Like most academic conferences I've experienced (not that many, but a few), it was long on pretention, but short on substance. Still, people finally, on the last day, DID raise the issue of whether short should really be considered an impediment, a kind of deficiency. To consider it so is like saying that a large painting is better than a small one. Often, small ones are better.

I have always wanted to attend the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a three week pandemonium of theatre and performance art held each August in the Scottish capital. Its original intent in 1947 was to take advantage of the audiences drawn to the cities’ official arts festivals, but by 1960 it had grown to 2,000 separate shows, ranging from the legendary “Hole in the Meadow”, a literal hole dug in a city park in which a naked man gave a 45 minute performance (each audience limited to one because of the size of the hole) to this year’s ‘The Container” by Clare Bayler, a play about “asylum, racial and religious persecution”, staged in an actual shipping container (audiences limited to 20 per performance).

June 3, 1926  April 5, 1997

In 1974, the man who was (arguably) the greatest architect of the 20th century died in a men's room in Penn Station.  His body lay unclaimed for three days in the morgue. 

Anyone who has been to Penn Station in New York City (ie half of America) must understand the sheer grotesque irony of that.  There cannot be a more irreverent, or even profane, place for an architect to die.  Not only does Penn Station defy any thought of architecture as an important human need, which makes it the ultimate abomination from the architectural point of view, but it is a desecration too, in that one of the most marvelous buildings ever built in New York City, Old  Penn station, was razed to make way for it.

http://www.nyc-archi...

http://www.imdb.com/...

Please contact members of the Texas House Committee on Culture, Recreation and Tourism and express STRONG OPPOSITION to HB 2460 Author: Flynn Title: Relating to the continuation and functions of the Texas Commission on the Arts. This bill calls for the abolition of the TCA.