“Saying the Art Institute of Chicago isn’t affordable for many city residents, Ald. Ed Burke (14th) today increased the pressure on the world-famous museum to reverse its looming 50-percent increase in admission fees. Burke, chairman of the Finance Committee, pushed through a resolution urging the Chicago Park District to repeal the increase it approved in March and force the museum to offer reduced fees for Chicago residents.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
UN’s World Digital Library Is Up And Running
“A globe-spanning U.N. digital library seeking to display and explain the wealth of all human cultures has gone into operation on the Internet, serving up mankind’s accumulated knowledge in seven languages for students around the world. … The site (www.wdl.org) has put up the Japanese work that is considered the first novel in history, for instance, along with the Aztecs’ first mention of the Christ child in the New World and the works of ancient Arab scholars piercing the mysteries of algebra….”
J.G. Ballard In Architecture, TV, Pop, Film And Visual Art
“Perhaps searching for a Ballardian cinema in ordinary terms is obtuse: we should be looking instead at CCTV footage taken from any shopping-mall security camera, or the Big Brother daytime live feed, or one of the direct-impact 9/11 World Trade Centre plane-crash shots – avidly consumed on YouTube, but now considered too brutal for television. Ballard was a poet of the occult fear, the subliminal horror.” And his influence spread far beyond literature.
Look! Up In The Sky! The Buildings That Never Got Built!
“An entire counterfactual history of New York could be written simply from the stories of buildings that never got built. … Only nine months ago, each of the buildings on the following pages stood a fighting chance of making the jump from architect’s drawings to glass, steel, concrete, and brick. Today, all are on indefinite, very costly hold. “
Explaining Steve Reich
“Composer Steve Reich won the Pulitzer Prize for music Monday, taking the award for his ‘Double Sextet.’ In honor of Reich’s career, here’s a look at another of his most celebrated works.” (With audio.)
Mapping Political Moralities: The Disagreements Are Real
“Liberals and conservatives, [University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt] insists, inhabit different moral universes. There is some overlap in belief systems, but huge differences in emphasis. In a creative attempt to move beyond red-state/blue-state clichés, Haidt has created a framework that codifies mankind’s multiplicity of moralities.”
W.S. Merwin’s Happy Accident Takes Pulitzer No. 2
“W. S. Merwin won his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry on Monday for ‘The Shadow of Sirius,’ a collection that the Pulitzer board described in its citation as ‘luminous’ and ‘often tender’ — and that Merwin called a happy accident. … ‘If people are honest, very few gardens are exactly the way they were planned, if they were ever planned. They evolve, just like children grow up.'”
To Win A Drama Pulitzer, Drink Deeply Of Lake Michigan
“There must be something in the Lake Michigan water. For the second straight year, a play originating in Chicago has won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. This year’s winner is Lynn Nottage’s ‘Ruined,’ her play set in an African brothel. In an interview Monday afternoon, Nottage described herself as ‘jubilant’ over the honor. “
For Brown’s Da Vinci Sequel, A Coy 5 Million-Copy Printing
“Six and a half years after the publication of ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ the best-selling adult hardcover novel of all time, Dan Brown will publish his follow- up on Sept. 15. ‘The Lost Symbol’ will feature Robert Langdon of ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ the Harvard professor played by Tom Hanks in the movie based on the novel. … The planned American first printing of 5 million copies would be the largest in the history of Random House….”
J.G. Ballard: An Appreciation
“If J.G. Ballard — the visionary British novelist who died this morning of prostate cancer at age 78 — ends up being remembered, it will likely be as a science fiction writer who aspired to use genre as a vehicle for art. That’s true enough, I suppose, in a certain small-bore manner, but it’s ultimately reductive, a way of categorizing Ballard that his entire career stood against.”