The Calcutta government has asked the British to help restore Calcutta’s British colonial architecture. “The Marxist government sees the conservation-led regeneration of the city’s neglected colonial past as part of a larger scheme for social and economic revival by promoting it as a business and tourist attraction. It feels the need to alter the city’s image from what Kipling described as the ‘city of dreadful night’ — summoning up the Black Hole and the slums where Mother Teresa worked — to ‘The gifted city’, as it will be promoted, emphasising its rich cultural and architectural traditions.” – The Art Newspaper
Author: Douglas McLennan
NOBEL EFFORTS
Last week Czeslaw Milosz and Günter Grass traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania to unveil a plaque commemorating Joseph Brodsky. – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
ATWOOD IS BOOKER FAVORITE
Margaret Atwood’s new book, “The Blind Assassin”, is the early favourite to win Britain’s Booker Prize. London bookmakers posted her as the 2 to 1 favorite. – National Post (Canada)
POTTERMANIA HITS CHINA
Harry Potter has come to China, creating the same sensation as it did in the rest of the world. Parents lined up for hours outside bookstores hoping to buy the latest accounts of “Ha-Li Bo-te,” as Potter is known in China. – BBC
PROGRAMMATIC ERROR
The Boston Symphony has hurriedly withdrawn this season’s covers of its program books after discovering that part of the cover image “presents an indistinct image that creates a visual double-entendre of a distinctly anatomical nature.” – Boston Globe
HOW SYDNEY GOT HER OPERA HOUSE
“Some think of the Opera House as a superb example of Goethe’s frozen music; others imagine a beached white whale, a galleon sailing off to Elfland, nine ears cocked to hear some heavenly aria, nine nuns playing football. ‘A bunch of toenails clipped from a large albino dog’, the Sydney journalist Ron Saw once wrote.” – London Review of Books
CROSSING OVER
Playwright Harold Pinter will make his acting debut in one of his own plays as part of a ten-play Pinter-fest coming to Broadway. – Theatre.com
OUT DAMN DOT
Artists in San Francisco march on city hall to protest high rents and evictions due to the Dot-com boom. – Los Angeles Times (Reuters) 10/05/00
BUILDING A BETTER CONGRESS
Think of all the lawyers and business-people who populate Congress. But in the 20th Century there was only one architect served in Congress. Why not more? Hard to say – “The creative process of architects is a constructive, inclusive process – therefore more diplomatic than the aggressive and adversarial methods of engagement in politics … Yet they have always seemed to be supporting actors at best or bit players at worst, in the various dramas unfolding on society’s main stage…” – Boston Globe 10/05/00
CHRISTIE’S/SOTHEBY’S DEAL PUT ON HOLD
A judge puts a hold on the $512 million settlement reached late last month by the boards of both Christie’s and Sotheby’s, saying that not all the plaintiffs have had a chance to sign off on the agreement. – CNN