“For the first time in the Minnesota Orchestra’s 110-year history, an entire season will pass with no music. The orchestra’s management on Wednesday canceled the remaining two weeks of the 2012-13 season because of the ongoing labor dispute with musicians.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
A Five-Year Plan To Revive The Minnesota Orchestra
“As a lawyer who works in the business world, I understand the need for revenue and expenses to balance. … Yet, I have not heard management express that its goal is to maintain a world-class orchestra. … We need a five-year plan – one that will assign responsibilities on all sides to find a more stable platform for the continuation of our world-class orchestra. Management says there is a $5 million problem. For the next five years, do the following (all with new money):”
Ray Harryhausen, 92, Master Of Stop-Motion Animation
With his Dynamation process, he became “the prime exponent of the [stop-motion] technique and its combination with live action” in fantasies such as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts. Current cinema titans Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, among others, credit Harryhausen with making their work possible.
Five Of Ray Harryhausen’s Best Animation Sequences
Clips from and commentary on Mighty Joe Young (1949), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), First Men in the Moon (1964), One Million Years B.C. (Raquel Welch carried off by a pterodactyl, 1966), and Clash of the Titans (1981).
Composer Steve Martland Dead At 53
“Throughout a fruitful musical career he worked almost exclusively with artists outside of traditional classical institutions – in particular with Dutch and American groups, freelance musicians and especially his own Steve Martland Band. … His works are frequently intended to be played amplified and their muscular and rhythmic forms led to many dance commissions.”
Mother Demands Michigan School District Censor ‘Pornographic’ Anne Frank Diary
“According to one Michigan mother, the unedited version of the landmark account of a young girl’s life during the Holocaust is inappropriate for 7th-graders because of a scene in which Frank discusses her female anatomy.”
Europe’s First Images Of Native Americans Uncovered In Vatican Fresco
“The lightly sketched group of men – nude save for what appear to be feathered headdresses and posed as if dancing – emerged during the restoration of a fresco of the ‘Resurrection of Christ’ by the Renaissance artist Pinturicchio, painted in one of several rooms he decorated for Pope Alexander VI between 1492 and 1494.”
Kaija Saariaho And Youssou N’Dour Win Polar Music Prize
“Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour and Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho have won Sweden’s 2013 Polar Music Prize, organisers said Tuesday. … The winners take home one million kronor (117,000 euros, $154,000) in prize money.”
Experimental Theater Director Herbert Blau, 87
“A fiercely iconoclastic theater director, scholar and theorist who staged some of the earliest productions of Beckett, Brecht and Genet in the United States, … he is probably best remembered for starting, with Jules Irving, the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco in 1952” and for his 1964 book, The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto.
More And More US Cities (Even Fresno!) Appoint Poets Laureate
“For many poets, and those in the poetry business, the popularity of poets laureate – those who labor over words to sing a community’s virtues or plumb its psyche in an age defined by Twitter messages – is a pleasant surprise. Why now, though, remains something of a mystery.”