“After a year and a half of negotiations and controversy, the city of Paris has still not found a site for the controversial sculpture the American artist gifted to the city in memory of the victims of the 2015 terror attacks. The French Culture Minister has now publicly stated that the work will not be installed at the Place de Tokyo square in front of the Eiffel Tower, as the artist had initially proposed.”
Archives for May 2018
Artists Try Out Ideas To Rebrand The EU
“The German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has teamed up with a friend, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, to encourage artists and other creative people to brainstorm ways for Europe to better present itself to the public. They put out a call in March for rebranding proposals, asking: ‘How can the European Union be valued by its citizens and be recognized as a force for good, rather than as a faceless bureaucracy?’ They requested ideas ‘for communicating the advantages of cooperation and friendship amongst people and nations.’ More than 400 proposals from 43 countries poured in.”
With Record-Breaking Production, Australian Ballet Posts $5.5 Million Surplus
While the company had its challenges this year – most notably, having to find an alternative venue for its Sydney season, with the Sydney Opera House’s Joan Sutherland Theatre under renovation – its staging of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, sold 75,840 tickets over 41 performances in Sydney and Melbourne.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.29.18
Odd ducks and different buds
‘You must have been quite an odd duck as a boy,’ I said to Barry Humphries, as the entertainer described his unusual devotion to Berlin cabaret artists, fostered in stuffy suburban Melbourne. … read more
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2018-05-29
From stage to screen
Time was when hit plays on Broadway and London’s West End were routinely turned into big-budget films. Most of the time, alas, the plays in question were recast and “adapted” within an inch or two … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2018-05-29
Why Are So Many Jobs So Useless? (There’s A Reason)
In an age that supremely prizes capitalist efficiency, the proliferation of pointless jobs is a puzzle. Why are employers in the public and private sector alike behaving like the bureaucracies of the old Soviet Union, shelling out wages to workers they don’t seem to need? Since bullshit jobs make no economic sense, David Graeber argues, their function must be political. A population kept busy with make-work is less likely to revolt.
Study: Loud Music In Restaurants Promotes Unhealthy Ordering
Dipayan Biswas, a marketing professor at the University of South Florida, conducted the study at a cafe in Stockholm, where various genres of music were played on a loop at 55 decibels and 70 decibels at different times, for several days. When the music was louder, researchers found 20 percent more customers ordered something that was not good for them, compared to those who dined during the lower-volume times.
Miami Theatre Says It Will End Black-Face Portrayal
The play “3 Viudas en un Crucero” (Three Widows on a Cruise), which has been showing since January, featured light-skinned actress Marta Velasco smeared with dark makeup, exaggerated red lips, thick, drawn-in eyebrows and an Afro wig. A trailer of the play posted on YouTube shows Velasco pounding her chest, with her legs wide open while saying “Bailar, tomar y gozar como tres gorilas” (to dance, drink and have fun like three gorillas).
Barbara Ehrenreich Critiques Boomers’ Culture Of Wellness
Ehrenreich contemplates with some satisfaction not just the approach of her own death but also the passing of her generation. As the boomers have aged, denial of death, she argues, has moved to the center of American culture, and a vast industrial ecosystem has bloomed to capitalize on it. Across twelve chapters, Ehrenreich surveys the health care system, the culture of old age, the world of “mindfulness,” and the interior workings of the body itself, and finds a fixation on controlling the body, encouraged by cynical and self-interested professionals in the name of “wellness.”
ABC Cancels “Roseanne” After Star’s Racist Tweet
ABC’s cancellation announcement came hours after Barr announced she was “leaving” Twitter – again – after apologizing for calling former President Barack Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett an offspring of the “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.” Barr came back to Twitter about 5 minutes later to expand on her apology.
Katharine Whitehorn Was A Sharp-Eyed Columnist. She Wouldn’t Want To Continue Living Like This
Her sons say without doubt that if the real Katharine could see herself now she would be horrified, never having wanted to end up as she is. Indeed, most people find the prospect of this ending a negation of self, denial of a life’s work and character, a mortifying indignity no one should suffer. Who wants to leave family and friends with a final memory of themselves as a vegetable, a distortion, an alien being?
Movies Are More Like Religion Than You Think, And On A More Fundamental Level
“Both religion and cinema [involve] practices of community formation, the generation of meaning through myth and ritual, and the creation of a sacred space that contrasts with the everyday world.”
Kansas City Symphony Chief To Step Down
Frank Byrne spent 27 years with the U.S. Marine Band, initially as a tuba player and then executive assistant to the director and acting chief administrator before coming to the Kansas City Symphony as general manager in 2000. Then-Symphony board Chairwoman Shirley Helzberg asked him to take on the executive director role in 2002. Since then the Symphony’s budget has grown from $8 million to nearly $19 million. Last year the Symphony successfully completed a $55 million fundraising campaign to strengthen its endowment.
What Improv Does To Your Brain
“Does the brain of a comedy improv actor or freestyle rapper work in a particular way? Is it measurably different? Is it processing language (or sound) faster than a regular, lower-improvising brain? … We asked our pal Ari Daniel from our partner program NOVA to look into this. As it happens, he found a group of researchers and a group of professional improvisers working together on some of these questions.”
Why We All Need Our Personal Space (And How We Define It)
The most consistent finding out of this vast literature, the one fundamental result, is that personal space expands with anxiety. If you score high on stress, or if the experimenter stresses you ahead of time—maybe you take a test and are told that you failed it—your personal space grows with respect to other people.
Tom Wolfe’s Notorious Critique Of The Architecture Profession Still Has A Point
“Wolfe was wrong to mock Modernism as purely utilitarian, and to let its worst abuses speak for the entire genre. … What Wolfe got right — and it’s a criticism that still rings true today — is his skewering of what can be an insular, snotty, tone-deaf culture, from the almost religious zealotry of the early days of Modernism to now.”
The Nobel Prize Lit Imbroglio That Has Us Questioning The Whole Enterprise
It is an understatement to say that the past months have been dramatic; they have in fact been outrageous, chaotic, and even, some would claim, disastrous — meaning that the Academy scandal has forever ruined Sweden’s reputation as a cultural lodestar. The drama has all the necessary ingredients: sex, abuse, power, money — and, of course, culture’s position in society.
How A Bearded, T-Shirted 38-Year-Old Is Remaking The Times Literary Supplement
“A fixture in England and on the Western world’s literary landscape, the TLS is a weekly book review journal with a reputation for being a bit dowdy — less progressive than The London Review of Books, a biweekly, and less agile than the books section of The Guardian, to name two of its competitors.” So where did they go to find an editor to shake things up? To The Sun, the British tabloid best known for its topless “Page 3 girls.” And in his two years there, Stig Abell really has changed the TLS, mostly for the better.
Big Data: The Six Basic Stories That Form The Basis For All Others
Professor Matthew Jockers at the University of Nebraska, and later researchers at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, analysed data from thousands of novels to reveal six basic story types – you could call them archetypes – that form the building blocks for more complex stories. The Vermont researchers describe the six story shapes behind more than 1700 English novels as:
John Kander And Susan Stroman Construct A Henry James Musical Out Of Waltzes
“It was fun for me to find out how many things you could express in the waltz form,” says composer Kander (Cabaret, Chicago) of their adaptation, with librettist David Thompson, of James’s The Beast in the Jungle. “The first thing I said was, ‘How much do I have to pay to do this?'”
What Are The Ailey Dancers Demonstrating For? The Same Things All Their Peers Are Getting
“The statistics are certainly compelling. The five highest earning workers in the Ailey organization make more than all 34 dancers and stage managers combined. [Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater] is the fourth largest American dance company based on budget, but the dancers make 30-35% less than their colleagues in other companies. AAADT performs 175-200 times per year, more than any other major dance company in the United States.”
‘Can A Thicker Brush Not Make Just As Beautiful Strokes?’ My Life As A ‘Fat’ Ballet Dancer
“Writer Olivia Campbell considers the years she spent as a dancer, when it seemed that her talent was living in the ‘wrong’ body, in this utterly honest and intimate meditation. She visits regret, self-loathing, and how the name of your art can become your trigger word.”
I Have No Control Over TV Version Of ‘Handmaid’s Tale’, And That’s Fine, Says Margaret Atwood
The author wants the people who are upset about how the series’s second season has diverged from her novel to relax: “It’s a television series. If you’re going to have a series you can’t kill off the central character and you also can’t have the central character escape to safety in episode one of season two. It’s not going to happen.”
Man Who Accused George Takei Of Drugging And Sexual Assault Admits It May Not Have Happened That Way
“A fabricated coffee meeting. Key facts withheld or walked back. A ‘great party story’ about a sexual assault — which the accuser now says may not have actually happened. What happens when an activist’s legacy is tarnished by the story of an old friend who later says it could have all been a misunderstanding? And how do we process such an anomaly in an era of overdue social justice?”
L.A. MOCA Hasn’t Had A Good Director For Two Decades, And ‘That Desperately Needs To Change’
Philippe Vergne, whose contract is not being renewed, is “the third MOCA director in a row who hasn’t been able to make the switch from smart, talented curator to top administrator at a major art museum, and I fear the museum cannot survive another one,” writes Christopher Knight, who argues that the problem is most likely with the museum’s board of directors.
Funding For Canadian Opera Co. And Toronto Symphony Clawed Back By Toronto City Council
“The city has cut $100,000 from the COC’s proposed $1.6 million grant, and $50,000 from the TSO’s $1.27 million grant. … The funding adjustment was made on the recommendations of a four-member committee who had serious concerns surrounding the COC’s and TSO’s diversity, as well as issues surrounding board stability, and a declining in the perceived impact they had on Toronto’s cultural life.”