“DNA is a non-profit organization renting 25,000 square feet of space in a city-owned building on Chambers Street. But the group says without a break on the rent, which is close to $70,000 a month, they’re as good as out.” But City Hall has granted the company a month and a half to renegotiate the lease for the facility.
Tag: 07.13.10
Royal Opera House, Shakespeare’s Globe Move Into Cinema Simulcasts
“Emerging Pictures and Opus Arte have announced a partnership that will bring Opus Arte’s events programming into cinemas. The deal will bring live footage from the opera and ballet at London’s Royal Opera House and Shakespeare performances from the Globe Theatre. This year’s season starts September 10.”
Why Children Take So Long To Learn Their Colors
“Divorced from context, most two- and three-year olds might as well be colorblind; certainly they look that way when asked to correctly identify colors in a line-up, or accurately use color words in novel contexts. ….This is seriously bizarre when you consider all the other things that children at that age can do: ride a bike, tie their shoes, read the comics, and – mistake a blue cupcake for a pink one? Really?” (Yes, and it’s worse for English-speakers.)
Bob Dylan Tells Boomers That They’re Going To Die
“Bob Dylan turned 69 in May. To make it sound more portentous: He has now entered his 70th year. Bob was always chronologically a little ahead of the generation that embraced him, and now, as Baby Boomers are rounding into their ’60s and taking, some of them, their first look at the end of the road, Dylan is out there on the frontier, spying what’s to come, what’s already here. The news is not good.”
‘The Bookcase You’ll Want To Live In’
Lucy Mangan: “Oh, my beloved Billy bookcases, I fear I will never look at you the same way again. I am in a free-standing, multi-storey wooden tower comprising a spiral staircase and walls composed of open shelves lined with 6,000 books.”
Honolulu Musicians: Symphony Bargaining In Bad Faith
A labor grievance “accuses the Honolulu Symphony Society, the entity that runs the business operations of the orchestra, of bargaining in bad faith,” but a board member said the symphony, which is trying to emerge from bankruptcy, is willing “to continue talks if [the musicians’ union] had a counterproposal that was ‘financially realistic and sustainable.'”
LA-Area Schools Court Hollywood To Fill Budget Gaps
“‘Schools have historically been reluctant to make themselves available, but now they’re falling over themselves,’ said Scott Graham, leasing director for the sprawling 1,000-school Los Angeles Unified School District.” There’s been “a flurry of inquiries from cash-strapped districts in recent months asking how they can market themselves to production companies.”
Looted Art At Madrid’s National Archaeological Museum?
“The objects in question were bought by the Madrid museum in 1999, as part of a major collection of 181 ancient artefacts from the Etruscan period, Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and Spain, spanning the fifth century BC to the fifth century AD. The museum … paid $12m to the 82-year-old collector and entrepreneur José Luis Várez Fisa for the collection.”
Where Arts Council Cuts Will Hurt Most: Rural Areas
“[R]ecent Arts Council cuts come as a particular blow in communities that are already struggling to support their cultural institutions. … [I]t’s easy for town and city-dwellers to forget how very, very different things can be in the countryside. But in a rural area, arts organisations are often the backbone of the community.”
Comics Writer Harvey Pekar Dies At 70
“Pekar, by all accounts, was a tough guy to be around: angry, confrontational, beset by grudges and troubles over money, an obsessive worrier. He never hid any of this, but wrote about it instead. That made him as brave as almost any artist I can think of — unadorned, unfiltered, less concerned with how the world thought of him than with how he thought of himself.”