Only two weeks after she was fired by Random House, Ann Godoff has has been hired by Penguin as the president and publisher of a new book imprint. Will she bring over some of the big authors she published at Random House? “These are people who I have a longstanding relationship with and I would be surprised if we were not able to work together again at some time.”
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John Browning, 69
American pianist John Browning has died of heart failure. “Mr. Browning maintained an active solo career, if never quite at the most glamorous level, and with the name Cliburn dogging his own in many a review and article. Although he lacked nothing in bravura technique, his pianistic style was reserved, elegant and penetrating, more intellectual than overtly emotional yet eminently approachable.”
The Forgotten Masterpieces
A new book wonders about the wherabout of great works of art that for one reason or another disappeared and slipped from the pages of history. “Supreme among them is Michelangelo’s bronze version of David, a statue he worked on while carving his celebrated colossus of the same biblical hero.”
Crossover – Getting Artists To Think About Science
How do you get people to think creatively about science? The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation believes the arts can help. “Sloan’s Public Understanding of Science and Technology program spends $8 million to $10 million a year funding a slew of projects in film, theater, public television, books, radio, and new media. “We need people going back and forth between the [science and lay worlds]. And I thought the best way is through media such as film, TV, and theater. It’s very powerful.”
Blockbuster Time In Queens
The Museum of Modern Art opens a blockbuster “Matisse Picasso” show in a couple of weeks. But MoMA is in a much smaller space (in Queens)than its longtime Manhattan home. Crowds “promise to be larger than anything the site has yet encountered, raising inevitable questions about how visitors will move through the building without clogging it and whether they will have room to appreciate the nearly 140 works by two of the 20th century’s masters.”
City In The Sky (And Under)
The World Trade Center project is about more than big buildings. “The process of thinking about this unique site expanded into an exercise in imagining a new future for the skyscraper in an increasingly dense and urbanized world. In a number of proposals, the towers are interconnected rather than autonomous, so that they work horizontally as well as vertically. In effect, they create another ground plane to accommodate the kinds of public spaces historically limited to the street: parks, gardens and cultural facilities. The nine diverse schemes all conceive of urban life as a vertical proposition – cities in the sky.”
Missing The Boat – The Book That Got Away
Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan tried and tried to get a Canadian publisher to take her book “Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World,” a revisionist history of the Treaty of Versailles, but without success. Finally she flew to London and sold it there. The book has since become a big bestseller and once again editors whose job it is to pick out books to publish, missed out. How does this happen?
Good-For-You (And The Environment) Housing
A new eco-friendly energy-efficient way of building housing in Britain makes minimal impact on the environment. It’s oh-so-good for you. Yet it’s the style and aesthetics that win buyers. “It’s ingenious: tapping into the power of the raw consumer, making eco-homes as easy to buy as an organic swede. Now, that’s how real revolutions start, you see. By playing capitalism at its own game. By stealth.”
Torture By Art
Was modern art used as a torture device in the Spanish Civil War? “A Spanish art historian has uncovered what was alleged to be the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture, with the discovery that mind-bending prison cells were built by anarchist artists 65 years ago during the country’s bloody civil war. Bauhaus artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and Itten, as well as the surrealist film-maker Luis Bunuel and his friend Salvador Dali, were said to be the inspiration behind a series of secret cells and torture centres built in Barcelona and elsewhere.”
Polarising Wynton Marsalis
“At 41, Wynton Marsalis is the most famous living jazz musician, named in 1996 as one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential Americans. While many jazz players have been classically trained, he is rare in straddling both worlds professionally.” Yet he inspires camps of critics as well as admirers. “While friends cite his charm and humility, others find him dogmatic, and worry about the power of his patronage. Marsalis rails against a ‘jazz establishment’ as ‘racist, ignorant and disrespectful of musicians’.”