She Said, They Said (And He’s Dead)

“The lead prosecutor in the recovered Glenn Gould artifacts case acknowledged yesterday that evidence demonstrating defendant Barbara Moore personally stole two documents that once belonged to the celebrated pianist and composer from Library and Archives Canada (LAC) ‘is circumstantial.'” Prosecutors are seeking to prove that Moore lifted the items from the national archive when she worked there as a researcher in the 1980s. Moore maintains the items were a gift from her boss, who died in 1994.

Could The Barnes Still Change Its Mind?

Lee Rosenbaum says that the revelation that Pennsylvania lawmakers may have allocated money to move the Barnes collection to Philadelphia may be disappointing, but that it doesn’t change the basic reality of the situation. “With all the fundraising and planning that have already gone into the Philly Barnes, It may be too late to effectuate any change in course… But big-money collectors ought to be sympathetic to the concept of honoring the memory and intentions of one of their own.”

Bomb Scare Shuts San Francisco Concert Hall

“The area around Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco was cleared for about two hours [Wednesday] while the city police department’s bomb squad investigated an odd- and suspicious-looking device on the sidewalk outside the building. The device — a yellow plastic tub about three feet long and one foot tall, with some clear liquid at the bottom and what appeared to be a bottle of bleach inside with a wire attached to a red blinking light — was determined to be harmless. There were no injuries or property damage.”

When “Real” News Won’t Do, We Turn To Comedy

“Surveys show that a high proportion of people aged 18 to 36 get most of their information about British politics from Have I Got News For You. In America, similar figures show that Jon Stewart’s topical comedy The Daily Show supplies a high percentage of 18 to 36-year-old Americans with their main news fix. Why is comedy taking up so much space in our culture? Why is it so present, so dominant? There are things that should matter more – but at the moment they just aren’t there.”

Fighting Disease With Good Grammar

“Grammar may have gone out of fashion in English lessons, but it is making a comeback as a weapon for fighting disease. Some short chains of amino acids have been found to kill antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Gregory Stephanopoulos at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues reasoned that if the amino acid sequences of these peptides were treated as a language with grammatical rules, the rules could be used to create new peptides with similar properties.”

Robert Hughes Settles Some Scores

Art critic Robert Hughes has written a memoir. “One object of this book is to settle a few scores with those who think like that. It’s not the only one. The autobiographical narrative, an odyssey through the Bohemia of Sydney and London in the late 1950s and 1960s, breaks from time to time while Hughes delivers a vivid peroration on some subject close to his heart.”

NYCity Opera – What Might Have Been

Plans for a new home for New York City Opera are done, even though the company probably won’t get a chance to use them. Too bad, writes James Russell. “City Opera says it’s still discussing a new home, but the task looks ever more formidable. The de Portzamparc effort makes it all too clear just what New York City is missing, and why the self-proclaimed world capital of culture has so much trouble nurturing it.”

Literary Nobel – Why So Political?

“The clear bias toward politically motivated choices for the world’s top literary prize is a shame, because politics is overrated. Certainly politics deserves a central place in the consciousness — and conscience — of every thinking person, but to banish from literature all but the relentlessly topical is to impoverish the world beyond measure.”

Will Bad Reviews Mute Success Of Denver’s New Art Museum?

Denverites hoped that the Denver Art Museum’s new Libeskind expansion would become a national landmark. But the reviews haven’t been positive in the nationa press. “The bad buzz as a place to show art certainly isn’t going to help. The negative or even middling reviews work against the Bilbao-effect phenomenon that you get, at least potentially, from a rave.”