“So far, the library’s collections committee has discussed parting with three items, according to minutes from meetings: a Crehore piano, a series of large-scale Audubon prints, and a collection of Tichnor glass printing plates that were once used to make postcards.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Why You Won’t Be Seeing A Live Twitterfeed On NYTimes.com
Original blog post: “Telegraph.co.uk has taken the ‘brave’ decision to publish a live Twitterfall stream of #budget tags on its Budget 2009 homepage.” Update to post: “Twitterfall has now been removed from the Telegraph‘s Budget 2009 page, but not before an awful lot of tweets made it through.”
Estonia Pianos, Stalin’s Favorite Maker, Becomes High-End World-Beater
“In an ironic twist of history, more than half a century later grand and baby grand pianos from the same factory in a Tallinn suburb have become a huge success on the US market and are catching on in Asia too.”
Edgar Allan Poe, Mad Genius And Inveterate Liar
“‘My whole existence has been the merest Romance,’ Poe wrote, the year before his death, ‘in the sense of the most utter unworldliness.’ This is Byronic bunk. Poe’s life was tragic, but he was about as unworldly as a bale of cotton. {…] ‘I have an inveterate habit of speaking the truth,’ Poe once wrote. That, too, was a lie. (That Poe lied compulsively about his own life has proved the undoing of many a biographer.)”
What Recession? London Book Fair Buzzing As Usual
“[A]lthough the global downturn has affected exhibitor attendance somewhat, the crowds milling around the entrance and pouring into the aisles seem as busy as ever, and the flood of new book deals struck just before and during the fair as overwhelming.”
Frank Gehry Threatens To Quit His Miami Beach Project
Not to worry: work on the high-tech concert hall for the New World Symphony is proceeding on time and on budget. But, with the scheme well underway, the city of Miami Beach is now balking at the cost of the adjacent 2½-acre park – and at Gehry’s fee for it. So the architect has withdrawn from the park component and is threatening “to walk away from the [entire] project completely if city commissioners continue to harp on his fees, which he says they have exaggerated and misrepresented.”
Esa-Pekka Gets A Tusch
“‘Tusch‘ – pronounced ‘toosh’ – is the German word for a brass fanfare, or any flourish. It is bestowed by musicians on fellow musicians or a conductor, the highest musical honor they can give each other.” The L.A. Phil’s brass players improvised one for Salonen as he took his last bow as the orchestra’s music director.
Why Should We Care About Nature?
“Few people need convincing that the destruction of rain forests, the mass extinction of species and the melting of the ice sheets in Greenland would all be very bad things. Do we really need to list the reasons? We do. After all, in many regards our species has already kissed nature goodbye, and we are better off for it.”
A Different Kind Of Money Mess At Texas Ballet Theater
The six-year-old Dallas/Fort Worth company has faced lots of financial trouble lately, though its board chair now says, “We have turned this ship around.” But serious questions have arisen about some of TBT’s past business practices, such as paying almost $700,000 to two board members and making a loan to artistic director Ben Stevenson for a down payment on a house.
Louisville’s Arts Orgs Face Down The Recession
“Approaches once considered sacrosanct, realities thought etched in concrete, are giving way to a host of novel strategies. Some are based on cutting back; others are grounded in giving patrons and contributors new reasons to attend and invest.” A look at the state of the city’s seven principal arts institutions.