Today’s Stories
Chiura Obata’s Career Was Interrupted By Internment During WWII. Now A Retrospective Of His Work Has Been Stilled By The Virus
“Suddenly he was in a drab, dehumanizing place, first a stable in California, then the barracks of Topaz, Utah, where he spent most of his time in internment. It was bleak, hot, arid and dusty, and he missed green things, trees and gardens. He moved quickly to establish an art school, both at Tanforan and later Topaz. And when he represented the camp at Topaz, the sense of displacement became dreamlike, even surreal, a luminous landscape that looked just a bit scorched, with a few dark buildings in the midground standing in for the enormity of what was happening there.” – Washington Post
How Podcasting Is Changing
The podcasting business is changing at the speed of sound. There’s a pivot toward profit. And while that’s great in the short run for public podcasting, it also attracts new players and an aggressive new business model. Public podcasts that often started as spinoffs or experiments are becoming lucrative. NPR recently projected that podcasting would account within three years for 20% of its revenues. In public-broadcasting–adjacent venues, The Daily reportedly made millions last year, and Slate draws half its revenue from podcasting. – Current
How Dance Helps Me Think And Thinking Helps Me Dance
For most of my career, dancing and academic research were two separate but equally weighted spheres. However, over the years, I have become more and more aware that many people viewed dance as a less valuable way of thinking and working. Dance, in their minds, was a purely emotive activity consisting of uncritical, spontaneous movement or a purely athletic endeavour whose sole purpose is to defy our body’s physical limits. Part of the reason why this view of dance persists, I think, stems from a deeply rooted prejudice against embodied vocations. – Aeon
Why AI Can’t Predict The Value Of Art
To bring real value, any A.I. application needs loads of quality data—which is doubly problematic in our small and notoriously opaque industry (dealers l-o-v-e to hoard sales info). Without greater transparency, A.I. can do only so much. – Artnet
Inside This Season’s Most Controversial Book – The Woody Allen Memoir
I spoke to several industry professionals; almost all were reluctant to play Monday morning quarterback without the promise of anonymity—if you’re making a book deal in secret, perhaps it’s worth interrogating why. – The New Republic
Comic Books Industry Grinds To Halt For The First Time Ever
Comics are largely sold through the direct market, moving from publisher to distributor to specialty comics retailers, as opposed to digital distribution or the newstands of yesteryear. But last month, Diamond Comics Distributors—the monopoly that supplies monthly comics to retailers in the United States and Britain—announced that it was refusing to accept new product from comics’ largest publishers, including Marvel, DC, Image, and Boom Studios. – The Daily Beast
Before There Was ‘The Onion’, There Was ‘Not The New York Times’
An April Fool’s story that’s actually true: back during the 1978 newspaper strike in New York City, a group of writers and editors that included some now-illustrious names — George Plimpton, Nora Ephron, Carl Bernstein, Terry Southern, Frances FitzGerald — put together a parody newspaper and got it onto newsstands. Here’s the first-ever oral history of this proto-Onion from some of the folks involved. – The New York Times
SXSW Will Put Its Film Festival Online Streaming For Ten Days
SXSW announced Thursday that it’s partnering with Amazon Prime Video to stream as much of its movie line-up as possible for a 10-day period in the U.S. It will be free to viewers with or without an Amazon Prime membership. – CBS Austin
Crosswords Only Date Back To 1913, But Written Word Games Have Been Around For A Very Long Time
Here’s a brief history, going from a five-by-five palindrome from ancient Rome to Victorian double acrostics to four different kinds of riddle (including the anti-riddle). – The Paris Review
Arts Freelancers Are At Particular Risk Right Now
Everyone includes musicians, visual artists, designers, dancers and other freelancers who are part of Washington’s vibrant arts economy. They are musicians with no tour dates. Art handlers with postponed exhibitions. Actors, dancers and designers booked for upcoming productions that are now in limbo. – Washington Post
Give This Woman A Pritzker Prize! Once Pakistan’s Starchitect, She Now Designs Mud-And-Bamboo Huts For Poor Villagers
Yasmeen Lari retired at 60 after making her career designing some of Pakistan’s glitziest modern buildings for government and corporate clients. Then, after a severe earthquake, she went to help with reconstruction — designing simple houses that survivors could build themselves, using the debris, that cost a tenth of what NGOs spent on prefab concrete homes. And she’s gone on from there, developing one innovative and inexpensive structure after another, creating jobs for impoverished women at the same time. – The Guardian
Simon Woods Chosen As League Of American Orchestras Next Leader
Mr. Woods’s previous position ended just as the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s season was about to begin last year. After building a reputation for innovation during his run as president of the Seattle Symphony from 2011 to 2017, he arrived in Los Angeles to follow Deborah Borda, who decamped to New York after a long, inspired run in California. – The New York Times
New Plays About Coronavirus Epidemic Are Already Arriving
“Skylight Theatre, a Los Angeles theater company that prioritizes social issues, … [has] kicked off weekly plays from its writers lab set amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and the [online] series will continue until Skylight can open its doors again.” The project has started with Christine Hamilton-Schmidt’s Our First Honest Conversation, about an estranged couple, separately sheltering in place, trying “to reignite a sexual spark using only words.” – Los Angeles Times
Bill Withers, 81
Withers broke out nationally with “Ain’t No Sunshine,” which he also wrote and reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1971. Fueled by a melancholic groove and soulful vocal, it won the Grammy for Bests R&B son\g and launched a relatively brief but memorable career. – Deadline
Now Even Arthouse Movie Theaters Are Embracing Streaming Video
“Alamo Drafthouse, Film Forum and the Angelika are a few of the … theaters testing out the provisional path into [online streaming]. … Patrons can purchase a digital ticket, most of which cost around $12, giving them access to a link that is available for a few days.” – Variety
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Guitarist And New York Jazz Institution Bucky Pizzarelli Dead Of COVID At 94
“[He] was revered for the technical aplomb that enabled him to combine intricate runs, full chordal accompaniment and even his own walking bass lines. His rock-solid rhythmic footing and broad harmonic understanding were hallmarks of a warmly understated style that always drew attention to the song he was playing, rather than the playing itself.” – NPR
Public Radio And TV Stations Are Having To Rework Their Underwriting Models — Fast
Cultural institutions and restaurants, whose revenue has been largely wiped out by the coronavirus epidemic, have been among the biggest underwriters of local public media outlets. Reporter Julian Wyllie looks into how several local stations are dealing with the sudden changes in their sponsors’, and their own, fortunes. – Current
Edinburgh Festivals’ Cancellation Could Devastate Labor Market Throughout City
Warning that there are up to five times as many jobs in the city indirectly affected by the festivals and the tourism industry as there are directly employed in them, the head of the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce said, “We are already seeing quite a number of businesses in the tourism and hospitality sector fail. … I think we’ll see a second wave now.” – The Scotsman
Calgary Philharmonic Reverses Mass Layoff, Recalls Musicians And Staff
Let’s hope this is the start of a trend. “Two weeks after temporarily laying off staff and musicians, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra is offering them reduced hours. Everyone will be able to work 70 per cent of regular hours per week at home while the CPO is shut down.” – Calgary Herald
Museum Will Become Temporary Morgue As Ireland Braces For Coronavirus Deaths
“The Irish Museum of Modern Art … announced last week that it had been ‘requested to facilitate the construction of a temporary mortuary’ on its grounds as the ‘country prepares Public Health facilities to deal with Covid-19’.” – The Art Newspaper
Carnegie Hall Projects $9 Million Deficit, Cancels Everything Until Fall
“Carnegie Hall is projecting a $9 million operating deficit on its $104 million budget after canceling … all events in its auditoriums through July 25, roughly 30% of this season’s schedule. It has just under 400 full-time employees plus part-time staff and teaching artists. It has not decided whether layoffs will be needed.” – Yahoo! (AP)
This Is A Transition From One Era To Another
The era of peak globalisation is over. An economic system that relied on worldwide production and long supply chains is morphing into one that will be less interconnected. A way of life driven by unceasing mobility is shuddering to a stop. Our lives are going to be more physically constrained and more virtual than they were. A more fragmented world is coming into being that in some ways may be more resilient. – New Statesman
How LACMA’s New Building Became A Referendum On Museums
How did this building, initially embraced as promising, if not visionary, come to ignite a scorched-earth debate in its final stages? The story of LACMA’s campus reconstruction—and the current opposition to it—reflects some of the thorniest questions at play in the operation of museums today: what they are meant to be, who gets to decide, and who is meant to pay for them. – Artnet
How To Maintain (Or Renew) Your Relationship With Shakespeare: Read Him
It’s certainly true that people have been reading Shakespeare’s plays for almost as long as they have been watching them. Within two or three years of his first, collaborative efforts on the London stage, Shakespeare’s first play in print was the gory tragedy Titus Andronicus (1594). Only one copy of this edition exists, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. That scarcity itself tells us something about reading: playbooks were small, consumable pamphlets often read into oblivion, not literary trophies to be venerated. – The Guardian
There’s Going To Still Be Theatre. But What Will It Be?
Said Chay Yew, “We’ve always complained about how the American theatre doesn’t work. I for one find the blank slate exciting. We either repeat what we did before or we don’t. The structure will have to come down.” Joe Haj conceded that if the crisis “ends in six weeks, we may be much like we were before. But if not, or there’s another spike in the virus, we may need to rethink our model entirely. There’s a huge role for leadership. We need to be able to dream ourselves forward.” – American Theatre