The cher public at Parterre Box is having a grand old time suggesting the ideal singers to re-enact the life of the former Vicki Lynn Hogan. So far, candidates for the title role range from Netrebko to Mattila to Bartoli; Plácido Domingo is suggested for the elderly husband, as is 106-year-old tenor Hugues Cuénod, and barihunks should be fighting to play baby-daddy Larry Birkhead.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Was East German Art Nothing But Socialist-Realist Propaganda? No.
Michael Kimmelman: “The show [“Art of Two Germanys” at LACMA] makes clear that the truth was actually more complicated, as it usually is, East German art having been more varied, not always politically compliant, closer at times to what was happening in West Germany than the West German art establishment either acknowledged or bothered to notice.”
Dada From Israel In Cincinnati (Now That’s Surreal)
The Cincinnati Museum of Art will be the only US venue for an exhibition of more than 200 Surrealist and Dada paintings, sculptures, photographs, etc. from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Duchamp’s urinal and mustachioed Mona Lisa will be there, as will Magritte’s boulder hovering over the sea and Man Ray’s landscape with lips.
Anne Hathaway To Do Shakespeare In Central Park This Summer
The Oscar-nominated actress will give what is apparently her first professional Shakespeare performance – as Viola in Twelfth Night, directed by Tony winner Daniel Sullivan (Proof). The Public Theatre’s other outdoor production this year will be JoAnne Akalaitis’s staging of The Bacchae, with music by Philip Glass.
Gramophone Mag Launches Online Archive
The venerable classical music magazine has opened in beta, at www.gramophone.net, “a searchable database containing every issue of Gramophone from April 1923 to the latest issue.” Each page is available as a PDF image and a plain-text version, and access is free except for the current issue (available to print subscribers).
Sydney Dance Co. Pins Hopes On New Director
“The pressure is on [Rafael] Bonachela to create a blockbuster season. He was appointed in November, more than a year after Tanja Liedtke was killed in a pedestrian accident as she was about to take up the reins at the company.”
Can A Computer Program Keep Frank Gehry On Budget?
With a powerful (and expensive) software package called Digital Project, “fabricators have produced a façade with various textures at a price that Mr. Gehry says does not exceed what a developer would pay to build a conventional boxy building of similar dimensions.”
Are Humans Hard-Wired For Religion?
Some psychologists and anthropologists say that processes built into the human brain – different cognition for animate and inanimate objects, separate consciousness of the body and the mind, “an overdeveloped sense of cause and effect which primes us to see purpose and design everywhere” – mean that the predisposition to religion is deep-rooted “and that atheism will always be a hard sell.”
Why Do Philosophers Live So Long?
Carlin Romano: “I therefore exited graduate school with the flinty belief that philosophers live extraordinarily long lives, a no-brainer in light of the standard personality I lazily attributed to them then… Even in the worst circumstances, philosophers didn’t go postal. They went, to speak in federal metaphorese, Social Security.”
Find Nirvana In A Database
“Tens of thousands of Buddhist manuscripts, paintings and other treasures scattered around the world have been brought together in probably the world’s largest computer database of its kind.”