Architect Submits A Plan to Save Brutalist Building in Orange County

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An architect who has offered to buy and restore a controversial Orange County, N.Y. government building, designed by Paul Rudolph but panned by many as an eyesore, presented detailed plans Friday for his proposal to turn it into an arts center.

The county has been debating whether to demolish the building, which had been used as its government center, or perhaps renovate it. The architect, Gene Kaufman, a partner at Gwathmey Siegel Kaufman Architects in New York City, had previously announced that he hoped to restore the building. The plans presented Friday to Orange County leaders gave his detailed vision of what he hopes to do.

The 1967 building owned by Orange County would be turned into a 150,000-square-foot center for “artist live-work units, artist work studios and event space,” the sort of place where famous artists from the visual and performing arts could serve as anchor tenants. Guest curators such as Bonnie Clearwater, director of the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, have agreed to curate exhibitions at the center, to be called Orange Arts, Mr. Kaufman said.

Mr. Kaufman has also offered to design a new government center on the land that is now the building’s parking lot.

The building has been a cause celebre for preservationists who argue that it is an important example of Brutalist architecture. Others consider the building out of a place in a town distinguished by its historic harness-racing track and Greek Revival, Federal and Victorian houses.

Calling the building “an architectural masterpiece,” Mr. Kaufman said in his proposal that arts have a rich history in the area, given the Hudson River School of painting and that Goshen “needs a major facility for the arts to compete with the towns along the Hudson.”

Mr. Kaufman’s firm would purchase the building for $5 million.

Rapper Beanie Sigel Shot in New Jersey

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Beanie Sigel being treated near the scene of the shooting on Friday. Michael Ein/The Press of Atlantic City, via Associated Press

The rapper Beanie Sigel, formerly of Jay Z’s Roc-A-Fella Records, was shot in the stomach on Friday morning in Pleasantville, N.J., Philadelphia’s NBC-10 reported.

The incident occurred just after 9 a.m. outside Beanie Sigel’s home, following “some sort of altercation next to that property,” Jose Ruiz, Pleasantville’s chief of police, told NBC-10. Another man was reportedly injured, but refused to cooperate with the police.

The 40-year-old Beanie Sigel (whose real name is Dwight Grant) was taken to a local hospital in critical condition and underwent surgery. He was awake as of Friday afternoon, according to The Associated Press.

A lawyer for Beanie Sigel said the rapper was not the intended target of the shooting.

Beanie Sigel’s last album with Roc-A-Fella was “The Solution” in 2007. In August, he was released after serving more than two years in federal prison for tax evasion. According to the federal Bureau of Prisons, his probation is scheduled to end on Saturday.

Popcast: The Pop Savvy of ‘Beyond the Lights’

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Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Noni in “Beyond the Lights.” Suzanne Tenner/Relativity Media

In “Beyond the Lights,” Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays Noni, a gifted singer trapped inside the body of a pop confection who finally begins to burst at the seams. Her savior: Kaz (Nate Parker), a police officer who saves her life, and then encourages her to take control of her personal and professional choices.

Girl meets boy. Girl finds inner strength. Girl throws away whole career to start fresh, chase love. It’s conservative stuff at the core, but “Beyond the Lights” has a warm maturity, and also a slight tweak to convention that gives it shimmer. It’s a modern updating of “The Bodyguard” that’s extremely knowing about modern pop mores and manners, and also an old-fashioned love story with enemies – the music business, a domineering stage mother, a crude boyfriend – who are there for the express purpose of being vanquished.

Popcast

The New York Times music critics talk each week about the latest pop music news. Subscribe in iTunes.

In his review of the film for The Times, A. O. Scott called the film an “occasionally silly, frequently stirring romantic melodrama.” He comes to the Popcast this week to talk about what’s conservative about “Beyond the Lights” and what’s novel.

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Book Review Podcast: 10 Best Books of 2014

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Jon McNaught

This week, The New York Times Book Review published its 100 Notable Books of 2014 and its 10 Best Books of 2014. One of the books named among the 10 best is Jenny Offill’s “Dept. of Speculation,” about which the Book Review says:

Offill’s slender and cannily paced novel, her second, assembles fragments, observations, meditations and different points of view to chart the course of a troubled marriage. Wry and devastating in equal measure, the novel is a cracked mirror that throws light in every direction — on music and literature; science and philosophy; marriage and motherhood and infidelity; and especially love and the grueling rigors of domestic life. Part elegy and part primal scream, it’s a profound and unexpectedly buoyant performance.

On this week’s podcast, Parul Sehgal and Gregory Cowles, editors at the Book Review, talk about the year’s best books; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Peter Sokolowski discusses four new books about language; and Mr. Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

$38 Million Grant to Bolster Woodruff Arts Center

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A month after the end of a bruising lockout at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra that raised questions about Atlanta’s commitment to the arts, the orchestra’s parent organization, the Woodruff Arts Center, announced Friday that it had received a record $38 million grant.

The grant, from the Woodruff Foundation, is being described as the lead gift in a new fund-raising campaign for the arts center, which also includes the High Museum of Art and the Alliance Theater. It will include $25 million in matching funds for the center’s endowment, and $13 million to make capital improvements, beginning with a renovation of the Alliance Theater.

Some of the endowment matching funds — $8 million — will go toward what is being called the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Players’ Endowment Fund, which will be used to endow seats for musicians and help the orchestra rebuild and reach its contractually mandated size.

The size of the orchestra has been a bone of contention in recent labor talks. In 2012 the orchestra shrank to 88 regular positions from 95. And its new contract will allow it to remain at 77 players this year, where it fell due to attrition, and give it four years to grow back to 88.

The Woodruff Foundation and the Woodruff Arts Center, which are separate entities, are both named for Robert W. Woodruff, the Coca-Cola Company executive and philanthropist, who died in 1985.

Theater

‘King Kong’ Musical in Search of a Director as Rando Says No

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The Broadway director John Rando, who staged this fall’s critically acclaimed revival of “On the Town” and won a Tony Award for “Urinetown,” has opted not to sign on as director of the new big-budget musical “King Kong,” he said in an interview on Friday.

He had been in advanced negotiations for the job and spent several days last month with the musical’s producer and artists in Australia, where the show – and its 20-foot-tall Kong puppet – was developed and had a world-premiere run in 2013 that altogether cost a reported $30 million, a far higher sum than most Broadway shows. The producer, Carmen Pavlovic of the company Global Creatures, is now overhauling “Kong” with an eye toward bringing it to Broadway at some point, and has already brought on board a new book writer, the Tony winner Marsha Norman (“The Bridges of Madison County,” “The Secret Garden”).

Mr. Rando said he was “very fond” of the “Kong” project and Ms. Pavlovic, among others, but concluded that the timing wouldn’t work. He is already committed to another musical with Broadway ambitions, “The Honeymooners,” which will probably have a development workshop in the first half of 2015 before a world-premiere run at Goodspeed Musicals in September.

“The ‘Kong’ team is extremely enthusiastic about the further development of the show, and it required a tremendous amount of directorial time, my time, and that just wouldn’t work given my other projects,” Mr. Rando said. “They wanted me to start on ‘Kong’ yesterday, basically, and I couldn’t do that. It breaks my heart.”

A spokesman for Ms. Pavlovic, Adrian Bryan-Brown, said Friday that he expected to have an update on the “Kong” musical soon.

Rare Dylan Recordings Set for Release in Copyright-Extension Bid

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Thanksgiving has come and gone, and there’s a nip in the air — no question about it, European Copyright Extension season is upon us.

Since 2012, when the European Union passed a revised copyright law, extending the copyright on recordings from 50 years to 70 – but only if the recording was published during its first 50 years – record companies have been exploring their vaults for potentially marketable material in danger of losing its copyright protection if it is not released.

That first year, Motown released a series of albums packed with outtakes by some of its major acts, and Sony released a limited-edition collection of 1962 outtakes by Bob Dylan, with the surprisingly frank title, “The Copyright Extension Collection, Vol. I.” In 2013, Sony released a second Dylan set, devoted to previously unreleased 1963 recordings. Similar recordings by the Beatles and the Beach Boys followed.

For collectors, these sets are a boon, and they are becoming increasingly plentiful as the 50th anniversary of each year of the 1960s rolls around, moving deeper into the rock era. Record labels, however, have complied with the publication requirement reluctantly, releasing the sets in small quantities, or making them available only as digital downloads.

This year’s trawl is starting to shape up. Sony has told European retailers that it will release a nine-LP set of 1964 recordings by Mr. Dylan, possibly as early as next week. Only 1,000 copies will be available, but if past years are any guide, collectors who obtain copies are likely to make copies available online before the year is out.

A person close to the project, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment, provided a track list that includes television performances at the CBC in Canada and on “The Steve Allen Show”; a tantalizing tape, accounting for nearly three LP sides, that Mr. Dylan recorded with the folksinger Eric Von Schmidt, at Von Schmidt’s home in Florida; and a disc of studio outtakes from the sessions for “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” with the first take of “It Ain’t Me Babe,” alternative versions of several other songs, and a 46-second pass at “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a song he would not complete until 1965.

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‘Peter Pan Live!’: The Best Tweets

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On Thursday NBC presented “Peter Pan Live!,” with Allison Williams, top right, in the title role. Virginia Sherwood/NBC

Thursday night’s “Peter Pan Live!” on NBC largely thwarted any hopes for an unmitigated disaster. While early reviews have been predictably mixed, most admit that whatever the flaws, the production was not without its charms.

“Allison Williams ruined hate-watching,” Alessandra Stanley wrote in her review of the telecast.

Like last year’s live “Sound of Music,” the production lit up Twitter. Below are some of our favorites.

What did you think of the show? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

British Museum Lends One of the Elgin Marbles to the Hermitage

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LONDON — One of the so-called Elgin Marbles, the much-disputed British Museum collection of Parthenon sculptures and artifacts acquired by Lord Elgin in Athens in the early 19th century, has been sent out of England for the first time.

A headless statue of the Greek river god Ilissos has gone to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, where it will be on display from Saturday through Jan. 18. It forms part of an exhibition celebrating the museum’s 250th anniversary.

Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, said in an interview with BBC Radio 4 that this “is the first time ever that the people of Russia have been able to see this great moment of European art and European thought.” He added that he hoped the Greek government would be delighted.

That seems optimistic. Greece has long refused to acknowledge Britain’s ownership of the sculptures, asserting that they were unlawfully removed by Lord Elgin, then a British ambassador. Since the opening of the new Acropolis Museum in 2009, the claims to return the works to their country of origin have become more pressing. (In October, considerable publicity was given to the hiring of the law firm where Amal Clooney works, and her visit to Athens to discuss the return of the statues.)

The loan to St. Petersburg comes after the state of the nation address on Thursday by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, in which he spoke about the West’s attempts to undermine and isolate his country.

Mr. MacGregor told The Times of London, “The politics of both museums have been that the more chilly the politics between governments, the more important the relationship between museums.”