AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only
DANCE
IDEAS
- How to start a theatre? Pose as a Property Developer
Good Morning,
Theatre director Jay Miller started the Yard, a Hackney Wick fringe theatre (and London’s coolest venue), by posing as a property developer and wearing a charity-shop tie and offering a landlord free night-watchman service in place of paid security. The three-month pop-up ran 14 years, sent Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum Dreams to the National Theatre, and has just reopened after a £7 million rebuild (The Nerve).
Sixty foreign architecture firms, not one of them Albanian, have proposed more than 500 projects for Prime Minister Edi Rama, coordinated partly through a WhatsApp group; an 800-page book of the plans has drawn “Starchitects go home!” placards in Tirana (The Guardian). Thélyson Orélien, the Québec novelist the Goncourt jury dropped over AI allegations he denies, sold 18,256 copies in a week to reach No. 1 in France, though that week also followed his Prix Fnac win (Rolling Stone Canada).
Seattle Public Library’s Books Unbanned program which makes available books banned in other jurisdictions, has passed 1.1 million e-book checkouts by readers 13 to 26 in all 50 states, paid for with nearly $900,000 in donations (KOMO News). Alexander Calder’s last work, Mountains and Clouds, again fills the nine-story atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building with its stabile and its mobile (The New York Times).
A Steinway showroom employee told AlterNet that the Kennedy Center’s grand pianos are moving to its Georgetown shop for sale because the center is “closed”; the same week, Senator Mike Lee objected to a bill that would bar demolishing presidential memorials (AlterNet).
- Kennedy Center Honors To Be Moved To An Arena
The 49th annual awards are set to take place at Washington’s downtown arena, a Kennedy Center spokesperson said Friday. Few other details were immediately available, and an explanation for the change wasn’t given. – AP (Yahoo)
- What Laurie Anderson Knows Now That She Wishes She’d Known At Age 18
Nothing, actually. “No, I’m happy with what I knew then and what I didn’t know, and I was glad to get a chance to be an idiot. … You know, I don’t mind making these blunders. I learned a lot through blunders.” – The Nerve (UK)
- What’s Behind The Amazing Starchitect Building Boom In… Albania?
Sixty top architecture firms from around the world have mooted 500 eye-catching projects across Albania, sparking fury and protests. – The Guardian
- When A Financial Tech Company Stages An Industrial Musical On Broadway
“Bill Pay itself was extremely meta and self-aware, a post-postmodern pageant that would have given David Foster Wallace an aneurysm. … (It) felt like an indicator of where the broader cultural zeitgeist is headed: back to a not-so-recent past where wealthy companies devoted heaping shares of their budgets toward sheer pandering.” – Slate (Yahoo!)
ISSUES
- What’s Behind The Amazing Starchitect Building Boom In… Albania?
Sixty top architecture firms from around the world have mooted 500 eye-catching projects across Albania, sparking fury and protests. – The Guardian
- Calder Sculpture (His Last Work) Is Restored To US Senate Office Building
The piece was the only one created by Calder to have a separate stabile and a mobile. Set against Hart’s white marble walls and filling nearly the entire nine-story atrium, it was the kind of avant-garde, modern sculpture that defined Calder’s final works. – The New York Times
- Trump Explores Landmarking The Oval Office So Future Presidents Can’t Reverse His Changes
In the Time interview, the president said he was exploring the possibility of a new federal designation for the Oval Office, which he suggested could protect the office from being torn down and preserve his changes to it. – Washington Post
- Wave Of Robberies Has Europe’s Museums Wondering What Is And Isn’t Worth Displaying
“Replicas have long been used by museums when originals are too fragile, valuable or difficult to travel, and the recent spate of thefts has encouraged some to consider this practice more widely. … Visitors are finding more stand-ins and, in some cases, an empty space where a treasure used to be.” – BBC (Yahoo!)
- After 11 Years, Spain’s Spectacular Royal Museums At El Escorial Have Reopened
El Escorial, the largest building erected anywhere during the Renaissance, was both a monastery and a royal palace; since the 1960s, the compound 45 miles northwest of Madrid has housed museums of painting and of architecture. In 2015 those museums were closed for updating; only now can the public visit again. – Art in Context
MEDIA
- Kennedy Center Honors To Be Moved To An Arena
The 49th annual awards are set to take place at Washington’s downtown arena, a Kennedy Center spokesperson said Friday. Few other details were immediately available, and an explanation for the change wasn’t given. – AP (Yahoo)
- Court Upholds Thomson Reuters’ Landmark AI Copyright Win
The ruling marks the first federal appeals case to reject a fair use argument for using publisher content, without permission or compensation, to train a commercial AI product. – NiemanLab
- One Third Of Britain’s Arts Centres Have “No Financial Cushion”: Report
“Drawing on financial data and member surveys of more than 131 arts centres, the report concludes that … one third of arts centres across the UK have ‘little or no financial cushion’ with which to absorb further increases in costs, reductions in funding or unexpected expenditure.” – The Stage
- After 40 Years, Segerstrom Center Is Thriving, Bringing L.A.-Level Performing Arts To Orange County
Building a Lincoln Center-style multi-venue arts center in a county that was a byword for conservative suburbia seemed improbable in 1986, but philanthropist Henry Segerstrom pulled it off. Now, after getting hit hard by the pandemic, the complex is back on track, with a $14.6 million surplus last year. – Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
- Can Trump Really Demolish The Kennedy Center?
The legal fight over Mr. Trump’s takeover of the center has revolved largely around one important statute, first passed by Congress in 1958. It established a National Cultural Center and then was amended in 1964 to dedicate the institution to President Kennedy after his assassination. – The New York Times
MUSIC
- Is Writing Really The Best Way To Learn?
Writing can be useful cognitive scaffolding for memory and self-regulated learning, but the notion that it is the best process for developing thinking skills is a fairly recent idea, traceable to the 1970s writing-across-the-curriculum movement. – The New York Times
- Seattle Public Library Program To Make Banned Books Available Anywhere Hits 1M Checkouts
Books Unbanned is designed to give young people multiple ways to access digital books regardless of where they live or what their local library can provide. The library said some participants sign up because their local libraries have been censored or underfunded. – KOMO Seattle
- That French Novel With The Plagiarism Accusation? It’s Now Number One On France’s Bestseller List
Haitian-Canadian novelist Thélyson Orélien’s C’était ça ou mourir (It Was Either That Or Die) was France’s literary sensation of the fall when another author claimed that Orélien used AI to write the novel. The Prix Goncourt removed the book from contention, but nevertheless, it’s currently the bestselling novel in France. – Rolling Stone
- What Librarians Want To Tell Their Fellow Americans About Libraries
“We spoke with dozens of librarians at the A.L.A. conference this summer. They came from rural towns and major cities, elementary schools and universities, local branches and big government agencies. … They want you to know about book bans and budget cuts, but also about career counseling and pop-up medical clinics.” – The New York Times
- How Haiku Became Hungarian
A foreign poetic form becomes local not when writers reproduce its original conventions faithfully, but when they discover what the form can do in a new language. In Hungary, Japanese short poetry encountered a literary environment already fluent in irony, epigrammatic compression, linguistic play, and knowing when to leave things out. – Asymptote
PEOPLE
- How to start a theatre? Pose as a Property Developer
Good Morning,
Theatre director Jay Miller started the Yard, a Hackney Wick fringe theatre (and London’s coolest venue), by posing as a property developer and wearing a charity-shop tie and offering a landlord free night-watchman service in place of paid security. The three-month pop-up ran 14 years, sent Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum Dreams to the National Theatre, and has just reopened after a £7 million rebuild (The Nerve).
Sixty foreign architecture firms, not one of them Albanian, have proposed more than 500 projects for Prime Minister Edi Rama, coordinated partly through a WhatsApp group; an 800-page book of the plans has drawn “Starchitects go home!” placards in Tirana (The Guardian). Thélyson Orélien, the Québec novelist the Goncourt jury dropped over AI allegations he denies, sold 18,256 copies in a week to reach No. 1 in France, though that week also followed his Prix Fnac win (Rolling Stone Canada).
Seattle Public Library’s Books Unbanned program which makes available books banned in other jurisdictions, has passed 1.1 million e-book checkouts by readers 13 to 26 in all 50 states, paid for with nearly $900,000 in donations (KOMO News). Alexander Calder’s last work, Mountains and Clouds, again fills the nine-story atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building with its stabile and its mobile (The New York Times).
A Steinway showroom employee told AlterNet that the Kennedy Center’s grand pianos are moving to its Georgetown shop for sale because the center is “closed”; the same week, Senator Mike Lee objected to a bill that would bar demolishing presidential memorials (AlterNet).
- Kennedy Center Honors To Be Moved To An Arena
The 49th annual awards are set to take place at Washington’s downtown arena, a Kennedy Center spokesperson said Friday. Few other details were immediately available, and an explanation for the change wasn’t given. – AP (Yahoo)
- What Laurie Anderson Knows Now That She Wishes She’d Known At Age 18
Nothing, actually. “No, I’m happy with what I knew then and what I didn’t know, and I was glad to get a chance to be an idiot. … You know, I don’t mind making these blunders. I learned a lot through blunders.” – The Nerve (UK)
- What’s Behind The Amazing Starchitect Building Boom In… Albania?
Sixty top architecture firms from around the world have mooted 500 eye-catching projects across Albania, sparking fury and protests. – The Guardian
- When A Financial Tech Company Stages An Industrial Musical On Broadway
“Bill Pay itself was extremely meta and self-aware, a post-postmodern pageant that would have given David Foster Wallace an aneurysm. … (It) felt like an indicator of where the broader cultural zeitgeist is headed: back to a not-so-recent past where wealthy companies devoted heaping shares of their budgets toward sheer pandering.” – Slate (Yahoo!)
PEOPLE
- How to start a theatre? Pose as a Property Developer
Good Morning,
Theatre director Jay Miller started the Yard, a Hackney Wick fringe theatre (and London’s coolest venue), by posing as a property developer and wearing a charity-shop tie and offering a landlord free night-watchman service in place of paid security. The three-month pop-up ran 14 years, sent Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum Dreams to the National Theatre, and has just reopened after a £7 million rebuild (The Nerve).
Sixty foreign architecture firms, not one of them Albanian, have proposed more than 500 projects for Prime Minister Edi Rama, coordinated partly through a WhatsApp group; an 800-page book of the plans has drawn “Starchitects go home!” placards in Tirana (The Guardian). Thélyson Orélien, the Québec novelist the Goncourt jury dropped over AI allegations he denies, sold 18,256 copies in a week to reach No. 1 in France, though that week also followed his Prix Fnac win (Rolling Stone Canada).
Seattle Public Library’s Books Unbanned program which makes available books banned in other jurisdictions, has passed 1.1 million e-book checkouts by readers 13 to 26 in all 50 states, paid for with nearly $900,000 in donations (KOMO News). Alexander Calder’s last work, Mountains and Clouds, again fills the nine-story atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building with its stabile and its mobile (The New York Times).
A Steinway showroom employee told AlterNet that the Kennedy Center’s grand pianos are moving to its Georgetown shop for sale because the center is “closed”; the same week, Senator Mike Lee objected to a bill that would bar demolishing presidential memorials (AlterNet).
- Kennedy Center Honors To Be Moved To An Arena
The 49th annual awards are set to take place at Washington’s downtown arena, a Kennedy Center spokesperson said Friday. Few other details were immediately available, and an explanation for the change wasn’t given. – AP (Yahoo)
- What Laurie Anderson Knows Now That She Wishes She’d Known At Age 18
Nothing, actually. “No, I’m happy with what I knew then and what I didn’t know, and I was glad to get a chance to be an idiot. … You know, I don’t mind making these blunders. I learned a lot through blunders.” – The Nerve (UK)
- What’s Behind The Amazing Starchitect Building Boom In… Albania?
Sixty top architecture firms from around the world have mooted 500 eye-catching projects across Albania, sparking fury and protests. – The Guardian
- When A Financial Tech Company Stages An Industrial Musical On Broadway
“Bill Pay itself was extremely meta and self-aware, a post-postmodern pageant that would have given David Foster Wallace an aneurysm. … (It) felt like an indicator of where the broader cultural zeitgeist is headed: back to a not-so-recent past where wealthy companies devoted heaping shares of their budgets toward sheer pandering.” – Slate (Yahoo!)
THEATRE
VISUAL
- Let’s Get Real: Intelligence Is About More Than Optimization
That slide from engineering model to human anthropology is easy to miss. We begin by saying: this is how machines work. Then, almost without noticing, we say: this is what intelligence is. And then, more dangerously still: perhaps this is what we are. – Aeon
- An Alternative Explanation Of Consciousness
Antonio Damasio argues, we “possess the celebrated gift of consciousness because of the continued presence and abundance of your homeostatic feelings.” According to Damasio, the conventional theories of consciousness have it backwards. – Undark
- Staying Human In The Age Of AI
The first step to building a better future is to acknowledge the reality of today. AI is not going away, and it is immensely capable across a wide range of domains. According to a recent Stanford study, 88% of organizations are using AI and the number is growing. – Think Like a Game Designer
- By Biological Definition, AI Is Life
There is nothing artificial about systems built from real atoms, powered by real electricity, running in real machines. The systems reproduce, vary, adapt, undergo selection and gather energy from their environment. By any working definition that draws on biology rather than philosophy or religion, that is life. – Noema
- It’s Getting More And More Difficult To Tell What’s Real
Life on the internet has become, among other things, a test of patience and an experience of gruelling duration; the ad somehow continued for more than three minutes. A captive audience, it turns out, gets crude digital puppetry as its just deserts. – The New Yorker