“After more than a decade, the Oxford American, a nonprofit literary magazine that explores Southern culture, has finally paid off the entire $700,000 debt it owed the University of Central Arkansas. Since the debt began accumulating in 2004 and peaked in 2008, UCA has seen four presidents, and the nonprofit magazine has parted ways with its founding editor and has a new top editor and executive director.”
Blog
Woman Brings ‘Enigma Variations’ Manuscript To ‘Antiques Roadshow’ – And Elgar Foundation Suggests That It’s Stolen
On last weekend’s UK broadcast of the popular TV series, one Jude Hooke showed the resident specialist a printed score of the “Enigma Variations” with annotations and pasted-in corrected passages of music in Elgar’s own hand. Imagine the surprise of the Elgar Foundation: that very score had gone missing in 1994 – at which time, it turns out, Ms. Hooke’s late husband was an attorney at the same firm as the Foundation’s former vice-chairman.
Truthbrary.Org: Sacha Baron Cohen Creates Parody Wingnut Website To Accompany His New Series
“Why Truthbrary? Well, as the website, which seems to have been set up last year explains, it’s a rejection of ‘THE MAINSTREME MEDIA + THE LIEbrary OF FALSE INFORMATION THEY TRY TO PUSH INTO THE PUBLICS MIND’S.'” The television project to which Truthbrary is a companion, Who Is America?, features Baron Cohen posing as an arch-conservative “citizen journalist” and includes interviews with, among others, Sarah Palin, Roy Moore, and Dick Cheney, all unsuspecting.
So What *Is* This Sacha Baron Cohen Show That Duped Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney And Roy Moore?
Not much has yet been publicly revealed about Who Is America?, which premieres next week in Britain and the US, except that Cohen posed as a right-wing “citizen journalist” named Billy Wayne Ruddick Jr, PhD, who convinced Palin and Moore to be interviewed on camera and even got Dick Cheney to autograph a “waterboard kit.” In fact, since Palin found out she’d been duped and called Baron Cohen “evil, exploitative and sick,” Baron Cohen has issued a response, in character as Ruddick, which has been reproduced here.
Head Of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Arts Program Talks About How The Arts Demonstrably Improve Cities
Mike Scutari interviews Kate D. Levin, who was also New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs commissioner for the 12 years Michael Bloomberg was mayor, about the “virtuous cycle that public art tends to trigger” and how government and non-governmental leaders in cities are coming to understand “the creative sector’s ability to address pressing civic issues.”
An Avant-Garde ‘West Side Story’ (?!?) Is Coming To Broadway
A pair of Belgian stage artists who are leaders of Europe’s institutional avant-garde, director Ivo van Hove and choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, will stage the first major American revival of the musical to make a complete departure from the model of Jerome Robbins’s original staging. (De Keersmaeker and her company have been regular visitors at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; van Hove has directed two Arthur Miller revivals on Broadway and won a Tony for one of them.)
Man Finds $1 Million Stolen Painting In Dad’s Garage
“Sometime in 1978 a huge piece by Robert Motherwell, the modernist painter, went missing from a Manhattan warehouse, one of dozens that were lost and thought stolen when Motherwell hired a moving company to help him switch his works from one storage site to another. On Thursday, four decades after it had disappeared, the 1967 work, ‘Untitled,’ now valued at $1 million, was returned to the foundation dedicated to preserving Motherwell’s legacy. It was found in a garage in upstate New York by the son of a man who used to work for the movers.”
Two Art Colleges In North Carolina Announce That They’re Closing Before The End Of The Year
“The Art Institute campuses in Durham and Charlotte are among more than 30 campuses across the country run by [Dream Center Educational Holdings]. Art Institutes offer classes in animation, design, film and audio production and fashion, as well as a culinary school. … The Art Institute schools were all acquired earlier this year by Dream Center Education Holdings, a California-based nonprofit, for $60 million … [from] Pittsburgh-based Education Management Corp., a for-profit school operator.”
Is Lang Lang Back? Well, Mostly (A Report From His Post-Injury Comeback At Tanglewood)
“Even at age 36, Lang Lang projects a boyish charisma that employs your protective instincts — all the more so if you saw him grow up before your eyes, emerging from his cramped Spruce Street apartment, speaking broken English, and yet becoming something as close to a rock star as any classical pianist can be.” David Patrick Stearns (who did see all that) reports on Lang Lang’s performance of a Mozart concerto with the Boston Symphony last week and checks in with Lang Lang’s primary teacher at Curtis, Gary Graffman.
Relocating This Science Museum Could Be The Most Expensive Museum Move In History
“The New South Wales state government is pushing ahead with a controversial plan to relocate the Powerhouse Museum — part of the Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences — from central Sydney to a western suburb, despite widespread criticism and an ongoing parliamentary inquiry. At a cost of A$1.2bn ($890m), … [the project] means demolishing the museum, which opened in 1988 in Ultimo, central Sydney, and seven historic buildings in Parramatta, 23km to the west, to make way for a new museum due to open in 2023.”