Stories

Gov. Newsom’s Proposed Budget Would Cut California State Arts Funding By Well Over One-Third

Funding to the California Arts Council would fall by 38%, and the state would rescind $12.5 million previously promised to the Equitable Payroll Fund, which was created to help small arts companies comply with so-called gig-work bill AB5. The state faces two years of 11-figure budget deficits. - San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)

Memphis Judge Puts Hold On Auction Of Graceland To Pay Debt That May Not Actually Exist

"Shelby County Chancellor JoeDae Jenkins issued a temporary injunction against the proposed auction that had been scheduled for Thursday in Memphis, where the king of rock ‘n’ roll’s former home is located." Elvis Presley's granddaughter says the debt allegedly racked up by Lisa Marie is based on fraudulent documents. - AP

Our Complicated Relationship With Nostalgia

Even if nostalgia is a less “dangerous emotion” today than it seems to have been to the Swiss soldiers, it well deserves to be taken seriously and sympathetically. - The Guardian

How Our Phones Have Warped The Ways We See The World

Your phone mirrors the world back to you. But what you see is the world you want to see—a “frictionless,” “responsive,” “immediate,” “obedient,” “commercialized,” “optimized” simulacrum of your own will accomplished. - The Point

Oregon Shakespeare Festival Shows Signs Of Revival

The reason for the return to larger-cast shows gets at the heart of what makes the 89-year-old company unique. OSF is one of the biggest nonprofit theaters in the U.S., but it’s based in Ashland, Ore., which has a population of just over 21,000 — about one-sixth the size of Berkeley. - San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)

How Cliches Limit Our Thinking

Since the moment I learned about the concept of the “thought-terminating cliche” I’ve been seeing them everywhere I look. - The Guardian

Behind The ChatGPT/Scarlett Johansson Debacle

At the core of these deflections is an implication: The hypothetical superintelligence they are building is too big, too world-changing, too important for prosaic concerns such as copyright and attribution. - The Atlantic (MSN)

Boston Symphony Names New Concertmaster

Nathan Cole, 46, fills a seat that has been vacant since the 2019 retirement of Malcolm Lowe, who served as concertmaster for 35 years. - Boston Globe

Confessions Of A Genuine Scrabble Addict

"People attempting to recover from unhealthy obsessions unanimously report a tendency to overthink to the point of debility. Riding the subway uptown to the Scrabble club, I considered the ways I’d replaced one addiction with another." - The Paris Review

Tom Lehrer Is A Biting Satirist And Still Alive At 96. So Why Did He Give It All Up?

Was it because, as a child mathematics prodigy, he wanted to fulfil his real vocation and become a great mathematician? Apparently not. He taught the course that humanities and social science majors have to take in the US university system. “Math for tenors,” he calls it. - The Guardian

Here’s The Guy Who’s Made His Career Orchestrating, Then Re-Orchestrating, Stephen Sondheim’s Musicals

Jonathan Tunick began his career in the 1960s, when Broadway pit bands were big, and orchestrated all of Sondheim's Broadway shows of the '70s. For the Sondheim revivals of the '90s, he reworked his arrangements for bands 50% to 80% smaller. Now he's building one of those back up again. - Playbill

Investigation: 1000 Damien Hirst Works Weren’t Made When He Said They Were

At least 1,000 paintings that the artist Damien Hirst said were “made in 2016” were created several years later, the Guardian can reveal. - The Guardian

Meet The Only Breakdancing Competitor At This Summer’s Olympics With A PhD In The Subject

"Dr. Rachael Gunn, … the 36-year-old B-girl known as 'Raygun', a portmanteau of her name, completed a thesis in 2017 on the intersection of gender in Sydney's breaking scene while training to become one of (Australia's) top dancers." - Reuters

After Decades Of Being Youth-Obsessed, TV Gets Comfortable With The Old

Most people watching TV are older than those groups. Among cable channels, the median age for TNT and Bravo viewers is 56, for HGTV it is 66, and even the once-youthful MTV’s median-age viewer is 51, according to Nielsen data. The cable news audience is even older. - The Wall Street Journal

Does Pay-What-You-Can Pricing Really Increase Ticket Sales?

Well, yes and no — depending on what exactly one means by "increase" and "ticket sales." - ArtsHub (Australia)

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