“Money is the last taboo in contemporary writing — there is no Fifty Shades of Green. I have a simple, crude, and self-serving idea of why that is the case: the people in our world, from book editors to magazine and newspaper editors to writers, usually hail from pretty pampered backgrounds and live pretty pampered lives. Often they’re downright rich. It’s an article of faith among these liberal elites, if you will pardon the loaded term, that they got to where they are all by themselves, and that the meritocracy works — all government has to do is level the playing field. So they talk a lot about identity, which is an easy addition to their moral equity and requires no change to their lives.”
Why SoundCloud Shutting Down Would Be Disastrous For Indie Music
“The streaming giant - which laid off 40 percent of its staff [last] Thursday - has long struggled to stay both stable and independent. But its unique contributions to music consumption can’t be overstated.”
What’s Going On With Fusion? It’s Being Splintered (Ahem) By Univision
Last year Univision bought up what was left of Gawker‘s network of sites and renamed it Gizmodo Media Group, into which it merged the Fusion.net site. But Univision also owns the Fusion television network (the Hispanic media giant’s first push into English-language broadcasting), so that channel is going to the Fusion.net address, while Fusion’s online journalism is moving to a new site called Splinter. Editor-in-chief Dodai Stewart says about the name, “Our aim is to do the kind of news coverage and commentary that gets under your skin.”
New Mayor Wants To Pull Books Depicting Same-Sex Unions From Verona’s Schools And Libraries
Says Federico Sboarina, who was elected in late June, “I am convinced that the family is composed [of a] mother and father, and I will defend this value in the education of children and young people.” Other local politicians are joining library and publishing organizations and gay advocates in pushing back against the policy.
Music Meta-Data – If It’s Missing, Does It Exist?
“The back of the original CD, and the LP, lists personnel. There is studio information and other details. On other releases there might be liner notes or additional images. This material is what I fed on as a young listener, and I’m still hungry for it today. Much of it disappears when I rip a disc to my hard drive, and online services generally don’t fill the gaps. Sure, background is available to varying degrees in a constellation of mutually supportive and competitive complementary services, from Discogs to Genius.com to Wikipedia to AllMusic.com, but that collective effort doesn’t satisfactorily fill the metadata void left when online albums are shorn of their contextual information.”
Does Opera Need Movie Directors To Save The Art Form?
“With all due respect, opera critics risk missing what the rest of us will see and hear in the new era in which an increasingly significant portion of the audience is at cinema relays: the cross-cutting between scenes, the aesthetic reconstruction of theatre-bound drama through montage and even, sometimes, sophisticated sound design denied to mere opera directors. Just the things, in fact, film directors are good at.”
Scientists Have Made A Machine That Can Write Poetry (And Fool Readers Into Believing A Human Wrote It)
“A neural network trained on thousands of lines of poetry has tried its hand at penning its own rhymes that mimic certain forms of verse. Its best efforts even fool people into thinking they’re reading the words of a human poet, rather than the algorithmic output of a cold-hearted AI.”
Expansion Plans For Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Museum Draws Ire Of Preservationists
Particularly after a statement by the museum’s director Janne Sirén: “We are also not in the business of collecting buildings. We are an art museum and our service is to our public and to the artworks in our custody. The buildings are here to serve us, and not us as the staff, but the public and the art. That is our foremost responsibility. The buildings are the utilitarian tools, in some respect, that allow us to accomplish our mission.”
Architect Gordon Bunshaft’s Albright-Knox Museum Is A Modern Masterpiece; Now The Museum Wants To Alter It
“The plan, which is still its early phases, would see Bunshaft’s tranquil gap between his black box and the 1905 building filled in with a new, glass-enclosed space; Bunshaft’s galleries and courtyard would be demolished. Surface parking currently in front of the 1905 building would be converted back into green space—as it was before the 1962 expansion—with parking and future gallery space buried underneath.”
Tactic: American Networks Try To Hide Bad Shows From TV Listings Services By Mis-Listing Them
“When a network TV show performs badly, the networks deliberately introduce errors into the episodes’ metadata before submitting it to the Nielsen ratings, so that the episode is counted as a separate show and doesn’t bring the season’s average rating down.”
Snapshot: Who Designs And Directs In America’s Theatres, By Gender
Porsche McGovern’s data project tracks the gender of designers, directors, and artistic directors at the League of Resident Theatre members.
Do University Teaching Jobs Stunt Writers?
“Even in Britain, whose elite universities were once home to elbow-patched, tweed-jacketed writers never burdened with the expectation of production — E. M. Forster famously spent more than two decades as an honorary fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, without ever publishing another novel — technocratic administrators have managed to extend their control over writers to a dispiriting degree.”
You May Hate Football, Or Fiction, Or YouTube, But Read This Story Anyway
Seriously. Just click on the link and keep going. (It’s not finished yet but will be within a few days, which is likely about how long it will take you to deal with this piece anyway.) As a Gizmodo explainer said, “It’s a deep thought experiment into what we consider humanly possible.”
Experiencing A 5,000-Year-Old Subterranean Cave System With Ruth Bader Ginsberg
It doesn’t matter if the West, whatever the president meant by that, wants to or “has the will to survive,” whatever survival means. “Visiting the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum is a good reminder that no matter how hard you resist, everything around you will eventually be buried and that most likely no one will find it until thousands of years later, and if they do, it’s usually by accident.”
Thoreau’s Environmental Legacy Isn’t Just About Walden Pond
Thoreau’s 200th birthday is July 12. With lectures, essays, and of course Walden, he helped inspire parks in cities, but also the National Park System. “The true largess of Thoreau, then, can perhaps best be discovered by experiencing one of the outdoor temples that his ‘in wildness’ declaration helped protect.”
Of *Course* There’s An ‘Accidental Wes Anderson’ Reddit Thread
The internet, and Reddit, can be terrible cesspools – and they can also be very, very wonderful places, where people who love Wes Anderson films and sets and filmography know how to replicate the eye of the director. “There are the eye-popping colors and the strong, well-defined lines. There are the eccentric architectural triumphs and eerie quiet. But most importantly, there are those shots ― the ones that zoom in and out with an almost borderline obsessiveness in their quest for near-perfect, everything-just-so symmetry.”
Let The Floods In, Or, How Design Can Help Cities Deal With Climate Change
Basically, design the cities so that it’s OK for many areas to get wet. “The challenge is to create city spaces that ‘prepare for routine-but-inconsistent flooding. … We know it’s going to happen, but it’s unpredictable. Planners don’t like that idea. It freaks us out.'”
The Latest Spider-Man Is Doing Well, And Perpetuating Hollywood’s Dude Director Problem
Excuse me, what the Wonder Woman? “The Marvel Cinematic Universe won’t have a woman in the director’s chair until 2019’s Captain Marvel. … For context, Captain Marvel is the MCU’s nineteenth film. However dire that ratio sounds, the MCU will actually be outperforming the rest of Big-Budget Hollywood.”
The Lowrider Pinata That Made Its Way Into LA’s Auto Museum
Artist Justin Favela “likes the idea of rendering powerful objects in cheap tissue paper. ‘The lowrider, it’s always perceived as this very masculine thing and I like to play with that,’ says Favela. ‘It is hyper masculine. But in this case, it’s also feminine, because of paper and craft.'”
What Do We Really Want From Amelia Earhart?
She’s not the hero of a fourth-grade report, but “her brazenness is bewitching at a remove, as are the mythical accomplishments of a demigod.”
In Paris, An Open-Air Concert, With The Musicians Playing From Balconies [VIDEO]
![In Paris, An Open-Air Concert, With The Musicians Playing From Balconies [VIDEO]](https://i2.wp.com/www.artsjournal.com/newsside/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/29906170001_5494861134001_5494830214001-vs.jpg?resize=150%2C113&ssl=1)
Composer Pierre Sauvageot’s piece “mixes building noises with classical tones” – and the residents, who also speak various words or phrases as part of the piece.
There Are Two American Ballet Theaters, Thanks To The Needs Of Filling The Met
Having the 3,800-seat Metropolitan Opera House to dance in is a blessing and a curse for the ballet as it has to balance creativity with getting people in seats. “When dancing elsewhere, its repertory consists more largely of one-act ballets; when at the Met, it has tended to model itself on the old Royal: full-length ballets with impressive scenery and costumes, storytelling and acting.”
New Theatre In The UK Is ‘Drying Up’ As Funding Crises Hit Programs For Playwrights
Screenwriter Olivia Hatreed, president of the Writers’ Guild, says, “It always takes a couple of years after the cuts start for people to really feel the impact… You kind of go along and think it’s all fine, but really you’ve already walked off the cliff.”
How Is Wrestling Like Greek Theatre?
One of the creators of Netflix’s new wrestling series, GLOW, says: “You’re telling stories on a scale that we’re not used to, but that’s really exciting — that can cross cultures, can cross languages. From one side, if you’re being ungenerous, you can say it’s super reductive and then from the other side, you could say it’s storytelling at its most potently inclusive and epic.”
If Jane Austen Lived Today, She Would Definitely Have A Twitter Feed Critiquing ‘The Bachelor’
“It seems that long before reality TV binges and bodice-rippers, women were indulging in entertainment that mixed straightforward pleasure with the appreciation of unintentional camp.”
San Francisco Symphony Gets A New Executive Director
Mark Hanson will become only the fifth executive director of the Symphony since the position was created in 1939. Like his predecessors, he combines training in arts management with a history as a practical musician.
What’s The Point Of Intermissions?
“If there is an art to intermission, what are its elements of style? When is the long event transporting, and how does the break (or two) become the worst part of the night? The feeling varies from dance to music to theater, from night to night and place to place.”
Can Danny Feldman Save The Pasadena Playhouse?
“The Pasadena Playhouse, which holds the designation of the State Theater of California, marks its centennial this summer. And while that’s reason to celebrate, the theater continues to struggle for survival amid serious financial challenges. Now, eight months into the job, Feldman has his work cut out for him.”
The Ideal EU City Of Culture (According To The EU)
“A new index by the EU Joint Research Centre published Thursday measures 168 cities in 30 European countries and ranks how they perform in 29 areas of culture and creativity. The ideal city would have the cultural venues of Cork, the cultural attractiveness and knowledge-based jobs of Paris, the innovation of Eindhoven, the new creative jobs of Umeå, the education system of Leuven, the openness, tolerance and trust of Glasgow, the connectedness of Utrecht and the good governance of Copenhagen.”
An Expedition To Spiral Jetty
“The road conditions near the jetty were highly variable, which was to say not always roads. The lake’s water levels, too, needed to be below 4,195 feet for us to see it, and those levels were partly dependent on snowfall (this winter there was lots) and how much of that snow, by the time we arrived, had melted and sluiced down the mountains — water that also, en route to the lake, could turn the 16 miles of unpaved roads into impassable mush.”