Classical Music Cruise Goes Belly Up, Leaving Fans In Lurch A retired Chicago Public School teacher gets feisty after being robbed of a classical music cruise Chicago Reader 02/08/12

Meryl Streep: How Opera Training Helped Me "I learned the importance of breath. There was a thing I learned in my lessons from Estelle -- to breathe from your back. She would always say, there's room in the back -- that you expand three dimensionally. ... I use it all." Los Angeles Times 02/07/12

The Free Open-Source Textbooks That Will Save Students $70 Million "Using Rice's Connexions platform, OpenStax will offer free course materials for five common introductory classes. The textbooks are open to classes anywhere and organizers believe the programs could save students $90 million in the next five years if the books capture 10 percent of the national market." Inside Higher Ed 02/07/12

Canadian Book-Reading Program Steps In Controversy "In extending Canada Reads to include works of non-fiction for the first time since the contest's inception 10 years ago, the CBC has inadvertently transformed a friendly, domestic literary debate into a geopolitical furor focused on volatile questions of truth and justice in distant totalitarian regimes." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 02/08/12

The Art Hotel That Challenged Guests To Steal Its Art "One couple failed because they Tweeted their every move. One man attempted to hook the picture off the wall with a long broom. Having eluded such elaborate ruses, Pulp Fiction will now be donated to Crime Stoppers, a division of the police, and will be auctioned off to raise funds for crime fighting." The Art Newspaper 02/07/12

The Music That Takes Over Your Smart Phone "A startup called SonicNotify embeds inaudibly high-pitched audio signals within music or any other audio track. When a compatible app hears that signal, it triggers any available smartphone function to link you to websites, display text, bring up map locations, display a photo, let you vote on which song a performer plays next and so on." Wired 02/07/12

How Should Mike Kelley Be Remembered? "He may be an artist so identified with his own moment that his flame will gutter when individual pieces of larger enterprises are broken up and confined in permanent exhibitions. This is the context where deceased artists (without their own museums) have to compete to be noticed and live on, and it's one reason painters have an advantage in art-history books." The Wall Street Journal 02/08/12

Ten Museums Contend For This Year's £100,000 Art Prize For Innovation "M Shed in Bristol, Turner Contemporary in Margate, The Hepworth Wakefield and Glasgow's Riverside Museum are among the 10 museums in contention. The prize rewards excellence and innovation for a project completed or undertaken in the previous year." BBC 02/07/12

The Craigslist Poetry "The following are real, quirkily obtuse entries from the Missed Connections section of Charleston Craigslist, broken into lines and stanzas and minimally edited for clarity..." Charleston City Paper 02/07/12

Metropolitan Museum To Revamp Its Fifth Avenue Plaza "Now an ambitious plan" - by the design firm OLIN - "is in the works to transform this four-block-long stretch along Fifth Avenue, from 80th to 84th Street, into a more efficient, pleasing and environmentally friendly space, with new fountains, tree-shaded allées, seating areas, museum-run kiosks and softer, energy-efficient nighttime lighting." The New York Times 02/08/12

London Plan For Free Dance Training For Boys In Regular Academic Programs "The Class would be a school for boys aged 11 to 16, located in London ... [where] every pupil will take daily ballet classes as well as trying other dance classes across the week and studying an English Baccalaureate-style curriculum." The Stage (UK) 02/07/12

Ambitious Plans For A For-Profit Cultural Center In Harlem My Image Studios, in the ground floor retail space of a new condominium building on West 116th Street in Manhattan, will combine a restaurant "with three theaters for live entertainment and independent films, as well as post-production studios, all to create a $21 million 'living room' of black and Latino-flavored arts and culture." The New York Times 02/07/12

SF Opera's Nicola Luisotti Named Music Director At Naples's San Carlo "San Francisco Opera Music Director Nicola Luisotti has been appointed music director of Teatro di San Carlo of Naples, Italy, effective immediately. ... Founded in 1737, San Carlo is the oldest continuously active theater in Europe, and one of Italy's most prestigious opera houses, famous for its beauty and acoustics." San Francisco Classical Voice 02/07/12

Antoni Tapies, 88, Painter And Sculptor "[He] came to prominence in the late 1940s with richly symbolic paintings strongly influenced by Surrealist painters like Miró and Klee, a style he abandoned by the mid-1950s as he turned to what became his signature work: the heavily built-up surfaces that were often scratched, pitted and gouged and incised with letters, numbers and signs." The New York Times 02/07/12

Ai Weiwei And Herzog & de Meuron To Create 2012 Serpentine Pavilion "Four years after designing the spectacular Bird's Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing, the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei are to reunite ... to design this year's pavilion - the 12th commission in what has become a major annual event on the architecture calendar." The Guardian (UK) 02/07/12

Paula Vogel Is Sergeant At Playwriting Boot Camp "[Write] a scene that would be impossible to stage. That was the first gauntlet Paula Vogel threw down to the 30 participants in her latest roving 'boot camp' on playwriting." The New York Times 02/08/12

French Booksellers Come Up With A New Kind Of Strike "In Nicolas Sarkozy's second crisis-budget plan, which raised taxes to try to plug the deficit, he raised VAT on books from 5.5% to 7%. ... Booksellers' unions are up in arms against the measure, which comes into force in April ... Some booksellers have hinted at a possible 'labelling strike' where they simply refuse to stick on new price tags." The Guardian (UK) 02/06/12

Another Casualty Of The Arab Spring: Zaha Hadid's Business "Profits at Zaha Hadid Architects more than halved last year as the Arab spring brought several major projects to a halt. A conference centre and a complex of offices and shops in Cairo were put on hold, as was a conference hall in the Libyan capital, Tripoli." The Guardian (UK) 02/06/12

Ballerinas And Eating Disorders - They Didn't Always Go Together "Ballerinas used to be plump by modern standards; indeed, the great Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova was criticised in the late 1890s for being too thin (mocked for her long, slender limbs, she was nicknamed 'the broom' by fellow students)." My, how things have changed. (Might Balanchine bear a bit of the blame?) The Guardian (UK) 02/06/12

Want To Make Uncreative People More Creative? Pressure Them To Conform (A Little) "Admittedly, that sounds like an oxymoron; creative thinking and conformity are usually considered mutually exclusive. But newly published research finds a specific sort of arm twisting can help people who aren't terribly innovative increase their creative output. The key is pressuring them to think independently, within the confines of a group project." Miller-McCune 02/06/12

Forget The 10,000 Hours Of Practice! To Gain Expert Skill More Quickly, Use Electrodes On Your Brain For years, research neurologists have been trying to determine what goes on in the brains of top athletes, performers and others when they attain "flow" - that fully engaged state of mind in which they achieve at peak level. Now US military researchers are trying to speed up the learning process (of, for example, expert snipers) by inducing "flow" with electric stimulation. New Scientist 02/06/12

Could Future Wars Be Fought With Mind Control Weapons? "Wars of the future might be decided through manipulation of people's minds, concludes a report this week from the UK's Royal Society. It warns that the potential military applications of neuroscience breakthroughs need to be regulated more closely." New Scientist 02/07/12

Barbie, Simpsons Dolls Banned In Iran "The Islamic Republic's morality police, fighting 'Western intoxication' as the dispute over nuclear technology has raised fears of war, last month went on a drive against Barbie," and the country has since banned action figures based on characters from The Simpsons. Yet "Superman and Spiderman were still welcome in Iran - because they do battle for the oppressed." Reuters 02/06/12

And The Critical Hatchet Job Of The Year Is ... Adam Mars-Jones's review of Michael Cunningham's novel By Nightfall in Britain's The Observer. The citation for the prize, awarded by The Omnivore, says "Adam Mars-Jones's review ... was at once erudite, attentive, killingly fair-minded and viciously funny. Every one of his zingers ... is earned by the argument it arises from." The Guardian (UK) 02/07/12

Werner Herzog Insults All Chickendom From the 40-second video, Werner Herzog on Chickens: "Try to look a chicken in the eye with great intensity, and the intensity of stupidity that is looking back at you is just amazing." Slate 02/07/12 (includes slanderous video)

First: 3D Printer "Prints" A Functional Jawbone For A Woman "An 83-year-old Belgian woman is able to chew, speak and breathe normally again after a machine printed her a new jawbone. Made from a fine titanium powder sculpted by a precision laser beam, her replacement jaw has proven as functional as her own used to be before a potent infection, called osteomyelitis, all but destroyed it." New Scientist 02/06/12

Dickens Anniversary Argues For A "Slow Reading" Movement "There's no denying that Dickens's embroidered, involved sentences make increasing demands on the modern reader. The enormous success of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books and Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy shows that we still have an appetite for long, complicated stories. But Rowling's and Larsson's prose is built for speed. Unlike Dickens, there's nothing there in the way of language to stop the rapid turning of pages." The Globe & mail (Canada) 02/07/12

It's Ten Years Since UK Museums Made Museum Entry Free "Supporters of free entry point to its success in terms of increasing attendance. Across the UK visits have increased by 51% since 2000, statistics collected by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport reveal." The Art Newspaper 02/05/12

Culture Minister's Book Pulped Over Cover Image "A new book by Munira Mirza, the culture adviser to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has been withdrawn because of a legal problem over a Tate image on its cover." The Art Newspaper 02/06/12

Britain's Illiteracy Problem "Poor neighbourhoods in England are still beset by Victorian-era levels of illiteracy, the schools minister has claimed." The Guardian (UK) 02/07/12

Top-Rated Part Of SuperBowl 2012? Madonna "Overall, Madonna's show was more popular viewing by nearly a 16 percent margin over the game itself - and TiVo said it wasn't because so many viewers rewound to watch rapper M.I.A give them the finger, though the company is checking to see if the controversy encourages those who recorded the Super Bowl to go back to that moment and see it for themselves." The Hollywood Reporter 02/07/12

M.I.A.'s Middle Finger Salute During Super Bowl Broadcast Unlikely To Rouse FCC "Right now, the U.S. Supreme Court is in the midst of considering the FCC's constitutional allowances to police indecency, and until that happens, the rulebook is in flux as the 2nd Circuit has already struck down some of the agency's policies on naughty words on broadcast television." The Hollywood Reporter 02/07/12