Riccardo Muti called the experience of the past year “an unnatural global experiment” that had “stunned” the world. “If we truly took into account how we are living, we would all go crazy. We try to maintain the illusion that we are living a normal life. It is the only way to reach the end of this absurd path,’’...
Livestreaming adds an additional layer of technical complexity and cost but doesn’t necessarily improve the audience’s experience of the play itself. Pre-recording allows the various elements of the production – editing, sound, etc – to be fine-tuned in advance. But then why not go the whole hog and just release an actual film? - Irish Times
As with the Museum of Sex, in New York City, and the Museum of Ice Cream, in San Francisco, the Disgusting Food Museum is conceptually closer to an amusement park than to a museum. There are eighty-five culinary horrors on display—ordinary fare and delicacies from thirty countries—and each tour concludes with a taste test of a dozen items. -...
Indeed, these verbal hesitations have been viewed as undesirable since the days of ancient Greece and, more recently, the American linguist Noam Chomsky characterised them as ‘errors’ irrelevant to language. But could there be more to these utterances than initially meets the ear? - Aeon
"Like many systems that appear meticulous, the writing of citations is a subjective art. Never more so than in fiction, where citation is an entirely other kind of animal, not required or even expected, except in the “acknowledgments” page, which is often a who’s who of the publishing world. (Also a good way to find out who is married to...
"Take a bunch of clever, ambitious people and tell them to get as many papers published as possible while still technically passing muster through peer review … and what do you think is going to happen? Of course the system gets gamed: The results from one experiment get sliced up into a dozen papers, statistics are massaged to produce...
“Our motto is ‘big, cheap theater.’ ” “I’d rather make a glorious failure than an apologetic win.” “We’re the cockroach of the arts — we may be ugly, but we’re really hard to kill.” - Seattle Times
"The exact targets of CRT’s critics vary wildly, but it is obvious that most critics simply do not know what they are talking about. Instead, CRT functions for the right today primarily as an empty signifier for any talk of race and racism at all, a catch-all specter lumping together “multiculturalism,” “wokeism,” “anti-racism,” and “identity politics”—or indeed any suggestion...
That new album by your fave, the one you haven't heard hyped on social media or in music magazines? It's probably by a deliberate Doppelgänger. "Inside Spotify’s borderless musical landscape, you’re never more than a playlist transition away from a fake-out. ... There’s always someone trying to game the system." - Slate
With a 500-person limit, a record high in private funding, new digital streaming infrastructure, and a mandate to be more ecologically conscious, the Milan opera house and its new artistic director, Dominique Meyer, are ready to put the horrible experience of 2020 behind them. - The New York Times
Justin Davidson refuses to relinquish hope. "The MTA, Amtrak, and NJ Transit have jointly released not one but two possible visions for rebuilding the rest of the Dantesque complex. And, lo and behold, they are both aspirational and realistic. The design ... amalgamates the jumble of bureaucratic fiefdoms, decades’ worth of duct-tape fixes, and a thicket of conflicting agendas into...
The director of Moonlight took on a 10-part adaptation of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad partly because it was such a wellspring of fear. "Jenkins was surprised, he says, of the extent to which the retelling of that history affected him. 'There’s no blood, there’s no fire on set,' he says. 'And yet, we were on an actual plantation...
Ahtesham wrote of his native city with care and love. One of his translators said, "He had this almost magnifying glass of an eye. ... If a cinema hall was razed or a new suburb was being built, he would describe these changes with a sensitivity, caring and love as if it were part of his own corporal organism."...
Today, we can see music, theatre, visual art, and new movies all from our chairs, couches, and beds. A year ago, not so much - heck, even the Louvre has put its entire collection online. "Many larger institutions like the Parisian giant had already made significant strides before last year to increase their online presence. But the rest of the cultural sector was forced...
Dickens' 17-year-old sister-in-law collapsed one night as she returned from the theatre, and died in the arms of the writer. "A failure of Hogarth’s heart was blamed, but today an aneurism, or stroke, is suspected as the more likely cause of death. It was a shock that altered Dickens for ever, throwing a shadow over his imaginative life." -...
