ROHINTON MISTRY CANCELS WORDSWORTH READING

Indian author Rohinton Mistry has cancelled the reading from his new novel, Family Matters (Knopf), that was slated for next Thursday, November 14, at WordsWorth in Harvard Square. According to a statement issued by his publicist: "As a person of color he was stopped repeatedly and rudely at each airport along the way [of the first part of his book tour] — to the point where the humiliation to him and his wife (with whom he has been traveling) has become unbearable."

Mistry — who will also be forgoing appearances in Chicago, Madison, Iowa City, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle — was born in Bombay but has lived in Toronto for more than 25 years. Last Monday, Canada issued a travel advisory to its citizens of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent warning them that they might want to avoid traveling stateside for fear of running afoul of US anti-terrorism laws. The American policy of singling out, photographing, and fingerprinting people from Muslim nations at the US-Canadian border — regardless of their current citizenship — is one that the Canadian government considers discriminatory. The Associate Press recently reported, however, that Canadian Foreign Affairs minister Bill Graham has been promised by the US that all travelers crossing the border with a Canadian passport would be treated equally.

Family Matters, Mistry’s third novel, was short-listed for the Booker Prize. It focuses on Bombay’s small subculture of Persian-descended Parsis, in particular a Parkinson’s-afflicted patriarch and the efforts of his family to care for him. A sad irony to Mistry’s travails: Family Matters just won this year’s Kiriyama Prize, which recognizes books that "contribute to greater understanding and cooperation among the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia."

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MRS. GARDNER

The home/museum that Isabella Stewart Gardner created in the Fenway was such a personal project that you wonder whether she really thought it would outlive her. She needn’t have worried: the museum has just announced plans for its Centennial celebration, which will begin this January and run through July of 2004. Highlights will include a neon installation by conceptual-art pioneer Joseph Kosuth; two new concert series, "Vivaldi in the Courtyard" and "Rose Garden Centennial Concerts"; two further exhibits, "The Making of a Museum: Isabella Stewart Gardner As Collector, Architect & Designer" (April 2003) and "The Palazzo Barbaro: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Her Circle in Venice" (April 2004); and a "Dante at the Gardner" series of readings, performances, and discussions of Inferno that will culminate with an all-day Dante event on April 26, 2003.

DOES TRADITION HAVE A FUTURE?

Isabella would surely have been interested the question Jed Perl will address when he comes to the Cambridge Center for Adult Education in a couple of weeks. A native New Yorker, Perl is the art critic for the New Republic and the author of Gallery Going, Paris Without End, and Eyewitness; he’s also been a contributing editor of Vogue, a columnist for Salmagundi, and a regular contributor to Modern Painters and the New Criterion. He’ll be appearing under the auspices of CCAE’s Intensive Studio Art Program, whose director, Phil Press, has been friends with Perl "ever since I went to art school with him 30 years ago. He and I studied with a lot of the same people in New York." Press adds that he’s an admirer of Perl’s criticism: "He has long been fascinated with the cultural context in which art is made, exhibited and discussed — especially the how hype can override tradition and content. What happens to art as the market dominates matters of taste and quality?"

Perl will speak about "The Future of Tradition" on Wednesday November 20 at 8 p.m. The Cambridge Center for Adult Education is at 56 Brattle Street in Harvard Square; tickets for this event are $5, and it might just sell out, so we recommend you call (617) 547-6789 extension 1 or else order on-line at www.ccae.org.

OPENING THE STAGE DOOR

If all the world’s a stage and all of us are merely players, then maybe it’s time we took a tour of our own house. Next Saturday, November 16, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., the Loeb Drama Center is opening its doors and raising its curtains for a day-long open house with exhibitions, demonstrations, performances, workshops, and discussions. The event affords the public, theatergoing or otherwise, the opportunity to poke around backstage and rub elbows with the actors.

Highlights will include the unveiling a new series of banners created by artist/scientist Kelvin Davies; an American Repertory Theatre acting-company Chekhov reading; a comedy workshop with ART company actor Will Lebow; a directing workshop with the Institute for Advanced Theater Training’s resident director, Scott Zigler; a dialect workshop with the Institute for Advanced Theater Training’s speech instructor, Nancy Houfek; a Shakespearean romance sampler with ART senior actor Jeremy Geidt; set, costume, and prop displays; and complimentary food from Harvard Square restaurants.

November 16 will also mark the launch of the Loeb Drama Center’s new membership campaign, which allows patrons to purchase discounted tickets and receive subscriber-like benefits without having to plan months in advance. The community is encouraged to make itself at home. That’s at 64 Brattle Street in Harvard Square; for more information, call (617) 495-2688.

TOYING WITH CYBERART?

For the artists of the 2003 Boston Cyberarts Festival, a keyboard is a palette and a paintbrush is a mouse. Scheduled for April 26 through May 11, the festival will bring together artists in all media who use computers to advance traditional disciplines and create new interactive worlds. And for its centerpiece, it will have a North American premiere. The brainchild of composer and inventor Tod Machover, and presented by the MIT Media Lab and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Toy Symphony will introduce kids to musicmaking through specially designed Music Toys. The project will include 10 weeks of activities in collaboration with Boston-area kids; it’ll culminate in a BMOP performance.

Also scheduled: a Fort Point Neighborhood Artists cyberart show and a conference on electronic literature. And Mass College of Art, Harvard, and Boston University will come together for the first-ever national conference on digital and interactive public art. For more information about the 2003 Boston Cyberarts Festival, call (617) 525-8495, or visit www.bostoncyberarts.org.

GETTING ‘ARTRAGED’ AT MOBIUS

Mobius, Boston’s artist-run center for experimental work in all media and the home for subversive, on-the-edge, experimental, avant-garde, and otherwise just totally out there art, is about to unleash its annual blow-out bash "FUN(d)raiser," ArtRages. The roster of weird and wild this year is a doozie, including the bizarro music of (deep breath) the Dresden Dolls, FLUTTR, the Calypso Invaders, High-Speed Coeds, Doktor Heinrich Erroneous, Landon Rose, D. Franklin, and Heather Kuhn. That’s in addition to the performance art of (deeper breath) Marjorie Morgan, Tom Plsek, Mari Novotny-Jones, Arthur Hardigg, David Miller, Dillon Paul, Jeff Huckleberry, Sandy Huckleberry, Vela Phelan, Alice Vogler, Magda Fernandez, Christina Bechstein, Richard Streitmatter-Tran, Cathy McLaine, John Buck, Sandra Vieira, Donna Coppola, Kristina Lenzi, Sniper Culture, and Hiroki Kikuchi. It all goes down Saturday November 23 at 8 p.m. at 205 A Street in Fort Point. Tickets are $20 at the door, $15 in advance and for Friends of Mobius. Be a friend to Mobius — Mobius loves making new friends. Call (617) 542-7416.

THE HOUSE THAT THE ICA BUILT

Okay, it’s not built yet, but the winning design for the Institute of Contemporary Art’s new Waterfront home was unveiled back in September, and now the ICA has announced a Fleet-sponsored exhibit, "Diller + Scofidio in Boston," that "will include the architect’s concept drawings and models that represent the evolution and various stages of the design process as well as the final design and modern of Boston’s first new art museum in nearly 100 years."

This isn’t exactly small architectural potatoes, as the ICA press release goes on to explain. "Diller + Scofidio’s dramatic cantilever design for the ICA’s new 62,000-square-foot museum integrates the city’s public HarborWalk into the building and produces shifting views of the Waterfront throughout the galleries, theater, and public spaces. Clad in alternating panels of transparent glass, translucent glass, and opaque metal, the four-story museum will provide both a world-class exhibition space to showcase works by leading contemporary artists and a vibrant center for public performances, educational activities, and Waterfront access." No need to say more; we’re there. The only bad news is that none of us can be there until January 22, which is when the exhibit goes up, but at least it’ll give us a post-holiday treat to look forward to. And it’ll be there through April 27. If you want to know more, call (617) 266-5152 or visit www.icaboston.org.

‘BOOM BOX’ AT THE BCA

It’s no longer enough to think of pleasingly arranged sound as "music"; now, thanks to various "ambient" aural wavelengths intended to work in conjunction with a specific environment (be it the "chill" room at a rave or a particularly trebly/woofy dark nave of an art gallery), we have something called "sound-art." In perhaps its most literal form, that would be the collaboration between painter Oliver Jackson and composer/saxophonist Marty Ehrlich that’s ongoing at Harvard’s Sert Gallery (in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, through January 19), where a 64-minute pre-recorded piece by Ehrlich "accompanies" four large, semi-abstract paintings by Jackson. In its more multifarious incarnation, we have "Boom Box," which will open January 17 at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Mills Gallery and run through March 9.

Intended as multimedia and collaborative, "Boom Box" will employ "theremins, feedback loops, experimental music, pirate radio, radio theater, sound machines, and installation art" in the ever-growing hybrid field of sound-based artworks that are descended from the likes of John Cage (with some help from Brian Eno and maybe BT) crossed with conceptual art. In developing the show, guest curator Roland Smart hopes to move away from the usual museum sound installation that’s characterized "by the ambient sound of a record skipping in a dark room, and by headphones dangling from a wall." Instead, he’s hoping for a true fusion of visuals and sound in a collaborative effort that will also include work by individual artists.

MATMOS AT HARVARD

And speaking of sound: San Francisco electro-experimental weirdos Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt, known collectively as Matmos, will appear at next week at Harvard’s Science Center to explain and perform their quasi-scientific approach to technology and musicmaking. It’s all part of the Office for the Arts at Harvard’s "Learning from Performers" series and the week-long residencies of Daniel and Schmidt as 2002-2003 Peter Ivers Visiting Artists at Harvard.

Best known for their collaborations with chilly Icelandic chanteuse Björk, Matmos are most respected for their own bizarre brand of musique concrète. Cutting loose with an instinctual improvisational feel while still adhering to a rigid conceptual framework, their compositions are marked by a reverent affinity for found sounds like hair being snipped, the unexpected aural joys of plastic surgery and, uh, the amplified neural activity of a crayfish. Over seven albums, Matmos have forged a distinct vein of techno composition that’s almost scholarly in its approach — no coincidence since Schmidt is a professor in the new genres department at San Francisco Art Institute and Daniel is a PhD candidate (Renaissance studies, of all things). You can hear these noise boys teach by doing on November 17 at 7 p.m. in Hall D of the Harvard Science Center, Kirkland and Oxford Streets in Harvard Square. It’s free; call (617) 495-8676.

IDEAS ON LINE

When the magazine Lingua Franca died, readers interested in wide-ranging discussions of the arts and ideas lost more than a magazine, they also lost a great Web site, Arts & Letters Daily. Well, thanks to the efforts of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Arts & Letters (www.aldaily.com) is back, concatenating the best of newspapers (from Ha’aretz to the Guardian/Observer to the New Zealand Herald), magazines (from the New York Review to the Atlantic and the Times Literary Supplement), Web sites (Brain/Behavior to Ifeminists to Web del sol), and Weblogs (Mickey Kaus to Andrew Sullivan to George Will). Articles in a recent edition focused on Marxism, Mad magazine, and Moby-Dick. Check it out.

QUEERING BUFFY

Ever get the feeling that life is just all vampires all the time? The players at the relatively new Queer Soup Production Company apparently agree. Friday through Sunday from December 6 through 21, Queer Soup will be presenting Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s High School Reunion at Theater 1 (formerly the Dollhouse Theater), 731 Harrison Avenue in the South End. Tickets are $15 and $20 (617-290-6809), or visit www.brianandmal.com.

The show, in case you’re wondering, is a parody.