“David Cronenberg’s next film looks set to be an adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel Cosmopolis, about a multibillionaire fund manager who spends a long day trying to get across Manhattan in a swanky stretch limo and ends up losing everything.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Michelangelo And Mapplethorpe, Side By Side In Florence
“It’s just been announced that ‘Robert Mapplethorpe: Perfection in Form’, the first ever exhibition of a modern artist in the gallery where – in addition to David – Michelangelo’s unfinished Prisoners and Saint Matthew hold the stage, is to be extended by popular demand until January 2010. Apparently it has been a huge success since opening this May.”
Merce’s Last Dance
“One of Merce Cunningham’s final works of choreography, before his death on Sunday evening, was creating site-specific work for Rockefeller Park, in Lower Manhattan, where it will be performed this Saturday and Sunday as part of the River to River Festival.”
Orlando PAC Will Have To Be Built In Stages
“The proposed performing arts center planned for downtown Orlando will almost certainly be built a piece at a time, a fall-back plan that reflects the stranglehold the recession has put on the city’s $1.1 billion plan for new community venues. … It’s not yet clear exactly how the design will accommodate multiple phases. The plan calls for three performance halls – seating 2,800, 1,700 and 300 – under one roof.”
Oregon Symphony Loses Its Children’s Outreach Program
“The instruments that kids in small towns around Oregon used to hit, rub and scrape as part of the Oregon Symphony’s award-winning outreach effort went quiet this summer. … The Roseburg-based Ford Family Foundation, the program’s primary funder, suffered losses to its endowment and declined to continue paying the program’s $150,000 annual cost.”
For A Wet And Steamy Metropolis, A Dissolving Skyscraper
“It is impossible to compete with Bangkok’s existing exotic menagerie of skyscrapers, so [architect Ole] Scheeren proposes a monolith, an un-twin tower, the dumb, extruded box of modernist orthodoxy – but then begins to erode its perfection. It is as if a computer virus has begun to eat away at an image, pixellating it, or as if a tower of sugar cubes is dissolving away.”
Dueling Civil War Stories And A Hollywood Deal
“Over the last few weeks, the writers of a pair of Civil War-era histories about the anti-Confederate inhabitants of Jones County, Miss., have been trading barbs in an unusual public spat. It began when the author of one book, rights to which had been sold to Universal Pictures and the filmmaker Gary Ross, discovered that Mr. Ross had spurred the publication of a new and somewhat sexier work on the same subject.”
A Budding Fullback Gives Up The End Zone For The Opera House
“He has learned the music but not the lingo. Keith Miller is perhaps the only opera singer who can talk about ‘running an aria’ the way a fullback talks about running for daylight – as he used to do, before he called an audible on his football career.”
The Smell Of Fear (It’s Real)
“The smell of the sweat you produce when terrified is not only registered by the brains of others, but changes their behaviour too, according to new research. It adds to a growing body of evidence that humans may communicate using scent in a similar way to how other animals use pheromones.”
A Second Portland Dance Institution Teeters On The Brink
Just a few months after Oregon Ballet Theatre staged an emergency fundraising campaign that saved it from bankruptcy, the downtown modern dance studio Conduit “has reached the same situation. … [The center] needs to raise $15,000 by Aug. 31 to keep its doors open. That doesn’t sound like much. But Conduit’s yearly budget is only around $45,000.”