"One of the first lessons you learn in grad school is to hide your personal taste or risk being shamed for liking the wrong sorts of things. Scholars have been conditioned to respond to talk of likes and dislikes with embarrassment, if not outright contempt. The facade of critical detachment may be on the way out, however." - Public...
Puppetry had never been part of the Yiddish theater tradition, but in 1920s America, they were all the rage. So in 1925-26, a pair of writers created a Purim shpiel (the Jewish equivalent of a Christmas panto) with puppets. It was such a smash success that the two men ended up creating a puppet company that put on...
"There’s always this quality of endeavor about reading—and at the same time, in cognitive terms it’s hard work. When someone reading complex passages of prose—ones, say, that attempt to convey human lives in all their manifold sensuous and intellectual complexity—is placed in a MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner, we can see on the machine’s visual display that almost all...
Shows were running in the French capital for a few months last year, before a big new wave of COVID infections led to a new lockdown and a crop of new productions were going to waste. But not anymore: leave it to Parisians to find an inventive way to break the rules while officially obeying them. - The New...
Naomi Beckwith, 44, who since 2018 has served as senior curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, will oversee collections, exhibitions, publications, curatorial programs and archives in her new position, which starts in June. She will also provide strategic direction, the museum said. - The New York Times
"Cory Lingner … using the app to tap alongside some of the most iconic movie stars, including Gene Kelly, Gregory Hines, Ann Miller and Shirley Temple. And, no, he doesn't have a time-traveling device. Lingner has perfected the use of the app's duet feature. On one side of the video is a clip of the tap-dancing icon and...
"The temptation to simplify morality when social injustice is rife is understandable, but reading Dostoevsky makes me impatient with the schematic bent of our age. To be fully human is to acknowledge, as Prospero puts in “The Tempest,” “this thing of darkness” as our own." - Los Angeles Times
Beginning in 1964 with Seven Up!, Apted made a series of nine films, shot at seven-year-intervals, following the lives of a group of 14 Englishmen and -women from ages 7 through 14, 21, 28, etc. (63 Up was released in 2019.) After his death last week, the 12 remaining subjects and several longtime crew members are considering whether to...
"Before Johnson, in instances wherein the tuba was part of a jazz arrangement, it was typically confined to bass parts. Johnson demonstrated a prowess that allowed him to play melodic lines, even lead parts. … He was a featured player in the Mingus, Carla Bley, and Gil Evans big bands; he also put in time with Charlie Haden's Liberation...
"The suit, filed in the Southern District of New York on January 14 by Seattle-based firm Hagens Berman, … currently names only Amazon as a defendant. However, it labels each of the Big Five publishers — Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin Random House — as '“co-conspirators' in an alleged scheme … to squelch consumer price competition...
Jarrett Ott and Steven LaBrie met in music school in Philadelphia and remained friends as they moved to New York and their careers grew. In 2018, Ott took a salaried singing position at the opera house in Stuttgart, while LaBrie remained in the U.S. with a busy freelance schedule. When COVID brought public performances to an abrupt end, each...
"The gift, from Atlanta collectors Irene and Howard Stein, which includes sculptures, prints and posters, is part of a larger bequest made by Steins, the museum announced on Wednesday. Included in the bequest are: 41 prints and posters and 10 sculptures by Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Gauguin and Desjardins; a drawing by Degas; and an oil painting by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux." -...
As the number of COVID cases continues to spike, "organizers behind a number of livestreaming concerts and theatre shows in Ontario say the province's stricter stay-at-home orders have forced them to sideline an array of upcoming virtual events. … The changes come after Premier Doug Ford introduced a new directive which, as of Thursday, requires residents to stay home,...
"The German government has announced that it will hand out €32 million ($38 million) this year to national cultural institutions undertaking modernization projects, including updating security systems. More than 73 cultural venues across Germany" — and outside the big cities in particular — "will benefit from the grant." - Artnet
The Kennedy Center Honors announced today that the lifetime artistic achievement recipients for its 43rd ceremony will be choreographer and actress Debbie Allen; folk singer-songwriter Joan Baez; country singer-songwriter Garth Brooks; violinist Midori; and actor Dick Van Dyke. - New York Magazine
