In Brief: Hello, 2008!

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• For the prurient interest of the curious, La Cieca has footage of the rehearsal of Natalie Dessay's bathtub scene, nude, in Manon. N'est-ce plus mon sein que cette main presse? [Parterre Box]


• A blogger who got into this thing about the same time I did is calling it quits. Is this a message? Adieu, James! [James Tata]


• The New York critic reviews the live simulcast from the Metropolitan Opera, which is actually much more interesting than it sounds. [New York Times]


• An on-the-money tribute to the late Oscar Peterson from Matthew Guerrieri. [Soho the Dog]


• A Philly New Year photo set from the amazing Zoe Strauss. (suggested by Mark Barry) [Flickr]


• A certain blogging art historian is in Rome for the semester. The view from his living room looks out over the Chiesa Nuova. Some people have all the luck! We will be following his posts from Rome with deep-seated envy. [The Cranky Professor]


• Via Boing Boing, this video of a man throwing a paper airplane from the window of his New York apartment and videotaping its graceful, minute-long flight to the ground. Does anyone recognize the music used as the soundtrack? It's Alexandre Desplat, I think. [Sam Fuller]
  
  


• It was already strange enough to see smoking bans in restaurants and bars in Rome and Siena this summer. Now my ashtray from the Café de Flore in Paris apparently became a collector's item this week. I cannot believe that this is happening in France. [New York Times]


• Via Boing Boing, the 20 selections in a newspaper contest asking kids to send in pictures and descriptions of imagined monsters. [The Guardian]


• The mismanagement and outright fraud at the Smithsonian is beyond belief. A lot of virtual ink has been spilled over James Grimaldi's latest article. Rick West, the director of the National Museum of the American Indian, spent $48,000 to have a portrait of himself made to hang in the museum. 1) The artist was not a Native American. 2) He did not donate the money himself but had it come out of the museum's funding. The worst part of this, which has not even come up yet in all the criticism, is that the museum, in spite of its impressive architecture outside, is a dud inside. The institution did not leap at the chance to bring this show to Washington, after it did not end up at the National Museum of Natural History. Enough said. [Washington Post]