“OSM officials are denying that Kent Nagano will be on his way in 2016 – without quite affirming that the Californian conductor is planning to stay.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
A Magazine On Mock Trial
“On January 30, approximately 180 people overfilled an auditorium in the New York Public Library to witness an event titled (after Musil, in part) ‘Cabinet on Trial: A Magazine of No Qualities?’ … The NYPL event echoed a 1921 Dada trial of Maurice Barrès, staged by André Breton to address Barrès’s collusion with nationalist groups like Action Française.” Sasha Frere-Jones reports.
The Shed: UK’s National Theatre Thinks Outside The (Black) Box
“If you have walked down London’s South Bank in the past month, or even been near Waterloo Bridge, you can’t have missed it. A bright red building with four chimneys, it has landed in the theatre’s grey forecourt like a big, mischievous block of Lego.”
UK Refuses To Release Renaissance Manuscript Purchased By Getty
“A valuable 15th century Flemish manuscript acquired by the J.Paul Getty Museum late last year has been placed under an export embargo by British authorities, who hope to keep the object in the United Kingdom.”
The US Gun Control Debate Isn’t About Militias Or Safety; It’s About Cultural Symbols
Adam Gopnik: “It has to do, really, with the illusions that guns provide, particularly the illusion of power. The attempts to use the sort of logic that helped end cigarette smoking don’t quite work. … Everyone, men especially, needs ego-accessories, and they are most often irrationally chosen.”
The Invention Of The Egghead
Was that particular stereotype simply another manifestation of longstanding American intellectualism? One author argues that it was in fact a postwar reaction to an earlier cultural climate that valued the widespread acquisition of knowledge.
Bare-Breasted Pussy Riot Supporters Swarm Vladimir Putin In Germany
“Topless activists from the Femen protest group tried to disrupt the visit of Russian President Putin and Chancellor Merkel to the Hannover Messe tech show. They had anti-Putin slogans on their semi-naked bodies and were shouting obscenities.” Putin appeared not to mind. (We bet Silvio Berlusconi is totally jealous.)
Another Week, Another Strike At La Scala
“Striking opera house workers at Milan’s prestigious La Scala have forced the cancellation of a performance on Sunday of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth conducted by Russian maestro Valery Gergiev.”
The Great Renaissance Polymath Who Got Everything (Well, Not Everything) Wrong
“[His] thirty-six books enticed the mind with their vast and encyclopedic erudition.” He understood myriad languages and fields of study. But he made up bodies of “knowledge” out of whole cloth, and “if he were around today, he would probably claim to have written Wikipedia single-handedly.” Meet Father Athanasius Kircher.
How (And Why) I Translated Dante’s Divine Comedy
Clive James recounts how his wife showed him what made Dante’s verse so great – the way it hurtles forward – and how he attempted to recreate the effect in English.