The six-year-old French tourist who was hurled from the London museum’s 10th-floor viewing platform in August has now been moved from intensive care (in a “full armour of splints”) to a rehabilitation center. His family says he can now go outdoors in a wheelchair for brief periods and is able to make slight movements with his legs, notable progress for a patient with a severe spinal cord injury. – The Guardian (PA)
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Russia’s Greatest Napoleonic Reenactor (That’s A Thing, Apparently) Pulled Drunk Out Of River With His Girlfriend’s Arms In His Backpack
Having been fished out of the Moika River early Saturday morning with a backpack containing a woman’s severed arms, he was in the Mariinsky Hospital, still very much alive but recovering from hypothermia and facing a murder charge. – Washington Post
A Body-Language Expert Analyzes Conductors’ Gestures
Consultant Lauren Tan watched footage of Leonard Bernstein, Gustavo Dudamel, Manfred Honeck, and others for what their hands, eyes, faces and postures can show the rest of us about non-verbal communication. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Seattle’s Intiman Theatre May Be Pulling Itself Away From The Edge Of The Cliff
“Shortly after a fundraising gala-brunch on Saturday, Nov. 2, Intiman announced it had raised $130,000 in one month (including the brunch), putting the theater close to its year-end goal of $200,000. Meeting that goal would leave the organization, which has operated with a roughly $1 million budget in recent years, with $150,000 cash on hand going into 2020.” – The Seattle Times
Indie Publishers Nervous As Amazon Cuts Way Back On Orders For Holiday Gift Season
Several independent presses tell PW that the mega-retailer’s weekly orders have fallen since late October; one publisher says the most recent order was down 75% from this time last year. The apparent reason? Amazon’s warehouses don’t have space for the books. – Publishers Weekly
Who’s The US’s Busiest Publisher Of Literature In Translation? Amazon
“Amazon Crossing, Amazon’s publishing imprint focused on literary translation, … has published more than 400 books, from 42 countries and in 26 languages … Crossing has also produced some of the bestselling titles to emerge from Amazon’s [entire] publishing platform, including The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch, which has reached more than 800,000 readers.” – Publishers Weekly
‘Carpetbaggers’ Keeping Aboriginal Australian Artists In ‘Modern-Day Slavery’, Say Advocates
The artists’ collective APY has warned the Australian federal and South Australian state governments that certain outside art dealers, referred to as “carpetbaggers,” have been manipulating some artists’ family members into debt and then taking those artists away from their families and homes and forcing them to make paintings to pay off that debt. – The Guardian
Another Movie About Nigerians Disqualified From Oscars’ Best International Feature Category
Last week, controversy broke out when Nigeria’s first-ever submission for what used to be called the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar was ruled out because a large majority of the dialogue is in English. Now Austria’s submission, a story of Nigerian sex workers in Vienna titled Joy, has been rejected for the same reason: two-thirds of the dialogue is in English. – The Hollywood Reporter
Arts Groups In Belgium’s Richest Region Brace For (More) Funding Cuts
“Flemish Culture Minister Jan Jambon … envisages cuts of up to 6% in the subsidies given to cultural institutions to cover their operating funds and 60% in the subsidies given to cover the costs of specific cultural projects.” This follows nearly a decade of consistent funding cuts for arts organizations in Flanders; as one administrator protested, “We have already had to made 25 million euro in savings in recent years.” – VRT (Belgium)
Comedian David Mitchell: The Internet Has Been A Disaster For Culture
“Genuinely, I think the internet and the smartphone have been a disaster for civilisation,” he says. “I think it would be very helpful for us to see it as a disaster, see it as something like nuclear weapons or . . . I was going to say the invention of heroin, but morphine is a wonder drug, so there’s an upside to heroin which I really can’t f**king see with the internet. It’s easier to get taxis, but that’s it. It’s addictive. It changes the nature of discourse in a horrible way. What was billed as the democratisation of knowledge has turned into the death of truth.” – Irish Times