Exploitative 9/11 Novels, Toe Up Ballet Companies, Sustainable Dancefloors and Other Cultural Headlines

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Books: In Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man (2007), a man dressed in a suit and tie plunges headfirst from a Manhattan skyscraper just weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001… Is it possible to create art out of horror without being exploitative and tasteless?” [Commentary]

Dance/Opera: “Miami City Ballet will forgo live orchestra and perform to recorded music for the second half of its 2008-09 season to save money.” [AP]

Design: “The dutch company Sustainable Dance Club in collaboration with Paullides and the Technical University Eindhoven has invented a way for clubbers to go out and party and be less waistful. Their solution? A Sustainable Dancefloor.” [Design Spotter]

Film: “Julian Farino, best known for his work on Entourage, is in final negotiations to direct Oranges, an indie comedy being produced by Anthony Bregman. ” [THR]

Music: “No matter what Heather DeLoach does for the rest of her life — short of, say, becoming president — she will always be known as the ‘Bee Girl.’ Hell, maybe even if she becomes president. And that’s just fine with her. ” [MTV]

Television: “Italians tuning in to their state TV network this week had a rare chance to see Brokeback Mountain, the tale of true friendship between two straight cowboys.” [Guardian]

Theatre: “A recent Austrian production of Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart featured a surprise ending: The prop knife for the final scene, in which a character stabs himself in the neck, was replaced with a real one.” [Daily Telegraph]

Visual Arts: “The Republic of Peru has quietly filed a lawsuit against Yale, officially turning a nearly century-long dispute over the rightful ownership of Inca artifacts into a legal battle, the News has learned.” [YDN]

Web: “Currently Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Bill Buxton writes a regular-ish column for the Innovation channel here at BusinessWeek. In the process of working on a new piece, we got to emailing about how innovation can flourish in a downturn. Bill made the point that industrial design in the U.S was born between 1927 and 1929, i.e., right on the eve of the great depression. Now-legendary designers such as Henry Dreyfuss, Walter Dorwin Teague and Raymond Loewy all flourished in this time and as Bill noted, ‘Firms employed these folks because they brought real value. It was about survival, not visual lollipops.'” [BusinessWeek]