Mark Lawson: “During two new London West End musicals – The Bodyguard and Viva Forever! – a huge whoop came from women in the audience during sequences when an attractive man took off his shirt. … What’s striking about this response is to imagine what would happen if men behaved in this way.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Galina Vishnevskaya, 86, Soviet Opera Star And Dissident Heroine
She spent two decades as the Bolshoi’s prima donna assoluta and the USSR’s most venerated classical singer – until she and husband Mstislav Rostropovich were blacklisted for having sheltered dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. They emigrated to the US in 1974, as famous Cold War icons as well as renowned artists.
Ravi Shankar, Who Brought Indian Classical Music To The World, Dead At 92
“[He] was the Indian maestro who put the sitar on the musical map. George Harrison called him ‘the godfather of world music’ and it was Shankar’s vision that brought the sounds of the raga into western consciousness, thus bridging the gap between eastern and western music for the first time.”
Zurich Has Misplaced 15% Of Its Art Collection
“Switzerland’s largest city Zurich acknowledged Monday it had lost trace of 5,176 works of art, including an original painting by Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. The city had carried out its first full inventory of its vast collection of 35,000 pieces in nearly a century, only to discover that nearly 15 percent were missing, including nearly 1,400 original works.”
Finalists Named For First $100K Kennedy Playwriting Prize
“Two recent Off Broadway plays and two works produced at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival are among the five finalists for the new $100,000 theater award established to honor Senator Edward M. Kennedy and his interest in American history.”
Surprise! Generations Y And Z Still Prefer To Read Their News
“Publishers be warned: For all the attention given to *rich multi-media experiences* news-readers still enjoy reading the news the way their great-grandparents did: In columns of paragraphs.”
Does Nirvana = Happiness? Does Heaven?
Leszek Kolakowski: “Both Buddhism and Christianity suggest that the ultimate liberation of the soul is also perfect serenity: total peace of the spirit. And perfect serenity is tantamount to perfect immutability … like the happiness of a stone. Do we really want to say that a stone is the perfect embodiment of salvation and Nirvana? … We are told that Nirvana entails the abandonment of the self. This might be taken to suggest that there can be … happiness without a subject – just happiness, unrelated to anyone’s being happy. Which seems absurd.”
British Choreography’s Next ‘It Boy’
“The choreographic whizz kid Liam Scarlett, 26, has just landed the newest job [at the Royal Ballet]: artist-in-residence, a post created especially for him. … For several years, the wide-eyed, tousle-haired dancer – he looks a little like Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins – has been increasingly recognised as the ‘great white hope’ of British choreography.”
Oregon Ballet Theatre Loses Another Top Staffer
“The turmoil continues at Oregon Ballet Theatre. Joanne Van Ness Menashe OBT vice-president of development and marketing is leaving the company, hard on the heels of artistic director Christopher Stowell’s surprise resignation. … OBT now needs to fill its top artistic, development, marketing and finance posts.” (The executive director position was eliminated over the summer.)
Film Blanc: The Power Of Wintry Noir Thrillers
“Classic film noirs used their dark settings as direct reflections of their subject matter, as well as to create the sense of their heroes getting lost. They tapped into our natural fears of the dark in the same way that horror movies do … But just as instinctual is the drive to seek warmth and shelter from the cold. … [The] danger isn’t unknown or theoretical; it’s bright, enveloping, bone-chilling.”