Priscilla Morgan is “that rare kind of patron whose phone book is more important than her pocket book. She has always been a curator of people selecting from her impeccable taste and nurturing more with friendship, encouragement, ideas and moral support than with money, though she has given plenty of that, too, over the years. She admits to having had “the most extraordinary men” in her life, including her former husband (“one of the great naval aviator heroes of the Pacific”) and the countless artists who attended the frequent gatherings at her garden apartment—from Buckminster Fuller, Willem de Kooning and Richard Lindner to Christo and Saul Steinberg. But after that Bastille Day 1959, her center was Isamu Noguchi.”
Tag: 07.14.04
Study: Movie Ratings Are More “Lenient”
“A new study from the Harvard School of Public Health has found that a decade of ‘ratings creep’ has allowed more violent and sexually explicit content into films, suggesting that movie raters have grown more lenient in their standards.”
Same-Sex Dance
Russell Halley and Jorge Guzman are “pushing against limits set by the United States Amateur Ballroom Dancers Association, which requires that a competing couple consist of a man and a woman. The two dancers say that the rules are archaic and that they have proved that two men can dance powerfully and still be artistic. Moreover, they ask, if questions of gay identity and inclusion are being engaged in the workplace and in the bonds of marriage, then why not in professional and amateur sport?”
UK Ballet Stars Of The Future?
The graduation performances of the Royal Ballet School and the English National Ballet School show evidence of solid training. “The so-called Billy Elliott effect seems to be working; at both performances, there was a strong presence of boys, with four going into the Royal and Birmingham companies, and one into English National Ballet next season.” But where’s the star power?
When Philosophy Met Science
“One of the leading themes of current philosophy is that the notion of objectivity is utterly illusory. This is not some post-modern pose: the subjectivity of scientific knowledge has been proved with mathematical rigour. The upshot of these proofs is that data merely serves to update our pre-existing beliefs, and that its impact on those beliefs depends on such touchy-feely concepts as trust. There was a time when philosophers would have been content to point all this out, and then sit back with a smug smile. No longer…”