Quinn “Dombrowski has come across [Regenstein Library] graffiti written in Arabic (‘a lot of it, actually’), Chinese (‘a reasonable amount’), German, Turkish, Greek, Russian and Serbian.” There are also “the graffiti she has found scrawled in dead languages; the graffiti that use the letters of multiple dead languages; and the graffiti scrawled in hieroglyphics.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Why The Resentment Of Good Criticism?
Glenn Kenny: There’s “an odd tendency I’ve seen more and more of over my quarter-century of doing something that sometimes resembles criticism–that a lot of people look at the critical impulse, and the work that it sometimes produces, as some kind of attempt to kill their buzz. And, beyond that, to force-feed them stuff that they don’t like.”
The Great, Absurd Tournament Of Books, Explained
Laura Miller: “Because the competition itself is essentially meaningless, ToB is a Trojan horse. Under the guise of a sports conceit, it encourages people to read outside their comfort zones and reflect on the often knee-jerk judgments they make about books they’ve never even cracked open.”
LA County Halves Its Arts Management Internship Program
“Last year the county spent $500,000 to sponsor 125 interns; this year there will be 75. … The county-funded internships place students who live in L.A. County or attend college here with performing arts organizations.”
Geffen Playhouse Names Its Main Stage For Gil Cates
“Cates founded the Geffen in 1994, calling on high-profile entertainment industry contacts he’d cultivated as then-dean of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television and the Emmy Award-winning producer of the Academy Awards broadcast for 14 years.”
Arts Policy Geeks, A Webcast Just For You
Friday morning’s meeting of the National Council on the Arts “will be the first one that is viewable online. The webcast as well as [NEA Chairman Rocco] Landesman’s cross-country travels are part of an effort to ‘connect the NEA with Americans wherever they are,’ says an agency spokeswoman.”
LA’s Dept. Of Cultural Affairs Shrinks As Jobs Fall Away
“Additional layoffs and early retirements loom over a department that expects staffing to fall from 63 last summer to 36 by July 1. The $9.6-million Cultural Affairs budget already had been trimmed by $700,000 through furloughs and unfilled openings.” The city also wants to unload some of its neighborhood arts centers on private operators.
Benefitting Playwrights, Roundabout Gives Up Some Rights
“The Roundabout will be ‘voluntarily foregoing its subsidiary rights participation for its regular runs at the Laura Pels Theatre, that began with Theresa Rebeck’s The Understudy, and at the Black Box Theatre, regardless of the length of the run.'”
Barbican’s Sheffield To Head Hong Kong Cultural District
“Hong Kong says it has picked the artistic director of London’s Barbican Centre, Graham Sheffield, as chief executive of the city’s HK$21.6 billion ($2.8 billion) West Kowloon Cultural District.”
Vienna, Which Turned Its Back On Mahler, Embraces Him
“Although everyone, from Emperor Franz-Josef down, acknowledged his success in galvanizing a stagnant art, Mahler was treated as an outsider and subjected to a barrage of anti- Semitic abuse — the most vicious of its kind until the Hitler era.” Now, “[w]ithout admitting it was wrong about Mahler,” the city “is working hard to adjust its attitudes.”