“Will Alsop, the Stirling prize-winning architect who carved a reputation as the profession’s enfant terrible for his blob-shaped buildings and disdain for conservative planning, today quit his practice to spend more time painting.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
3D Television Is On The Way
“3D movies are all the rage in Hollywood once again, and this time flatscreen TV makers are joining in the party, promising to release a slew of 3D-ready TV sets for our lounge rooms as early as next year.”
Revisiting John Cage’s Symphony For 12 Radios
“The piece was scored for radios because Cage had absolutely no idea what sounds would come from their speakers. This was one of his first works that used chance operations to determine structural elements. His idea was to liberate music from his own taste, his concerns and his ego.”
John Hughes, ‘The Steven Spielberg Of Youth Comedy,’ Dies At 59
Richard Corliss: “Hughes generated successful movie-comedy franchises as fast as other people wrote postcards. First the National Lampoon Vacation films … Then the teen movies” – Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – “not strictly a series but with more or less the same rep company of kids. And then the blockbuster Home Alone” and its sequels. (Not to mention the movies about Beethoven the enormous dog, written under a pseudonym.)
‘Leave It To The French To Stick Tarzan In A Semiotic Jungle’
“Edgar Rice Burroughs’s famous ape man is the subject of a [highly popular] summer show at the Musée du Quai Branly … Its organizers cogitate, with Gallic élan, on Tarzan’s proto-environmentalism; his philosophical roots in Rousseau and the 19th-century nudist movement; his literary antecedents in Kipling and H. M. Stanley; and his mythological reliance on the stories of Hercules and Romulus and Remus.”
Rediscovered William Inge Scripts Could Change Views Of His Work
“In a small Kansas town that inspired some of William Inge’s most melancholy characters, about two dozen never-before-performed plays are poised to become the found treasures of his collected works. These plays were not hidden in the proverbial cedar chest in a dusty farmhouse but languishing in a college library in obscurity and solitude, like a tragic Inge heroine.”
‘Classical Music’s Coolest Conductor,’ Marin Alsop
She’s “an ex-studio musician who played on KFC and Lysol television commercials as a struggling 20-something. Now here she is, a globe-trotting superstar … [who] pops up on NPR and the Today show to banter about classical music.” She says, “I have managers who tell me, ‘Oh, maestros don’t do that.’ They’re always trying to get me to be more maestro-like. It’s a losing battle.”
The Most Pivotal Event In History: An Online Poll (Jesus Is Runner-Up)
“What was the most important year in human history? That was the question we put to you in our first More Intelligent Life poll, which brought votes from nearly 3,000 readers. And the winner is … 1439, the year Johannes Gutenberg figured out how [to] print words on paper. The arrival of the printing press saw off all other events including the birth of Jesus.”
Never-Before-Seen Sketches Of The Young Merce Cunningham
“With the news of Merce Cunningham’s death has come a blizzard of wonderful photographic portraits of the dancer in action. He was a great camera subject, often caught in mid-flight, lyrical yet hyperbolic, arrestingly individualistic. To this extraordinary photographic record … I would like to add a small trove of images of Cunningham from around 1946, which unlike so much of what we have been seeing are not products of the photographer’s eye.”
L.A. County Arts Funding Takes Only A Small Hit
“The Los Angeles County Arts Commission will distribute $4.42 million in county-funded grants to nonprofit cultural organizations – a 2% belt-tightening from last year’s total.”