Tag: 10.10.06

Gourevitch’s Paris Review, Reviewed

“Most literary mags have the life span of fruit flies, perhaps because most literary magazines are about as interesting as fruit flies. But the Paris Review endured, partly because (founding editor George) Plimpton was great at raising money from his rich friends but mostly because his magazine was actually worth reading. … When Plimpton died, the literary world wondered: What will happen to the Paris Review? Now we know the answer. It has gotten even better.” New editor Philip Gourevitch has made some changes, but cautiously and well.

Nielsen To Track College Students’ Viewing

“Moving to assuage critics who say the TV ratings don’t reflect the watching people do outside their homes, Nielsen Media Research said Monday it will start measuring the viewing habits of college students next year. It’s the first time that the ratings firm will include any out-of-home viewing in its national sample. … (The) college students whose habits will be tracked will already be members of a Nielsen family — that is, from a household where meters are installed to track which family members are watching what shows.”

Carry-On Prohibition Leads To Trumpeter’s Broken Arm

“As international authorities strive to harmonize a myriad of rules for carry-on flight luggage, a Russian-American jazz musician is nursing a broken arm he said he suffered in a struggle with French airport police over his right to board with a prized trumpet. The musician, Valery Ponomarev, 63, a former member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, was preparing to board an Air India flight on Sept. 9 from Paris to New York City, where he lives, when a routine airport ritual erupted into a fierce dispute over his 1961 Connstellation trumpet.”

Choreographers, Conferring Behind Closed Doors

The Springdance Dialogue, an off-year offshoot of the Springdance festival in the Netherlands, is visiting New York’s Dance Theater Workshop. “The dialogues, which vary depending on participants’ resources and interests, arose in 2000 from a question: how can established organizations help young, independent choreographers — those not linked to an institution like an opera house or running a big company — maintain their artistic integrity while sustaining careers?”

Elegantly, Foster Challenges The Upper East Side

“I expect Norman Foster’s design for a new residential tower at 980 Madison Avenue to infuriate people. Rising out of the old Parke-Bernet Gallery building, a spare 1950 office building between 76th and 77th Streets, its interlocking elliptical forms throw down a challenge to a neighborhood known for an aversion to bold contemporary architecture. The tower’s height, roughly 30 stories, hardly helps its cause…. With a little trimming, though, this could be the most handsome building to rise along Madison Avenue since the Whitney Museum of American Art was completed 40 years ago.”

So What Was The UK’s Best Building This Year?

The Stirling is the UK’s top prize for architecture. “The official line says that the Stirling goes to the British-designed building ‘which has been the most significant for the evolution of architecture in the past year’, a sentence packed with assumptions. Does it go to the prettiest? The most thrilling? To the architect most deserving? Or, old-fashioned notion this, to the building that best fulfils its brief, be it a bicycle shed or a cathedral?”