Category: today’s top story

“‘The station itself is a fraction of this cost,’ said Calatrava. Indeed the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey has swept a great amount of peripheral work into the station project — including 500,000 square feet of retail — which may prove far too much. … ‘I have designed stations in Zurich, Lisbon, and Lyons,’ Calatrava said. ‘And this is the most complex I have done.'”

“Atwood has written a one-hour, semi-dramatic performance based on her new novel, The Year of the Flood , to be staged in Ottawa, Toronto, Sudbury, Kingston, Calgary and Vancouver, as well as five international cities. As narrator, she will be backed by three local actors and an original score by Los Angeles composer Orville Stoeber, to be sung by local choirs.”

“Gridlock, furious patrons, embarrassed officials and a classic good news-bad news story that saw $3.75 million raised for local cultural groups … also left a trail of anger and frustration throughout the arts community. Technical problems Tuesday sabotaged the Community Foundation Challenge, an online $1-million matching grant program for about 75 cultural groups in metro Detroit. Scores of donors were prevented from making gifts and others wasted hours in front of their computers.”

Behrens, one of the world’s top Wagnerians in the 1980s and ’90s, was en route to a music festival in Japan when she fell ill and went to a hospital in Tokyo; she died of an apparent aneurysm shortly thereafter.

“In good times, eyebrows might be raised over whether $1 million a year is a fair wage for a director of a nonprofit museum. But in the midst of a recession that has forced budget cuts and layoffs at museums around the country, the issue becomes more loaded.” Michael Govan’s “compensation, about a 50% increase over that of his predecessor, places him in an elite group of art museum directors who for the most part preside over institutions more prestigious and many times richer than LACMA.”

“Rocco Landesman, who was confirmed this month as the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has accepted an invitation to visit Peoria, Ill., an offer proffered in response to public comments he made about the city.” His main inflammatory remark: “I don’t know if there’s a theater in Peoria, but I would bet that it’s not as good as Steppenwolf or the Goodman.” Unsurprisingly, that didn’t go over well with the locals.

“The Prince of Wales lobbied for one of the world’s leading architects to be dropped from a £500m office and shopping complex beside St Paul’s Cathedral so one of his preferred designers could take over, the Guardian has learned. The developer who commissioned the Paris-based Jean Nouvel to design One New Change has revealed that the prince called for an alternative architect to be considered for the sensitive site yards from Christopher Wren’s masterpiece.”

Anthony Tommasini: “In February, when [George Steel] took over, even those most hopeful about his potential wondered whether any manager, let alone one with so little experience in opera, could stabilize the tottering company. … [Yet] Mr. Steel’s steadiness and youthful enthusiasm (he is a boyish 43) seem to have paid off.”

A “virtuoso guitarist and inventor whose solid-body electric guitar and recording studio innovations changed the course of 20th-century popular music, … Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as a tireless tinkerer.” In addition to the electric guitar, “he built the first eight-track multitrack recorder. Each track could be recorded and altered separately, without affecting the others. The machine ushered in the modern recording era.”

Yale University Press has banned not only the “notoriously controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad” from its fall title, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” but also “any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s ‘Inferno’ that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.”