The People’s Republic’s most famous actress, who “embodies Chinese womanhood in the way Helen Mirren sets British hearts racing, or the way Catherine Deneuve is an icon in France,” has taken the citizenship of her Singaporean husband. Her erstwhile compatriots are fuming: “She earned enough money in China, didn’t she? Then she becomes a foreigner! Why do we make her money for her, just so she can take the money and run.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
How Malcolm Rogers Completely Shook Up The Boston Museum Of Fine Arts
In which a mild-mannered administrator from London’s National Portrait Gallery turned into a “maverick with the Midas touch,” perpetrated a “Boston Massacre,” and is massively expanding the MFA’s fundraising, programs and even physical space.
August: Osage County To Get Movie Version
The Weinstein brothers have acquired the film rights to Tracy Letts’s Tony-winning drama about a ferociously dysfunctional Oklahoma family. Actresses are already lobbying for the juicy female roles in the film, which is planned for 2011 release.
Dallas Symphony Cancels Concert Butterfly
The DSO is replacing its concert performances of Madama Butterfly, scheduled for next May, with a conventional orchestra-and-chorus program. For once, it’s not due to the current economic mess: the orchestra is avoiding conflict with The Dallas Opera’s new Butterfly planned for the following spring.
How The Economic Crisis Is Changing Housing Design
Prosperous baby-boomers snapped up huge McMansions because they saw a house as an investment vehicle. But now the mortgage crash, rising commodity prices and high energy costs are causing a revival of smaller houses and such low-tech energy-saving features as porches, awnings and vine-covered walls.
If Tiger Woods Can Hawk Sportswear, Why Not Lenny Kravitz?
“A decade or two ago, rock stars teaming up with a nationwide department store chain to hawk back-to-school clothing would have raised more than a few critical eyebrows and accusations of ‘selling out’.” But this year, the Kohl’s chain is doing just that – “unveiling several brand-new apparel lines inspired – and pitched – by famous musicians, including Lenny Kravitz, Avril Lavigne and Vanessa Carlton.”
Rushdie On Religion: Unnecessary But Indispensable
The world’s most famous living condemned heretic says, “The world was not created in six days and God rested on the seventh. It was not created in the churning of a giant pot… And regarding ‘how shall we live,’ I don’t want answers that come from some priest. [But] as a writer I find I need [religion] to explain the world I’m writing about. As a person I don’t need it and as person I do. I would agree, that tension is irreconcilable. [But] it’s just there. It’s just so.”
Brokeback in Bollywood? (Um, No…)
In Dostana, Indian film superstars Abhishek Bachchan and John Abraham play gay. Except it’s Three’s Company-gay: their characters are straight buddies pretending to be lovers so as to share an apartment with a hot babe. In India, this is seen as extremely daring.
Rediscovering A Rival To Rembrandt
The National Gallery has opened the first-ever survey of the paintings of Jan Lievens, who launched his career alongside Rembrandt in Leiden. Constantine Huygens even commissioned the two men to paint the same subjects in a sort of competition. Blake Gopnik finds that, “[j]udging by this show, the almost unknown test-pictures by Lievens aren’t obviously weaker than the very famous versions Rembrandt came up with.”
Joseph Boyden Takes 2008 Giller Prize
Boyden’s Through Black Spruce, a novel narrated by a Cree bush pilot in a coma and his niece, who has left the subarctic wilderness to find her missing sister in Manhattan, has won this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, which carries a C$50,000 cash award. The jurors were novelist Margaret Atwood, former Ontario premier Bob Rae, and Irish author Colm Toíbín, the first foreign judge in the prize’s 15-year history.