“[Bestselling author Shea Serrano] decided on Wednesday to direct his 135,000 Twitter followers to the Carmichael’s online store. His goal was to generate 1,000 orders in one day. It took less than five hours.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
How A Colorado Arts Center Collapsed, As Warnings Were Ignored Or Deflected
Beginning two years ago, not long after a new executive director arrived, staffers and some board members at the Glenwood Springs Center for the Arts began discovering serious financial shenanigans: multiple bank accounts, paid-for items that had never been ordered or delivered, paychecks bouncing. The executive director kept saying things were under control; city officials, repeatedly warned, insisted they could do nothing. Now the exec is gone, the Center is broke and may close, and the police are involved. How did it get to this point? Ryan Summerlin reports.
The Gay Period Drama The World Wasn’t Ready For: Merchant And Ivory’s ‘Maurice’ At 30
“Adapted from a posthumously published EM Forster novel that is likewise overshadowed in reputation by other works in his canon – like, well, Howards End and A Room With a View – Merchant Ivory’s film opened hot on the heels of their broadly beloved, Oscar-garlanded adaptation of the latter. Almost immediately, it was filed away as, if not a disappointment, a lesser diversion.” But now, in the post-Brokeback, post-Moonlightera and with a new high-def restoration, Guy Lodge argues that the time for this soft-spoken romance may finally have arrived.
Merchant And Ivory’s Own 45-Year Love Story
As James Ivory, now 89 and still traveling and writing, tells Sarah Larson, “[Ismail] was my life’s partner. From the beginning right on down to his final day. I lived openly with him for forty-five years, in New York and wherever else we were. That says what it says.”
Chicago Symphony Denies Tenure To Principal Oboe (And Lawyers Are Now Involved)
Alex Klein had been principal oboist at the CSO before – from 1995 to 2004, when he had to resign due to the effects of focal dystonia. After a dozen years of recovery and retooling his technique, Klein re-auditioned for and returned to his old job last year, with the usual two-season probationary period. But the musicians’ tenure review committee and music director Riccardo Muti (who has final say) decided last month not to keep Klein on.
New York City Opera Will Finally Stage The ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Score It Commissioned
“The new group that reorganized City Opera and brought it out of bankruptcy announced Wednesday that it would give Brokeback” – which Gérard Mortier commissioned from composer Charles Wuorinen during that brief period he headed the company before it went bankrupt – “its United States premiere in the spring of 2018, at the end of its second full season back in the business of staging operas.”
Jeff Koons’s ‘Seated Ballerina’ May Have Been, Um, ‘Appropriated’
Koons based the 45-foot-tall inflatable, currently installed at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, on his 2015 stainless-steel sculpture of the same name. It turns out that both of them bear the proverbial striking resemblance to a porcelain titled Balerina Lenochka by Oksana Zhnikrup and the The Kiev Experimental Ceramic-Art Factory. (A Koons representative has subsequently claimed that he copied Zhnikrup’s work “under license”; no details of this license were provided.)
Utah Symphony Keeps Thierry Fischer For Three More Seasons
“Fischer’s current contract [as music director] was set to expire at the end of the 2018-19 season. The new contract will mean Fischer will continue programming and conducting the Utah Symphony’s concerts through the 2021-22 season.”
Barbara Smith Conrad, Mezzo-Soprano Who Figured In Civil Rights Struggle, Dead At 79
It in 1957, her first year at U. Texas-Austin – and the first year black students were admitted as undergrads – that Conrad was cast as Dido, opposite a white student, in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. She was harassed not only by white students but also by state legislators, who threatened to withhold funding from the university if she were not replaced.
Museum Of African Art In Paris To Shut Down
“The Musée Dapper in Paris will close its doors next month, with officials citing high costs and low attendance as reasons for shutting the privately funded, non-profit museum of traditional and contemporary African art.”