Sex & Violence – News Syndication

Dorotheum will hold its first auction exclusively spotlighting Austrian modern design in Vienna later this month.

“We are doing pioneer work,” says Gerti Draxler, the specialist who has made Austria’s biggest auction house into a major international player in the field of modern and contemporary design.

Taking place Feb. 29, “Austrian Design” will have a strong focus on pieces from the 1920s to the 1960s, decades which Ms. Draxler suggests haven’t had the attention they deserve.

“A lot of high-quality objects are little-known internationally. There is much to be discovered,” she says, adding that now is the perfect time to launch a dedicated sale aimed at making international collectors aware of modern Austrian design’s potential. “People today are looking for little-known works that are fresh to the market.”

The market is full of “sleepers”—objects whose value isn’t recognized—Ms. Draxler says, explaining that she hopes that the sale will bring pieces out in the open as Austrian families wake up to these treasures, laying a basis for regular auctions in the future.

In the 168-lot sale will be works by architect and designer Josef Frank, who, in 1925, co-founded Haus & Garten, a leading furnishing house in Vienna noted for its lightweight wooden furniture and colorful textiles. A cherry wood, reclining armchair (circa 1925-26) with its original, hand-woven fabric is estimate at €4,500-€5,500. In 1933, Frank fled from the Nazis, leaving Austria to live in Sweden. He became a Swedish citizen in 1939 and is credited with having an extensive influence on design there. From his early Swedish work will be an Egyptian-style stool of polished walnut and brown leather with brass studs, created in 1941 for the interior-decorating company Svenskt Tenn (estimate: €3,000-€4,000).

Among designer and painter Carl Auböck’s most memorable works are his tree-trunk tables. In the auction will be a rare model from 1949 featuring a walnut-slab resting on four straight steel legs (estimate: €3,400-€4,200). From the same year will be his stained beech hallstand with brass hooks (estimate: €600-€900).

Bringing light into the sale will be “Sun,” a chandelier from the 1950s, with 16 bulbs stretching out like sun rays (estimate: €1,500-€2,200). The chandelier was designed and manufactured by J. T. Kalmar, a firm that created lights for the Burgtheater, Vienna State Opera and Vienna Stock Exchange. The firm produced lighting that was aesthetic, functional and of high craftsmanship. A fun ensemble from circa 1950 will be a bar by interior designer Oskar Riedel, which comprises a wall bracket, mirrored display cabinet, two tables with illuminable glass tops and three stools (estimate: €5,500-€6,500). Riedel was editor of the magazine “Das Moderne Heim” and a guru of home decorating.

Courtesy of Dorotheum, Vienna

Chair (circa 2002) by Franz West. Estimate: €4,000-€5,000.

Dorotheum’s catalog cover features a prototype of an armchair designed by architect Walter E. Gindele. It is a striking piece made of brilliant blue straps from 1960 (estimate: €1,800-€2,200).

Later decades are also represented. A so-called “Vodööl” seat object (1989) designed by Coop Himmelb(lau) for Vitra sets an offbeat note. Considered an important object of deconstructivist design, a look-alike of Le Corbusier’s famous seat “Grand Comfort” balances drunkenly on girders (estimate: €8,000-€10,000). “It’s very comfortable,” Ms. Draxler says.

Meanwhile, a fourfold, corrugated cardboard screen decorated with mysterious collages of faces, a key and full-length mirror was designed by Los Angles-based, Austrian artist Hubert Schmalix in 1990 (estimate: €2,800-€3,500). A television cabinet covered in canary-yellow leather, designed in 2000 by Anna-Lülja Praun, is expected to fetch €5,000-€8,000. And artist Franz West’s chair from circa 2002, with colorful, woven plastic, geometric bands, is valued at €4,000-€5,000. Ms. Draxler notes: “Franz West springs the divide between art and functional design.”

Write to Margaret Studer at wsje.weekend@wsj.com

New York

It ought to be good news that “Porgy and Bess” is back on Broadway for the first time in 35 years. Sad to say, the new version, which is billed by express order of the Gershwin brothers’ estates as “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” is a sanitized, heavily cut rewrite that strips away the show’s essence so as to render it suitable for consumption by 21st-century prigs. If you’ve never seen or heard “Porgy,” you might well find this version blandly pleasing. Otherwise, you’ll be appalled.

The “Porgy” “problem,” if you want to call it that, is twofold. “Porgy and Bess” is a full-scale opera, not a musical—an uncut performance runs for 3½ hours—and it is written in dialect, which makes some modern-day listeners squirm. Hence this nannyish adaptation, in which Suzan-Lori Parks has neutered DuBose Heyward’s book to make the characters seem more dignified. (Old version: “Crown dead, ain’t he?” New version: “Crown is dead. Or do you know different?”) Among other ludicrously euphemistic touches, the grievously crippled Porgy, who in the opera must ride around on a goat-drawn cart, now walks on his own with what Ms. Parks calls “a modest cane,” suggesting that there’s nothing wrong with the poor fellow that couldn’t be fixed up by a visit to his friendly neighborhood chiropractor. Diedre L. Murray has done comparable damage to the score, tarting up some numbers, “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” (pardon me, “I Got Plenty of Nothing”) in particular, almost beyond recognition. Her musical tampering is tasteless, condescending and, above all, unnecessary: Anyone who thinks that George Gershwin’s great score needs to be “modernized” in order to make it palatable to Broadway audiences is by definition unqualified to touch a note of it.

Diane Paulus and Ronald K. Brown, the director and choreographer, have given this Disney-style “Porgy” an emotionally null staging that is utterly devoid of any sense of place. You’d never guess from looking at Riccardo Hernandez’s anonymously contemporary set that “Porgy and Bess” takes place in a South Carolina ghetto tenement circa 1930. Much to my surprise, Audra McDonald’s Bess is prim and juiceless, not at all the sort of woman you’d expect to show up at a crap game wearing a red dress. Norm Lewis is vastly more convincing as Porgy, though his part has been rewritten to disguise the fact that he couldn’t have sung the opera-house version (he doesn’t have the high notes). David Alan Grier is too polite as Sporting Life—you barely notice him—but the other roles are strongly sung, and the pit orchestra, conducted by Constantine Kitsopoulos, digs into what’s left of the score with invigorating force.

I’m no “Porgy” purist. The best production that I’ve seen in recent years was the small-scale staging directed by Charles Newell at Chicago’s Court Theatre last spring, a passionate two-act chamber opera performed on a dirt-plain unit set reminiscent of a backwoods church. But Mr. Newell’s compact version was true to the show’s spirit, whereas the creators of “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” despite their elaborate claims of admiration, seem not to like it very much. According to Ms. Paulus, their purpose in rewriting “Porgy” was “to strengthen the piece dramatically.” It takes a lot of gall to suppose that you can improve a masterpiece, and even more talent to get away with it. They’ve got the gall—but that’s all.

***

Fort Myers, Fla.

“God of Carnage,” whose film version was released a couple of weeks ago, had already been making the regional-theater rounds for the past year and a half. Small wonder: Yasmina Reza’s four-character stage farce, which tells the tale of two well-heeled married couples who come to blows after their children get into a playground scrap, is a lightweight, deftly wrought comedy of bad manners that can be mounted without breaking the bank (it requires a single set). Having reveled in Matthew Warchus’s star-studded 2009 Broadway production, I was curious to see how “God of Carnage” would hold up when played by less familiar faces, so I flew down to Fort Myers to check out the Florida Repertory Theatre’s production.

I’m delighted to report that Florida Rep’s staging, directed with hair-trigger precision by Dennis Lee Delaney, is at least as good as the Broadway version, and better in one respect: The casting is less predictable. On Broadway, the presence of James Gandolfini and Jeff Daniels signaled from the start that the husbands weren’t as nice as they looked. Not so Craig Bockhorn and Chris Clavelli, whose transformation into beasts of prey is a well-kept surprise. Shelley Delaney is properly insipid as Mr. Clavelli’s mousy wife, and Carrie Lund couldn’t be better as the self-righteous hostess who disintegrates into sniveling hysterics as soon as she knocks back a stiff tot of rum.

Mr. Delaney’s staging is so fine that you could use it to teach students how to direct a farce—every piece of body language tells—and Robert F. Wolin’s ultramoderne living-room set tells you all you need to know about the social pretensions of the characters before they’ve said a word out loud.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, blogs about theater and the other arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

Managing the same baseball team for 10 years is as rare as getting 3,000 hits. Since 1900, only 28 men have done either. So the three-year extension Joe Maddon signed this week to extend his tenure to a full decade with the Tampa Bay Rays (through 2015) puts him on a path to join select company.

Currently, just two active managers have lasted 10 or more years as their team’s skipper: the Twins’ Ron Gardenhire and the Angels’ Mike Scioscia. The recently retired Tony La Russa managed to last that long with two teams—the A’s and the Cardinals. Of the 141 men who have managed in the big leagues since 1990, only six others have hung on with the same team for 10-plus years.

Historically, there’s no touching Connie Mack, who managed the Philadelphia Athletics for 50 years. But it’s hardly fair to compare him to other managers, since Mack also owned the A’s for most of his tenure. Mack lost more games than he won (.486 lifetime), though he won five World Series.

Maddon, who is entering his seventh year with Tampa, has already won two manager-of-the-year awards. He’s done so while sharing a division with the Yankees and Red Sox. Despite finishing last his first two years, Maddon has already lifted his Rays record above .500 (.509)—perhaps his most impressive achievement.

—Michael Salfino

By MICHELLE KUNG

Four films from different genres helped boost box office sales in the pre-Valentine’s Day weekend, continuing a recent streak of Hollywood releases performing above expectations. The romantic drama “The Vow” led the pack with $41.7 million.

The quartet of new films—”The Vow,” from Sony Corp.’s Screen Gems and Spyglass Entertainment; thriller “Safe House,” from Comcast Corp.’s Universal Pictures; “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island,” from Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. Pictures; and a rerelease of Twentieth Century Fox’s “Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace” in 3-D—all earned more than $20 million, according to early estimates by movie studios.

The films helped bring the weekend’s overall take to roughly $190 million—a 27.2% increase from the same period last year, according to film tracking firm Exhibitor Relations Co.

The last time four new films opened over $20 million each was in December 2008, when holiday films like “Marley & Me” and “Bedtime Stories” helped bump up the box office.

“The Vow,” which exceeded studio expectations, was made for roughly $30 million. The drama stars Channing Tatum as a devoted husband trying to help his wife, played by Rachel McAdams, regain her memory after a car accident.

The majority of the film’s audience was female, who made up 79% of ticket buyers. Fifty-five percent of the audience was under the age of 25.

According to Rory Bruer, Sony’s president of worldwide distribution, “The Vow” also had the highest opening ever for a film released under Sony’s Screen Gems label and is poised to perform well on Valentine’s Day and the following weekend.

Going into the weekend, Mr. Bruer says the studio felt good about “The Vow” but was also, in light of multiple competing films, asking itself how many people could actually go to the movies. The answer was “quite a lot,” he says, adding that the solid overall weekend “bodes well for the industry.”

In second place, Universal’s $85 million thriller “Safe House” grossed $39.3 million from 3,119 theaters in North America. Audiences were evenly split between males and females, with 84% citing star Denzel Washington, who plays a villain, as their primary reason for seeing the film, according to market research provided by Nikki Rocco, the president of Universal Pictures distribution.

The film’s opening also represents the second-highest of Mr. Washington’s career, following the $43.6 million start of “American Gangster” in 2007. That film was also released by Universal.

The film also took in $10.2 million from 25 smaller international territories, bringing its world-wide cumulative total to $49.5 million.

Warner Bros.’s $79 million “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island,” took third place with $27.6 million, an opening that exceeds the $21 million debut of the original family film, which opened in 2008.

The film’s audience was evenly split between males and females and 74% saw the film in 3-D, says Dan Fellman, Warner Bros.’ president of domestic distribution. Mr. Fellman adds that the film was boosted by positive word-of-mouth, as evidenced by the film’s 94% uptick in sales Saturday from Friday.

The presence of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was also a major drawing factor for audiences, says Mr. Fellman. The audience interest bodes well for other franchises that have added Mr. Johnson to their casts this year.

Two Fox releases rounded out the top five. The studio’s rerelease of George Lucas‘s “The Phantom Menace” grossed $23 million in its first weekend, and the sci-fi thriller “Chronicle” earned $12.3 million, bringing its cumulative gross to $40.2 million after two weekends.

Both Twentieth Century Fox and The Wall Street Journal are owned by News Corp.

Write to Michelle Kung at michelle.kung@wsj.com

By ERIN MCKEAN

Getting Your Goat

wether

What kind of animal was this? A kid, wether or doeling is good. A nanny or billy goat—also called a buck—means it could be tough and gamey.

—”Cooking & Eating: Get Your Goat On,” Off Duty, Feb. 4

A wether is a castrated goat (or sheep); it’s probably related to a Latin word for “calf.” A doeling is a young female goat that has not been bred.

Sound Generation

echo boomers

One way builders have been trying to do that is by “right-sizing” their homes, or building smaller, more efficient dwellings that are more appealing to the supposedly more urban-minded and environmentally conscious young buyers, who are referred to as “Generation Y” or the “echo boomers.”

—
“Builder Economists Push Back the Bottom of the Housing Market…Again,” Developments blog, WSJ.com, Feb. 8

Echo boomers (so-called because their parents were baby boomers) are also known as “Millennials” or “Generation Next” and are usually considered to include those born in the 1980s.

Skeleton Crew

osteoclast

The drugs target a protein called RANK Ligand, which helps regulate cells called osteoclasts that break down bone.

—”FDA Panel Votes Against Expanding Use of Amgen Drug Xgeva,” WSJ.com, Feb. 8

The word osteoclast comes from Greek roots meaning “bone” and “break”—it’s the same “-clast” as in “iconoclast.” Other less-common -clast words include mythoclast (someone who destroys myths), genuclast (a medical instrument for breaking knee-joint adhesions) and bioclast (a piece of shell or a fossil in a sedimentary rock).

Winning at Squash

mirliton

That last item can be replaced by a serrano; the mirliton squash (also known as a chayote) can be swapped for bitter melon varietals.

—”Reconsider: Frito Pie: The Tailgaters’ Favorite Gone Frou-Frou,” Off Duty, Feb. 4

The word mirliton comes from a French word for a kazoo-type flute, although the squash itself is often called a “christophene” in France. It is also pronounced as “mella-ton.”

—Ms. McKean is a lexicographer and the founder of Wordnik, an online dictionary focusing on how words are used today.

By ANN MARLOWE

AFP/Getty Images

The 17th-century Saraya al Hamra, or Red Palace, which has housed Libya’s National Museum since 1988.

Tripoli, Libya

‘Now we have to hurry to do everything we want. Everyone from his place. Me, from this museum.” Fatheia al Howasi, the director of Libya’s National Museum since 2007, is soft-spoken, determined, and refreshingly honest in her serviceable English. She is also eager to get to work bringing the museum up to international standards and reopening it to the Libyan public—it has been closed since the revolution started in Benghazi on Feb. 17. Though the capital grows calmer every day, life is far from normal; armed men are ubiquitous and there is a serious shortage of cash. On Sunday, Ms. Howasi led me on an all-too-brief tour of the five-story structure, built in 1988 with Unesco help inside Tripoli’s 17th-century Saraya al Hamra, or Red Palace.

A 1984 graduate of Benghazi’s Garyounis University who has spent her entire career in Tripoli’s Department of Antiquities, Ms. Howasi tells the recent history of the museum without drama. While the museum was closed, she visited every day and her staff of 70 looked after the physical plant. When Moammar Gadhafi fled Tripoli on Aug. 19 and the uprising began, Ms. Howasi and the staff hid “some important small pieces”—a half-dozen glass display cases are still empty—but otherwise took no extraordinary measures.

Soon, revolutionary fighters from the Nafusa Mountains and nearby Zawiyah poured into Tripoli. (One of the major brigades that entered Tripoli hails from Zintan, Ms. Howasi’s hometown.) “Some thuwar [revolutionaries] came into the museum,” she says, but they damaged only the exhibits in the six galleries devoted to Gadhafi and smashed the windows of two of Gadhafi’s cars that are incongruously exhibited among Roman artifacts in one of the main galleries on the ground floor. (One is a lime-green Volkswagen Beetle from the 1960s.) Upstairs, the area that once held Gadhafi mementos is now empty. When I expressed the hope that the history of the Gadhafi period would not be lost to the next generation of Libyans, Ms. Howasi quickly agreed: “These things are for another time, but we need to remember and correct.”

Ms. Howasi says that the Gadhafi exhibits were the extent of the regime’s interference with the museum’s exhibition contents, though she also admits that the reason so few of the Arabic signs are translated into English is that the museum “was not allowed to write by English” during one period when Gadhafi burned foreign-language textbooks and forbade the teaching of foreign languages in schools. When he changed his mind in recent years, “somebody start and stop, somebody start and stop.” This, too, is typically Libyan: There is a sort of national attention-deficit disorder, perhaps the result of 42 years under a madly capricious ruler. When I visited, Ms. Howasi was unable to find any English guide or catalog to the museum.

While there are no classical pieces of earth-shattering importance—a fair amount of Libya’s classical heritage made its way to Italian and other European museums during the Italian occupation—there are vibrant, dynamic mosaics of daily life from the ancient cities of Leptis Magna and Sabratha, many centered around fishing and sea creatures, and important panels from the arch of Septimius Severus at Leptis Magna. The mosaics compare with the best in Tunisia, with tiny fragments that capture light and allow for great naturalism. But the Roman glass on show is mediocre, and even if the empty cases that once held jewelry and other small artifacts were full, they would not compare in extent with the holdings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, not to mention the Italian museums. The Islamic artifacts are substandard, which probably reflects the fact that Libya was a backwater for most of the postclassical period.

The well-traveled foreign visitor will be most thrilled by the pieces from Libya’s indigenous civilizations, mainly unfamiliar to Westerners. There is a fascinating bijou third-century mausoleum and panels of bas reliefs from Ghirza, south of Misrata, whose endearingly naive depictions of animals and foliage show a fusion of local and Greek art. There are also artifacts from the mysterious Garamantian desert empire, thought to be a Berber civilization. Work is still being done on the remote desert sites where these objects were found. The exhibits on Libya’s rich prehistoric heritage only hint at its splendor and importance. The vast desert covering most of the country below the Mediterranean coast contains some of the world’s finest prehistoric rock art—represented here mainly by photographs and reproductions—along with shards of the indigenous pottery and the 5,400-year-old mummy of a 7-year-old girl found in the Acacus Mountains in 1958.

Libyan cultural and educational institutions usually have a Rip Van Winkle quality, with decades-old signage, little Web presence, and an insular orientation—and the museum is typical. Libyans are not big on maintenance, and many of the light bulbs were out when I visited. But Ms. Howasi is quick to note that most of the improvements she hopes for are cosmetic. In her opinion, the museum does not need a major cash infusion. She did not ask for foreign help. (That is much more necessary to conserve Libya’s neglected archaeological treasures, as Saleh Alagab, head of the Department of Antiquities, has noted.) Ms. Howasi’s attitude, which is common here, reflects the pride and self-confidence of a people who won their freedom with their own blood. And the fact that the museum’s treasures were respected by the revolutionaries is an encouraging sign for Libya’s future.

Ms. Marlowe, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, blogs at World Affairs.