A publicist for the Sopranos showrunner said in a statement: “To simply quote David as saying, ‘Tony Soprano is not dead,’ is inaccurate. There is a much larger context for that statement and as such, it is not true.” The statement goes on to remind us what Chase has said about the subject many times, and Vox culture editor Todd VanDerWerff offers a defense of the article.
Archives for August 2014
“It’s The Wrong Thing To Ask About ‘The Sopranos'”: Matt Zoller Seitz On The Did-Or-Didn’t-Tony-Die Question
“I won’t take anyone’s interpretation away from anybody – not because I feel that certain interpretations are more provable than others, but because if you’re trying to ‘prove’ a particular theory about the ending of a consciously ambiguous and at times tactically frustrating work of popular art, you’re watching it wrong.”
Judge Throws Out “Deep Throat” Owner’s Copyright Suit Against “Lovelace”
The owners of the rights to the 1972 porn film sued the Weinstein Co., producers of the 2013 biopic of Linda Lovelace, for recreating three scenes from the older film. A U.S. federal judge dismissed the complaint based on the fair use doctrine.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 08.27.14
Plagiarism, Libel Suit, Blackballing: Bad-News Summer for Art-&-Architecture Journalism
AJBlog: CultureGrrl | Published 2014-08-27
One Publisher Takes on Amazon
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-08-27
Call for Mini Stories
AJBlog: Engaging Matters | Published 2014-08-27
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This Year’s Opera Olympics
“From over 1,000 applications, 40 singers from 17 nations, including the United States, Russia and China, made it through to the main competition, which began on August 25. Following two days of preliminary rounds, 20 singers enter the semi-finals. Ten singers will reach the final round on August 30, which is presented as a Gala Finals Concert with an orchestra conducted by Domingo.”
Science’s Problem With Big Data
“As the rest of the society, from business and economics to journalism and art, wakes up to the power of big data, the world of research is, ironically, not doing nearly enough to embrace the power of information. A big-data mindset involves more than having a lot of petabytes on your hard drive, and science is falling short in three main areas.”
Former Jasper Johns Assistant Pleads Guilty To Stealing Art
“The assistant, James Meyer, was indicted in 2013 on charges connected to a scheme that prosecutors said involved the theft of at least 22 artworks over about six years. Mr. Meyer removed the works from Mr. Johns’s studio in Sharon, Conn., prosecutors said, and delivered them to an art gallery in Lower Manhattan, where they were sold for about $6.5 million.”
Final Acts: Doris Lessing Left 3000 Books To Public Library In Zimbabwe
“The bequest includes biographies, histories, reference books, poetry and fiction. It has been welcomed by public services strained by years of neglect and underfunding; many libraries in Zimbabwe have no budget to buy new books.”
Julian Lloyd Webber: Here’s How To Make It As A Young Musician
“To succeed in today’s music business the aspiring musician needs to give almost as much time and thought to business-related matters as they give to practising their art. They need to find their unique space in the market place. They need to find out what they have to offer that is different to everybody else.”
Video Games – The New Spectator Sport
“Fans watch for the same reasons ancient Romans flocked to the Colosseum: to witness extraordinary displays of agility and skill.”
Is Banksy Over?
Is “Banksy, arguably the most well-known and successful graffiti artist in the world, now over? In other words, was his production permanently slowing down? Could he now be considered part of art history? Or would he start to mean less to the general public and the street art community?”
Knowledge Versus Information
“The Internet does make it easier to gather – aggregate, as the jargon goes – information, but not necessarily to make sense of it. An overabundance of raw information devoid of context and interpretation can actually be detrimental to knowledge. Knowledge springs from the act – the art – of interpreting, digesting, and integrating new information with our existing understanding of the world.”
New Trend: The Office That Sings Together Works Better Together
“London, long a choral capital, is setting the tone with law firms, banks, accountancy firms, tech firms, even cosmetics giant L’Oréal now featuring company-supported choirs. A number have set up Google-style music rooms, and some even offer music lessons during the workday.”
Generous Cincinnati Funder Shuts Its Doors After An Amazing Run
The Corbett Foundation – which gave more than $70 million to arts and education in the region over the last 60 years – is shutting its doors, effective immediately.
ABT’s Not Just Wringing Its Hands About Lack Of Diversity In Ballet, It’s Going Out To Develop More Dancers
“Classical ballet in the United States has an image problem, as dancers at the top companies are almost entirely white. … In an attempt to make ballet more diverse, the American Ballet Theatre has launched a new programme to search for talents from the excluded communities. Al Jazeera’s Daniel Lak reports from New York.” (video)
Paavo Järvi Won’t Renew Contract With Orchestre De Paris
The conductor announced on his Facebook page that, “with a heavy heart”, he has decided to step down from the orchestra’s music directorship after the 2015-16 season. He gave no reason other than his desire to devote time to his new post at Tokyo’s NHK Symphony (beginning in fall 2015) as well as his ongoing work with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. (in French)
ShakesBEER – This May Be Taking Pub Theater A Little Too Far
Yes, ShakesBEER is actually the name of a theater project: It’s Shakespeare-meets-pub-crawl. Then there’s Shotspeare: Shakespeare-meets-drinking-game. And there’s Drunk Shakespeare (the actors get drunk as they perform), a New York version of Scotland’s S—faced Shakespeare. They’re putting the bar back in Bard. (Sorry.)
Robert Hass Wins $100,000 Poetry Prize
The UC-Berkeley professor and former MacArthur Fellow, “who served as poet laureate of the United States in the mid-1990s, and won a National Book Award in 2007 and a Pulitzer Prize in 2008, has now also won the Wallace Stevens Award, a $100,000 cash stipend given by the Academy of American Poets, an organization founded in 1934 to foster an appreciation for American poetry.”
How A Latin Scholar Became A Public Intellectual, TV Star And (Actual) Poster Girl
Once, Mary Beard was just an unusually prolific Oxbridge don. Now she’s a popular historian with multiple television sows to her credit, something of a heroine to middle-aged and older women (and more than a few of their daughters), and a skilled slayer of Internet trolls. (Sometimes she even reforms them.)
Sam Hunter, 91, Curator, Art Critic, Founder of Rose Museum
“Over six decades, Sam Hunter could usually be found at the center of some of the most exciting times for art in New York and beyond. He was an art historian (an authority on 20th-century art), a museum director, a curator, an art critic and an art adviser to museums, corporations and private collectors” – not to mention author or co-author of some 50 books.
A Director’s Medium: It’s Not Just The Writers Who Make This A Golden Age Of TV
“The prevailing sentiment is that TV is a writer’s medium, and film is a director’s medium. … But that doesn’t mean TV can’t be a director’s medium, too – many ‘golden age’ shows have also had fantastic directing. In fact, many respected movie directors are taking notice and flocking to the small screen.”
Harvey Weinstein Feuds With NY Post Columnist Over “Finding Neverland” Musical
Post theater columnist Michael Riedel, based on two reviews of the pre-Broadway run in Cambridge, Mass., pronounced the show “dead in the water” and said of the critics that “if you’re going to review the baby in the cradle, strangle it.” One of those critics, Jeremy Gerard, reports on the brouhaha and Weinstein’s predictable response.
James Conlon To Leave Ravinia Festival After Next Summer
“Increased commitments abroad and at home, where Conlon has served as music director of the Los Angeles Opera since 2006 and music director of the Cincinnati May Festival since 1979, have caused him to weigh his personal and professional priorities, he added.”
Sleep Drunkenness – We’ve All Experienced It, And It Has A Name
“Your alarm goes off on your phone, and instead of turning it off or hitting snooze, you pick it up and stupidly say, ‘Hello?’ You are, to use the technical term, in the throes of sleep drunkenness.”
No Copyright For Works Not Created By Humans, Says U.S. Copyright Office
“Marking an end to the controversy surrounding the ‘monkey selfie,’ a self-portrait snapped by a particularly photogenic macaque in Indonesia in 2011, the US Copyright Office” has ruled that it “will register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being … the Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants.”