Following in the mold of his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a Seville-based ensemble of young musicians from Israel and the Arab states, the conductor and Mideast peace activist is establishing a conservatory-cumacademic institution for up to 60 resident fellows from the Near East. The school will be housed in a former warehouse for the Berlin State Opera, where Barenboim is artistic director.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Remembering The Grandmother Of New Age Spirituality
“Depending on whom you ask, [Helena] Blavatsky – a fat, chain-smoking Russian noblewoman with a profane vocabulary and reputation for occult powers – was either one of the major innovators of modern religious thought or a complete fraud, her books works of great erudition and synthesis or piles of pasted together rubbish. For a few years in the late nineteenth century, she was all the rage.”
Philip Roth’s Advice To A Young Novelist
“Really, it’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.”
Neuroscience And The Masks Of Ancient Greek Theater
“Over 2000 years may have elapsed since masked Greek tragedies had their heyday on stage in Athens, but some of the most modern neuroscience may be able to give classicists a better understanding of how the ancients watched and thought about those plays.” The key concept: “embodied cognition”.
Nintendo May Be About To Transform Television
“Will the Wii U and its new controller change the way people play games? Possibly. Will the Wii U achieve the same level of success that the original Wii did (nearly 100 million consoles sold)? Probably not. … But I am confident enough to make one big prediction: The Wii U will revolutionize the way we watch television.”
Louise Erdrich, Katherine Boo Win US National Book Awards
“Beating out an unusually competitive field, Louise Erdrich won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday night for The Round House, a novel about a teenage boy’s effort to investigate an attack on his mother on a North Dakota reservation.” The nonfiction prize went to Katherine Boo for Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.
New York Public Radio To Record August Wilson’s Plays
“The estate of the playwright August Wilson has, for the first time, granted the rights to record all 10 of his plays about African-American life in the 20th century to New York Public Radio’ Jerome L. Greene Performance Space in New York.”
How Will The Martha Graham Company Salvage Its Flooded Archives?
“[Some] of the costumes, most of which are made of wool jersey, may simply need a good spin in the washing machine … More worrisome are Noguchi’s painted wooden sets and the paper archives dating back to [the] company’s first days. Mold is a major concern.”
Osmo Vänskä Speaks Out About Minnesota Orchestra Lockout
Writing that he is “desperately anxious” about the ensemble’s future, the music director responsible for the Minnesotans’ rise to international prominence asks the board, management and musicians, “Please, do what it takes, find a way, talk together, listen to each other and come to a resolution of this dreadful situation,”
Poet Jack Gilbert Dead At 87
“Famous for eschewing fame, he did not go to writers’ conferences or cocktail parties, gave readings sporadically and did not publish a great deal, either.” Yet audience members in tears were a common sight at his (rare) public readings, and readers often told him that his work had changed their lives.