“Arts and cultural organizations have a multibillion-dollar impact on the Philadelphia region’s economy, and are among the nation’s most productive in creation of jobs and stirring up economic activity. Only those in the Washington area generate more per-capita expenditures, and in terms of jobs, no region comes close to Southeastern Pennsylvania.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Can An Arts Center Really Anchor An Urban Makeover? Newark Is Going To Try
“The New Jersey Center for the Performing Arts is the shining star of the state’s largest city, something that works in a place that has lots of things that don’t. … What NJPAC, as it is known, doesn’t have is a neighborhood, but it has the land and a plan, and that’s where Philadelphia developer Carl Dranoff comes in.”
Hollywood Returns To The Biblical Epic
“Noah, a $125 million epic … starring Russell Crowe and directed by Darren Aronofsky, is one of a boatload of religious films in the works from major movie studios. … With floods, plagues, burning bushes and parting seas, Bible movies make great vehicles for big-budget special effects.” What’s more, the source material is both familiar and in the public domain.
Gramophone Award Winners 2012: Abbado, Calleja, Heinrich Schütz(!)
Tenor Joseph Calleja was named Artist of the Year, while éminence grise maestro Claudio Abbado received a Lifetime Achievement Award and had three different recordings win their categories. Record of the Year honors went to a sleeper candidate: Schütz’s radiant Musicalisches Exequien performed by the relatively unknown (but marvelous) Belgian group Vox Luminis.
Scotland Approves A Second Sistema Programme
“Scotland’s second Sistema orchestra has been given the go ahead in the Govanhill area of Glasgow. Big Noise Govanhill will follow the example of its sister orchestra in Stirling’s Raploch area which was set up five years ago.”
Tereska Torrès, 92, Wrote (Inadvertently) The First Lesbian Pulp Novel
“Though she wrote more than a dozen novels and several memoirs, [she] remained inadvertently best known for Women’s Barracks, … a fictionalized account of the author’s wartime service in London with the women’s division of the Free French forces.”
Book Bloggers Aren’t Killing Lit Crit, They’re Saving It
“What blogs can give readers is a sense of trust that, in professional circles, only the biggest lit-crit names – such as James Wood or Michiko Kakutani – can attain: a ‘criticism with personality’. They are expressing opinions about books in particular, and literature in general, based on a particular life of reading, written in a critical but non-technical language. What they can also give, crucially, is attention to books other than the newly published.”
Jeffrey Eugenides On Writing The First Sentence Of A Novel
“[What] I’m searching for with the first sentence is the entire book. … And the process is not always the same, but finally there is a sentence that seems to suggest the entire narrative and the tone and the narrative strategy and everything all in one. … Whenever someone compliments me on the first page of Middlesex, I say, ‘Thanks, it took me two years to write’.”
New $100K Playwriting Prize Named For Teddy Kennedy
“A $100,000 theater award, recognizing a play or musical inspired by American history, is being established at Columbia University in honor of the Senator Edward M. Kennedy [by] the university and one of Mr. Kennedy’s sisters, Jean Kennedy Smith.”
That $7 Flea-Market Renoir Is Apparently Stolen Goods
A Virginia woman came across Paysage Bords de Seine at a West Virginia flea market in 2010 and had it authenticated this year. Just days before it was to be sold at auction, documents have surfaced indicating that the painting was stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1951.