Month: July 2018

The Actor Whose Theater Is The Underground Drug Trade, And Whose Director Is The DEA

“Fluent in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Greek, [Spyros] Enotiades specializes in playing the role of cartel boss, middleman, or money manager, making phone calls and holding face-to-face meetings with the DEA.’s targets. During the past thirty years, he has become one of the agency’s longest-serving and most successful confidential sources, participating in dozens of investigations targeting narcotics and weapons traffickers in the United States, Europe, South America, and Africa. ‘His ability to migrate between different types of people and cultures is incredible,’ [one for DEA agent who worked with him] said.”

The Two Things Shonda Rhimes Really Wants To Achieve At Netflix

“One is to come up with shows that are more expansive than her ABC fare. The other is to turn Shondaland into an enduring company that will live within Netflix in the same way that Marvel exists inside the Walt Disney Company. ‘It would be really amazing to me at some point down the line — not now — if somebody said, ‘There was a Shonda for Shondaland?” Ms. Rhimes said. ‘It needs to be bigger than me.'” (includes summaries of her first eight series for the streaming service)

The Big Question Behind The Massive Spending On Culture (And Starchitecture) In The Gulf

Rowan Moore: “Should well-intentioned and influential outsiders refuse to legitimise what should be challenged or might they hope that (for example) the conditions of migrant workers will be improved through the attention brought by the Louvre and the World Cup? Does the presence of Nabokov on the library shelves outweigh governmental support for extremism? Where on the scale from Faustian to Abrahamic is the bargain being struck? The truthful answer is …”

Is Lyn Gardner Suggesting That Theatres Pay For Developing A New Crop Of Critics? Or For Turning Audience Members Into Critics?

“A new approach to theatre criticism, in which theatres see developing critical voices as part of audience and artist development and invest in it accordingly in terms of both time and money, is needed. … Particularly when The Stage survey indicates that word of mouth and friends is a more trusted source of opinion than mainstream publications. Could audiences be those friends too?”

Judge Orders Return Of 2,500-Year-Old Stone Bas-Relief To Iran

“The bas-relief, which depicts a Persian guard, was seized in October by investigators for the Manhattan district attorney’s office from the Park Avenue Armory, where it was being offered for sale at an art fair. … Investigators say the item was reported stolen from Tehran in 1936, and then was stolen a second time, in 2011, from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, to which it had been donated decades earlier.”

Brian Kellow, Longtime Editor At ‘Opera News’, Dead At 59

“Brian left behind an extraordinary legacy within the magazine’s pages — thirty years’ worth of news features, personality profiles, reviews and opinion pieces, every one of them lit by a writerly spark that was uniquely his own. He was also the author of a series of dazzling biographies exploring the lives of Pauline Kael, Sue Mengers, Ethel Merman and Hollywood’s Bennett sisters.”