Zachary Woolfe: “Though both films have been given credit for helping to popularize opera, the idea of the art form they have popularized has profoundly damaged it in this country. … In the two movies the vision of opera is the same: lush, static, stale. It is less a living encounter than a trip to Madame Tussauds.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Down With Reductionism! (It Flattens Reality)
“Every thinking person tries to reduce some things to others; if you attribute your cousin’s political outburst to his indigestion, you’ve reduced the rant to the reflux. But the reductionism that’s at stake here is a much broader habit of thinking that tries to flatten reality down and allow only certain kinds of explanations.”
Forget Your Shrink! Try Bibliotherapy!
Alain de Botton’s School of Life in London has a “bibliotherapy” program that “matches individuals … with a list of books hand-selected to help them through tough times. You get your reading list after an initial consultation with a bibliotherapist in which you discuss your life, your reading history, and your problems.”
5,000 Years Of History In Aleppo Endangered By Syria’s Civil War
“Preservationists and archaeologists are warning that fighting in Syria’s commercial capital, Aleppo – considered the world’s oldest continuously inhabited human settlement – threatens to damage irreparably the stunning architectural and cultural legacy left by 5,000 years of civilizations.”
Angelin Preljocaj On Choosing Dancers
“It’s like a bouquet of flowers. In some companies you’ll only find tulips, they might be yellow or red, but they’re still tulips, because the choreographer has an idea of what the bodies performing their work should look like. But my company is a bouquet of lots of things – tulips, roses, even thorns. Their bodies are very different, not just their personalities, there are tall girls, short girls, big boys, thin boys, and I like that.”
Indianapolis Museum of Art Names New CEO
“Charles Venable, the current director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky., was introduced Wednesday as the Melvin & Bren Simon director and CEO of the IMA.”
Berlin’s Hipster Shakespeare In The Park
Launched last summer, Shakespeare im Park Berlin takes place in Görlitzer Park “in the heart of the alternative scene, multi-ethnic Kreuzberg, an increasingly trendy district in the throes of gentrification.” Longtime locals saw the bilingual troupe as the enemy, though this year the actors are welcomed as regulars.
Will The Orange Prize Become The Apple Prize?
“Apple, the US technology giant behind the iPad and the iPhone, is understood to be looking at backing the prestigious award, which recognises novels written by women.”
Remembering Julia Child At 100
“[She] is one of those rare stars who is somehow better in reality than in the popular imagination. No matter how many times one hears about how charismatic, how natural and unembarrassed, or how funny and charming she was, seeing Julia onscreen or hearing her talk about food always surpasses those expectations – she’s so perfectly Julia every time.”
Julia Child And Learning How To Eat
“We have all heard Julia say ‘I just hate health food,’ and that diet food was what one ate while waiting for the steak. But she also said, in the same theoretical if not literal breath ‘You must have discipline to have fun’. That is what it means to learn to eat.”