Today’s Stories
Yeah, Lots Of Us Love To Point And Laugh At ‘Florida Man’ — But Is That Really The Right Thing To Do?
“At its most comical, the Florida Man phenomenon encapsulates the wildness of both America and the Internet. At its most salacious, it’s a social-media update on the true-crime TV of America’s Dumbest Criminals and the gallows humor of tabloid headlines. At its most insensitive, Florida Man profits by punching down at the homeless, drug-addicted or mentally ill.” Reporter Logan Hill travels to a Florida prison to meet an actual subject of a Florida Man story — and he talks with the guy who started the Florida Man Twitter feed about the moral qualms he began to feel. – The Washington Post Magazine
Report: Notre Dame Was Much Closer To Collapsing Than Has Been Reported
Some of what went wrong that night has been reported in the French news media, including Le Monde and Le Canard Enchaîné. Now, The New York Times has conducted scores of interviews and reviewed hundreds of documents to reconstruct the missteps and how Notre-Dame was saved in the first four critical hours. – The New York Times
Martha Plimpton Does Something Very Few Actors Ever Do — Quit Steppenwolf Theatre
“Why would anybody want to go? It’s inarguably among the most prestigious collections of stage actors in the world and yet membership comes with no formal minimum participation requirement. … However, two sources close to Steppenwolf said that there was no love lost between the actress and the current artistic administration, although Plimpton had wanted to keep her action as private as possible.” – Chicago Tribune
Richmond’s Institute For Contemporary Art, Only A Year Old, Lays Off More Than A Fifth Of Its Staff
“Six full-time employees out of 27 are having their positions eliminated as a result of a reorganization, said Dominic Willsdon, executive director of the ICA. … The non-collecting contemporary art museum at Virginia Commonwealth University opened in April 2018 after four years of construction and roughly 15 years of planning.” And ICA has had staffing issues ever since. – Richmond Times-Dispatch
Metro-DC-Based National Philharmonic Says It’s Out Of Cash And Is Closing
The freelance orchestra, based at Strathmore in the Maryland suburbs, was founded in 1983 and performed two to three dozen concerts a year. The announcement said that the orchestra would need an additional $150,000 to save the upcoming season, and its president told Anne Midgette, “The National Phil would be delighted if a donor would come forward or funding were to come through for its operations.” – The Washington Post
Frieder Burda, Who Founded Museum For His Collection Of German Expressionism, Dead At 83
“Titled the Museum Frieder Burda, the space [in Baden-Baden] has displayed works by artists Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Max Beckmann, Gerhard Richter, and Pablo Picasso. The museum was also notably the first to display Banksy’s self-destroying artwork, Love is in the Bin (2018). – ARTnews
Check Out The New World’s Largest Performing Arts Building
Designed by the Dutch architectural firm Mecanoo, the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Kaohsiung is a city of nearly 3 million at the southern end of Taiwan) opened last fall and includes a 434-seat recital hall, a 1,210-seat theatre, a 1,981-seat concert hall, a 2,236-seat opera house, an art gallery, and an outdoor amphitheatre incorporated into the roof. – Bachtrack
What Snowball The Dancing Parrot Is Teaching Neuroscientists About Why Humans Dance
These newly published observations cement the human-ness of Snowball’s dancing. His initial headbangs and foot-lifts are movements that parrots naturally make while walking or courting. But his newer set aren’t based on any standard, innate behaviors. He came up with them himself, and he uses them for different kinds of music. “This is what we would genuinely refer to as dance, both in the scientific community and in the dance profession,” says Nicola Clayton of the University of Cambridge, who studies bird cognition. “It’s amazing.” – The Atlantic
Francoise Gilot Was Picasso’s Muse. When She Left He Predicted Disaster. It Didn’t Turn Out That Way
“For one thing, Gilot ended up happily married to Jonas Salk, who was doubtless secure enough in his own accomplishments to like her for reasons that had nothing to do with Picasso. And she went on to have an admired career as an artist. Gilot is ninety-seven now; she has been painting nearly as long as Picasso did, and is enjoying something of a revival.” – The New Yorker
Scarlett Johansson Says Her Comments On Casting Were Taken Out Of Context
In a recent interview with As If magazine, she said actors should be allowed to play any person “because that is my job and the requirement of my job”. On Saturday, Johansson said those comments were subsequently edited in other publications for “clickbait”. – The Guardian
Speakers Of Endangered Languages Find Model For A Comeback
“As thousands of languages around the world are threatened—hundreds of which are in the United States—Indigenous communities are learning from the successes of the Māori and the Hawai‘ians. Revitalization has proved to be as dynamic as the communities who undertake it: fluency, intergenerational learning, and engagement with a deeper understanding of cultural contexts and traditions are just some of the aspects of language revival.” – Emergence Magazine
The Philadelphia Orchestra’s Transformative $55 Million Gift
Peter Dobrin: “It’s hard to overstate the significance of this recent $50 million infusion to the endowment plus an additional $5 million toward operations from an anonymous couple. In real financial terms as well as symbolic ones, it promises to be a turning point for the long-troubled organization.” – Philadelphia Inquirer
Rethinking Hipster Culture – What It Says About Our Time
The grand consensuses of modern life online—the politics of approbatory or condemnatory agreement—keep culture from renewing and reinventing itself. When hipster lost its edge and went mainstream, we entered a period of aesthetic and moral stagnation. This wasn’t hipster’s fault, and—dear god—hipster was never going to save us. It is simply what happens when we defang the subversive element in culture, even the stupidly subversive. – Hedgehog Review
Wendy Whelan Comes Back To New York City Ballet, This Time As A Boss
And here’s the dynamic she means not to recreate: “In my whole 30 years in New York City Ballet, I rarely interacted with my boss except on the stage. I never knew where I was in his eyes or other people’s eyes, so I was just guessing, along with everybody else.” – Vogue
A History Of Celebrity (Why We Care)
Celebrity distinguishes itself from other forms of public approbation because it centres on the individual personality. Celebrities reflect our personhood – they show us who we are. But they also charm us with illusion, showing us whom we want to be. – Aeon
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On The Nature Of Aphorisms
Adam Gopnik: “The aphorism, in the course of history, can be taken as the epitome of the rational or the epitome of the irrational. It can be compressed and self-contained wisdom, or it can be a broken fragment designed to show that ours is an already shattered world. But, whatever it is, it’s always an epitome, and seeks an essence.” – The New Yorker
Why Other Experiences Help Make Better Artists
“You’re trying to do something new to you, and in some cases new to anyone. One of the sources of power for doing things like that is having really broad experiences.” That often requires trying, and failing, at a number of different activities. – Artsy
John Leguizamo On The Difference Between Performing Solo In Comedy Clubs And Theaters
“In a comedy club, you can go nuts and go off and be funny, but you can’t really get emotional, you know? The crowd is there to get in a rhythm of set-ups-and-jokes with you. They don’t really care about stories — stories that last a whole show, I mean. In a theater, though, jokes are not enough. You better have a story, you better have a point. I loved the energy and immediacy of comedy clubs. You can see why it’s so addictive. But you get to a theater, people don’t let you slide.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
A Look Inside The Ruins Of Notre Dame
The man responsible for overseeing the reconstruction of Notre-Dame says the risks of a catastrophic collapse are small but that the true extent of the damage will not be known until at least the end of the year. Until then, it will remain a triage site. – Time
The Great Composer Schumann — Clara Schumann — Is Still Being Overlooked, Even In Her Bicentennial Year
“What we have here, in other words, is the painful and all-too-familiar story of two creative dynamos in the same house, only one of whom was allowed to give full rein to their artistic impulses. Yet the music that Clara did produce is astonishingly fine.” Joshua Kosman fills us in on what most of us have been missing. – San Francisco Chronicle
In Hyper-Curating Our Desires Have We Lost The Thread Of Reality?
One doesn’t have to subscribe to Plato’s ladder of ascent or gift of the gods to appreciate his point that the realm of selfish desire is the futile and corrupting alternative to more genuine longing. And one doesn’t have to be a philosopher to see how longing can open up a different logic of meaning in our contemporary aesthetic stage. – Hedgehog Review
Marcus Overton, Who Managed Classical Music Institutions From Coast To Coast, Dead At 75
“His many management credits included production stage manager at Chicago Lyric Opera, where his colleagues included William Mason, later the company’s general director; general manager of the Ravinia Festival; director of performing arts at the Smithsonian Institution; executive director and then producing director of Spoleto Festival USA; and artistic administrator at La Jolla Music Society.” – San Francisco Classical Voice
Sony Picks Up Respected Book-To-Film Unit That Disney Shut Down
“Sony and HarperCollins Publishers said on Monday that they would finance a yet-to-be-named venture run by the executive, Elizabeth Gabler, who is considered Hollywood’s foremost bridge to the New York publishing world. Ms. Gabler, 63, was previously president of Fox 2000, a division of 20th Century Fox, which Disney absorbed in March as part of a $71.3 billion deal with Rupert Murdoch.” – The New York Times
Edinburgh Fringe’s Looming Problem: Not Enough Critics
“[The worrisome development is] the recent decision of leading Scottish newspapers and magazines to slash their coverage of the festival in half. Coupled with the dwindling size of the annual contingent of London critics, the threat to the ecology of the festival is real.” – The Observer (UK)
A Huge Illicit Antiquities Market Hiding In Plain Sight On Facebook
“Last month, the ATHAR Project published an important report on West Asian antiquities trafficking taking place more or less out in the open — on Facebook. … The report, ‘Facebook’s Black Market in Antiquities: Trafficking, Terrorism, and War Crimes,’ published in June, is the result of nearly two years of research.” – Hyperallergic