“[There’s a] growing crop of film-makers drawn towards the country’s spectacular rural interior, which is starting to take a place as central to Turkish cinema as the American west once was to Hollywood.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Revisiting (In Color!) The Operas Of The Cultural Revolution
Zhang Yaxin “was a photographer for Xinhua News Agency when he was chosen by Jiang Qing, the wife of Chairman Mao Zedong, to photograph the performances of the model operas she developed after the Communist Party leaders banned traditional Peking opera for being too bourgeois.” And he was one of the few people besides Jiang Qing in all of China to have access to color film.
In Praise Of Concision
“Some guy on TV is describing how he fitted his automobile with a new skin: gluing them one by one, he has blanketed every inch of its exterior with beer-bottle caps. … Or he’s displaying the dozens of photo albums that catalogue, exhaustively, the individual stacks of pancakes on which he has breakfasted daily for the past six years. And as I sit watching, one of my daughters ambles by, glances at the screen, and mutters, ‘Whoa, free time’.”
A Dozen New Plays On US Civil War
“The National Civil War Project is commemorating the 150th anniversary of the war (1861-65) by developing 12 new theatrical works about, or inspired by, the conflict, as well as scholarly and public presentations and student projects.”
Could Los Angeles Become Famous For Beautiful Bridges?
“As Los Angeles undertook massive freeway expansion in the latter half of the last century, aesthetics were sacrificed for efficiency when the car ascended as the primary mode of transportation. Yet there is a shift occurring in Los Angeles today, one indicative of a larger trend towards multi-modal transit with a renewed emphasis on beauty.”
Van Cliburn, 78, Pianist And Cold War Hero
“After a tense decade of air raid sirens, duck-and-cover drills and fears of Soviet superiority, hope for America came in an unlikely form in the late 1950s: a lanky, 23-year-old Texan with a head full of curls and huge hands that ranged across a piano keyboard with virtuosic power.”
Marie-Claire Alain, 86, Grande Dame Of Organists
“With over 260 recordings to her credit, she was arguably the most recorded organist and is only one of two people to have recorded the complete works of Bach three times … as well as the complete works of 12 other composers.”
Pittsburgh Theater Board Fires Founder
“The Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre board of directors today fired founder and artistic director Andrew Paul and told him he would not be working on the four plays he was scheduled to direct.”
Fifty Unknown Rudyard Kipling Poems To Be Published
“Discovered by the American scholar Thomas Pinney in an array of hiding places including family papers, the archive of a former head of the Cunard Line and during renovations at a Manhattan house, more than 50 previously unpublished poems by Rudyard Kipling will be released for the first time next month.”
Getty Announces Theme For Next Pacific Standard Time Mega-Exhibition
“After dozens of meetings and a few orphaned ideas, the Getty has settled on a theme for a 2017 sequel to the 2011-12 museum exhibition extravaganza known as Pacific Standard Time. It will be ‘Los Angeles and Latin America,’ or ‘L.A./L.A.’ for short.”