“Los Angeles Opera asked for and received a $14-million emergency loan from Los Angeles County today to allow it to stay afloat and keep paying its expenses through the middle of next year.” In his request for the aid, the company’s COO said that the loan “is needed now, literally next week.”
Tag: 12.08.09
With Its Ring Cycle, Did L.A. Opera Anticipate Money Mess?
Mark Swed: “Most likely L.A. Opera has suspected since the Wall Street woes of last year that it was headed for this trouble. But what the company has done has been very savvy. It has created a Ring too big and too important to Los Angeles to fail.”
Ireland Gives $3.5M For New Irish Arts Centre In NYC
“Over the years Ireland has provided New York with cultural assets like Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne and that occasional visitor Bono. Now the Irish government has made a more numerically quantifiable contribution in the form of a $3.5 million grant that will be used to build a new Irish Arts Center in Manhattan.”
A Picture Can Undermine A Thousand Words
“In a troubling corollary to the truism that a picture is worth 1,000 words, a new study suggests stereotypical imagery can largely negate the central point of a lengthy text.”
Buffalo Phil Ticket Sales Fall By Ten Percent
“The BPO said it finished its fiscal year, which ended on Aug. 31, with a $531,000 operating loss including a 10.4 percent drop in concert revenues and a three percent decrease in annual fund donations.”
Former Concert Pianist, An Amputee, Gets Real Bionic Fingers
“The world’s first bionic fingers were unveiled today after a set invented by a British firm was fitted to a former concert pianist. Maria Antonia Iglesias, 42, who lost all her fingers after suffering pneumococcal septic shock in 2003, can write, use cutlery and hold a glass again.”
Jennifer Hudson As Winnie Mandela? South Africans Object
Casting Jennifer Hudson in the title role of a film about Winnie Madikizela-Mandela “has not gone down well in [South Africa’s] acting community. At a stormy weekend press conference, the Creative Workers Union of South Africa said that using foreign actors to tell the country’s stories undermined efforts to develop a national film industry.”
For SFMOMA Expansion, The Design Is Critical
“[H]ere’s the most formidable challenge facing the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as it prepares to enlarge its brick-clad citadel on Third Street: The architecture must soar, or the new wing will mock the museum’s grand dreams.”
A Copenhagen Cube Puts CO2 Output In Perspective
“Its creators said the cube represents the space that one metric ton of carbon dioxide would occupy if stored at standard atmospheric pressure — specifically, a space that is the equivalent of 27 feet cubed, or 19,683 cubic feet.” That’s because “[t]he average citizen of an industrialized country releases one metric ton of carbon dioxide per month.”
Researchers: Ivory Coast Monkeys Have Syntax, Too
“Having spent months recording the monkeys’ calls in response to both natural and artificial stimuli, a group led by Klaus Zuberbühler of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland argues that the Campbell’s monkeys have a primitive form of syntax.”