“Promiscuity and songwriting were Cole Porter’s antidepressants, at once an expression of and a relief from his neediness—the ‘oh, such a hungry, yearning burning inside of me’ that he wrote about in ‘Night and Day.’ Porter seems never to have found the love that he eloquently invoked in song after song.”
Blog
The Caveman’s “Sistine Chapel”
Artwork dating back 13,000 years has been found in a cave in England. “The site of the find, Church Hole Cave at Creswell Crags, is being called the “Sistine Chapel” of the Ice Age because it contains the most ornate cave art ceiling in the world. The ceiling extends the earliest rock art in Britain by approximately 8,000 years and suggests that a primary culture unified Europeans during the Ice Age.”
Drawing The Line – The Gatsbyesque Collector
The art world has been buzzing about Shipley Miller, “head of the Judith Rothschild Foundation, ever since he hatched a Gatsbyesque plot in the spring of 2003: He would travel the globe for one year acquiring contemporary drawings with several million dollars of the foundation’s money. Then he would usher the collection into MoMA, where he serves on the drawings committee, with a museumwide show.”
Minority Opinion
“Every black writer has a piece about the special challenges of being black. Every Latino writer has a piece on growing up Latino or speaking Spanglish. Native American writers lament their treatment at the hands of Caucasian police or describe journeys they made to rekindle their lost heritage. Chinese American and Korean American writers have pieces about the difficulties their Asian-born parents have living in America. And so on. Please don’t misunderstand me. I rejoice at these honest and exciting essays, and I teach some of them in my classes every semester. But it seems that writers who happen to be members of minority groups are getting pigeonholed.”
Two Hit Movies, Two Very Different Audiences
Fahrenheit 9/11 and Passion of the Christ have been surprise hits this year. But their audiences are very different. “The top theaters for “Fahrenheit” have been in urban, traditionally Democratic strongholds, including Manhattan, Los Angeles, San Francisco and the Bay Area, Chicago and Boston. The highest grossing theaters for “Passion” were typically more suburban and far more widely dispersed, from Texas and New Mexico to Ohio, Florida and Orange County, Calif.”
Betty Oliphant, 85
Betty Oliphant, founder of Canada’s National Ballet School, has died at the age of 85. Emigrating from England in 1947, she became an icon of the Canadian dance scene. Some of the most celebrated dancers in the company’s history – including dancers Frank Augustyn, Veronica Tennant, Karen Kain and Rex Harrington, and artistic director James Kudelka – are graduates of the institution.”
Ditch Those Hard-To-Play Instruments
“Scientists are developing ways of capturing human movement in three dimensions which would allow music to be created with the gesture of an arm. It would eliminate the need for music technicians to twiddle hundreds of knobs to achieve the perfect sound. The technique could also be used for scrolling a webpage, especially useful for people with limited mobility.”
Broadway Union Agrees To Actors Deal
Broadway actors and producers have reached a tentative deal on a new contract. “The deal settled most of the major outstanding contractual issues between the union, Actors Equity, and the producers, including the knotty issue of non-Equity tours, which threatened to sidetrack negotiations — and Broadway shows — several times.”
Opera – Stuck In The Past?
“While every other art has remade itself several times in the past century, opera stuck to formula and shut the book on self-renewal. Considering the immensity of its contribution to 19th- century opera, it is anomalous that English literature has been bypassed by opera companies in modern times…”
The Lacklustre Old Masters
The buzz at Sotheby’s last week was high as a Vermeer was put on the block. But “the atmosphere at Christie’s Old Masters sale a few hours earlier could scarcely have been more different. There were empty seats, little buzz and a lacklustre mood. Several of the most important pictures failed to sell, including El Greco’s Saint Francis meditating, estimated at £700,000 to £1 million, Il Vanvitelli’s The Piazza del Popolo, Rome, expected to fetch £1 million to £1.5 million, and Bodegon with bread by Luis Melendez.”