“Author E.L. Doctorow — who is doing a reading later in the evening — will be on hand to celebrate the machine’s debut, and to give it a new name. Sadly, he won’t be cracking a bottle of Champagne over the Espresso’s bow….”
Tag: 09.29.09
At Hotel Bel-Air, The Baby Grand Goes Silent, Too
“The lounges of top-tier hotels are a distinct musical niche, a rarefied, murmurous, dimly lit world in which [Antonio] Castillo de la Gala is a highly polished fixture, even a minor legend.” Now, after 12 years, he “ends his run at the Bel-Air, which is closing for a renovation expected to last two years.”
The ‘Spurban’: Guerrilla-Dance-Meets-’60s-Happening
Choreographer Trey McIntyre “liken[s] the spurban (which is short for spur-of-the-moment urban performance) to the hot lunch jam scene from the 1980 movie Fame and the T-Mobile commercial in which several hundred seemingly ordinary passersby break into joyous, unison movement at London’s Liverpool Street Station.”
Making A New Arts Center Work In A Working-Class ‘Burb
“A night on the town in Lansdale [PA], a blue-collar borough of 17,000 people, hasn’t the widest range of options, but 60 or so more were just added – conveniently located between the hardware and health-food stores.”
The Google Book Search Deal Is Not Evil
Tim Wu: “[The complainants’] premise is that the monopoly that the settlement creates is invaluable – and that without the settlement, we can create a competitive market for putting out-of-print books online. But I fear that’s a fantasy … there is a reason that libraries aren’t generally run for profit.”
Van Dyck Self-Portrait On The Block
“The last self-portrait painted by Sir Anthony van Dyck, within months of his death in 1641, is to be sold by trustees of the family which has owned it for almost 300 years, and is expected to fetch up to £3m.”
San Francisco Ballet Thrills (And Puzzles) Shanghai Audiences
“Chinese ballet aficionados like the classics: Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty are all routinely performed here.” But they’re “also used to uniformity, in the way their dancers look, dress and move.” So when the company gave a mixed program, including modern ballets, for its first performance in Shanghai, viewers weren’t sure what to make of it at first.
Keith Haring’s Pop Shop Recreated As Museum Exhibit
“The Pop Shop, which opened at the height of Reaganomics in 1986 to sell branded T-shirts, toys and magnets, … closed in 2005 owing to rising costs, but the shop has been reconstructed as part of Tate Modern’s exhibition ‘Pop Life: Art in a Material World’.”
So, Should You Be Clicking On Every Ad On ArtsJournal?
A reader writes to Slate asking if clicking on the display ads on favorite Web sites (and letting pop-up ads run their course instead of closing them) actually helps those Web sites – “or am I just annoying myself for no good reason?” And the answer is …
Irish Arts Minister Defends Artists’ Tax Exemption
Ireland’s arts minister “has said he will not scrap the artists’ exemption as proposed by the Commission on Taxation.” He “described as ‘nonsense’ the suggestion that the exemption costs the exchequer between €36 million and €38 million every year.”