Category: people

“An architect without a monstrous ego is like a building without a roof. It’s part of the package. But Daniel Libeskind’s memoir leaves the impression that he thinks of himself as some kind of mystical rabbi who divines the soul of a place and then, with a gentle touch of his hands upon drawing paper, allows a manifestation of that spirit to spring from the ether in the shape of a building.”

“Sir Jonathan Miller, Britain’s best-known opera director, has said his career in opera is effectively over. Now 70, he told the Guardian that opera houses had turned their back on him and he was “bitter and angry” about it.”

“Gregory Mitchell, the actor who suffered a heart attack Nov. 11 during a performance at the Kennedy Center, died yesterday at Washington Hospital Center… Mitchell, 52, collapsed while onstage with Mikhail Baryshnikov in the drama Forbidden Christmas, or the Doctor and the Patient during the second of its six-performance run. After a doctor in the audience attended to him, Mitchell was taken to George Washington University Hospital and later transferred to Washington Hospital Center.”

Sir Jonathan Miller may be English opera’s greatest curmudgeon, and at 70, he clearly doesn’t feel that he has a lot to lose by criticizing his colleagues in the industry. With only a bit of prodding, Miller reveals that, in his view, Joe Volpe is little better than a Jersey mob boss, critics are “midgets talking into a loudspeaker,” and the well-heeled opera fans who crowd Covent Garden on a weekly basis are “chalk-striped aubergines” who don’t know the first thing about great art. Miller can afford to say these things, apparently, because he believes that he will never again work in opera.

The new national director of the Ottawa-based Canadian Conference of the Arts brings a unique profile and a long resume to the job. Jean Malavoy “comes to the CCA after a three-year stint as the executive director of La Nouvelle Scène, an umbrella theatre centre for four francophone troupes in Ottawa… He also has a certificate in marketing the performing arts from the École des hautes études commerciales de Montréal. In short, he knows both the bureaucratic/fiscal and the administrative/creative sides of the cultural ledger.” His main mission at the helm of the CCA will be to convince the precarious Martin government not to cut the arts for political gain.

Canada has named a new poet laureate: Pauline Michel, a Francophone who has built an impressive reputation in Quebec, but who is virtually unknown in the country’s English-speaking regions. She has been publishing poems, mainly in French, since 1975.

Huang Xiang “earned international attention in 1978 when he and friends traveled 1,500 miles to Beijing and posted his political poems on a wall in the street. The Democracy Wall Movement, as it became known, put him at odds with the authorities. For the next 20 years, he was jailed numerous times, blamed for inciting a riot and sent to labor camps. It was only when a Beijing company revoked a long-awaited publishing contract because of governmental pressure that Huang saw a way out of China.” Eventually he got to America, where he became part of the City of Asylum project in Pittsburgh…

Actress Vanessa Redgrave and her brother Corin, also an acclaimed stage actor, are starting a new political party in the UK. “Its manifesto calls for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq; the cancellation of third world debt; the return of Britons held at Guantanamo Bay and the release of all foreign nationals held without trial in the UK.” The party is not expected to have any actual influence on the British political system, and seems to have been conceived largely as an attempt to draw attention to the issues of human rights which have long been championed by the Redgraves.

Emil Kang, the young arts executive who abruptly resigned from the top leadership post of the Detroit Symphony last December, has surfaced at the University of North Carolina, as the school’s new executive director for arts. Kang’s duties will include managing UNC’s largest arts venues and “promoting the arts through the development of the Arts Common, UNC’s decades-long project to create a central space for the arts on North Campus.

“Herbert Axelrod, the Monmouth County philanthropist turned globetrotting fugitive, pleaded not guilty to a federal tax charge in Trenton yesterday, ending a seven-month odyssey that brought him from Cuba to Switzerland to a jail cell in Germany. In his first U.S. court appearance since fleeing the country in April, the 77-year-old millionaire appeared upbeat and relaxed. He smiled and waved to friends in the courtroom gallery, at one point offering a reassuring wink.”