“Since August 2010, the MCA has been undergoing a makeover worth 53 million Australian dollars, or about $56 million, and has gained 50 percent more space. It will reopen March 29 as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia – a name that reflects its status as the only contemporary art museum in the country with a permanent collection.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Ballet San Antonio Scales Back Season
The final program of 2011-12 has been cut from two performances to one (at a smaller theater); 14 of 19 dancers have been laid off, though several may be re-hired this fall.
When Hollywood’s Finest Filmed The Nazi Death Camps
“John Ford was the Academy Award-winning director of The Grapes of Wrath and Westerns starring John Wayne. George Stevens was known for comedies featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. They would make history, at Nuremberg, with the first documentary film ever created for submission as evidence in a trial.”
Sydney Opera House Renames Auditorium For Joan Sutherland
“The opera theatre at the Sydney Opera House will be renamed in honour of the late Dame Joan Sutherland … Despite the announcement, a long-proposed $1 billion renovation of the Opera House, with a particular focus on the opera theatre” – which has notorious design and acoustical problems – “remains stalled.”
Two Of France’s Finest Families Fight Over Missing Monet
“More than 70 years after it was plundered by the Nazis, a missing painting by Monet that depicts the shimmering blue rapids of the Creuse River has pitted two of the wealthiest and most prominent families in France against each other.”
Thinking With Noam Chomsky
“Why can everyone learn Portuguese? Are some aspects of our nature unknowable? Can you imagine Richard Nixon as a radical? Is Twitter a trivialiser? New Scientist takes a whistle-stop tour of our modern intellectual landscape in the company of Noam Chomsky.”
There Is No Such Thing As The ‘Literary Establishment’
Author Geoff Dyer: “It’s one of those expressions and concepts whose rhetorical potency and convenience derive, imprecisely, from the fact that no one stops to think whether it means anything at all – any more than a squash player pauses to consider why there’s a wall at the back of the court. … [And] like a squash court wall again, [it] exists in order to have stuff hurled against it.”
‘An Agent’s Manifesto To All Those In The Business Of Publishing Books On Behalf Of The Author’
Item 1: “The author is the expert. Why assume that the one person who has spent the past 12-18 months on the subject, the story and the world of their work, knows least about how they should be represented to the trade and to the reader?”
Sorry, Mike Daisey, Your Steve Jobs/Apple Play Is Journalism, Whether You Admit It Or Not
David Carr: “Is it O.K. to lie on the way to telling a greater truth? The short answer is also the right one. No. It’s worth examining that question now that we have learned about the lies perforating the excerpt of Mike Daisey’s one-man show on Apple’s manufacturing processes in China, broadcast in January on the weekly public radio show This American Life.“
So Who Is Mike Daisey, Anyway?
“It may surprise people who only know his name from the controversy that Daisey is a highly respected theater performer who has toured the world with his solo shows. … Like the late Spalding Gray, Daisey is essentially a monologist who pens his own material and performs it behind a simple desk. His shows usually tackle current issues from a highly subjective angle, weaving together the topical and the personal into something that isn’t quite fiction or nonfiction.”