Fish Island Labs “will provide 50 emerging practitioners with support and guidance during a 10-month residency in which they will develop work from physical performance to digital art.”
Archives for May 2014
The Resurrection Of Stefan Zweig
“In the decades between the two world wars, no writer was more widely translated or read than the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, and in the years after, few writers fell more precipitously into obscurity, at least in the English-speaking world. But now Zweig, prolific storyteller and embodiment of a vanished Mitteleuropa, seems to be back, and in a big way” – new editions of his books, movie adaptations, new biographies, even a novel about him.
The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas
“[Patricia] Lockwood is all large eyes, apple cheeks and pixie haircut – like an early Disney creation, perhaps a woodland creature; one of her fans recently rendered her as a My Little Pony. The contrast between how she presents and what she writes is something Lockwood delights in. … Her steady [Twitter] stream of surreal, sexually explicit and often sexually impossible humor has won her 30,000 followers.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.28.14
Ownership, without the air quotes
AJBlog: The Artful Manager | Published 2014-05-28
Engagement Working Group
AJBlog: Engaging Matters | Published 2014-05-28
Essential video
AJBlog: Sandow | Published 2014-05-28
The Freer’s Whistler Connection Pays Off (Again)
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-05-29
Please Do It Again
AJBlog: Dancebeat | Published 2014-05-28
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Bowing Out: When And Why Dancers Retire
For classical ballet performers, who typically need to stop around (or before) age 40, it’s some version of, “I want to leave while I still love it, before my body is broken.” For contemporary dancers? Says one, “I thought I should retire and seek another profession when I was like 20. But then when I was 30, I was like, ‘Screw it.’ [I’ll keep going] until I end up in a state-funded nursing home.”
Paris Opera Moves (Carefully) Into Cinemacasts
“For the Opéra de Paris, whose two stages are typically sold out, the screening in local movie theaters – even in Paris – is not seen as a threat but as an opportunity to widen the tent and bring in audiences who, as French taxpayers, support 50 percent of its annual costs. That is one of the reasons why the Opéra de Paris is pleased with distribution in smaller towns and has encouraged [local cinema managers] to turn the screenings into festive occasions.”
‘Fifty Shades Of Grey’ Is Really A Self-Help Book (#AcademicsOverthinkingPopCulture)
Sociologist Eva Illouz argues “that EL James’s novels are ‘a gothic romance adapted to modern times in which sexuality is both a source of division between men and women and a site to orchestrate their reconciliation’, and that their graphic descriptions of bondage, discipline and sadomasochism are ‘as much a cultural fantasy as a sexual one, serving as a guide to a happier romantic life’.”
Universal Knowledge Allah Pleads Guilty To Stealing Strad In Milwaukee
“Allah was accused of supplying the stun gun to Salah Jones, who allegedly incapacitated [Milwaukee Symphony concertmaster] Frank Almond with the weapon as he left a concert in a Milwaukee suburb on Jan. 27 and took the violin, valued at about $5 million.” He faces up to 15 years in prison.
Quentin Tarantino Gives Up Snit Fit, Goes Ahead With Filming ‘Hateful Eight’
In January, the writer-director angrily announced that he was dropping the project after the script was leaked – and he went on to sue Gawker Media for posting a link to the script. “I have calmed down a bit,” he says. “The knife-in-the-back wound has started to scab.”
What Moved Lynn Nottage To Write ‘Intimate Apparel’?
She had seen too much of what she calls “really macho theatre” and wanted to write “something simple and gentle”. And then she found an old photo in her grandmother’s brownstone that set her on a binge of historical research.
It Takes A ‘Gentleman With Elbows’ To Run Chicago’s Field Museum
“When the Field Museum was searching for a new president in 2012, one of Richard W. Lariviere’s references called the Sanskrit scholar and Chicago-born son of a welder ‘not a rogue but a gentleman with elbows’ … Mr. Lariviere got the Field Museum job, and from day one has been confronted with massive problems that again require him to use his elbows.”
When The ‘Orange Is The New Black’ Staff Visited A Prison
“It’s these low-slung buildings, and it’s hot, but you look around and you think, ‘It’s not so bad.’ Then within 10 minutes, everyone was thinking, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’ The oppression starts to bear down on you, and you realize you’re trapped.”
Broadway Scores Record Box-Office Week
“Broadway shows grossed $30.9 million last week on sales from 299,090 audience members, the highest dollar amount and best attendance ever recorded for the week leading into Memorial Day … The comparable gross and attendance figures for the same period last year were $25.5 million and 240,878.”
America’s Cultural Capital Has An Arts-Education Problem
“A report from the New York City comptroller “has raised fresh questions about how art enhances learning and whether children will be better prepared for a 21st century economy if they have mastered the ‘soft’ skills that art teaches. In an increasingly ‘creative’ economy, the argument goes, students need original thinking to thrive – and then only wealthy New Yorkers are being set up to succeed.”
Discounted Registration Ends Friday
The Americans for the Arts Annual Convention in Nashville this June 13-15 is your opportunity to learn from and network with more than 1,000 arts professionals from across the country.
Maya Angelou, 86
“From her desperate early years, Ms. Angelou gradually moved into nightclub dancing and from there began a career in the arts that spanned more than 60 years. She sang cabaret and calypso, danced with Alvin Ailey, acted on Broadway, directed for film and television and wrote more than 30 books, including poetry, essays and, responding to the public’s appetite for her life story, six autobiographies.”
All-Female ‘Henry IV’ Coming From Donmar Warehouse
“Harriet Walter is to follow up playing Brutus in Julius Caesar by taking on Henry IV in the second of a trilogy of all-female Shakespeare productions staged by the Donmar Warehouse [in London].”
Amazon UK And Hachette Ramp Up Battle Over E-Book Profits
“The dispute has also dragged in JK Rowling and the best-selling American writer James Patterson, and broke into the open on Friday, when the world’s largest bookseller started turning the thumbscrew on the French-owned publisher.”
Massimo Vignelli, 83, Designer Who Created New York’s Subway Map
“[He was] an acclaimed graphic designer who gave shape to his spare, Modernist vision in book covers and shopping bags, furniture and corporate logos, even a church and a New York City subway map that enchanted aesthetes and baffled straphangers.”
Do We Really Have To Shut Down? Ask Musicians Of Wisconsin’s Green Bay Symphony
“Members of the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra will talk among themselves in coming weeks to determine whether there’s any way to keep the 100-year-old organization alive beyond next season. At least two of the 70-plus musicians disagree with executive director Dan Linssen’s claim that orchestra can’t survive beyond next season.”
‘Small Army’ Of Conservators Volunteer To Restore Glasgow School Of Art
“Conservators from the UK and abroad answered a social media call for help from within 24 hours of the blaze that destroyed the school’s famous art nouveau library. The volunteers include managers and coordinators, conservators trained in disaster response, archivists, conservators of paper, paintings, textiles and stone.”
Violinists Forbidden To Board Flight With Their Instruments – And Turn (Of Course) To Social Media
Indianapolis Symphony concertmaster Zach DePue and colleague Nick Kendall, two-thirds of the group Time for Three, were denied boarding on a US Airways Express flight out of Charlotte after flight staff refused to allow them to bring their instruments as carry-ons. Left on the tarmac, they made a video and posted it to YouTube; naturally it went viral.
Why Do We (Or Should We) Stick To A Seven-Day Week?
The day, the month, and the year all have clear and obvious bases in nature, but the “pattern of living on a seven-day cycle – with one or two of those days set aside for rest – is a relative novelty. Only in the past few centuries, with Western colonization of most of the world, have the majority of human societies adopted it.”
Boston Ballet Names New Executive Director
Meredith (Max) Hodges “succeeds Barry Hughson, who left the company in January to become executive director of the National Ballet of Canada. Hodges is currently executive director of Gallim Dance, a New York-based contemporary dance company.”
River Phoenix’s Last Film Will Finally Be Released After More Than Twenty Years
“[He] was just 23 when he died of a drug overdose. At the time, he was about 80 percent through the arduous production of Dark Blood … [The film’s producers] released a trailer today, confirming that the film will, over two decades after its production, finally see a release.”