Today’s Stories
How Might We Rethink Public Spaces After COVID?
In recent years, designers and city-builders have largely come to reject defensive strategies and the exclusionary policies from which they stemmed. Great public spaces are now built with flexibility and approachability in mind, offering ample amenities and public resources. Yet, even in the best of times, the creation and operation of public parks, squares and community hubs remains both an honourable and difficult pursuit. – Spacing Toronto
New York Theatres Are Opening Their Buildings To Protestors
A new Twitter account, called “Open Your Lobby,” has encouraged theaters to welcome protesters. A post from the account recommended that the theaters “not permit police inside of the building for the safety of your protesters,” adding that nonblack staffers should block officers from entering. – The New York Times
Where Did “Shit Hits The Fan” Come From?
The true origins of the expression “shit hits the fan” are largely undetermined, though some sources suggest that Canada is to blame—it might have come from particularly picturesque Canadian military language of the early twentieth century. Another suggestion is that the idiom is descended from “an old joke.” – JSTOR
China’s Movie Theatres Reopened… But Audience Hasn’t Returned
There are now more than 12,000 cinemas in China, according to market research firm IBISWorld. This figure has more than doubled in the past decade as China has embraced movie-going. But four out of 10 said they “are very likely to close” in the near future, according to the China Film Association survey. This could mean nearly 5,000 cinemas going bust as a result of the pandemic. – BBC
Lebrecht: Privatise The South Bank Centre
Save that? Better to take the South Bank apart, piece by piece, in a period when there is no performance, so that it can put it together again under entrepreneurial management over the next year, ready to serve the public interest once concerts resume. It was the public, after all, who paid from their LCC rates to have the place built in 1951. That public has been given no say in its destiny ever since. – The Spectator
Poor Old Machiavelli Had ‘A Talent For Ending Up On The Losing Side’
His tenure as a senior administrator in the Florentine Republic saw many more failures than successes; he was bounced into prison and then exile after the Medici returned to power; when he finally got back into their favor, he was commissioned to write a great history of the city, only to see the family booted once again and die himself a couple of months later. “That hallmark of his work, Fortune, shined upon him only posthumously.” – History Today
Study: Kids Now Spending Nearly As Much Time On TikTok As On YouTube
Kids are now watching twice as many videos per day as they did just four years ago. This is despite the fact that YouTube’s flagship app is meant for ages 13 and up — an age-gate that was never truly enforced, leading to the FTC’s historic $170 million fine for the online video platform in 2019 for its noncompliance with U.S. children’s privacy regulations. – TechCrunch
The Backstory Of The Bravest (And Sneakiest) Opening Number In Tony Awards History
Here’s how songwriters Adam Schlesinger and David Javerbaum and host/lead performer Neil Patrick Harris concocted, and got away with, the immortal intro to the 2011 Tony Awards telecast, “It’s Not Just for Gays Anymore.” – The New York Times
No Tonys This Year? How About The Charlies?
Instead of choosing the best from an incomplete list, I decided to play a different game. Looking back at the last 10 years of Tony winners, I came up with my own nominations and winners for the Charlie Awards, representing the crème de la crème of Broadway from 2010 through 2019. – Los Angeles Times
How Did Ancient Australians Make Their Cave Paintings So Precise? A Team Of Archaeologists May Have The Answer
At a site in Limmen National Park in the Northern Territory are 17 paintings, stenciled on rock, that are far smaller than usual for such art, featuring detailed renderings of humans, kangaroos, turtles, boomerangs, and geometric figures. Researchers, working with the Marra people native to the area, think the painters may have used the same beeswax figures they used to make toys. – Artnet
How Ornette Coleman Radically Reimagined Jazz
Conventional jazz harmony is religiously chord-based, with soloists improvising within each key like balls pinging through a pinball machine. Coleman, in contrast, imagined harmony, melody, and rhythm as equal constituents. He sometimes said that he played around a melody, in such a way that he could hear it was there, but some listeners could not. – The New Republic
Post-Plague Poetry In Medieval England Could Be Downright Reactionary
With the huge drop in population following the Black Death, peasants and laborers were able to take advantage of the labor shortage to demand higher pay and improve their lives. Those who had been at the top of 14th-century society weren’t happy about that — and since they were the ones who were literate, such works as Langland’s Piers Plowman, Gower’s Vox Clamantis, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales reflected and reinforced their readers’ wish that the social order stay the way it was. – The Conversation
Artist Response To Injustice? Seven Musicians Speak Out
“What’s really important is to take a step back and look at the macro picture, and think through, how did we get here? What are the underlying causes? There’s this phrase flying around a lot for coronavirus, that the disproportionate impact on black or minority communities is due to “underlying health conditions.” Well, what were the conditions that created the underlying health conditions, and what can we do to start picking away at that? And it’s so unsexy, but the census helps a lot.” – NewMusicBox
Venetians Are Loving This Not-Utterly-Overrun-By-Tourists Thing. Is There Any Hope Of Preserving It?
Residents and interested observers have been concerned for years about the local economy’s addiction to mass tourism and the ills that accompany it. Italy’s COVID lockdown has, at least temporarily, returned Venice to its own people, and many of them are wondering how they might be able to keep it. – The New York Times
These Ballet Dancers Are Calling Out Inequity At Their Companies
“Over the past few years, calls for the ballet world to become more diverse, equitable and inclusive have become a regular rallying cry. Most of the public complaints, however, have been about general, systemic problems throughout the field. But this week, as our entire country is reckoning with the devastating effects of racial injustice on the Black community, a handful of dancers have taken to Instagram to directly call out the problems they’ve seen in their own companies.” – Dance Magazine
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Are TV Shows Scared Of Dealing Frankly With Police Brutality? Or Just No Good At It?
“As protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd continue around the country, THR‘s Daniel Fienberg and Inkoo Kang reflect on the small screen’s struggle to depict police violence and community responses.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Here’s One Area Of Publishing That’s Making Progress On Diversity: Audiobooks
“Audiobook publishers are increasingly offering opportunities to narrators of color, … a response to a broader range of stories and desire for the voice talent to reflect that diversity. … But the particular demands of the job, compared with film and stage acting, make this tricky. What does representation mean when actors can only be heard and not seen? What constitutes a black, Latino or Asian voice? And to complicate matters, in most audiobooks a single narrator voices multiple characters, who may have a variety of ethnicities and accents.” – The New York Times
Museums And Galleries Sue UK Insurers For Not Paying COVID Claims
“The group of more than 50 claimants — none of whom wanted to be named — includes major contemporary art galleries, museums and sole traders, with claims ranging from around £50,000 to £35m.” – The Art Newspaper
€1 Billion For Arts In Germany’s New €130 Billion Corona-Rescue Package
“The funds, which will be made available this year and next year, will be widely distributed across cinemas, music clubs, memorials, museums, theaters, and festivals. €250 million will go to help cultural institutions reopen with new hygiene protocols, such as updated ventilation systems and new socially-distanced visitation arrangements. Some €30 million has been earmarked for galleries, cultural centers, and publishing. The package, called New Start, also decreases the tax rate on art by 3 percent.” – Artnet
One-On-One Corona-Concerts Are Now Spreading Through Germany
Last month, a few musicians in Stuttgart began giving intimate-yet-socially-distanced performances — one performer, one listener, a couple of meters of empty space between them — at the city’s currently-unused airport. Now two of the area’s publicly-funded orchestras, the Staatsorchester Stuttgart and the Southwest German Radio Symphony, have taken on the project. “The result has been an intense series of more than 1,100 encounters — first in Stuttgart, and now in five other German cities. And what began as a clever adaptation to coronavirus rules has since become something more profound — a means of establishing human connection, agency and meaning at a time when such concepts have been harder to foster.” – The New York Times
Bail-Outs For The Arts Aren’t Enough
Virus impacts aren’t a short-term blip for the funded arts to be ameliorated by nifty footwork, strategised centrally and ‘top down’ in the coteries of arts power. Short-term bail-outs are insufficient for the enormity of the task. No amount of skilled fundraising and better marketing technique will save the plethora of slow-moving, risk-averse arts organisations in the recessionary world ahead. – Arts Professional
Here’s What A Socially-Distanced Theatre Looks Like
Around 70 per cent of the auditorium’s seats have been removed, with every second row cleared and seats arranged either individually or in pairs on the remaining rows. – Dezeen
Between Theatre And The Screen – A New Form?
It’s not film. (Except when it is.) It’s definitely not television. It’s…theatre on a screen? As COVID-19 continues to force industries online, one Bay Area organization is exploring a hybrid platform that could sustain theatre through the pandemic—and possibly beyond. – American Theatre
Black Theatre Workers Call Out Broadway Racism
Several black actors, writers, and others working in the New York theater have come forward to share the stories of the racism embedded in the industry. Many of them described hearing subtly or overtly racist language from powerful white people within the industry and described their frustration with producers and theater owners currently issuing boilerplate statements (like many brands) about the Black Lives Matter movement. – New York Magazine
The Reggae Producers That Changed The Way We Record Music
Perhaps no innovations have been as far-reaching as the set of boundary-smashing experiments that a small group of producers performed on multi-track recording machines and mixing desks in a handful of Jamaican studios throughout an astonishingly creative period almost 50 years ago. These pioneers created not just a vast trove of still-exhilarating recordings, but completely reinvented how a recording studio could be used, what a producer was able to do, and what listeners expected from music. – BBC