Philip Glass has been commissioned by the New York City Opera to compose an opera based upon The Perfect American, a novel by Peter Stephan Jungk about the final months of Walt Disney's life. If Glass's opera stays true to the spirit of his source material, Disney enthusiasts are likely to be, uh, enthused: Jungk's book, which is told from the perspective of a fictional Australian cartoonist working for Disney in the fifties, portrays Disney as a miserable, vindictive man who harbored racist and virulently anti-Communist beliefs. [Variety]