Word: britishers
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...this week's market meltdown, companies will still be keen to buy the special brand of magic that sports teams offer. Citigroup stumped up some $400 million to tag its name to a new stadium that baseball team the New York Mets will play in from next year. And British lender Barclays - who backed out of talks over a possible takeover of troubled Lehman Brothers last weekend - lavished a similar sum for the naming rights to the New Jersey Nets' planned Brooklyn basketball arena. If that sounds risky, consider its exposure in its home market: the U.K. bank...
...which, one hopes, will spark a fresh reappraisal of the work of the most misunderstood, and very likely best, playwright currently writing in English. That is far from a widespread view. In America, Ayckbourn is still typecast, anachronistically, as a lightweight boulevard farceur (the "British Neil Simon"), or simply as a clever deviser of staging gimmicks: plays that squeeze the action in several rooms into one space, or move backward in time, or fill up the stage with water, or (in his insanely ambitious Intimate Exchanges) have no fewer than 16 dramatic permutations, depending on which alternative action the characters...
Ayckbourn, whose father played violin for the London Symphony Orchestra and whose mother wrote novels, was influenced in his early years less by theater than by the triple bills of American B-movies that he would spend long afternoons watching. Even today he seems aloof from most of his British playwriting peers; he's friends with few of them, and the only dramatist with whom he professes a close affinity (personal and professional) is Harold Pinter, who directed him in an early production of The Birthday Party. "I got fascinated by his use of dialogue, his use of words...
This church (pictured above), near Megalopoli in Greece, used to be part of a village. By the time British photographer Stuart Franklin visited and took the picture in 2007, work crews had leveled the other buildings and scraped out the earth to extract lignite (brown coal), used to fuel a nearby power station. The crews were too superstitious to destroy a holy place, a guide told Franklin. Far above the new ground level, the edifice is now inaccessible...
...Indeed, there was a time when 19 seemed so far down the line that I couldn’t even imagine what I would be doing after so many years. But watching the 14-year-old British diver Tom Daley and the 16-year-old American gymnast Shawn Johnson made me think back with regret to what I was doing when I was 14 (Mortal Kombat) and 16 (Jackass stunts...