James Chute gives a progress report.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Christopher Wheeldon, Edgar Degas, And “Swan Lake”
“Wheeldon discovered that the rather seedy world of 19th-century ballet harbored a counterpart to evil sorcerer Von Rothbart. In Degas’s paintings, ‘I kept seeing this mysterious top hatted figure,’ he says, ‘standing in the wings, looking out onstage.'”
Why Are All The Great TV Shows On Sunday Night?
“It seems counterintuitive to pit all of TV’s best series against one another, as anyone who’s tried to program a DVR on Sundays can attest. But there is in fact a method to the networks’ madness, and five reasons why Sunday night’s quality TV overload exists – and won’t be going away anytime soon.”
Man Booker Prize 2014 To Australian Richard Flanagan
The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about the World War II prisoners forced by the Japanese to build “the Death Railway” in Burma, is a personal work for Flanagan, whose father was a survivor of that campaign.
Has U.S. Copyright Law Gone Overboard?
“Rod Stewart is being sued over the rights to an image of his own head.” (True story.) Louis Menand gives an in-depth look at the current approaches to the concept of copyright – and asks if we need to update our ideas and laws for the Internet era.
Met Museum Gets Serious About 20th-Century Art With New Lauder Collection
The group of 81 Cubist works – including works by Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Gris, and donated by Leonard Lauder last year – “marks a turning point for the Met that includes new curatorial hires, a planned renovation of its Lila Acheson Wallace Wing and an expansion into the building currently occupied by the Whitney Museum of American Art.”
Could Detroit Be The Next Berlin? These Berliners Think So
The music industry folks behind a project called the Detroit-Berlin Connection “compare Detroit to their city after the fall of the Berlin Wall and say it has all the ingredients for a similar rebirth as a center of underground culture: deserted buildings, cheap rents and a gritty reputation.”
Tobias Picker’s Big Plans For Opera San Antonio
Says the composer, now artistic director of the reborn company: “I would like to do a range of repertoire from Monteverdi to the present day. … American repertoire is extremely important. We’re living in a golden age of American opera. There’s a tremendous amount of opera being written today. … [I’d like] to get to the point where we can commission a new opera [every year].”
London, Urban Cesspool And Cradle Of English Slang
“Slang’s literary origins are widespread and ever-expanding. Its social roots, however, are narrow and focused: the city. … London’s chroniclers had always noted the urban vocabularies, though none before the eighteenth century had rendered their discoveries lexicographical.”
The Nazi Statue That Has Uruguay All Verklempt
“Weighing 700 pounds and with a wingspan of nearly 9 feet, the statue is a rare surviving example of the ultimate Third Reich symbol of an eagle perched atop a swastika.” A Montevideo businessman salvaged it from the wreck of a battleship and wants to sell it; the government of Germany would rather it sink back into the River Plate (but would settle for having it smelted); the Uruguayan government is stuck in the middle.