“Lucas Debargue, a 24-year-old French pianist, came fourth in the finale of the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow on 30 June, yet he’s the only competitor anyone is talking about. Why?”
Archives for July 2015
David Byrne: Technology Isn’t The Only Reason Musicians Are Having A Hard Time Earning A Living
“It’s easy to blame new technologies like streaming services for the drastic reduction in musicians’ income. But on closer inspection we see that it is a bit more complicated. Even as the musical audience has grown, ways have been found to siphon off a greater percentage than ever of the money that customers and music fans pay for recorded music.”
The Difference Between Movies And Video Games
“It surely must be tempting to think that this compulsion for games and movies to feed into and off each other is a sign that they are artistically tied together, that they are both destined to lift one another to higher and better things and that they have something important in common that means they can both learn from each other. But no; games are games and movies are movies.”
UK Apologizes To Ai Weiwei, Grants Him Six-Month Visa
“On Thursday Ai disclosed that the British embassy in Beijing had turned down his request for a business visa, saying he had failed to disclose a criminal conviction. Instead it gave him a visa covering 20 days in September, when a major exhibition of Ai’s work is opening at London’s Royal Academy.”
How Netflix Is Disrupting TV
“It’s less than three years since Netflix debuted its first original series — Lilyhammer, recently cancelled after three seasons — and Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos said the service expects to roll out 16 scripted dramas, nine original documentaries, three documentary series, 12 comedy specials and 17 children’s series in 2015 for a total of 475 hours of original programming in the United States.”
The Problem With Cutting Theatre In Schools Is That It Cuts Audiences In Theatres
“My own fear about drama getting smaller in regular public schools like Lakeshore is that it limits the ability of kids to stumble upon it – and that affects not just future theatre professionals, but future theatre audiences.”
Will Star Rolling Stone Movie Critic Leave The Magazine?
“Two people who work at Rolling Stone parent company Wenner Media said that Peter Travers had been asked to move from a staff position to a contractor by company founder and chief Jann Wenner. Travers, a 26-year-veteran of the magazine, bristled at the suggestion and threatened to leave the publication entirely.”
25 Years Ago Francis Fukuyama Declared The End Of History. A Lot Has Happened Since
“After the initial celebration, he quickly lost favor, his argument often treated as little more than a rhetorical punching bag. Commentators of varying leanings could all agree that the end of history thesis was willfully naive, a relic of post-1989 triumphalism that had been rapidly overtaken by harsher political realities. Fukuyama, for his part, turned to somewhat more modest topics in the years after End of History, writing books on trust, biotechnology and U.S. foreign policy.”
Public Projects To Transform Neighborhoods (But Who Asked The Neighborhoods?)
“As Thomas Heatherwick’s projects have grown larger, and entangle private wealth with government financing, they present the public with a quandary: Should communities accept the unasked-for gift of a design perhaps more ambitious than what might result from limited public funds, developed in a public process?”
If You Were Going To Do Something New With The Barnes Art What Could You Do?
“The question naturally arises, then, of what to do in terms of contemporary programming — because the irony, at least in terms of the permanent collection, is that the institution can’t actually do anything. Unlike other large museums, the Barnes cannot rotate objects in and out of active display or organize special shows using these works to bring particular artists or styles to light. Each piece must remain exactly where it is, forever.”
How The Ways We Watch TV Are Changing
“We’re at a media moment where media consumers expect media to find them. They are not going to go to media. They’re not going to go out and find shows in general. Now, it’s to the point where appointment viewing for most people can be narrowed down to a select two or three or four shows that people make sure they always catch.”
Bolshoi Ballet Won’t Renew Contract Of Director Who Suffered Acid Attack
“Sergei Filin, the Bolshoi Ballet artistic director whose sight was maimed two years ago by an acid attack organized by a disgruntled dancer, will lose his job when his contract expires next spring. Bolshoi Theatre chief Vladimir Urin announced yesterday in Moscow that he is abolishing Filin’s position and replacing it with a more management-focused director, indicating that artistic decision-making is to be taken ‘jointly’ with the theatre directorate.”
What Drives Trophy Hunters Like The Man Who Killed Cecil The Lion?
“The question, then, is why? What motivates Palmer and other trophy hunters, as they’re called, to fly thousands of miles and spend tens of thousands of dollars, all for the sake of killing an animal like Cecil? The answer is complex, but, largely, it can be thought of as a demonstration of power and prestige, says Amy Fitzgerald, a sociologist at the University of Windsor.”
Hollywood Blockbusters Need To Lose The Plot
“What was once a series content to celebrate simple boy-racer pleasures, the seventh Fast & Furious fell prey to a recent tentpole-film affliction: ridiculously over-complicated plotting.”
UK Denies Ai Weiwei Business Visa, Citing His ‘Criminal’ Past
“The dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has accused British authorities of turning their backs on human rights defenders after UK immigration officials rejected his application for a six-month business visa, claiming he had not declared a criminal conviction in his home country.”
Happy Days: Northern Ireland Town Loves Its Beckett Festival
“The barber offers Beckett haircuts; a local coffee shop sells Krapp (banana and nutella) and Endgame (I didn’t investigate) sandwiches named after his plays. Events take place in theaters, churches, halls, at the Portora School, on the small islands that surround the town and in other improbable places, often kept a secret until a bus deposits audiences at the spot. All of this creates a festive and buoyant atmosphere that works strangely well with Beckett’s famously dark, difficult and often mordantly humorous oeuvre.”
Inside The Floating 3-D Head Of Marlon Brando
“One unusual sequence in the documentary Listen to Me Marlon shows a seemingly low-tech digital version of the actor Marlon Brando quoting Macbeth. His head floats in black space and the image looks three-dimensional yet still raw. These visuals were constructed by the filmmakers from a series of scans of Brando’s head that were made around 20 years ago.” (includes video)
Bringing Ballet To Farms In (Where Else?) Vermont
“[Charles] Pregger, a ballet teacher, said Farm to Ballet was born after he led outdoor classes at Oakledge Park in Burlington. He saw that alfresco ballet was possible and joked that he’d like to do something like a flash-mob-styled performance halfway up Mount Philo. That lighthearted thought became a more meaningful and concrete plan to bring dance to Vermont farms.”
New Musical Loses Half Its Cast Amid Delays And Dissension
Five actors and four dancers will be leaving the 19-person cast of Dusty, a new show about the singer Dusty Springfield, by the end of August. The producers of the show, which began performances in an Off-West End theatre in late May, keep postponing the press night.
Is The Next Bolaño A Middle-Class Brazilian Housewife Who Died Almost 40 Years Ago?
“No one converts the uninitiated into devout believers as suddenly and as vertiginously as Clarice Lispector, the Latin American visionary, Ukrainian-Jewish mystic, and middle-class housewife and mother so revered by her Brazilian fans … She writes like a medieval saint who time-traveled to a high-rise apartment building in Rio and took up chain-smoking and visiting fortune-tellers.”
Ernest Hemingway, Godfather Of Long-Form Journalism
“Unlike Joyce’s innovations, Hemingway’s experimental fusion of fiction and nonfiction [in Green Hills of Africa] remained largely at the level of theory – but it has proven to be even more enduringly influential. Hemingway’s stream has become hard to recognize and to distinguish, because it has become the mainstream.”
Archaeology Frauds – They’re A Lot Of Trouble, So Why Would Scientists, Even Crooked Ones, Go To The Bother Of Perpetrating Them?
“There is a reason that we keep buying into hoaxes such as the ‘Shroud of Turin’ or the ‘Wife of Jesus’ fragment.” (Note: This article begins with an actual three-archaeologists-walk-into-a-bar joke – it’s a recently excavated prehistoric bar, of course.)
Republics Of Letters: How Medieval Scribes Fashioned Modern Writing
A millennium after the Greeks created European civilization’s first written culture, the scholar Alcuin and his monks at Charlemagne’s court fused Roman and Celtic scripts to create the alphabet we use today – and established standards and rules such as leaving a space between words and beginning sentences with a capital letter.
Motels, Marrakech, And Mouths: From The Travel Journals Of Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“I find a variety store-bar called the Sans-Souci. Inside is a drunk loudmouth of about 50 and a platinum blonde who looks like she’s been thru all the mills and talks tough. The drunk is saying: Well, if you waz ever in a war, you’d see something. She says: I ain’t gettin near no war! I’m not thinkin of wars, I’m thinkin of prisons!”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 07.30.15
Peter Brant’s Brands: Whither ARTnews and Art in America?
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-07-30
The Whole-Tone Hypothesis
AJBlog: PostClassic Published 2015-07-30
So you want to see a show?
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-07-30
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