The “official photograph of President Obama, Vice President Biden and about 40 staffers who assembled to applaud the late-night passage of the [healthcare] bill … inserts Obama squarely into the middle of healthcare reform’s bipartisan history,” between portraits of FDR and his Republican cousin, “failed predecessors in the fight for federal healthcare legislation.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
A Footballer Tries Rehearsing With The Royal Ballet
“Top footballers train for two to three hours a day and might do an hour’s work in the gym after that. Their counterparts in ballet kick off with an hour’s Pilates, followed by a 90-minute warm-up and up to six hours’ rehearsal. And perhaps a two-hour performance in the evening. … Football is hard, but ballet is evil.”
Sirs Peter Hall And Alan Ayckbourn Talk Shop
Hall: Interesting thing about notes. You can see an actor missing doing something, and if you tell him what he should do, he won’t do it…. But if you say: “I think you were so wise not to . . .” then he’ll do it. It rather works, I find.
Ayckbourn: Remember when Mrs Thatcher invited you to a reception at Downing Street and you asked me to come with you because “she likes you”?
How Was The London Philharmonic Swindled From Within?
“Unless [the LPO’s former general manager] comes up with some unforseen defence to an embezzlement charge, it would appear that the fraud was disguised by understating the orchestra’s costs and overstating its fundraising. … But the £666,000 question is whether there’s something about cultural organisations that makes them particularly prone to fraudsters.”
Ted Hughes To Get A Poets’ Corner Memorial
“The honour, which was announced yesterday, is the result of a campaign led by Seamus Heaney and Hughes’s successor as Poet Laureate, Sir Andrew Motion. … There is no automatic qualification for a place in Poets’ Corner, nor does admission involve any moral judgment on an individual’s character.”
Herta Muller: To Escape Police, We Proofread In The Woods
“Speaking at the Leipzig book fair on Saturday, [Nobel laureate Herta Muller] said that while she was writing books including her debut, the short story collection Niederungen (Nadirs), which was censored in Romania, she would meet her German proofreader in the woods to avoid discovery.”
Milwaukee Book Co-Op Quickly Goes Belly-Up
After the beloved Harry W. Schwartz Bookstore chain closed, co-op “organizers raised money from local residents and also secured a low-interest, $35,000 loan from the village” to open in a former Schwartz location. They said that “the economy, a change in the public’s book-buying habits and strong competition from online booksellers” prevented success.
Peter Bohlin And The Beautiful Cube
Architect Peter Bohlin’s Fifth Avenue Apple store cube is reportedly “the fifth-most-photographed building in New York, the 28th worldwide.” Its design likely “helped him triumph over two superstars, Thom Mayne and Adrian Smith, to win this year’s gold medal from the American Institute of Architects,” yet Bohlin works “by sketching on paper rather than by turning on a laptop.”
Is Criticism Pointless?
“[O]ver the past decade much of our ‘critical’ cultural has degenerated into a glorified form of punditry, in which critics have forsaken their role as compassionate arbiters for the barbed joys of snark.”
A Photographer Is Britain’s Official Election Artist
The first photographer to hold the position, “Simon Roberts has been commissioned by the Speaker’s Advisory Committee on Works of Art to document campaigning activity in the run-up to polling day. Mr Roberts will be given special access to the campaign trail and his images will join the House of Commons Parliamentary Art Collection.”