Thursday August 31

• DEALING WITH THE LAW: Crispo, a Manhattan art dealer who was "acquitted in a 1980s sex-torture case was sentenced to seven years in prison on Wednesday for threatening to kidnap a lawyer's daughter in an attempt to get money from a bankruptcy trustee." Yahoo! (Reuters) 08/30/00

• ODE TO DANTO: Arthur Danto is a prominent philosopher as well as art critic for The Nation. "Philosophers, at least in theory, are seekers after truth. Truth, the poet says, is beauty. Thus it makes perfect sense that Danto, who philosophizes by day, should moonlight as one of America's best-known art critics." Boston Globe 08/31/00

Wednesday August 30

• ONE MAN’S MUSIC… Nearly 30 years after his composing debut, Steve Reich’s music still receives tumultuous receptions wherever its performed, splitting audiences between those who hear genius and others who just hear noise. “’Minimalist’ is a label he hates but how else to describe his music, much of which involves a great deal of repetition? Think of Andy Warhol with his repeated pictures of Campbell's soup tins and translate that visual image into sound. The Herald (Glasgow) 08/30/00

Monday August 28

• THE ART OF NOT KNOWING: An interview with American art legend Robert Rauschenberg who, at age 74, is still creating, improvising, and expounding freely on “the way a serendipitist works.” “For me, art shouldn't be a fixed idea that I have before I start making it. I want it to include all the fragility and doubt that I go through the day with. Sometimes I'll take a walk just to forget whatever good idea I had that day because I like to go into the studio not having any ideas. I want the insecurity of not knowing.” New York Times 08/27/00 (one-time registration required for entry)

Thursday August 24

• FORGOTTEN BIRTHDAY: This week is the 100th anniversary of the birth of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He easily makes the Top Ten list of philosophers, and even has a degree of name recognition among the general public. "So where are the Nietzsche symposiums, the exhibitions, the 900-page reassessments? Where are the T-shirts?" The Globe and Mail 08/24/00

Wednesday August 23

• ODE TO PIERRE BOULEZ: "To those who whine, who doubt his importance to our times and to the future - a warning. To Boulez we owe the most influential musical changes of our lifetime - as a conductor, composer, educator, programme planner and superior being, he has embraced an international state of artistic achievement, and wrestled, built and triumphed on all our behalfs. He has educated a whole generation of musicians - and happily, ecstatically even, it was mine - evangelising for rhythm and form over mere miasma of sound or texture, and has been bold for all who would be creative, insisting on rigour in intellect, opinion, art and its practice." The Scotsman 08/23/00

Tuesday August 22

• LAVA LAMP INVENTOR DIES at the age of 82. Edward Craven Walker once said: "If you buy my lamp, you won't need drugs." CNN.com 08/22/00

Monday August 21

• LEONARDO'S SON? "Leonardo da Vinci may have fathered a son, a finding that blurs the image of Leonardo as a gay icon, according to a scholar investigating the master's family life." Discovery 08/18/00

• PAVAROTTI SPEAKS: About taxes, about his new young companion, about his weight - "I am very chubby. I make a competition for very young singers. If someone comes out who is chubby like me, he must sing like a god." New York Times Magazine 08/21/00

Wednesday August 16

• WAR STORIES: Franz Welser-Möst survived his six-year tenure as conductor of the London Philharmonic - but just barely. Installed as music director at age 29, he made sweeping (and unpopular) changes, saw three managing directors unseated in his six years,  and was dubbed “Frankly Worse Than Most” by his critics. Now, four years after his departure, he’s back on top - head of Zurich Opera, and about to take on the Cleveland - and finally able to reflect on his difficult past. The Telegraph (London) 08/16/00

Sunday August 13

• LIVING HISTORY: "Alicia Markova, a living legend not only of British ballet, but of 20th-century civilisation. This is the body that Matisse drew black squiggles down for his costume for her in Rouge et Noir. This skin was rubbed down by the immortal Pavlova with her personal eau de cologne. This musical mind was guided as a child by Stravinsky and Balanchine." The Telegraph (London) 08/13/00

• LEAVING THE GETTY: Getty Museum director John Walsh says goodbye after 17 years. "Walsh arrived a year after the Getty Trust received its fortune. As the endowment has grown from $1.2 billion to $5 billion, the Getty Museum has not only spent huge sums on its collections, but also beefed up educational programs, developed what Walsh says is now the best publishing program of any museum in the world and built the new facility at the Getty Center." Los Angeles Times 08/13/00

• ROBERT WILSON has a new theatre project. "Mr. Wilson is probably the most prolific theater artist in the world. An astonishingly tireless man who presents premieres of 8 to 12 new projects each year in an array of far-flung countries, he directs, designs the sets, co-designs the lighting and usually choreographs them all. He also organizes an army of loyal acolytes in the presentation of twice as many touring productions of older shows throughout the world. He estimates that he spends 10 days a year at his apartment in New York." New York Times 08/13/00 (one-time registration required for entry) 

Wednesday August 9

• MR. MODERN: Nicholas Serota is smiling. And why not? Serota, director of the Tate Museum, is "one of the handful of culture gurus who have persuaded conservative Britons to cast aside their instinctual suspicion of modern art. Serota has, with Tate Modern, simultaneously catapulted Britain to the forefront of the international contemporary art world, up there with New York's MOMA and the Pompidou in Paris." Los Angeles Times 08/09/00

• ON JERRY HALL'S NUDE SCENE: "Without my stopwatch on the night, I had to resort to the trusted old method of counting seconds, muttering "One elephant . . . two elephants . . . three elephants," and so on. By the time I reached the fifth elephant, my neighbours in the stalls were pushing me under my seat and sitting on my head to shut me up, because they thought my comments would upset Mick Jagger, who was in the audience." Sydney Morning Herald 08/09/00

Monday August 7

• SIR ALEC GUINNESS dies at age 86. The Age (Melbourne) 08/07/00

  • TRIBUTES: "He was one of the last surviving members of a great generation of UK actors, which included Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Mills." BBC 08/07/00

• FRANK IN TIMES SQUARE: Frank Sinatra never actually performed in a Broadway show, but he starred in a couple of movie versions of Broadway classics. Now plans are underway to erect a statue to Old Blue Eyes in Times Square. Theatre.com 08/06/00

Sunday August 6

• ON JESSYE NORMAN: "She is 54 now, and past her vocal prime. Time has accentuated her tendency to sing sharp, and the sheer brazen splendour of the sound she once produced is irrecoverably tarnished. As if to compensate, she has developed a grand manner on the platform - complete with radiant smiles, gracious waves and a rapt pose suggesting fervent prayer to the Almighty - which forcibly brings to mind the Irish adage of 'all gong and no dinner'." The Telegraph (London) 08/06/00

Thursday August 3

• LEAVING SANTA FE: After 43 years John Crosby is stepping down from running the Santa Fe Opera. "A first-rate visionary and a second-rate conductor, Crosby has run his festival like a reasonably benign dictator, amassing an extraordinary record of significant premieres to counterbalance the tourist-attraction repertory. He has done much to cultivate domestic exposure to the neglected operas of his favourite composer, Richard Strauss, and has also helped discover several generations of important American singers. Glyndebourne was never like this." The Financial Times 08/03/00

• BERLIN THROUGH AN EXPAT'S EYES: Tom Freudenheim, a Jewish American and former director of the Jewish Museum Berlin, has decided to stay in Germany after stepping down from his museum post. His views on antisemitism in Germany, the Holocaust Memorial, and differences between the arts in the U.S. and Germany. Die Welt 08/03/00

Wednesday August 2

• WILLIAM MAXWELL DIED at age 91 on Monday. Accomplished novelist and revered editor at the “New Yorker” for 40 years, Maxwell honed the prose of some of this century’s finest American writers, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, and Harold Brodkey among them. CNN 08/01/00

• AN INTERVIEW WITH STANLEY KUNITZ, the new U.S. poet laureate. First published more than 70 years ago, Kunitz, now 95, has won almost every poetry award (including the Nobel in 1959 to the National Book Award in 1995), although he’s only published a handful of books. “I write poems only when I cannot escape them, when it is so urgent I will sacrifice everything else to do it.” A new Kunitz collection is due out next year. NPR 8/01/00 [Real audio file]

• THE PLACES YOU'LL GO: Nine years after the real Dr. Seuss died, the good doctor's work makes a comeback - a new movie, new musical, even a couple of new books. "Altogether, not a bad comeback for a man who worked in a variety of advertising, film and magazine cartooning jobs well into his 50s, when he finally achieved literary stardom with his back-to-back children's books Cat and Grinch (1957). His middle name was Seuss - or was it Mischief?" Toronto Globe and Mail 08/02/00

• MODERN-DAY ROMEO AND JULIET: The opera singers Marijana Mijanovic and Kresimir Spicer are “the couple of the summer,” having thrilled audiences at Aix-en-Provence’s popular summer opera festival. “But it is also because they are a real-life Romeo and Juliet: she is a Serb, he is a Croat, and they live together in Amsterdam. New York Times 08/02/00 (one-time registration required)

• IL BEL MARCELLO: A salute to Marcello Mastroianni, on the eve of the UK’s National Film Theatre’s major retrospective of 22 of his movies. “Nowadays, if you want to sum up Italian style, that sinuous Italian charm that is so easy on the ear and eye, then it's usually Mastroianni who comes to mind.” The Guardian (London) 08/01/00

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