“That premise has been embraced by television for almost a generation, with gay characters and couples and parents dating at least to the dads depicted on The Tracey Ullman Show in the late 80’s. What effect have these portrayals played in gaining social acceptance for same-sex families? What role does a movie likeThe Kids Are All Right play in changing social perceptions?” Five contributors debate the questions.
Tag: 07.21.10
How BP’s CEO Has Undermined Carl Hiaasen’s Writing
“When you hop on a yacht in the middle of this and sail in an ocean where there’s no oil just to have a little party, now you’re getting into Monty Python territory,” says the master of Florida absurdism. “The truth is way worse than anything I can invent, and I can invent some very twisted stuff.”
Henry Moore’s Biggest Sculpture Restored
Henry Moore’s heaviest bronze sculpture, Large Divided Oval: Butterfly, has been restored in Berlin. Weighing nearly nine tons, it was his final major work, completed just before he died in 1986
Al Pacino Makes It Safe To Hate Shylock
Jason Zinoman: “His hardheaded new performance [in Central Park] seems like a direct rebuke of his previous one [in the 2004 film], going against the grain of the usual cheap humanizing. This Shylock is strong, humorless, and not quite as smart as he thinks he is.”
Dueling Shylocks in New York This Winter?
“Off Broadway’s Theater for a New Audience announced on Wednesday that its critically acclaimed 2007 production of The Merchant of Venice, starring F. Murray Abraham as Shylock, … will return to New York for a two-week run starting Feb. 27 … The Public Theater, meanwhile, is continuing to look at options for a Broadway transfer of its current [Central Park] production of Merchant,” starring Al Pacino.
Why Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness
“Money is surprisingly bad at making us happy. Once we escape the trap of poverty, levels of wealth have an extremely modest impact on levels of happiness, especially in developed countries” – where there’s a fundamental, partly sunconscious belief “that dollars are delight in a fungible form.” Why is this? Perhaps because of the “experience-stretching hypothesis” …
‘I Looked Into the Heart of an Artichoke’: Making Art From MRI Scans of Fruit
Francis Lam: “Presumably, Andy Ellison’s artichoke didn’t feel the terror I did when he laid it down to a nice magnetic resonance bath, but the images he got of it – and 14 other fruits and vegetables so far in his project Inside Insides – are stunning.”
Tenor Anthony Rolfe Johnson, 69
“A late starter who already seemed set in his career as a farmer before he was persuaded to train his voice, … [he] was soon taken up by many of the world’s leading conductors – often the recording tenor of choice for both Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Sir John Eliot Gardiner – and song accompanists.”
Does The Edinburgh Fringe Have Some Real Competition?
“Visiting the Latitude festival [in Suffolk] for the third time, it struck me that this event is fast becoming a genuine alternative to the Edinburgh festival fringe. The theatre offering gets better every year, and … a short-form festival such as Latitude must seem like a far more practical proposition than schlepping up to Scotland for a month. The same could be said for audiences.”
Vienna Museum Pays $19M to Keep Looted Schiele
“Austria’s Leopold Museum paid $19 million to the heirs of the Jewish art dealer Lea Bondi Jaray to settle a decades-long dispute over Egon Schiele’s portrait of his lover Wally, stolen by the Nazis in the 1930s.”