“Fire-breathing bizarros are so hard to find these days. (No, Glenn Beck doesn’t count.) And when’s the last time you saw a girl change into a gorilla? A headless woman? The Human Blockhead? (Again, Glenn Beck doesn’t count.) What used to be a mainstay of American circuses and county fairs – the sideshow grotesquerie – is on its last legs.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Soprano Hildegard Behrens Dies Suddenly At Age 72
Behrens, one of the world’s top Wagnerians in the 1980s and ’90s, was en route to a music festival in Japan when she fell ill and went to a hospital in Tokyo; she died of an apparent aneurysm shortly thereafter.
Hindu Extremists Threaten To ‘Cut Off Fingers’ Of Indian Artist
Painter and installation artist Subodh Kerkar is about to open an exhibition in a beach resort town in Goa featuring images of the elephant-headed god Ganesh in various guises: as Rodin’s Thinker, performing a Maori war dance, as an Oscar statuette, and so on. Several militant Hindu groups are threatening demonstrations and violence against the show and the artist; Kerkar protests that he is himself a devotee of Ganesh.
Texas’s Metropolitan Classical Ballet Cuts Entire Season Except For Nutcracker
“Metropolitan Classical Ballet, the Arlington-based dance company that has been a fixture on the [Dallas-Fort Worth] Metroplex’s dance scene for more than a decade, announced Tuesday that it will severely curtail its upcoming season, including eliminating all three scheduled repertory shows at Bass Performance Hall.”
Coming Home: Neeme Järvi To Return To Estonian National SO
“[T]he Estonian-born music director emeritus of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra” and conductor laureate of the New Jersey Symphony “is returning to his hometown of Tallinn to become the music director of the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, the ensemble that launched his career nearly 50 years ago.”
Franco Zeffirelli, Being Franco Zeffirelli
“Few Italians since Fellini have had such an impact in the United States” as the man his fans and courtiers know as “the maestro” – “from his flower-child-era film of Romeo and Juliet to his opulent productions at the Metropolitan Opera. As he himself is the first to note: ‘I am very much loved’.”
Heathrow Airport Acquires A Writer-In-Residence
Alain de Botton – who “bit our arms off to be involved in the project,” according to a Heathrow spokeswoman – is spending this week in Terminal 5, “seated at a desk and tapping away at his laptop computer [with his] typing appear[ing] in real time on a screen behind him.” His observations will be condensed into a short book to appear next month. The idea seems to be to get the wider world saying something, anything, about the London air hub other than that it’s a crowded, chaotic mess.
Another Issue About LACMA’s Director: He Spends A Lot Of Time, And Per Diem Money, In New York
Michael Govan receives a per diem of “$1,000 a night to stay in his own New York condominium, while there on museum business,” to a maximum of $36,000 a year. Says Christopher Knight: “It’s about time, not money. Do the math: The payment means that out of 1,095 days total, the director was paid for working 103 days in New York. On a six- or even seven-day work week, that’s 10% of his time.”
So People Really Do Think They Can Dance (Or At Least Learn How)
The popularity of television series like Dancing with the Stars, So You Think You Can Dance and America’s Best Dance Crew is leading to a surge of enrollment in dance classes.
Book Your Tickets Now, Fanboys: Monty Python Reunion Set For This Fall
“The Pythons will meet again to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the creation of the troupe on Oct. 15 at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City. While the event will feature no cows being flung by catapult … the reunion will involve the complete troupe” – including, we are told, the late Graham Chapman. The gathering is to launch the new documentary Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut).