Israeli actors to boycott new West Bank theatre

60 actors, writers and directors argue that performing in occupied territories would legitimise illegal settlements

Ariel Turgeman, manager of the theatre being built in Ariel, a West Bank settlement, which has prompted a boycott by Israeli actors.
Photograph: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

More than 60 have joined the protest over plans by Israel's national theatre, the Habima, and other leading companies to stage performances in Ariel, a settlement 12 miles inside the West Bank. The letter, to Israel's culture minister, Limor Livnat, says the new centre for performing arts in Ariel, which is due to open in November after 20 years in construction, would "strengthen the settlement enterprise".

"We want to express our dismay with the intention of the theatres' managements to perform in the new auditorium in Ariel and hereby declare that we will refuse to perform in the city, as in any other settlement." Israel's theatre companies should "pursue their prolific activity inside the sovereign territory of the state of Israel within the boundaries of the Green Line".

The actors' letter follows the refusal of some international artists to perform in Israel because of its occupation of the Palestinian territories. Earlier this summer, Elvis Costello cancelled concerts in Israel, citing the "intimidation, humiliation or much worse on Palestinian civilians in the name of national security". The Pixies, Gil Scott Heron, Santana and Klaxons have also withdrawn from performances.

Ariel, home to almost 20,000 people, was founded in 1978 deep in the West Bank. Israel wants it to remain on its side of any border resulting from peace negotiations with the Palestinians. All settlements on occupied territory are illegal under international law.


Read the whole story at guardian.co.uk, by Harriet Sherwood

Reward Offered in Case of Missing van Gogh Painting

The Van Gogh painting that remains missing from an Egyptian museum.
Associated Press

An Egyptian telecommunications magnate has announced he is offering a reward for information leading to the recovery of a van Gogh painting that was stolen from a museum in Giza, while Egyptian authorities said they would improve security measures at all of their museums.

Naguib Sawiris, the billionaire chairman of the wireless network company Orascom Telecom, said he would pay a reward of a million Egyptian pounds (about $175,000) for information on the van Gogh, Reuters reported. The painting, known as “Poppy Flowers” or “Vase and Flowers,” is valued at more than $50 million. The work was stolen Saturday from the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum, where it hung in a room with only some working cameras and no working alarms.

Read the whole story at The New York Times, by Dave Itzkoff

Critic's Notebook: Eli Broad and the Diller Scofidio + Renfro museum design

The news that New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro has finally, officially been named architect of the new Broad Collection museum in downtown Los Angeles proves a couple of things quite clearly. One is that in a design competition as constrained and carefully controlled as the one Eli Broad has been running, a few big conceptual ideas dramatically presented — rather than an inventive treatment of a building's shape — can go a long way. Another is that a little flattery never hurts.

Because Broad from the start gave the six firms vying for the museum job such tight parameters, the high-powered private competition — which also included Rem Koolhaas, Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and Tokyo firm SANAA — essentially produced six versions of a steel-framed box. (I was given exclusive access to the competition proposals a few weeks ago, before Broad made a final decision.) Each of the designs featured a rectangular museum building rising above a parking garage, open to the sidewalk along Grand Avenue and topped with skylit galleries.

The veil would be lifted up at two corners, with a particularly large opening at the corner of 2nd and Grand, where the museum comes nearest Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall. The architects see that gesture, in part, as a flirtatious one in the direction of the concert hall.


Read the whole story at Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic, by Christopher Hawthorne

British literary critic Frank Kermode dies at age 90

Frank Kermode taught at Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Cambridge University. (Orion Publishing)

Frank Kermode, 90, an English literary critic who wrote masterfully, and in a digestible fashion, on a range of interests, including Shakespeare, the Bible and Kurt Vonnegut, died Aug. 17 in Cambridge, England. No cause of death was reported.

Considered one Britain's most prolific and admired academics -- he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991 -- Mr. Kermode's critiques were often praised for their graceful prose and fresh perspective. He wrote his first book at age 20 and his last, on the works of E.M. Forster, this past year.

He became embroiled in controversy for a short time in the 1960s as the editor of the British literary and political journal Encounter, after reports came out that the magazine was secretly funded by the CIA. Mr. Kermode said that he was ignorant of the scheme and promptly resigned from his post.

John Frank Kermode was born Nov. 29, 1919, in Douglas, on the Isle of Man, about 80 miles off the west coast of England in the Irish Sea.

Read the whole story at The Washington Post, by T. Rees Shapiro

Geraldine Brooks to receive the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's lifetime achievement award

On Thursday, the organizers of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize announced that this year's lifetime achievement award will be presented to Geraldine Brooks. The Australian journalist-turned-novelist has written about war as both fact and fiction. Her second novel, "March," won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize, first awarded in 2006, was inspired by achievements of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords to bring the war in Bosnia to an end. Previous lifetime achievement winners include Elie Wiesel, Taylor Branch and Studs Terkel.

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize will also award prizes to fiction and nonfiction books; those in competition are being read by judges now. The Dayton Literary Peace Prizes -- and lifetime achievement award -- will be presented Nov. 7 in Dayton, Ohio.

Photo: Geraldine Brooks.
Read the whole story at Los Angeles Times

Frank Kermode, 90, a Critic Who Wrote With Style, Is Dead

Photograph: Miriam Berkley
Frank Kermode about 1998.

Frank Kermode, who rose from humble origins to become one of England’s most respected and influential critics, died Tuesday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 90.

His death was announced by The London Review of Books, which he helped create and to which he frequently contributed.

The author or editor of more than 50 books published over five decades, Mr. Kermode was probably best known for his studies of Shakespeare. But his range was wide, reaching from Beowulf to Philip Roth, from Homer to Ian McEwan, from the Bible to Don DeLillo. Along the way he devoted individual volumes to John Donne, Wallace Stevens and D. H. Lawrence. Unrelentingly productive, he published “Concerning E. M. Forster” just last December.

Mr. Kermode’s critics sometimes faulted him for a deliberately difficult style and what Mr. Lodge called “intellectual dandyism.” Although in “The Art of Telling” Mr. Kermode suggested that innovative French approaches to literary criticism like structuralism and deconstructionism might eventually find at least some place in the mainstream, he took to task some of the more radical attempts to subvert traditional texts through gender or racial perspectives. In “An Appetite for Poetry” (Harvard, 1989) he reaffirmed his belief in the value of reading literary classics as a way of gauging both ideals of permanence and the forces of change.


Read the whole story at The New York Times, by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

A Dream of a Contemporary Art Museum on the Jersey Shore

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Robin Parness Lipson, at home with Matthew Chambers’s “Rembrandt,” left, and “Follow Your Eyes,” by Simone Lucas.

ASBURY PARK, N.J. — When Robin Parness Lipson walks along the boardwalk here, she does not focus on the shirtless old men with fishing poles, the concrete relics of failed condominium developments or the pigeons who have taken up roost in the neglected Beaux-Arts landmarks along the shore.

What she sees are the bustling new restaurants and gift shops and the energy of a bright future being shaped. And as part of that future, she sees her baby, her dream, the New Jersey Museum of Contemporary Art: a glittering monument to the idea that New Jersey is not just the home of Snooki and the Situation, or feuding housewives, or the Bada Bing Club, but a place where cultured, philanthropic people can build something that makes a difference.

Ms. Lipson also has a dozen young artists, curators, event planners and others who are part of her dream. These volunteers have done everything from build a Web site, njmoca.org, to plan an inaugural exhibition and gala on Oct. 23.

Ms. Lipson noted that while New Jersey had many regional museums, it had nothing that drew international tourism.

Read the whole story at The New York Times, by Kate Taylor

Do Arts at Governors Island Need Governing?

Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

EDWARD ROTHSTEIN There are two phrases that Leslie Koch, the president of the Trust for Governors Island, has used to explain her vision of how culture can make this peculiar and beautiful place more integral to the lives of New Yorkers. She has spoken of the island as a “playground for the arts” and she has talked about its character as a “summer vacation with irony.”

JON PARELES Ed, you’re extrapolating way too far here: And those visitors, “must represent the diversity of the surrounding city. So culture here must be popular; it must be talked about; it must represent many different tastes. It must be, in other words, democratic and undemanding.”

CHARLES ISHERWOOD My experience of Governors Island as a cultural destination this summer was probably a little different. I saw “The Demons,” part of the Lincoln Center Festival, which as many probably know was a full-day marathon production. We got on the ferry at 10 a.m. and off it at somewhere around midnight. In between was nine hours of theater and a couple of meal breaks.

And others, read the whole story at The New York Times

Saudi Labor Minister Algosaibi Dies of Cancer at 70

Mr Algosaibi, 70, was a former ambassador to London and a confidant of King Abdullah
Photo: GETTY

Aug. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Saudi Arabian Labor Minister Ghazi Algosaibi died today at the age of 70 after a career as a diplomat, government minister and author, Al-Arabiya news channel reported.

Algosaibi was admitted to Riyadh’s King Faisal Specialist Hospital about a month ago for treatment for cancer, the Dubai- based news channel said on its website, without saying where it got the information. He had received medical care in the U.S., it said.

Read the whole story at Bloomberg Businessweek, by Maher Chmaytelli and Glen Carey

Negatives 'authenticated' as Ansel Adams' work — but by whom?

Rick Norsigian couldn't win over experts on the photographer, so his authentication report was by two relative unknowns. And even they doubt the find is worth $200 million.

Rick Norsigian holding up a print from the found negatives. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times / July 27, 2010)

The case of the "lost" Ansel Adams negatives that purportedly are worth $200 million has turned into a public argument between Rick Norsigian, who found them at a Fresno garage sale 10 years ago, and the great photographer's family and former associates and leading art-photography dealers, who deny that Adams took them.

It was important for Norsigian to trace a path for the negatives to L.A., where Art Center was then based, because the man he bought them from in Fresno in 2000 had said he acquired them in the 1940s at a warehouse salvage sale in Los Angeles.

"It will never be possible to know why [Adams] left them in storage," Alt said in the report. Adams' associates say the photographer, known for safeguarding his work in a bank vault or in a concrete bunker behind his house, would not have let 65 of his pictures vanish.


Read the whole story at Los Angeles Times, by Mike Boehm

David L. Wolper, Producer of Groundbreaking ‘Roots’, Is Dead at 82

Laurie Wierzbicki/BEI for Warner Bros., via Reuters

David L. Wolper, an award-winning movie and television producer best known for the groundbreaking mini-series “Roots,” died on Tuesday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 82.

The cause was congestive heart failure and complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Dale Olson, Mr. Wolper’s publicist.

Mr. Wolper produced hundreds of films and television shows, including the hit 1983 mini-series “The Thorn Birds,” a romantic drama set in Australia, with Richard Chamberlain and Rachel Ward. But the work with which he was most closely associated was “Roots,” shown in eight parts on ABC in 1977.

Read the whole story at The New York Times, by Richard Severo

Building Plans at Columbia’s Athletic Complex Stir Unease Among Neighbors

Ruby Washington/The New York Times

While a full-blown tempest has swirled around Columbia University’s plans for a satellite campus in Harlem, a teapot-size storm has been brewing over the university’s more modest plans involving two celebrity architects in Inwood.

Starting in the 1920s, when Lou Gehrig was playing baseball on Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus, the university began moving its outdoor athletic fields to the northern tip of Manhattan. Now, the Baker Field complex, where football fans perennially come to watch the Lions lose to other Ivy League teams, stretches to 26 acres around 218th Street, encompassing baseball, softball and soccer fields; tennis courts; a track; and a boathouse.

Inwood neighbors say they understand the problem but contend the design, by the acclaimed architect Steven Holl, a Columbia professor, is out of character with the sedate Art Deco and Tudor-style apartment buildings to the south. The angular Holl building would be set partly on stilts and accented by terraces and stepped ramps that echo urban fire escapes.

“It does not relate well to the community,” said Gail Addiss, 61, an architect who lives opposite Baker Field. “It’s similar to Frank Gehry architecture — large metal things whose glare is going to cause more brightness to reflect into people’s windows.”


Read the whole story at The New York Times, by Joseph Berger

The jock in chief, getting his fill of sports?

"You must always remember that the president is about 6."

This advice was offered more than 100 years ago by a British friend of Teddy Roosevelt's. The nation has matured since then, and so has the presidency. Now the president is about 12.

While President Obama's wife and younger daughter were conducting international relations in Majorca on Sunday with Spain's King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia, the commander in chief was at home hosting a fantasy camp for himself. He and his buddies had a birthday weekend barbecue and basketball game with LeBron James, Alonzo Mourning, Magic Johnson and other legends of the sport.

Read the whole story at The Washington Post, by Dana Milbank

The Hand of a Master Architect

From left, Raj Ahuja, John Burgee and Philip Johnson in 1987

Photo: Rich Addicks/The Atlanta Journal Constitution

A huge and previously unknown trove of archival material from Philip Johnson’s architectural practice — including his hand-drawn sketches for towers that helped define postmodern architecture — is to be put up for sale by one of Johnson’s former partners, who has had them in storage for years.

The cache contains more than 25,000 design sketches, working drawings, renderings and photographs from the second half of Johnson’s architectural career, covering more than 120 projects from 1968 to 1992. While there are collections of his early work at the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum and the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, documentation from this later period, in which he became known for his tall buildings, is much rarer.

Mr. Ahuja, the archive’s owner, was a former design partner of Johnson’s. An Indian-born architect, he joined the firm as a young man in 1971 and ran its Iranian office before becoming a partner with Johnson and John Burgee in 1984. During his tenure Mr. Ahuja developed a strong affinity for Johnson, who left the partnership for a consulting role in 1986 and left the practice entirely five years later.

Read the whole story at The New York Times, by Robin Pogrebin

Sketching a Future for Brooklyn Museum

THOUGH it resides in a prime example of traditional museum architecture — a Beaux-Arts building designed in 1893 by McKim, Mead & White — there is little stale or stodgy about the Brooklyn Museum.

For more than a century the museum has been one of the country’s most important cultural institutions, and for more than a decade it has also courted controversy.

In 1999 the museum created a maelstrom by exhibiting a painting that depicted the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung, prompting the mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to threaten to cut city financing. In 2002 it hosted an exhibition featuring props, models, costumes and characters from the “Star Wars” films that struck some reviewers as particularly lowbrow. And five years ago it added an unapologetically brash, modern glass entrance to the Old World exterior of its building.

Apart from the discussion over its mission and future, the museum, which operates on a $28 million budget, has had many successes in recent years, from educating school children, to mounting critically acclaimed shows and introducing countless visitors to paintings by Gilbert Stuart, landscapes by Bierstadt, the mummy of Demetrios and other works in its permanent collection.

Many of the experts who agreed to assess the museum’s efforts were effusive in their support for the institution, whose innovations they embraced. Others suggested changes in its approach.


Read the whole story at The New York Times, by Robin Pogrebin
Photo: Todd Heisler/The New York Times

After the Internet, There’s Always Art

TIM NYE, the bon vivant, Park Avenue heir and Chelsea gallery owner, has a theory about art openings. “You’ve got to do something that makes them say ‘Wow.’ ”

By that standard, the festivities for Swell, a three-gallery exhibition on surfing-inspired art that opened last month, lived up to expectations.

Mr. Nye is not your usual scion of a New York real estate fortune, going about town, quietly sprinkling money around art fairs and museum boards. He has always tended to make big professional statements. In the 1990s, he earned millions of his own, as a high-flying dot-com entrepreneur, when the Web was in its unprofitable infancy.

Looking back, Mr. Nye said that he spread himself too thin — a lesson he is now trying to apply to his gallery. Until recently, for example, he curated each show as a one-off, reflecting his enthusiasm of the day, rather than cultivating a stable of artists.

Read the whole story at The New York Times, by Alex Williams

Photo: Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Oscar-nominated, Robert F. Boyle Dies at 100

Robert F. Boyle, a four-time Oscar-nominated production designer best known for his work on Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" and "The Birds" and Norman Jewison's "Fiddler on the Roof," has died. He was 100.

Boyle died of natural causes Sunday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after a two-day stay, said family spokeswoman Nicole Bamber.

Among his other major motion picture credits as a production designer are “The Birds,” “Winter Kills,” “The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas,” “Private Benjamin,” “Portnoy’s Complaint,” “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “In Cold Blood,” “How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying,” “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming,” “The Shootist” and the original “Cape Fear.”

Robert Boyle was born October 10, 1909, in Los Angeles and was a graduate of the School of Architecture of the University of Southern California (1933). He began his art direction career that year at Paramount Studios moving from there to Universal Studios. In 1941 Hitchcock chose him to be the art director on his “Saboteur” film. He served as a member of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for nine years and was a two-term president of the Art Directors Guild.

He is survived by his daughters, Emily Boyle-Biddle and Susan Licon; and three grandchildren.

Source: www.hollywoodnews.com, www.kansascity.com

Mitch Miller, music innovator and host of Sing Along With Mitch,' dies at 99

Miller died Saturday after a short illness at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said his daughter, Margaret Miller Reuther. He made a career switch from playing to producing in the late 1940s by becoming A&R (artists and repertoire) director at Mercury Records, a small label that he turned into a major force in the industry.

Miller strongly disagreed with Sinatra's accusations then - and continued to do so decades later.

"When I came to Columbia, he was already at the nadir of his career," Miller told the Chicago Tribune in 1987. "He had lost his television show, he had lost his movie contract, he was chasing after Ava (Gardner), he was behind in his income taxes. In short, his records would not sell, his voice was gone."


Read the whole story at Kansas City.

Elaine Stritch in "A Little Night Music."

When it opened in December, there were raves for the three leads -- Catherine Zeta-Jones, Angela Lansbury and Alexander Hanson -- but much criticism, including mine, of director Trevor Nunn's minimalist approach, which included visually drab sets, monochromatic costumes and dim lighting design.

Well, the production elements remain the same, but the two lead replacements, Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch, have enlivened the proceedings immeasurably. What before was an undeniably moving experience has now become even richer, filled with a humor that too often was lacking in its first incarnation. Peters and Stritch are beloved Broadway icons, and their performances here illustrate the
reasons why.

Based on Ingmar Bergman's film Smiles of a Summer Night, A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC is set in a weekend country house in turn of the century Sweden, bringing together surprising liaisons, long simmering passions and a taste of love's endless possibilities. Hailed as witty and wildly romantic, the story centers on the elegant actress Desirée Armfeldt and the spider's web of sensuality, intrigue and desire that surrounds her.

A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC - featuring a score by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler - originally opened in 1973 at Broadway's Shubert Theatre and ran for 601 performances. Produced and directed by Harold Prince, the production garnered six Tony Awards® including Best Musical and Best Original Score. The Sondheim score features one of the composer's best-known songs, "Send in the Clowns," as well as
"Every Day a Little Death," "The Miller's Son" and "A Weekend in the
Country."

Photo: Joan Marcus via Bloomberg
Source: www.broadwayworld.com, www.reuters.com, www.bloomberg.com

'American Idol'

The revolving door on the "American Idol" judges' table may be starting to spin out of control. On the heels of Thursday's shocking news that Ellen DeGeneres would be leaving "Idol" after just one year on the panel, TMZ reported later in the day that two-season veteran Kara DioGuardi had been fired from the show.




Reps for Lopez and Tyler could not be reached for comment. Fox is widely expected to announce the makeup of the new "Idol" judges' panel on Monday at the Television Critics Association event.

Lopez and Tyler are just the latest names to surface in connection with the vacancies on the "Idol" panel in the wake of the departure of original lead judge Simon Cowell at the end of season nine and DeGeneres' unexpected bailout. Among the other musicians reportedly in the mix are Justin Timberlake and Elton John (whose reps both denied they were considering the move), Harry Connick Jr., Chris Isaak and, most unlikely, loquacious grunge godmother Courtney Love.

Source: www.mtv.com