Core Business
Source: Engaging Matters | Published on 2013-12-11
Fire Burning at Both Ends
Source: Dancebeat | Published on 2013-12-11
Wang Luyan and the Power of Paradox
Source: The Great Flourishing | Published on 2013-12-12
The next five most powerful women in US music
Source: Slipped Disc | Published on 2013-12-11
How many of us believe poetry is useless? How many of us don’t even care to ask the question, “Is poetry useless?”
“The most obvious application for iBeacon is tying digital information to physical places. When Apple first presented iBeacon to developers at their WWDC conference this summer, they used the example of an art museum. Instead of punching a three-digit number into a handheld tour guide, you could walk up to a painting, pull out your iPhone, and find additional information on the artwork right there waiting for you.”
“Disney remains intent on discovering, rescuing, and rehabilitating precious pop culture artifacts so they can be found or rediscovered by audiences around the world—a modern-day Indiana Jones, indeed.”
As a reminder, the annual budget of the National Endowment for Arts in 2011 was $154.7 million. In that same year, the Philadelphia “Phillies,” a Major League Baseball team, paid their players alone $173 million.
“Comments and interaction were taken into account, rather than just views, to identify the 10 videos that people were talking about most in 2013.”
“Until we rid ourselves of the notion that the best music of all time was created by a handful of men who lived an ocean away from us and who all died more than a century before any of us were born, we will never have programming that truly reflects the vast array of musical creativity all around us.”
“Like the work of other artists once dismissed as producers of nostalgic Americana—“big paydays for small-town mush,” in the caustic phrase of Benjamin DeMott, who also mentioned Frank Capra and Thornton Wilder—Rockwell’s paintings have become more interesting over time.”
“I think we both have the ability to unsettle the other’s opinions. That’s what happens. It’s just kind of going back and forth, back and forth. If we really disagree, I tend to think, I’ve got to reconsider this. And sometimes I don’t think that.”
In the conversation below, he explains how Alice Waters almost made the cut, how Time simply reflected the “harsh reality” of the culinary world, and why he thinks the media has no obligation to “advocate for anything” when it comes to the gender gap among famous chefs.
“Architecturally, the new Kimbell addition will soon fade into the middle rank of Piano’s oeuvre, neither at the top (the Nasher and Menil) nor the bottom (the Broad Contemporary Art Museum of 2003–2008 in Los Angeles and the Morgan Library & Museum of 2000–2006 in New York.) His Fort Worth pavilion is the twenty-first museum building Piano has completed, with another four in the works, and he cannot be expected to produce a hit every time.”
The statistics are daunting…
It was late November when Trumbull High School’s first-year principal. Marc Guarino, (pronounced Gar-in-o) put the kibosh on the long-in-the-planning spring musical, “Rent: School Edition,” saying the show was too controversial.
The letter accuses orchestra leaders of manipulating financial results “in a deliberate deception of the public.” In addition to calling for the resignations, the letter urges the board to immediately end the lockout and resume contract negotiations.
Mark Shenton recounts how this somewhat-naughty-but-entirely-legal picture from San Francisco (which Shenton didn’t even know was online) led the editors of the Sunday Express to decide it was just too embarrassing to keep him on.
“His career began in the ’50s as part of the West Coast jazz scene with Jimmy Giuffre and Chico Hamilton, recorded with wealth of jazz royalty over his career, including Ben Webster, Ella Fitzgerald, Bill Evans and Sonny Rollins.” Despite his relatively quiet profile, he was considered one of his instrument’s most influential players in all of jazz.
Altynai Asylmuratova, the former star ballerina and revered artistic director of the Vaganova Ballet Academy (one of the world’s most prestigious), has resigned – and she’s decamping to a company that has become something of a refuge for Russian dancers.
If the vocabulary and grammar of our languages shape the way we think (e.g., the presence or absence of verb tenses affecting the way we perceive time), then would inventing a completely logical language require its speakers to become more logical thinkers? James Cooke Brown decided to try it.
Back in 2006, Roberto Alagna actually stormed off the stage and out of the theater mid-performance after some of La Scala’s notorious loggionisti let him have it. This year – again in the house’s season-opening production – they did it again.
Joan Acocella: “God boasts to Satan, Have you seen my servant Job, so pious, so devoted to me? Satan answers, Why shouldn’t he be devoted? You have given him everything he could ever want: ‘But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.’ Well, God says, let’s see, and he gives Satan permission to ruin Job’s life.”
“I’ve found that the way to capture the truth of a character – and beyond that, to reflect the truth of how I feel – is to write microscopically. To focus on all the tiny details that, together, make sense of character. Each person’s perspective is absolutely unique; my job is to unearth all the specific events and associations that form an individual consciousness.”
Rupert Christiansen: “[These] efforts draw small but loyal audiences, usually very appreciative, and you might say at the very worst, that no harm is done. But for the critic these pop-up performances pose a quandary: how can one balance one’s desire to pat honest endeavour on the back with the sacred imperative of rigorously honest and unsentimental judgment?”
Robin Norton-Hale of OperaUpClose: “Theatre critics don’t tie themselves in knots trying to find a way to compare a production at the (rightly) well-funded RSC or National Theatre to one at … the Edinburgh Fringe. Each performance is judged on its own merits. … Far from being a poorer experience, I would argue that seeing a smaller-scale opera is simply a different one.”
“It’s 11 o’clock in the morning and row upon row of well-sculpted men are pirouetting in a small room to the tinny notes coming from an upright piano.”
A new poll by English Touring Theatre finds that it is … one you’ve probably heard of, but it may not leap immediately to mind.
Emma Green counterattacks in the Love, Actually wars at The Atlantic: “I admire the bravery that’s needed to declare oneself the enemy of Christmas, Colin Firth, and crushes nurtured by 11-year-old kids, and it would be cowardly to hide behind the movie’s cute-factor in mounting my defense.”