“Burnsville is about to embark upon a $20 million experiment: Can a publicly funded suburban arts center fill enough seats, and generate enough economic activity, to justify the cost?”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Giant Piano From Big Goes To Philly
“The Please Touch Museum has gotten a big acquisition: the 16-foot light-up keyboard used in the 1988 Tom Hanks movie Big, upon which the Oscar-nominated Hanks and Robert Loggia danced/played ‘Chopsticks’ and ‘Heart and Soul.'”
Is Roberto Bolaño Really As Good As All That?
“His posthumously published book 2666 has been hailed as ‘the finest novel of the present century’ and yet, until recently, the English-speaking world knew little of Roberto Bolaño. The colourful life and early death of the hard-living, rebellious Chilean writer are the stuff of literary legend, but does the work live up to the hype?”
Are The Ranks Of Culture-Vultures Actually Swelling?
“In most rich countries, the old distinction between high and popular culture is breaking down… Millions more people are going to museums, literary festivals and operas; millions more watch demanding television programmes or download serious-minded podcasts.” As Philippe de Montebello likes to say, “the public is a lot smarter than anyone gives it credit for.”
The Vocabulary Of Smell
So why is it that the words we use to describe smells are the names of actual things with particular odors (rose, ammonia, hay, sulphur), while we have abstract words for color (red, green, light, dark) and touch (rough, smooth, hard, soft)?
‘Radicals Make The Best Posters’
“In Lebanon the propaganda posters of Hizbullah and its allies are a heady mix of bright colour, simple logos and distinctively Arab calligraphy and portraits… [they] harnessed contemporary graphic design and made it their own: Jerusalem in glowing colours features alongside clenched fists and AK-47s; the four-sided Syrian symbol rises like a sun; car bombs go bang like Roy Lichtenstein paintings.”
Those Beastly Dickens Incest Rumors May Be True After All
Charles Dickens was hounded by gossip that he had an affair with his sister-in-law, who lived with him and his wife. He called the rumors “abominably false,” of course. “But next month a diamond ring goes up for auction that, together with documentation about its provenance, could prove he had a child with Georgina.”
Scholar-Collector Jailed For Stealing Pages From Antique Books
Farhad Hakimzadeh, an Iranian-born philanthropist and bibliophile has been sentenced to two years in prison for carefully slicing pages, plates and maps from rare books in the British and Bodleian Libraries and adding the pages to his own private collection.
How Wedgwood Stifled Itself Into Bankruptcy
“But when I drove up to Stoke to visit the Wedgwood museum last summer, the place was as dead as a cobwebbed dodo… Two weeks earlier I’d attended the Ceramics in the City show in London, featuring the best new talent in a market that’s been expanding… I’d seen revolutionary shapes, colours and ideas. The punters were handing over their credit cards. So why wasn’t Wedgwood buying in?”
How Hollywood Helped Prepare Us For President Obama
Dargis and Scott: “Of course, we had seen several black presidents already, not in the real White House but in the virtual America of movies and television… in the 47 years since Mr. Obama was born, black men in the movies have traveled from the ghetto to the boardroom, from supporting roles in kitchens, liveries and social-problem movies to the rarefied summit of the Hollywood A-list.”