My Image Studios, in the ground floor retail space of a new condominium building on West 116th Street in Manhattan, will combine a restaurant “with three theaters for live entertainment and independent films, as well as post-production studios, all to create a $21 million ‘living room’ of black and Latino-flavored arts and culture.”
Tag: 02.07.12
SF Opera’s Nicola Luisotti Named Music Director At Naples’s San Carlo
“San Francisco Opera Music Director Nicola Luisotti has been appointed music director of Teatro di San Carlo of Naples, Italy, effective immediately. … Founded in 1737, San Carlo is the oldest continuously active theater in Europe, and one of Italy’s most prestigious opera houses, famous for its beauty and acoustics.”
Antoni Tapies, 88, Painter And Sculptor
“[He] came to prominence in the late 1940s with richly symbolic paintings strongly influenced by Surrealist painters like Miró and Klee, a style he abandoned by the mid-1950s as he turned to what became his signature work: the heavily built-up surfaces that were often scratched, pitted and gouged and incised with letters, numbers and signs.”
Ai Weiwei And Herzog & de Meuron To Create 2012 Serpentine Pavilion
“Four years after designing the spectacular Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing, the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei are to reunite … to design this year’s pavilion – the 12th commission in what has become a major annual event on the architecture calendar.”
Could Future Wars Be Fought With Mind Control Weapons?
“Wars of the future might be decided through manipulation of people’s minds, concludes a report this week from the UK’s Royal Society. It warns that the potential military applications of neuroscience breakthroughs need to be regulated more closely.”
And The Critical Hatchet Job Of The Year Is …
Adam Mars-Jones’s review of Michael Cunningham’s novel By Nightfall in Britain’s The Observer. The citation for the prize, awarded by The Omnivore, says “Adam Mars-Jones’s review … was at once erudite, attentive, killingly fair-minded and viciously funny. Every one of his zingers … is earned by the argument it arises from.”
Werner Herzog Insults All Chickendom
From the 40-second video, Werner Herzog on Chickens: “Try to look a chicken in the eye with great intensity, and the intensity of stupidity that is looking back at you is just amazing.”
Dickens Anniversary Argues For A “Slow Reading” Movement
“There’s no denying that Dickens’s embroidered, involved sentences make increasing demands on the modern reader. The enormous success of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy shows that we still have an appetite for long, complicated stories. But Rowling’s and Larsson’s prose is built for speed. Unlike Dickens, there’s nothing there in the way of language to stop the rapid turning of pages.”
Britain’s Illiteracy Problem
“Poor neighbourhoods in England are still beset by Victorian-era levels of illiteracy, the schools minister has claimed.”
Top-Rated Part Of SuperBowl 2012? Madonna
“Overall, Madonna’s show was more popular viewing by nearly a 16 percent margin over the game itself – and TiVo said it wasn’t because so many viewers rewound to watch rapper M.I.A give them the finger, though the company is checking to see if the controversy encourages those who recorded the Super Bowl to go back to that moment and see it for themselves.”