the midst of an information explosion, librarians are still the most versatile information specialists we have. And the purest.”
The Birth Of ‘The New Yorker Story’ As A Genre
Jonathan Franzen: “What made a story New Yorker was its carefully wrought, many-comma’d prose; its long passages of physical description, the precision and the sobriety of which created a kind of negative emotional space, a suggestion of feeling without the naming of it; its well-educated white characters, who could be found experiencing the melancholies of affluence, the doldrums of suburban marriage, or the thrill or the desolation of adultery; and, above all, its signature style of ending, which was either elegantly oblique or frustratingly coy, depending on your taste.”