Young musicians from the prestigious Berklee College of Music in the United States gave three concerts in Cairo over the weekend. The concert series, which consisted of two public performances along with an interactive workshop with Egyptian youth, was organized by Yasmin Tayeby, an Egyptian-American Berklee graduate. Tayeby’s nascent company, Nile Promotions, organized the event …

By Jacques Clement / AFP BAGHDAD: Performing before a half-empty room at Baghdad’s Alwiyah Club, Taha Gharib is conscious that the music he has passionately played for decades — traditional Iraqi maqam — is dying. Victim of the country’s growing modernity and years-long violence, the poetic form of music that came to symbolizes the newly-born Iraq …

Roman Polanski’s political thriller "The Ghost Writer" swept the board Saturday at the European Film Awards, the continent’s version of the Oscars. The movie won six of the seven categories in which it had been nominated, including best film. Polanski, meanwhile, was named best director, to add to the Silver Bear he won at the …

VIENNA: More than 250 papyri recently discovered in Austria’s national library have shed new light on the Arab conquest of north Africa and northwest Asia in the 1st century AD, say experts. The collection of documents, written in Greek and Coptic and dating from 643 and 644 AD, contain precious information on what the library …

Alchemy Cairo, the new furniture line that is headed and designed by Karim Mekhtigian, one of Alchemy Design Studio’s three partners, debuted at the studio’s new store located in furniture retail mall Designopolis last month. Mekhtigian’s signature contemporary take on local design themes of geometric patterns, traditional items such as the local ahwa (coffee shop) …

Karim Mekhtigian is not new to the field of design in Egypt. On the contrary, he has for quite some time played a large role as one of the three partners of design firm Alchemy Design Studio. Alchemy has been responsible for some of the North Coast’s most novel beach homes, and in Cairo, designing …

A Washington art gallery pledged a round-the-clock protest Thursday against what it calls censorship by the Smithsonian Institution for removing a video that shows ants crawling on a crucifix after the Catholic League and members of Congress complained it was sacrilegious. Transformer Gallery manager Barbara Escobar said the small, nonprofit gallery will show the video …

"New Wave" director Jean-Luc Godard, who turned European filmmaking upside-down in the 1960s and who counts the likes of Pedro Almodovar and Quentin Tarantino as his modern-day heirs, turns 80 on Friday. The French-Swiss director shot to fame in 1960 with "Breathless" in which Jean Seberg played a cropped-haired American in Paris, following up with …

By Jake Coyle / AP The National Board of Review, widely considered a harbinger of the Academy Awards, has chosen “The Social Network” as the best film of the year. The NBR lavished a total of four awards on the film, naming David Fincher best director, Aaron Sorkin’s script best adapted screenplay and Jesse Eisenberg best …

In a much-anticipated event at Manial Palace, Penguin Chairman and Chief Executive John Makinson and Dar El Shorouk Chairman Ibrahim Moallem signed a joint publishing agreement on Nov. 24. The Shorouk-Penguin partnership will support the translation and distribution of 12 Penguin Classics titles into Arabic and eight works of Arabic literature into English each year. …

Irish composer Derek Gleeson, who has conducted orchestras throughout Europe, faced a bit of a learning curve in preparing to take the guest baton at the Tehran Symphony Orchestra this weekend. The 46-year-old music director of the Dublin Philharmonic Orchestra says he had to get familiar with a traditional Persian stringed instrument known as the …

The crowd sang happy 175th birthday to Mark Twain before the lights went down at the Clemens Center, then laughed along with the nearest incarnation of the late author and humorist: Hal Holbrook. The 85-year-old actor once again put on his white suit and makeup and reminisced, wisecracked, smoked and scolded Tuesday night in the …

After a week of events highlighting creativity in Cairo, Freedom to Create ended with an awards ceremony and concert celebration held at the Salah Eldin Citadel. The event was hosted by Egyptian actor Amr Waked, who is also the UNAIDS Goodwill Ambassador for the Middle East and North Africa region, and Femi Oke, former CNN …

Film aficionados are gearing up to indulge their love for the big screen with this year’s Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF) selection, from Nov. 30 to Dec. 9. The opening film at the Cairo Opera House on November 30 was "Another Year" by acclaimed filmmaker Mike Leigh, a drama about an old married couple who …

A man breached security Saturday at Britain’s international modern art gallery to stage a demonstration on fellow Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s "Sunflower Seeds" exhibition. In a one-man protest about the difficulty of working as an artist, Cai Yuan walked on Ai’s artwork of more than 100 million porcelain "seeds," which cover 1,000 square meters (10,760 …

Four performances of the Bolshoi Ballet are to be beamed live from Moscow to 300 cinema screens around the world as part of a tie-up with French movie house giant Gaumont-Pathe, the firm said on Friday. The shows will be broadcast over a six-month period starting December 19 on cinema screens in 12 countries including …

A 71-year-old retired electrician is at the center of a legal battle after coming forward with more than 200 hitherto unknown paintings by Pablo Picasso, a French newspaper reported Monday. Experts who have examined the collection have estimated it could be worth some €60 million ($80 million), Liberation reported. Pierre Le Guennec wrote to Claude …

The studio bills Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway’s "Love & Other Drugs" as an unconventional love story. Maybe a bit, in its unusual setting, the world of prescription drug sales, and in its attempt to inject drama by arbitrarily giving an incurable disease to one of its romantic leads. Yet despite its dramatic pretenses and …

More than 200 students and environmental activists gathered Friday in the desert outside Egypt’s capital to form an image of a giant scarab visible from space to raise climate change awareness. The image of the beetle holding a sun in its pinchers — a symbol of resurrection for the ancient Egyptians — was documented by …

Damon Albarn, the key creative force behind the Gorillaz, isn’t a big fan of the way record labels treated music videos in the past. "They never really got it together to commercialize video production in the way that they got it together with (songs and CDs)," Albarn said. "I think that was a bad precedent …

Fans of far-right Japanese author Yukio Mishima gathered in Tokyo on Thursday to mark the anniversary of his shocking samurai-style suicide after a failed coup attempt 40 years ago. Mishima, who was 45 and an international celebrity when he committed a ritual "seppuku" suicide by disemboweling himself with a sword, is considered one of the …

Spanish novelist Ana Maria Matute was Wednesday awarded the Cervantes Prize, only the third woman to win the leading literary award for works in Spanish since it was first granted in 1976. "I am happy, enormously happy," the 85-year-old told a news conference in Barcelona after the culture ministry announced she had won the award, …

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II is officially launching a British-designed project to build a new national museum in the United Arab Emirates. The ceremony in Abu Dhabi on Thursday comes near the end of her first visit in more than 30 years to the UAE, which was a British protectorate before achieving statehood in 1971. The …

Like the first line of a novel, the idea for a letter could occur to Saul Bellow at any time. The words might have come on a daily walk or during a drive to the grocery store. Perhaps he had just finished a bath, a bubble bath, or awakened in the night. "That was thrilling …