The 87-year-old author of To Kill a Mockingbird “is dropping her big bucks lawsuit against her former agent Samuel Pinkus and others she’d charged had conned her out of the copyright to her novel, widely considered one of the greatest in American history.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Osmo Vänskä Extends Deadline For Leaving Minnesota Orchestra
The orchestra’s music director “is easing his deadline for a restart of rehearsals as part of the drive to end the orchestra’s lockout of musicians, and by extension, his threat to resign.”
Don’t Give A Dollar To The Opera (Or Ballet Or …)
Hamilton Nolan goes all Peter Singer on us: “There are many things in this world that are all well and good, but that are not the best uses of charitable donations, which are a precious and limited resource. … Opera, as an art form, will survive. The child who gets malaria will not.”
What’s The Most Important Thing Bill T. Jones Has Learned About Collaborating?
“You don’t have to win every fight. … Learning to say, ‘OK, let’s try it your way’ has been the most liberating thing for me. Solutions come when you don’t work too hard.”
A Fake Van Gogh In The Attic Turns Out To Be The Real Thing
“Sunset at Montmajour – which depicts trees, bushes and sky – had spent years in a Norwegian private collector’s attic after he had been told the work was not by the Dutch master. [The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam] said the painting was authenticated by letters, style and the physical materials used.”
South Africa’s “Theatre Of Struggle” Appoints First Black Artistic Director
“The 44-year-old Zulu [James Ngcobo] is the new artistic director of the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Despite the venue’s celebrated history of protest plays during white minority rule, when it was known as the ‘theatre of the struggle’, Ngcobo is the first black person to fill the position full time.”
Margaret Atwood And Howard Jacobson To Rewrite Shakespeare
The two Booker Prize winners join authors Anne Tyler and Jeanette Winterson in the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, in which the authors will create (in prose) updated versions of Shakespeare’s plays in honor of his 400th birthday.
Albert Camus, Colonialist For Justice
“In the Anglo-American West, where Camus is often revered as a kind of French Orwell, his stand on Algeria is typically taken as the sole mark against him.” Yet, as Thomas Meaney reminds us, Camus’s opposition to Algerian independence wasn’t just loyalty to his own pied-noir community: he wanted genuine equality for all Algerians as French citizens.
Can Yoav Talmi Save The Israel Chamber Orchestra?
“Over the past two decades, the frenzied turnover of general and musical directors has caused major unrest. Its constantly changing roster of directors exploited the orchestra in order to carry out weird experiments, before leaving or being asked to leave their posts.” Now the 70-year-old Talmi, back for his third stint as music director, will try to stabilize the ICO.
Community Radio Blossoms In Bangalore
“On a breezy April afternoon in Bangalore, a young, visually impaired radio host named Jaidev sat straight-backed before a console mic at the offices of Radio Active, the city’s first community radio station. He prodded his listeners – mostly low-income workers – to take an unusual pledge: to never discard certain fruit peels. ‘You want a cheap, delicious curry?’ said Jaidev. ‘Use watermelon rinds.'”