The actor confesses that, while on a two-day bender, he told his assistant to bid for an Andy Warhol portrait of Elizabeth Taylor at a Sotheby’s auction. “And to my horror, she did, and even worse, got it.” The price: £2 million. Not to worry: Grant sold the painting six years later for £13 million.
Tag: 12.13.09
Beckett And Calatrava: A Lovely, If Unlikely, Couple
The designer of Dublin’s fine new Samuel Beckett bridge is none other than “Santiago Calatrava, the Valencian architect who has made expressionist bridges and weirdly torqued structures a trademark. Never mind that Beckett made a virtue of muted understatement.”
In Recession, Even Roundabout Finds The Going Tougher
“The company expanded during the boom,” when it overtook “Lincoln Center Theater as the largest nonprofit theater in the country. But the past year has seen drops in fundraising and membership subscriptions,” as well as box-office disappointments. “And now the renewal of Roundabout’s biggest corporate sponsorship is in doubt.”
Was One Man Motivating Americans To Go To The Movies?
“You may not know his name — Don LaFontaine (also known as ‘The Voice’) — but you certainly know his work. He’s the guy with the ominous voice of doom who introduced thousands of previews by saying things like … ‘In a world of blood. In a time of plague. In a land of death. In a house of pain . . . ‘” Now that he’s dead, fewer of us are going to the movies.
How Downloading Has Altered Music Collecting
“This is not a Luddite’s lament, or a cri de coeur about the significantly reduced audio quality of those compressed MP3 files. I love having more music at arm’s reach than ever before, I love taking it with me wherever I go. But I do find myself wondering why, exactly, collecting music now means so much less.”
Are Movie Directors Overrated?
“We liked the story and that dialogue was hilarious — doesn’t that mean the movie was well written? And that actress we love — she’s good in everything. The director didn’t design the costumes. She didn’t operate the camera for that unbelievably cool tracking shot. She didn’t write that lush musical score or invent the sound effects that nearly rattled our teeth out of their gums.”
The Louvre Expands To The Countryside
The 150 million euro ($226 million) museum in Lens, to open in 2012, is part of a strategy to spread art beyond the traditional bastions of culture in Paris to new audiences in the provinces.
How Europe’s Teens Get Their Entertainment
“European teenagers still spend more time watching television than they do with any other medium — 10.3 hours a week, on average. That compares with 9.1 hours on personal — rather than work- or school-related — use of the Internet. Perhaps more surprisingly, according to the report, 12- to 17-year-old Europeans appear to spend considerably less time on the Internet than people 18 and older, who are online 11.4 hours a week — again, not counting professional or academic use.”
Ode To The Dancing Feet
“The foot is at the root of poetry. Lines of verse are divided into feet, and that’s because words, music and dance were once intimately connected. And in terms of physical complexity, the foot is among the most miraculous mechanisms of the body.”
Who Owns That University Lecture? (Professor Or Student?)
“Thanks to technology, one of the core functions of a university – distributing information through its professors – is no longer entirely in its control. It’s a potentially unsettling development for universities and professors, and it has found its way into court, as professors take on commercial note services and grapple with how much to limit the recording and even filming of their lectures.”