A New Literary Memoir Recalls Dylan Thomas
AJBlog: Straight|UpPublished 2015-05-31
Archives for May 2015
How Do You Juggle Broadway, Hollywood, And Chemo?
“She’s so alive onstage and so thrilling to watch. That’s a direct result of her having to live in the moment in her life right now. She doesn’t say, ‘I’ll do it later.’ I’ve never once felt like she wasn’t giving 100% of herself.”
Urban Planning Via LEGO
“With the sounds of real construction—jackhammers, saws, cranes—whirring steadily in the background, the toy-sized towers were being heavily edited by visitors with less in the way of architectural bona fides.”
Hilary Mantel – Once More – On Taking The Tudor Court From Page To Stage
“Inside my head, they are whirls and blurs of energy in a show that never sleeps, where even in the small hours the blood runs down the walls. I construct the scenery and source the props, arrange the sound effects: church bells, the cry of hounds. I am my own lighting expert.”
Black Directors And Filmmakers Flip The Script With Public Twitter Discussion
“Academy Award nominee director Ava DuVernay, founder of the African American Film Releasing Movement (AFFRM), organized a massive ‘Rebel-a-Thon.’ The online event included the voices of 43+ black filmmakers—some well known, like Debbie Allen and Malcolm D. Lee.”
A Haitian Novelist Who Came Of Age In Canada Is The First Non-French Citizen Inducted Into Academie Française
Dany Laferrière “wore the signature costume of academicians: a black tailcoat embroidered with green olive branches that in his case a Montreal embroiderer spent 500 hours sewing, and a metal sword specially made by a Haitian sculptor with references to Legba, the Voodoo deity of crossroads.”
An Irish Art Collector, Drowned On The Lusitania, Left His Collection To Ireland – So Of Course It’s In London
“I don’t think it is unreasonable for me –or for anyone who has studied the history of the Lane paintings – to feel a glow of righteous rage when we see the ownership of these paintings vested solely and simply in the National Gallery, London.”
The Raid To Find Long-Missing Nazi Art
“Although a few museums will be pleased to be able to exhibit the original works — as reminders of the fanatic cult of heroism that led to the deaths of millions of people — the artistic value of the bombastic sculptures is debatable at the very least.”
DVD Box Sets: Still A Thing?
“The studios owning rights to those shows are rushing to release complete collections, especially of long-running series, while consumers are still in the habit of buying them.”
Dressing ‘Sleeping Beauty’ For The Ballet Theater At The Met
“Then there are the ornate headpieces and floppy, wide-brimmed hats. Everyone wears a wig. … There are 210 of them, three times as many as in any other Ballet Theater production, the head of the wig department, Rena Most, said. The Queen’s perruque towers above her like a sheaf of wheat, augmented further by a spray of giant feathers.”
Why The World Needs Women Rock Critics
“In the effort to prove the burgeoning rock scene of the sixties a worthy subject of critical inquiry, rock needed to be established as both serious and authentic. One result of these arguments—the Rolling Stones vs. Muddy Waters, Motown vs. Stax, Bob Dylan vs. the world—was that women came out on the losing side, as frivolous and phony. Whether a teen-age fan or a member of a girl group, women lacked genuine grit—even female critics thought so.”
Will The Protest Mattress – Remember, It Was A Senior Year Art Project – End Up In A Museum?
“Whatever its fate in art or social history, Mattress Performance could well live on in objecthood. But would a museum or gallery want it? On the phone from California, where she is visiting a friend in Laguna Beach post-graduation and luxuriating in the distance from the 50-pound mattress she hauled around daily since September, Sulkowicz says no one has approached her about the prospect yet.”
Explaining Theatre To Someone Who’s Never Seen A Play
“Perhaps what we don’t talk about enough is the pleasure of theatre, how it makes us feel, and why those of us who go frequently love it so much.”
How A Twitter Campaign Changed (This Year’s) BookCon
“There were some instances where, when we were planning panels — Who’s available? Who fits with kind of the theme of this panel? — where we would definitely stop and say, ‘We need diversity included here. We have three white people; the fourth cannot be that way.'”
When The Only ‘American Girl’ Black Doll Is A Slave, We’ve Got A Problem
“If you were a white girl who wanted a historical doll who looked like you, you could imagine yourself in Samantha’s Victorian home or with Kirsten, weathering life on the prairie. If you were a black girl, you could only picture yourself as a runaway slave.”
Dean Sends ‘USC7’ MFA Group Another Letter
“As the USC students and the administration go back and forth over what promises were and were not kept, a larger debate now rages about the future of art in education.”
‘USC7’ MFA Students Respond To Dean’s Letter
“Current and former Roski faculty also issued a statement, expressing solidarity with the USC7, urging the administration to ‘honor its commitments to its students.'”
Color Collotype Printing Preserves Japan’s Heritage [VIDEO]
“Benrido has been kept alive by the Japanese government, who use this intricate printing method to ‘replicate and preserve Japan’s heritage’ by copying important cultural documents and artworks in case of natural disaster. Yamamoto, who treasures collotype, and is saddened to see its decline over the past several decades, views it as his duty to preserve the process – and Japan’s history – for the next generation.”
What Happened When An Opera Company Opened Its Dress Rehearsal To Working-Class Students
“It was an extremely new experience to be sitting in the three-tiered performance hall, listening to the kind of song and live music that was so good it belonged on an album.”
Instead Of ‘Decluttering,’ Try Loving Your Stuff And Its History
“It is time to liberate ourselves from the propaganda of divestment. I would like to submit an entirely different agenda, one that is built on love, cherishing and timelessness. One that acknowledges that in living, we accumulate. We admire. We desire. We love. We collect. We display.”
What’s Wrong With Hiring On ‘Cultural Fit’? Only Everything
“It is easy to mistake rapport for skill. Just as they erroneously believe that they can accurately tell when someone is lying, people tend to be overly confident in their ability to spot talent.”
The Lawsuit Over The Principal Oboist In Buffalo
“Davis asked to sit somewhere else during rehearsals and performances – an unusual request because the principal flutist and principal oboist sit side-by-side in front of the woodwind section. She said she didn’t want to sit so close ‘to someone who was very enraged.'”
Margaret Atwood Is First Author To Write For A Library That Won’t Be Read For 100 Years
“The Toronto-based Man Booker Prize winner is the first author to hand over an unpublished piece to the Future Library in Oslo. The international project will see one writer contribute a new, unread text to the collection every year for the next 100 years. The pieces will be kept locked up until 2114, when 1,000 trees planted for the project in a forest just outside Oslo will be cut down to provide paper for their publication.”
One Last Havana Biennial Before Cuba Opens
“Everyone knows that major shifts are inevitable once capitalism begins to flood the socialist zone. And a sense of mingled excitement and apprehension is in the air at the 12th Havana Biennial, a diffuse, gradually unfolding, monthlong series of art exhibitions that have been injected into the tissue of this majestic heirloom of a city, adding contemporary warmth to its gorgeously crumbling bones.”
Last Year The Baltimore Symphony Hired An Embedded Journalist To Cover The Orchestra (Here’s How It Turned Out)
I have a whole lot of editorial control as far as picking stories out. I would say probably 75 percent of what I do is unrelated to the orchestra; it’s just generally about classical music. Twenty-five percent relates the orchestra. But I don’t see it as a direct “try to sell this concert.”