In Brief: October Edition

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

• For your video pleasure (with hat tip to Boing Boing), Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, with many of the vocal parts rendered on slide whistles and kazoo. The man who made this video said it took four days to make. [YouTube]


• Valérie Duponchelle has a review of the new Arman retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. The French artist is perhaps best known for boxed collection pieces and his exploded and dismantled works, including the remote explosion of a white sports car, carried out by a team of technicians. [Le Figaro]


• Bronzino's infamous Portrait of Dwarf Morgante, a nude depiction of a dwarf who served the Medici court in Florence, has been restored and is now on display at a Bronzino exhibit at the Palazzo Strozzi. [Discovery News]


• The National Library of Argentina in Buenos Aires, where Jorge Luis Borges was director for 18 years, is displaying books that include an unknown poem by Borges and a thousand or so books from the author's library that bear his annotations. [Libération]


• Oh no he didn't. Robert Battey, reviewing Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra playing the same piece he reviewed them playing three years ago: "The Dvořák 'New World Symphony' is, of course, one of the great crowd-pleasers in the canon, delivering the highest technical and artistic achievements in a folklike voice that is accessible to any sentient listener. But are Strathmore audiences that desperate to hear it repeatedly? Both the Baltimore Symphony and the National Philharmonic have already given it there in the few years since the venue opened, and this fall both are playing it again. If patrons don't mind hearing Alsop's take on the piece again after just three years, perhaps readers won't mind if I just reprint what I wrote the last time." [Washington Post]


• Evelyne Bloch-Dano has written a new book, Le dernier amour de George Sand, about Alexandre Manceau, the last paramour of the notorious French novelist. After turbulent relationships with Musset, Chopin, and Mérimée, Sand was forty-five when she met Manceau, who was thirty-two. Unlike her other lovers, Manceau never appeared in any of Sand's books, although they lived together for fifteen years, until he died of tuberculosis. She called him her "faithful dog." [Le Figaro]