Holler If Ya Hear Me “never brought in more than $175,000 a week in gross revenues, becoming one of the worst-selling musicals of recent years.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
This Robot Is Scrawling Poetry On The Floor Of A Shopping Center
“If, as Wordsworth said, poetry is human emotion recollected in tranquillity, what happens when verses are scrawled in sand on the floor of a shopping centre? When they are left unguarded, to be kicked and scuffed by customers wandering into Costa Coffee or New Look? We’ll find out this week.”
£10,000 Caine Prize For African Writing To Okwiri Oduor
Her 2003 short story “My Father’s Head” opens “with the narrator’s attempts to remember what her father’s face looked like as she struggles to cope with his loss, and follows her as she finds the courage to remember.”
Harper Lee Disavows New Biography (Again)
“Now, with the publication this week of The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee, [former neighbor] Marja Mills’s memoir of what she describes in the book as a warm friendship with Ms. Lee and her older sister, Alice Lee, Harper Lee is back to remind us that she did not authorize the book or cooperate with Ms. Mills.”
English National Ballet Hunting For Major New HQ
“The English National Ballet is planning a move to a major new home, which it hopes will help it create a ‘powerhouse in the dance world’. The company … wants to sell the lease on its current cramped premises in Kensington and join the English National Ballet School at a new London site.”
Troubled Delaware Symphony’s Chairman Dies Suddenly
“Bruce Kallos, board chairman of the Delaware Symphony Orchestra, died suddenly Sunday afternoon at Wilmington Hospital from complications associated with a blood infection. He was 79. … Kallos was elected in April to the symphony’s highest leadership post, after former board chairwoman Tatiana Copeland abruptly resigned.”
China’s Museum Boom: What It’s Achieved And What It Still Needs
“Last year one museum was built every day on average, though the rush has since ‘slowed’ to about one every three days” Author Cathy Giangrande talks about the various kinds of museums being opened, what they are and aren’t doing well, and how the government is and isn’t involved in the museums’ content.
John Luther Adams’s New Score Is Five-Pieces-In-One
“Sila is actually five separate scores – one each for strings, winds, brass, percussion, and chorus – that can be performed concurrently in any combination, from one section at a time to all five together. ‘If you just perform it with strings, then it’s pretty delicate, like a Japanese rock garden,’ Adams says. But gather the whole thing into an ensemble that is 80 strong, and the result should be able to hold its own.” It’ll need to – it’s premiering outdoors in Manhattan.
No, Your Language Does Not Influence How You Experience the World
“It’s become fashionable in recent years to tout the notion that the language you speak affects the way you think, and even influences how you experience reality itself. It’s an attractive idea, and one that makes some visceral sense.” But linguist John McWhorter says it’s wrong, wrong, wrong, and he explains why in this Lexicon Valley podcast.
Thinking Of Applying To Run An Italian Museum? Don’t
“Every now and again [politicians and boards] appoint a foreigner … in the hope of getting a bit of that magical know-how, and then they get rid of him or her in humiliating, destructive and unprofessional ways that in the UK or US would be inconceivable.” Anna Somers Cocks explains why this happens, and offers three horror stories case histories.