In Brief: Advent 1 Edition

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

• The Ionarts family spent way too much time making silly holiday videos of ourselves and other people, over the vacation weekend with friends in the Great White North. Here is one of our more topically relevant efforts. [Elf Yourself]


• Jessica Duchen reports on her tête-à-tête with lupophile pianist Hélène Grimaud. [Standpoint]


• As mentioned a few weeks ago, Alain Vircondelet, the author of a biography of visionary artist Séraphine de Senlis, charged that the screenplay of a recent film on the painter's life lifted sections of his book. He has won a judgment of plagiarism against the filmmakers in the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris. Nine of 35 alleged "borrowings" were found to have been copied more or less directly from the book. The court did not, as requested, ban any further distribution of the film, since it found the complaints were related most directly to the screenplay. [Libération]


• Greg Allen ferrets out a mystery about the theft of a part of a Robert Rauschenberg combine piece. [greg.org]


• After French pianist France Clidat won the 1956 Liszt Competition in Budapest, she undertook the first complete recording of the works of Liszt (not including the transcriptions and paraphrases): critic Bernard Gavoty labeled her "Madame Liszt." The box set, made for the French label Vega and long introuvable, will finally be re-released by Universal/Decca France, just in advance of the Liszt year (2011, the 200th anniversary of his birth). Marie-Aude Roux spoke to Clidat about the rediscovery of the lost master recordings in the archive of a Japanese recording company in Tokyo -- "an investigation worthy of an Agatha Christie novel," as the 78-year-old pianist put it. [Le Monde]


• A discussion on the future of something called "the Internet" on NPR's Science Friday -- in 1993. [Boing Boing]


• Jennifer Homans has written the definitive history of ballet, the art form that, in the words of Théophile Gau­tier, is "the dreams of poets taken seriously." Toni Bentley has a review. [New York Times]


• By the way, that ballet stuff is really difficult, as actress Natalie Portman learned preparing for her role in the upcoming Darren Aronofsky film Black Swan. [New York Times]


• The Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal has opened La Bastille ou « l’enfer des vivants », an exhibit that attempts to recreate the horrors of the Bastille before the French Revolution. Items on display include documents from the prison, instruments of detention and torture, and even bloody articles of clothing worn by prisoners. [Le Figaro]


• Looking for some tasteful Christmas CDs of historical music to purchase on "Cyber Monday"? Try these Ionarts-approved discs from Stile Antico and Anonymous 4. More choices will be recommended in the weeks to come. [Ionarts]