Cybervisionary novelist William Gibson recently did a live reading that was also a virtual reading on Second Life. “I had a laptop open so I could see it as if I was watching from within Second Life. What I saw I found a bit distracting — people levitating and sitting on top of the microphone.” He writes, these days, about the contemporary world, which is not, he says, as big a shift as it might seem. “All science fiction is in one way or another about the moment in which it’s written, even if the people who write it don’t know that.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
A Burgeoning Dance Form Has Battle Call At Its Heart
“South Korea is at the forefront of the new wave of break-dance, or b-boy, artistry, but dancers from France to China are also incorporating elements of jazz, capoeira, acrobatics and martial arts into longer choreographed works that are intended for a mainstream audience and the legitimacy of a proscenium stage. Though still largely unknown, this new generation has reinvented a movement style that in many ways had been exploited and dismissed.”
German Mosque’s Architecture Is A Red-Herring Issue
In Cologne, Germany, some locals are irked “that some actual Muslims want to build an actual mosque with a dome and minarets. The residents complain that the minarets would clash with the towering spires of the city’s celebrated 13th Century cathedral.” Designed by Paul Boehm, son of Pritzker Prize winner Gottfried Boehm, the $20 million mosque “blends elements of Ottoman classicism with cutting-edge modernity.” Of course, architecture isn’t the real issue….
Sotheby’s Shares Drop With Stock Market
“Sotheby’s shares declined 11.2 percent in two days amid concern that the worldwide stock-market drop will deter the wealthy from buying art.” An analyst says the extreme wealth of Sotheby’s clients makes that highly unlikely.
Sarah Ruhl, Outfitted By Grandmother’s Closet
Playwright Sarah Ruhl “has a closet full of her grandmother’s clothes, many of which she has had for more than 15 years. … The longest lasting of these garments are six or seven well-made winter coats from the 1950s and ’60s. Her favorite is a nubby pink wool, which she has worn steadily since she filched it, as a defiantly Midwestern student amid the fashionably black-clad masses at Brown University, and all through her career as a playwright. ‘I like the color pink,’ she said. ‘I am tired of the color black.'”
Black Authors Seek An Audience Through L.A. Expo
“Three-quarters of the writers” at Saturday’s third annual Los Angeles Black Book Expo “were self-published, said Charles Chatmon, the festival’s executive director. ‘Rather than deal with the horrors of mainstream publishing, they prefer to control the finances and the content,’ said Chatmon, a proofreader for an Irvine biomedical firm who has self-published two poetry books. ‘And it’s the only way many African Americans can get their works out there.'”
On Blast Walls, Iraqi Artists Paint Their Nation’s Past
“For four years these vast concrete slabs have slowly crept through Baghdad, snaking along road, river and sidewalk as they shut out light and encircled ministries, palaces and districts. Now, confronted by the inescapable presence and likely longevity of these blast walls, the city has hired two dozen Iraqi artists to soften their harsh gray solidity by using the city’s past to hide its present.”
Israel Museum Revamp Respects Architecture, Visitor
“The Israel Museum is one of the finest in the Middle East — if you can figure out how to get in and find the art.” Museum director James S. Snyder sees an $80 million expansion and renovation project, due to be completed in 2009, “as the solution to deep irritation over how the Israel Museum’s rich and varied collections … seem almost to be hidden in a maze of different entryways. Yet the original architecture is itself an admired work of art that no one wanted to mar.”
The Legacy Of “Tommy”: Rock Opera Thrives (Sort Of)
“Rock opera has had a spotty history, but by now the barriers between high and low art, between classical and pop music, have been so thoroughly demolished that something was bound to have happened. And, in fact, rockers are welcomed into the opera house and concert hall like never before. Meanwhile, classical composers appropriate from the pop world like crazy. … The only problem with all this is that very little rock opera is opera, and very, very little of it is any good.”
Woody Allen On Ingmar Bergman
“To meet him was not to suddenly enter the creative temple of a formidable, intimidating, dark and brooding genius who intoned complex insights with a Swedish accent about man’s dreadful fate in a bleak universe. It was more like this: ‘Woody, I have this silly dream where I show up on the set to make a film and I can’t figure out where to put the camera; the point is, I know I am pretty good at it and I have been doing it for years. You ever have those nervous dreams?'”