Venice is under threat of a major flood – not if, but when. So it’s time to get on with building gates to help control water. The controversial flood control plan has been in the works for decades. “The barriers are to be completed by 2012 at a cost of 2.5 billion euros. A prototype section of the barriers was successfully tested as long ago as the 1980s, but their execution has been delayed by objections from the Green Party, which believes, among other things, that they would cause the lagoon to become dangerously polluted if closed frequently.”
Tag: 10.26.03
When Merce Meets Radiohead
It didn’t rock, reports Joan Acocella. “You can find dancing that is more poignant, or easier to watch, than Merce Cunningham’s, but I don’t think any choreographer in the world gives us a closer look at the truth. Beauty without reasons, and without anxiety over the lack of reasons: that may be what life was like before we started making it up. Sometimes, when I look at Cunningham’s stage, I think I’m seeing the world on the seventh day, with everything new and just itself—before the snake, and the tears, and the explanations.”
Updike On Robert Hughes
Robert Hughes is back, three years after a crippling car accident in Australia. “The dreadful accident in Western Australia has not extinguished Hughes’s old habits of incidental invective and capsule tirade. I have seen his prose characterized as of the Muscle Beach school, which, transposed to the higher cultural tone of Sydney’s Bondi Beach, seems fair enough. He has done the workouts to get himself into shape, and, if he turned a few handstands and kicked sand at a few ninety-pound weaklings, his pleasure in his own strength and suppleness of mind and pen was infectious.” And thus a new book on Goya…
Presidential Peter
“A couple of new recordings of Peter and the Wolf – narrated by Sophia Loren and Bill Clinton. “His famously pock-marked voice is strangely alluring. He sounds sincere and avuncular, and acts with a fair amount of ease. This is something more complex than a statesmanlike reading of Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. Hidden talents? No. After all, it was Ronald Reagan who said during his presidency that there had been times when he wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.”
Lethal Weapon – Book Review As Blunt Object
Dale Peck is “a 36-year-old novelist and critic who has created a furor in the literary world by lobbing grenades in the back pages of The New Republic intended not to disparage, not to bring down a peg, but to destroy his victims – usually established writers whom Peck deems a threat to literature. To puncture the inflated reputations of these (mostly) Living White Males is a matter of the greatest urgency, Peck seems to believe, and he goes about the task with a crusader’s obsessive zeal. At the end of a Peck essay, his subjects – Philip Roth, Julian Barnes, Colson Whitehead – are wounded, their books in ruins, massacred.”
Nude In Grand Central Station
Spencer Tunnick’s latest project brought 450 women to pose nude in New York’s Grand Central Station Sunday morning. “For his latest, he said, he first sought permission to use the New York Public Library and the Museum of Natural History but was rebuffed by both. He’s also been arrested several times in New York for previous projects.”
What Matters, The Booker?
So much controversy and hoopla over who wins a literary competition like the Booker. “Perhaps the Booker wars would end if the participants realized that, according to a recent study by one economist, very little is at stake: Judges in aesthetic competitions, according to Victor Ginsburgh, a professor at the University of Brussels, are simply not very good at identifying art works that future generations will acknowledge as great.”
OC Register Cuts Back Arts Columns
The Orange County Register cuts back its arts coverage, cutting its classical music column back from once a week to once a month. “Behind the change, of course, is the thinking that classical music is a marginal art form, patronized by a very few.”
Connecticut’s New Super Culture Agency
Connecticut creates a “super-agency” of culture that combines all the state’s cultural programs under one roof. “What there is plenty of, are politicos. This could bode well when it comes time to go after significant state dollars beyond the $24.48 million the new agency now oversees this fiscal year ($20 million comes from lodging tax revenues) and at least $20 million for the next; but when it comes to allocating those funds politicians haven’t the best of track records of fairness, merit and accountability.”
The Scariest Film Scene Of All
What’s the scariest scene in all of movies? According to a new British poll, it’s Jack Nicholson’s “Here’s Johny!” in “The Shining. “The scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining topped a poll for a Channel 4 special on The 100 Scariest Moments on TV and film. It beat classic terror scenes such as the head-spinning scene in the 1973 horror film The Exorcist and the moment a severed head tumbles from a hole in a boat in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.”