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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Rio de Janeiro: Samba, samba, 365!

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Insanely danceable, eminently exportable, the samba has become Rio’s infectious contribution to world dance and culture. The world’s obsession with Carnival only skims the surface of a dance and lifestyle that’s integral to lives in Rio all year long. Sibel Tinar of The Rio Times reports.


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Comcast-NBC Universal merger plans have encountered a setback, by way of the FCC’s demands for more information from both companies (More in The Huffington Post)

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A year after his death, Michael Jackson still fascinates. This fall, 12 unseen portraits of the King of Pop go up for auction (More at EW.com)

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Updike: A mind at work

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For more than 50 years, in novels, poetry and short stories, John Updike plumbed the psyche of middle America with a body of work as passionate, perspicacious and voluminous as any writer in American history. It’s only natural that there must be a personal archives. Sam Tanenhaus of The New York Times examines the intellect behind the Updike archives. “I was recently allowed an advance look, conducted over three days in Houghton’s reading room, long enough to sample a range of the holdings (among them typescripts of early short stories rejected by The Atlantic and Harper’s) and to confirm that they hold the keys to Updike’s literary universe. The papers also suggest that Updike was a more complex artist — and person — than he chose to admit.”

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Survivor: Sarah Palin

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TLC, the cable channel with a yen for reality programming pegged to women TV viewers, gets set to start work on an eight-episode Mark Burnett-produced series starring conservative lightning rod and political personality Sarah Palin. For TLC, it’s a decision that’s all of a piece with the desires of its middle-class audience. But the choice may bring as much heat to the channel as to the subject of the series. The Los Angeles Times’ Scott Collins reports.


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‘Red,’ ‘Memphis’ lead a Tony affair

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”Red” and “Memphis” paced the field at Sunday’s Tony Awards ceremony in New York, winning 10 Tonys between them for best play and best musical. Hollywood came to Broadway: Film stars Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Scarlet Johansson were winners as well. The 1983 musical "La Cage aux Folles" won as best musical revival, becoming the only musical to win top Tonys for each of three turns on the Great White Way. David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter reports.


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U.K.: Big Brother bows out

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The British show, a guilty viewing pleasure that defined the U.K.'s take on reality television (spawning Jade Goody and the cult of citizen celebrity), ends its run 13 weeks from now, its producers have announced.

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Los Angeles: Jazz lives!

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For author and longtime jazz aficionado Tom Nolan, Los Angeles is a hotbed of jazz, the same way it used to be decades ago, back when Central Avenue was the main artery of the city's jazz music scene: “You can still find it all over the Southland — you just may have to look a little harder.”

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Radio's indie darling

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National Public Radio, bastion of a scholarly, liberal, Birkenstocked brand of cool, has lately seen the benefits of its 2007 launch of NPR Music — among them, the imprimatur of various alt-music talents who use the site, bypassing iTunes and going straight for the original social media: the radio.

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