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Archives: Posts From November 2007

Nicholas Penny: Just What the National Gallery Needs
By Zoe Strimpel | Fri, 30 Nov 2007 at 1:24 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: The former curator of sculpture at Washington's National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, will return to London as the director of the National Gallery, it was announced earlier this week. Mr. Penny arrives for one of London's most daunting jobs, once filled by ...

BIFAs Largely Bypass Unknowns for Mainstream
By Zoe Strimpel | Thu, 29 Nov 2007 at 7:31 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Anton Corbijn's biopic of Joy Division's Ian Curtis, "Control," scooped five awards at last night's British Independent Film Awards (BIFAs) at the trendy Roundhouse in Camden, North London. The black-and-white — and none too cheerful — movie won Best ...

The Bad Sex in Fiction Award: Mailer's Last Hurrah
By Zoe Strimpel | Wed, 28 Nov 2007 at 12:11 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Norman Mailer last night won the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award with a passage from "The Castle in the Forest," a novel about Hitler from the point of view of a mysterious SS officer. Here is the winning extract, a sex scene between Hitler ...

Russian Buyers Go Full Out at Sotheby's Evening Auction
By Zoe Strimpel | Tue, 27 Nov 2007 at 9:11 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Russian art continued its market high last night with Sotheby's inaugural evening sale in the area, which made a record $52,137,295. Leading the pack was the avant-garde painter Natalia Goncharova's "Bluebells," from 1909, which sold for $6,287,576, ...

Thanksgiving in Bavaria
By Zoe Strimpel | Mon, 26 Nov 2007 at 7:53 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: BAVARIA — Southern Germany is not, perhaps, the most obvious place to spend Thanksgiving week. This is mainly because it does not offer sun or warmth, the main incentive for a Boston family to flee home at this time of year. Instead, it lavishes visitors ...

'Alice in Wonderland' in Munich
By Zoe Strimpel | Mon, 26 Nov 2007 at 7:28 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: MUNICH — Traditionally, Bavarians have been known as culture vultures. For any self-respecting Frankfurter or Munich dweller, a weekly trip to the opera, or a concert, is still the norm, if my German friends are correct. The importance of culture in ...

Indies at BIFA, Thanksgiving Turkey With All the Fixings
By Zoe Strimpel | Mon, 19 Nov 2007 at 7:51 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: The British Independent Film Awards (BIFAs) come after repeated successes for British cinema. They take place on November 28 in Camden, north London, hot on the heels of the highly praised London Film Festival and the largely sold-out Korean and Jewish ...

"Let's All Become Israel Fans!" (in Soccer if not Politics)
By Zoe Strimpel | Sun, 18 Nov 2007 at 12:26 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Israel was at the center of the British stage on Saturday. And this time it was nothing to do with politics. No, it was the other great (maybe the greatest) British preoccupation that drove Israel into the limelight. What else but soccer? The ...

Kirkenes: More Crabmeat Than Most People Will Ever See
By Zoe Strimpel | Thu, 15 Nov 2007 at 7:30 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: KIRKENES, Norway — On to Kirkenes, a mining and fishing city east of Tromsø, close to the Russian border. Vessels from the Russian port of Murmansk (250 km away) loomed in the harbor, much to the comic distaste of our anti-Russian guides. (The Russians ...

Farmed Fish, Norwegian-Style
By Zoe Strimpel | Tue, 13 Nov 2007 at 9:04 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: TROMSØ, Norway — One little thinks of Norway as a big country (or, indeed, gives the country due thought at all), but the two-hour flight from London to Oslo was matched in length by the one immediately following from Oslo to Tromsø, one of Norway's ...

Prize Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery
By Zoe Strimpel | Mon, 12 Nov 2007 at 7:05 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: The National Portrait Gallery's Photographic Portrait Prize is a chance for the work of amateurs, students, and part-timers as well as established photographers to deck the hallowed halls of one of London's most august galleries. The winner goes home ...

Transport Museum Looks to the Past and Future
By Zoe Strimpel | Mon, 12 Nov 2007 at 6:37 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: London has gone transport mad. Talk of the deliciously refurbished St. Pancras, which will fling open its doors and its tracks for high-speed rail travel to Europe on Wednesday, has sent a city already in a constant state of agitation — about the ...

"Aida" at the Coliseum: Spirited, Awash in Color, and Fun
By Zoe Strimpel | Fri, 9 Nov 2007 at 12:03 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: After a rocky season with a much-derided "Carmen," the Coliseum needed something good to happen. Luckily, that good thing did happen, on Thursday night, with the opening of "Aida," a gorgeous production of Giuseppe Verdi's tragic love story of an ...

U.K. Jewish Film Festival — Not Just for Jews
By Zoe Strimpel | Fri, 9 Nov 2007 at 1:01 AM | Permalink
Excerpt: It's all go for cinema in London at the moment. Clawing its way to mainstream eminence — not without effort — is the U.K. Jewish Film Festival, which began on a small scale in the seaside town of Brighton 11 years ago. Only in 2003 did it arrive in ...

The Fourth Plinth of Trafalgar Square Shoulders New Art
By Zoe Strimpel | Fri, 9 Nov 2007 at 12:11 AM | Permalink
Excerpt: On a different end of the installations scale from Banksy's yellow flower that went up last week in a quiet street in East London, a new 8-ton, 15-foot glass sculpture of a hotel was unveiled on Wednesday in Trafalgar Square by the London mayor Ken ...

Korean Films Test Taboos
By Zoe Strimpel | Tue, 6 Nov 2007 at 4:24 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: If the recent London Film Festival — in its 51st edition, the glitziest, most exciting to date — didn't convey London's new cinematic preeminence, then the success of the less mainstream film festivals immediately following it should. A city that can ...

One-Stop Shopping for Foodies in Mayfair
By Zoe Strimpel | Mon, 5 Nov 2007 at 4:51 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Bland as they sound, the two words "John Lewis" represent all that is reassuring and good to the well-heeled British shopper. The John Lewis Partnership owns a string of department stores around the U.K., selling the very best of everything from granite ...

Salcedo's 'Shibboleth 2007' Offers a Peek Into the Void
By Zoe Strimpel | Sun, 4 Nov 2007 at 6:06 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Much furor over the undoubtedly magnetic "crack" in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, a room that has hosted its fair share of giant towers, walls, boxes, and other major installations. The Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo's "Shibboleth 2007" is a crevice ...

Sinister Happenings, Coming to America Soon
By Zoe Strimpel | Thu, 1 Nov 2007 at 11:13 AM | Permalink
Excerpt: The best-selling author of "Labyrinth" and the woman whose name provides no end of confusion, Kate Mosse, launched her new book on Wednesday night in London. Like "Labyrinth," "Sepulchre" takes place in Southern France and echoes with the strange and ...