“With the rise in popularity of the sport in the late-19th century, tennis and music soon began to make a match.”
Archives for June 2015
Those Awkward Animal Moments On Stage
“During a four-week run of “Gypsy,” a baby lamb from Living History Farms grew almost too big for the star to hold in her lap. Mice in “Cinderella” gave birth to a squirmy pink litter in the Playhouse costume shop, and a goat in “Mister Roberts” ate a hole in the dressing-room wall.”
Here’s What Happened When One Foundation Consolidated Its Giving And Focused On The Arts
“Long a contributor to causes across the board, from homeless shelters to opera companies, the organization began steering all of its funding toward the arts. Culture needed the money, the thinking went, and by targeting one area, the foundation could set itself apart from its peers and become a real player in the community.”
Music Streaming Services Are Pretty Terrible At Discovering New Music
“Though I keep listening out of animal curiosity for what comes next, I am almost never surprised. I always feel as if I’m shopping somewhere, and the music reflects What Our Customers Like to Listen To. The experience can feel benignly inhuman.”
A New Shakespeare Play?! Computer Algorithm Says Yep
“The play does have all the hallmarks of a legitimate Shakespeare and Fletcher collaboration.”
Principal Ballet Dancers, Aging Gracefully
“Retirement is there, it is going to happen. This is going to sound morbid and I don’t know if I should say it, but it’s a bit like dying. You know you’re going to die, everybody does, but you don’t stop what you are doing because of that. You don’t slow down because you know you are going to have to retire. You get on with it, you keep taking the vitamins, you go to Pilates, you do what you have to do to survive in this thing that we do.”
Bookstores Are Planning For Harper Lee’s New Novel Like It’s A Harry Potter Sequel
“Because Ms. Lee, who is 89 and famously private, will not be doing any publicity or bookstore appearances, booksellers are finding creative ways to draw in customers and capitalize on the widespread anticipation, with read-a-thons, midnight openings, film screenings, Southern food and discussion groups.”
French Singer And Actress Magali Noël Was Muse To Fellini, And Much More
“Her daughter described Ms. Noel as ‘the muse of Federico.’
“‘It was a great relationship,’ she said. ‘Platonic or not at the start, I do not know.'”
The Underfunded, Disorganized Plan To Save Earth From The Next Giant Asteroid
“Unfortunately for the future of the world, the recent 2005 Congressional mandate to find NEOs on the order of 140 meters or larger within the decade appears to be floundering due to organizational and funding challenges.”
Apple Music Starts Tuesday
What it is, what it does, what it means.
The Worst Act Of All Time – Perhaps By Design
The Cherry Sisters’ “variety act included original music, bass drum thumping, poetry, mouth harp playing, inspirational recitations, essay reading, fake hypnosis and other artistic expressions. And the audience responded to the whole shebang by hurling vegetables, shouting interjections and behaving rudely.”
Why Theatre Basically Sucks (Except When An Actor Entirely Forgets The Lines)
“The vast majority of plays are distinctly average. They are fairly well written, fairly well acted and fairly well staged. But they do not reflect how people actually speak because dialogue in most modern plays is generally produced to show how clever the writer is or how gifted the actor delivering it is. The tickets are expensive. The seats are uncomfortable. The audiences are pretentious and pleased with themselves, laughing loudly to show they get obscure jokes and cultural references.”
Those Deeply Ugly Ebook Fonts Are Getting A Makeover
“For typography fans, electronic books have long been the visual equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard. The fonts are uninviting. Jarring swaths of white space stretch between words. Absent are all the typesetting nuances of a fine print book.”
Wait, What Actually *Is* The Most Banned Book In The United States?
The American Library Association’s list is not statistically supported, says FiveThirtyEight. Sooooo what’s the deal?
Retired Baby Boomers Become Docents Gone Wild
“Managing a generation of volunteers who grew up as rebels isn’t always easy.”
As The Recent Met Show Proves, Museums Need To Step It Up Around Native Art
“That a show of that size and scope wouldn’t include Native American curatorial partners is indicative of a museum system that has for centuries seen Indigenous people as subjects. In the United States, where most of the large encyclopedic art museums were formed in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, legacies of putting Native cultures on display are deep-rooted and not so easily given up.”
Remember That Photo Of The Nine-Year-Old Smoking?
“When she came along and took those photos, I thought, ‘Well, hey, people will see me and this may get me the attention that I want; it may change things for me,’ ” Ellison says. She thought someone would see the images and come rescue her. “I had thought that that might have been the way out. But it wasn’t.”
What If The Only Shakespeare Play To Survive Had Been ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’?
“The mystery of Midsummer Night gets bound up in the larger mystery of Shakespeare. Yet it is an anomaly, distinct from anything he wrote before or after, a world to itself with its own rules and its own moods.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs For 06.28.15
Ornette Coleman, Traditionalist
Are Children’s Books The Next Frontier For High-Quality Nonfiction Illustration And Writing?
“For a long time it has been thought that publishers serve fiction well, while non-fiction has been dominated by glossy reference books. But we are currently seeing a boom in beautifully illustrated narrative non-fiction – and this Greenaway win marks a high point in the trend.”
The President’s ‘Amazing Grace’ And The Political Power Of Music
“When it comes to political leaders, it’s a fine line between human and unbecoming, and the line gets ever-thinner in a social-media age where moments can be highlighted, repeated and parsed ad infinitum. If the singing isn’t good, it can become a punchline; if it is, it can look glib or narcissistic.”
Why Is The Academy Suddenly Getting More International (Again)?
The Best Foreign Film category’s “apparent magnanimity was said to have emanated out of a desire to celebrate great international works, but many saw right through it: it was at least as much about giving Academy members a specific way of honoring foreign language films so that they wouldn’t necessarily feel compelled to honor them in categories in which Hollywood films were also competing.”
Nina Simone’s Music Is More Relevant Than Ever
“For Simone, who lived next door to Malcolm X in Mt. Vernon, New York, and whose first interaction with Martin Luther King, Jr. involved a heated declaration that her activism was on the ‘by any means necessary’ part of the scale, the tune bore none of the turn-the-other-cheek wholesomeness of other protest songs. ‘Mississippi Goddam’ was also an upshot of Simone’s time spent in the care of intellectual co-conspirators like Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and Stokely Carmichael.”
London Is Eating Itself. What Will Be Left?
“The spaces for work that are an essential part of the city’s economy are being squeezed, its high streets diminished, its pubs and other everyday places closing. It is suffering a form of entropy whereby the distinctive or special is converted into property values. Its essential qualities, which are that it was not polarised on the basis of income, and that its best places were common property, are being eroded.”
Public Art: Nuisance Or Blessing (Or Both)?
“Undistinguished work warrants critical drubbing; strong work is a catalyst for dialogue. Isn’t it the presenting organization’s role to stimulate that conversation? Doesn’t diverse opinion fulfill the ambitions of a democracy?”