“When something doesn’t go right, the usual, understandable instinct is often to forget it, as quickly as possible. Move on, we advise each other. Don’t look back. … And yet, as tempting as it is to think of stoically soldiering on as the smart approach to dealing with failure, there’s also a solid case for wallowing in your mistakes, at least for a time.”
Archives for August 2015
Top Posts From AJBlogs 08.31.15
Monday Recommendation: Logan Strosahl
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-08-31
Links Gone Wild: September Gurl Clicks
AJBlog: blog riley Published 2015-08-31
What I Learned This Summer: Philadelphia
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2015-08-30
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Unpacking The Call For Diverse Books
“Sometimes it seems that what publishing is looking for, when they look to the Market to sell books by marginalized writers, is a single story. It is: this writer is *the* Dominican writer, or *the* Japanese writer, or *the* Sudanese writer that you should read right now. After all, we live in a culture that sells books with the tagline, if you read only one book this year.”
The True Value Of Contemporary Music
“Musical performances are among the few that demand you sit still and turn off your phone, and in the realm of the avant-garde, where there is rarely a narrative structure or a song, those can sometimes seem long. But art that forces you to sit and experience something, even if it makes you impatient, can be valuable in the same way that meditation and quiet spaces (churches, libraries) are valuable, in the same way that any inactivity is valuable.”
‘Hamilton’ Is Not Only A Great Musical But Also A Theatrical Game-Changer
“Within the Broadway spectrum, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop historical musical has less in common with recent smashes than with shows that radically expanded audiences’ perceptions of the kind of stories musicals could tell, and the language and form they could use to tell them.”
Netflix Film Premieres At Venice Film Festival
“When it is commercially released in October, Beasts of No Nation will be immediately available to see not only in selected cinemas but also to subscribers to the Netflix home entertainment service – which now boasts more than 50 million international subscribers.”
A New Ballet Explores The Real, Complex, Dark Relationships Behind Picasso’s ‘Three Dancers’
“Working for the ballet had been a good career move for Picasso, augmenting his income and introducing him to an audience of rich, cultured patrons. It had also pleased Olga who, while retiring from the stage, remained deeply attached to her old profession.”
How Art Helps New Orleans Students Deal With Their Post-Katrina PTSD
“Trauma is all about details. Trauma renders itself in certain songs, in the quality of the air against the sky, in colors of socks, in flavors of alcohol. When the human brain encounters a trauma, it makes quick decisions about what to remember, and it often remembers otherwise mundane details: the timbre of birdsong, or the specific shake of a tree’s shoulders. Sometimes the brain gets kind of obsessive about trauma.”
What British Dramaturgs Do
“While every major theatre in Germany has a whole department devoted to the function and a practitioner assigned to every production, in British theatre the dramaturg has been a comparatively rare beast. Until recently.”
Is The Symphony Over?
“A genre once aimed at vast crowds—Mahler imagined his symphonies being played in stadiums, for tens of thousands of people—now leads a more subdued, solitary existence. Much of its legacy is ignored in concert halls and can be encountered only on recordings.”
Wes Craven, The Mainstream Horror Maestro With A Debt To Ingmar Bergman
“Wes Craven’s career is a startling link between the European arthouse and Hollywood exploitation horror.”
Some Oliver Sacks Reading Lists
“Over the course of his life’s work, Sacks approached his many questions with rigorous intellect and, above all, empathy. The best word for this, maybe, is grace. And it’s everywhere in the elegant body of work he left behind—his many books, but also his shorter essays and interviews.”
(Also, here’s a link to all of Sacks’ work for the New Yorker.)
Apparently, European Cinema Is About To Be Destroyed
First, there’s Netflix (and HBO, Amazon, iTunes, etc.); and now “this sense of threat has been made more urgent by the proposals tabled by the European Union’s executive branch, the European Commission, to sweep away territorial copyright barriers in the movie and TV business in order to create a single European market.”
Target Shooters Are Destroying Ancient Petroglyphs In Utah Parks
“Spattered paint and bullet holes are erasing an archaeological record dating back thousands of years on public lands south of this growing enclave of subdivisions in Utah County.”
One Of China’s Biggest Peking Opera Stars Makes Her U.S. Debut At The Met
“Ms. Zhang, a lithe, delicate woman of 44, is a megastar in Beijing. She has performed for sold-out crowds here and in Shanghai, captivating audiences, including legions of young fans, with her sorrowful eyes, deep vocal intonations and graceful displays of martial arts. In 2007, she was the first star of the Peking Opera genre to perform solo at the Great Hall of the People, the seat of China’s central government.”
Fast-Rising Artist Noah Davis Dies (Far Too Young) The Same Day His MOCA Installation Opens
MOCA chief curator: “Noah is an important artist because he occupies the term ‘artist’ in the largest possible way: an incredibly accomplished painter, he is also a profound visionary — dreaming up the idea of the Underground Museum and then physically enacting that dream against all odds.”
Social Media: To Blame For Literary Mediocrity?
“A middlebrow cult of the popular is holding literature to ransom. Thus, if you judge by the emotional outpourings over their deaths, the greatest writers of recent times were Pratchett and Ray Bradbury. There was far less of an internet splurge when Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014 and Günter Grass this spring. Yet they were true titans of the novel.”
Conductor George Cleve, 79, Helped Interpret Mozart For The Summer Festival Crowd
“Renowned as a Mozart interpreter, Mr. Cleve spent his career primarily on the West Coast. He was the music director of the San Jose Symphony from 1972 to 1992 and in 1974 founded the Midsummer Mozart Festival, an annual concert series in the Bay Area that he directed to the end of his life.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs For 08.30.15
What I Learned This Summer: Philadelphia
AJBlog: Real Clear ArtsPublished 2015-08-30
Johan Renvall, Former Principal At American Ballet Theatre, Dead At 55
“As a temple statue come to life and near-naked in gold body paint, he erupted into sensational airborne bravura with perfect form. Yet as critics across the country noted, Mr. Renvall’s gifts went far beyond pyrotechnics.”
The Dissident Artist Who Was Detained For Eight Months In Cuba Speaks
“Until the last minute they want to mess with your head. They want to make you paranoid. At one point he said, ‘Someone close to you works for us.’ I said, ‘You’re not going to make me a paranoiac. I’ve been here for eight months and I am not a paranoiac.’ I understood they were watching me. But I would not let them make me a paranoiac. That’s what they do, they make you paranoid, they isolate you.”
The Reading Is So Hard – But That Doesn’t Make It Brilliant (Or Does It?)
“The reader who assumes that abstruse prose is clever prose, or that there is a reliable correlation between opacity and depth, is bound to waste a lot of time on writing that doesn’t deserve it. She is also liable to end up praising works that confound her, for fear of being revealed as a dimwit if she confesses her perplexity.”
Who Sets Cell Phone Etiquette In Theatres – And Who Should?
“Theater as a whole desperately needs to keep attracting younger audiences, and yet it doesn’t seem particularly able or willing to educate newer playgoers or accommodate their differing ideas on how culture should be consumed.”
Former NYT Music Critic Allan Kozinn Is Now Looking For New Music Concerts In Maine
“Leaving the Times was not easy, but I began considering the prospect in 2012, when the paper’s culture editor thought it would be interesting to redefine my job, transforming me into a general culture reporter.”
What Happened To Phnom Penh’s Historic Artists’ Building?
“With poor sanitation, a decaying structure and no ventilation, this once-historic building is facing demolition – yet grocery shops, hair salons, cafés and even a school have sprung up to cater for the thousands of residents in this sprawling community.”