Why is it that we let movie plots dictate how we try to protect ourselves from terrorists? “Sometimes it seems like the people in charge of homeland security spend too much time watching action movies. They defend against specific movie plots instead of against the broad threats of terrorism.”
Blog
Atomic: Sellars In Los Alamos
Director Peter Sellars travels to Los Alamos to check out a little history before his opera with John Adams about the nuclear bomb (Dr. Atomic) opens in San Francisco. “With his spiky hair, enthusiastic laugh, endless curiosity, boyish friendliness and theatrical graciousness, Sellars attracts attention.”
Wynn: Vegas Is The New Broadway
Steve Wynn is out to make Las Vegas a theatre capital. He says he can envision a not-too-distant future in which Broadway-type musicals are nurtured in Vegas. “I see money and creativity gravitating here because of our importance and the possibility of a payoff. For a show to open here and then go to Broadway will someday seem like the most natural thing in the world.”
Is This Thompson’s Suicide Note?
Rolling Stone magazine has published what it says is Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide note. “The scrawled words — perhaps the last he ever committed to paper — were written on February 16, four days before the self-described “gonzo” journalist shot himself to death at his secluded home near Aspen, Colorado, the magazine said.
800 Years Of Russia In The House
How do you describe the art of a sprawling country like Russia in a single exhibition. The Guggenheim attempts to negotiate the premise…
ABC Goes Spanish In Prime Time
Reflecting the growing Hispanic influence in America, “starting Sept. 19, ABC will offer its entire primetime entertainment lineup in Spanish — saying that it’s the first English-language broadcast network to do so on such a large scale — through a combination of closed-captioning and dubbing.”
Reflecting On 9/11 Art
What’s the art coming after 9/11 look like? “Artists are apt to weigh in early and often on great national traumas, of course, but at times the most memorable works — the ones that last past the generation that actually experienced the catastrophe — come along some years after the event. It’s as if painters and poets and filmmakers need time to let it all sink in, to let the meaning of a great national tragedy slowly push its way past the sentimental cliches and the creaking platitudes, like a patient commuter at a rusty turnstile.”
Disaster Relief – The Fall TV Season
A river of anxiety runs through this fall’s American TV lineup. “A dominant theme of the fall season is that of invasion – and survival. In many, though by no means all, of the new shows, the nation is under attack, but is fighting back, led by its best and brightest.”
New Orleans – History To Build On
“Deep racial and class divisions aside, New Orleans is one of the few places in America that, in the best sense, looks its age. Though it is unusually vulnerable to natural disaster, nearly all of its neighborhoods have managed to avoid the urban renewal and crass commercial projects that have taken their toll elsewhere. This is partly due to the intractable poverty here, which has made great sections of New Orleans unattractive to national developers, and partly to a long-standing preservation movement. Katrina, in other words, has managed to do to this city what a wrecking ball never could.”
British/China Art Deal – Does It Harm Tibet?
Does Britain’s major deal with China to trade archaeological treasures damage Tibet’s culture? “By lending their prestigious names to the Chinese government, the British Museum and others implicitly sanction Beijing’s cultural policy and, with it, the ongoing artistic, linguistic and religious genocide in Tibet. Over the past 10 years, mainland China has rediscovered its pre-communist past. The iconoclastic modernism of the Great Leap Forward has been replaced by official respect for China’s ancient civilisation. But this admiration for heritage has come too late for the people of Tibet.”