“The nature of truth. Theories of fairness. The essence of bullying. These are big, weighty subjects, and apparently 9- and 10-year-olds just eat them up.”
Archives for December 2016
Violinist Sarah Chang Robbed While Flying To Moscow
She was traveling from Philadelphia to the Russian capital via London when someone took $12,000 worth of money and property from her suitcase.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 12.29.16
12 Plays of Xmas: 3. Ruined by Lynn Nottage
I can’t remember how I missed the Pulitzer-winning Ruined when it played in London in 2010. It was at a favourite theatre (the Almeida) and starred favourite actors (Jenny Jules, Lucian Msamati). Maybe I was … read more
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2016-12-29
My favorite posts of 2016
In addition to writing about theater and the other arts for a living, I also blog in this space purely for my pleasure. Here are ten of my favorite posts from the year almost past: … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-12-29
The Battle For Creative Cities – Lessons From Oakland’s Ghost Ship
We appear to be confronted with two very different sets of criteria regarding what can be considered a “safe space.” One is rooted in alternative populations seeking respite from the omnipresent social factory and its all-pervasive marketplace; the other is based on municipal fire-code regulations intended to prevent the type of tragedies that the Ghost Ship now signifies.
When The Science Of Mistakes Made A Big Mistake
“This scientific study of scientific bias would ignite a romance of the mind, one that spanned several decades and ended up transforming both psychology and economics. Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky went on to show that mistakes in human judgment are not exceptions but the rule, resulting from a host of mental shortcuts and distortions that cannot be avoided. We do not behave like “rational actors,” as economists once presumed; rather, we’re predictably misguided—subject to a “bounded rationality.” Tversky went on to win a MacArthur “genius” grant on the basis of their work. Kahneman would get a Nobel Prize.”
How Streaming Is Changing The Art Of Music
Streaming music services such as Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal are shifting not just how music is consumed, but increasingly how it is funded, created and marketed. The talk of the industry is increasingly about playlists and how labels and artists can seed their music into high-rotation mixes on streaming services to blend their new offerings with old favourites.
Seriously? Alt-Right Racist Leader Gets $250K Book Deal From Simon And Schuster
Milo Yiannopoulos has parlayed his ban from Twitter — and some controversial appearances on college campuses and cable TV shows — into a $250,000 book deal with Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, The Hollywood Reporter learned on Thursday.
The Church Of Efficiency Is Making Us Anxious
“The quest for increased personal productivity – for making the best possible use of your limited time – is a dominant motif of our age. And yet the truth is that more often than not, techniques designed to enhance one’s personal productivity seem to exacerbate the very anxieties they were meant to allay. The better you get at managing time, the less of it you feel that you have.”
Is Streaming Helping Musicians Be Artists Again?
“With streaming rather than downloads, access replaces ownership and the commitment is of time, not money. That’s still significant, but it doesn’t feel so irrevocable. Where downloads and playlists favored the lone song, streaming gives the artist and the album a fighting chance again. Anyone interested in a particular artist, from die-hard fans to novelty seekers, can listen to a whole album repeatedly — not just song samples, not just YouTube choices — and let subtler material sink in.”
Mapping Our Political Divide By The TV Shows We Watch
“When we looked at how many active Facebook users in a given ZIP code “liked” certain TV shows, we found that the 50 most-liked shows clustered into three groups with distinct geographic distributions. Together they reveal a national culture split among three regions: cities and their suburbs; rural areas; and what we’re calling the extended Black Belt — a swath that extends from the Mississippi River along the Eastern Seaboard up to Washington, but also including city centers and other places with large nonwhite populations.”
Evelyn Waugh’s Extraordinary Gift For Insult
“[The] novelist, travel writer, essayist, and biographer … the 50th anniversary of whose death rolled around this year, celebrated by those survivors who had the misfortune of knowing him at all well, was as wretched and ornery a human being as anyone could be who was not actually moved to suicide or murder.”
Midgette: Kennedy Center Honors Demonstrate Marginalization Of High Art
Anne Midgette: “My keenest experience of the Kennedy Center Honors this year had to do with the marginalization of the high arts. This is not usually my position: I have no problem celebrating the artistry of popular culture, placing Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” above the level of many works of contemporary art music or recognizing the quality of “The Wire” and other high-level made-for-television series. And I have been comfortable with the idea that in what is essentially a knockoff awards ceremony, the Kennedy Center should seek to honor the best of American art. But fully recognizing just how marginalized my field is, both before and during the ceremony, was sobering.”
Does Empathy Lead Us To Moral Actions Or Get In The Way Of Them? (A Debate)
Research psychologist Paul Bloom, author of the new book Against Empathy, and a colleague from Stanford, Jamil Zaki, argue it out.
Claim: Denver Loves Artists – But It’s Leaving Them Behind
“Denver has boomed over the past decade. The city is bigger, richer and more interesting than ever. Public- and private-sector investment is through the roof, and neglected neighborhoods are springing back to life. And in all of this, artists have been left behind.”
The Oakland ‘Ghost Ship’ Fire And The Contradictions Of The ‘Creative City’
“We can read into this tragedy the disastrous head-on collision of two conflicting obligations that the ‘creative city’ imposes on itself and its residents.”
Are “Liberal Elite” Performers Missing The Point?
“The all-encompassing liberalism in popular culture might not be hurting the performers’ financial bottom lines (so far), but it’s certainly not doing anything to help their political causes, either. As we learned this election, we ignore whole segments of the population at our peril.”
‘They Came After Me With The Fury Of Wasps’: The Woman Who Pretended To Be JT LeRoy Defends Herself
The young demimonde celebrity of the ’00s had a hell of a backstory, which turns out to have been made up by a middle-aged “fat Jewish girl” from Brooklyn. (Her sister-in-law made the public appearances in a red wig.)
Indie Booksellers Pick Their Favorite Overlooked Books Of 2016
There’s a huge French bestseller just translated into English, a ferocious and hilarious satire of contemporary El Salvador, Jim Harrison’s final collection of poetry, the history of a New York apartment building through the AIDS crisis, a history of the coyote, and “the most literary book on bodybuilding and superbike racing you’ll ever read!” (There’s also Marina Abramović’s memoir, which we don’t think was exactly overlooked.)
Rereading ‘Great Expectations’ After 50 Years
David Denby: “Page by page, the book is less hearty than I remembered … and much funnier – really savage in many passages.”
Could Wood – Glued-Together Layered Slabs Of It – Become The Next High-Tech Building Material?
“Sandwiching layers of wood and adhesive,yields cross-laminated timber (CLT), a kind of super-plywood that comes in immense slabs as long as a bowling lane and as thick as 12 inches. A similar process yields steel-hard beams called glulam. The principle is almost touchingly simple: ‘Gluing a stack of cards together produces something stronger than building a house of cards.'” And you can build skyscrapers with it.
Race Mixing, Resistance, Resilience: The History Of ‘Othello’ In America
The Adams family (specifically, Abigail and John Quincy), like many of their day, saw the play as a tale of the dangers of race-mixing; white 19th-century Americans de-blacked the title role; Paul Robeson saw it as an indictment of white racism (and claimed the role for black actors ever afterward). “For more than 200 years, Americans have fought over Othello’s race as a way of fighting over the meanings of race itself.”
Gay Plays In 2016 – We’ve Come A Long Way From ‘The Boys In The Band’
“Portraits of gay life in mainstream culture are no longer rare; they have been proliferating for decades. As a result, no one play (or movie) bears the burden of either seeming to affirm, or attempting to negate, stereotype.” Charles Isherwood looks at five shows presented in New York this year.
Paris Opera Ballet Booted From Its Own House’s Next Production
Choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker is directing the staging of Mozart’s Così fan tutte opening at the Palais Garnier late next month, and her central idea is to have a dancer doubling each of the opera’s six characters. The singing roles are double-cast, and the plan was to use six dancers from de Keersmaeker’s own company with one cast and six members of the Paris Opera Ballet (who had been rehearsing with the choreographer for several weeks in Belgium) with the other. According to a statement from the Paris Opera, de Keersmaeker has decided that, with two sets of singers involved, for practical as well as artistic reasons she wanted to set her extremely detailed direction on only one group of dancers – her own, who have been working on the choreography for more than a year. (in French; Google Translate version here)
I Taught Myself Piano In A Prison Cell, Using A Cardboard Box
Demetrius Cunningham, an inmate at an Illinois correctional facility, wanted to learn to play so he could accompany the prison’s chapel choir. But he had access to a piano for only an hour a week. So he mocked up a model keyboard and got busy.
What A Pro Violinist Learns About Listening To Music From Playing For Prison Inmates
Chattanooga Symphony concertmaster Holly Mulcahy writes about what she has performed for prisoners, how she gets them to talk about what they heard, and what they said.