“For Tamar Muskal, an Israeli-American composer, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians goes beyond politics. It is music, it is poetry, it is the lone voice, speaking of pain and dreams… Ms. Muskal, who is Jewish and grew up in Israel, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, said that at 39 she realized that pain is pain, no matter who does the suffering.” Her latest composition attempts to reconcile the pain of both Israelis and Palestinians in a single work, combining music and texts from two cultures locked in seemingly permanent conflict.
Tag: 05.14.05
Plimpton’s Paris Moves Downtown
The Paris Review, George Plimpton’s little-read but much-admired literary journal, hasn’t actually been based in Paris for decades. In fact, the small but devoted staff of the Review did their work in a small Manhattan office just one floor beneath Plimpton’s East Side apartment. But following Plimpton’s death last year, the editors found it inconceivable to continue putting out the magazine from a now-Plimptonless office, and chose to move again. No, they’re not headed back to Paris – lower Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood will have to do.
Malcolm X, Reconsidered
A new exhibit at the New York Public Library is prompting a scholarly reexamination of the life and work of civil rights leader Malcolm X. The artifacts and writings from the life of the controversial activist provide a more complete look at the life of a highly complex thinker than has ever previously been available to the public, and “the exhibition also represents an end to a wrenching public struggle over their ownership of Malcolm X’s personal effects. After almost being auctioned in 2002, most of the items were reclaimed by the family, which deposited them with the [library] in 2003.”
Art Is In The Heir
You won’t usually find Alice Walton’s name listed among America’s more prominent art collectors, but the WalMart heiress has spent the last 15 years amassing an impressive array of American art. “Slowly and methodically, Ms. Walton has paid top dollar at auction and through dealers for the best paintings, drawings and sculptures she can find by artists like Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, George Bellows, Marsden Hartley and Charles Willson Peale. The goal, the family foundation says, is to start a museum in Bentonville, Ark., where her father, Sam Walton, opened his first retail store in 1951.”
Libraries Without Books
The University of Texas is moving out all of its books, replacing them with an “electronic learning center”. “Such digital learning laboratories, staffed with Internet-expert librarians, teachers and technicians, have been advancing on traditional college libraries since appearing at the University of Southern California in 1994. As more texts become accessible online, libraries have been moving lesser-used materials to storage. But experts said it was symbolic for a top educational institution like Texas to empty a library of books.”