“This season, after 38 years on the job, Ms. Waters will step down as artistic director of Ailey II, the second company of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, where her main triumph has been to cultivate dancers and nurture their inner stars. Ms. Waters’s track record of spotting talent is astounding; at the moment, 65 percent of the main company comes from Ailey II.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Italian Cinema’s Anti-Berlusconi, Laura Morante
“One of the country’s most famous actresses, Morante, who could be described as a kind of Italian Catherine Deneuve, … is hoping to exploit the changing times in her country by playing her own part in promoting a different, more powerful role for women in cinema” after 20 years of media mogul Berlusconi’s bunga-bunga aesthetic (if that’s the word).
Can Non-Christians Fully Appreciate Bach’s St. Matthew Passion? (A Muslim Wonders)
Recently journalist and editor Sameer Rahim asked a priest acquaintance about Bach’s oratorio, and was told that “I should listen to it once a year on Good Friday as part of a church service. Any other time or setting would not be true to the composer’s Christian vision.” So he tried it that way …
Last Of The Borscht-Belt Tummlers, Lou Goldstein, Dead At 90
“Mr. Goldstein, a slender six-footer, performed his antics at Grossinger’s, perhaps the premier Catskills resort, from 1948 until the hotel closed in 1986. He’d hold absurd exercise classes. He’d have a circle of grown men don silly hats and maneuver them onto one another’s heads, with one hand and without letting the hats tumble to the ground.” He was also probably the world’s master practitioner of the game Simon Says.
Werner Herzog On The Future Of Humanity
“Microbes can come and wipe us out. It can happen fast. Avian virus or mad cow disease, you name it. … Or a cataclysmic volcanic eruption which would darken the skies for 10 years … Trilobites died out, dinosaurs died out. Life on our planet has been a constant series of cataclysmic events, and we are more suitable for extinction than a trilobite or a reptile. So we will vanish.”
#EconoHipsters (Hey, Who Showed These Geeks How To Use Twitter?)
Sample tweets: “I saw mortgage backed securities at a loft in Brooklyn in 2004. I thought they were overrated.” “#EconoHipsters seasonally adjusted for the winter quarter before it was cool.” “The economics & happiness literature used to be awesome, before Bhutan went corporate with it.”
Pulitzer Board Declines To Award Prize For Fiction; Book Publishers Are Angry
“Days after the Department of Justice made the blockbuster announcement that it was suing five of the biggest book publishers in the business, the Pulitzer Prize board dropped its own bombshell on Monday: for the first time in 35 years, there would be no Pulitzer winner for fiction.”
Boston Globe Film Writer Wesley Morris Wins Pulitzer Prize For Criticism
“Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for criticism Monday, for essays and reviews that embodied what Pulitzer judges called ‘smart, inventive film criticism, distinguished by pinpoint prose and an easy traverse between the art house and big-screen box office’.”
Paralyzed Ballet Dancer, Now Recovered, Set For Return To Stage
Jack Widdowson, 19, was mugged and beaten last November on a vsit to Cardiff; the attack initially left him paralyzed from the neck down. Last week, “[he] performed his first jump since being injured – and was invited to perform with the English National Ballet” next month and again in June.
Kevin Puts’s Opera Silent Night Wins Pulitzer For Music
“Puts’ opera is adapted from the 2005 movie Joyeux Noël, which was nominated for an Academy Award for foreign-language film. Like the movie, the opera depicts an unexpected truce negotiated by Scottish, French and German officers on Christmas Eve [in 1914].” The work’s premiere was at Minnesota Opera in November.