Australia: Aboriginal art boom fades

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Australia’s passion for Aboriginal art, once a product of breakneck economic expansion, has declined (like everything else) in the current global economic downturn. Government-imposed regulatory constraints and reporting burdens haven’t helped matters. "The market's not exactly dead," one art gallery owner said, "but it's certainly ailing.”                                         
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Seattle: Grant Cogswell, the movie

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“ … a year and a half ago I was unemployed, essentially homeless, and pushing the last of my salable possessions in a shopping cart four miles across the flats of the San Fernando Valley in order to sell them for exactly seven dollars. That was shortly before I first met Stephen Gyllenhaal.” One-time Seattle city council candidate Grant Cogswell, writing in The Stranger, recounts the strange experience of seeing his own life as a Hollywood movie.

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A history of L.A.’s future

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A book like Black Los Angeles could be expected to slice and dice the events and trends of recent turbulent years. It’s a deeper, better work of scholarship that wades into the history of this city, some of that history hundreds of years old, as a way of making sense of not just the present but the future as well. Michael E. Ross, writing in PopMatters, reviews this collection of supple, trenchant essays.
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American women: A history in style

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She’s morphed from heiress to Gibson Girl to suffragette, flapper to Bohemian, screen siren to rock icon. The styles of the evolving American woman are the basis for a sweeping exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.


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Lives in wartime:
‘Mad Men’ and ‘The Wire’

MICHAEL E. ROSS 

Two of television’s most honored not-so-guilty pleasures are back for your viewing pleasure. With their two views of domestic American combat — one happily entrenched in the sleek boardrooms of New York City in the 1960’s, the other a portrait of grim and gritty urban life closer to the present day — cable TV renews its embrace of stories well told and characters we actually give a damn about.


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Havana: ‘Optimism’ theater

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Slowly but surely, the change in presidential administrations in the United States has reawakened the reality of new artist exchanges between Cuba and North America, and the strong likelihood of more to come. For one Cuban-American director, the new stageside diplomacy means “there’s a change in the wind.” Victoria Burnett reports for The New York Times.
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London: Bolshoi ‘Spartacus’ rocks

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In spite of ancestral nods to Soviet Russia, ‘Spartacus,’ the 1968 Yuri Grigorovitch ballet, is alive and well in the hands of the Bolshoi. The production at the Royal Opera House is a muscular, physical delight, The Observer’s Luke Jennings reports.
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Nuke dread, now playing

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The nuclear apocalypse movie, a dormant subgenre of motion pictures, may be making a comeback thanks to two enterprising directors’ new films — and fresh fears of atomic catastrophe via rogue nations like Iran and North Korea. But have a little dread with your popcorn: These aren't feature films with an honor roll of A-list actors. They're documentaries. It's time to start worrying again.
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