“As holiday traditions go, the play Burning Bluebeard doesn’t exactly seem like a natural: no Cratchits, no elves, no Grinches, no sugarplum fairies. Its place in the season is all about timing. It’s based on the real-life story of a fatal fire that happened in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day – and it’s told by clowns.”
Archives for December 2014
“Serial” Update: Jay Speaks Publicly For The First Time
“The star witness at [Adnan] Syed’s trial was Jay Wilds, a former classmate who testified that he helped Syed dispose of Lee’s body.” Jay declined to speak to the producers of Serial while the podcast seires was being prepared; now he feels he was unfairly portrayed and has spoken to a different outlet – with yet another version of the events in question.
Why Uber – The Idea, Not The Actual Car Service – Crossed A Cultural Barrier In 2014
‘”Like an Uber for’ is shorthand for describing an item or service delivered wherever you are and whenever you want it, but the phrase also hints at a much larger shift in people’s expectations about their interactions with the world. It turns out one of the most hackneyed phrases in tech this year may also be one of the most profound.”
How To Hack Your Holiday Memories
“What if we could choose which memories of the holiday season – or any season – will stand out most vividly and which we’re content to let fade with the passage of time? While it isn’t possible to do this with an exacting, sci-fi level of precision, it is possible to use some basic findings about human memory to increase the odds that you will remember that amazing New Year’s party but forget that Christmas-dinner squabble over Obamacare.”
Cracking The Sitcom Formula
When Noah Charney (a U.S. expat in Slovenia) was asked to write a sitcom for Croatian TV, he said yes, despite knowing little about either Croatia or sitcoms. As he learned from lots of Googling and watching old shows online, he learned that “there is a highly-specific, minute-by-minute recipe used to write the vast majority of sitcoms out there. And once you know the formula, it makes it much easier to write them, and much harder to watch them.”
Benedict Cumberbatch On Why Sherlock Never Gets Laid
“I think he also realizes he can’t beat female intuition; he can’t. So to embroil himself where he might be enslaved through adoration or sexual desire or any kind of power or chemistry to do with love is too big a risk for him. That doesn’t make him gay, and it doesn’t make him asexual. It means he’s purposely abstaining for the sake of his craft. Not something I do.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 12.29.14
Court Orders Tate To Provide Funding Details, Pronto
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2014-12-29
Explainer: How do costs affect ticket prices?
AJBlog: For What it’s Worth Published 2014-12-29
The Year in CultureGrrl, 2014 Edition
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2014-12-29
Monday Recommendation: Edward Simon
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2014-12-29
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Cabaret Is Enjoying A Mini-Renaissance, But It Might Not Be Long For This World
“Fitful attempts to bring cabaret to television in a variety-show format have fizzled. The pace of contemporary life is too fast and too loud to showcase new, rising talent in an intimate, convivial atmosphere. Nowadays, singing on television is a competitive sport.”
Paying (In Security, Interruptions, Incessant Photos) For Celebrities On Broadway
“New audiences, however, have sparked new security needs, particularly around the stage door that cast members use to enter and exit the theater. Fans, sometimes ones who didn’t attend the production, flock to them, so that most Broadway stage doors are now flanked by steel barricades.”
The Mind-Hacks Of Stoicism Beat Out Anything in Christianity Or Zen Buddhism
“Only by envisioning the bad can we truly appreciate the good; gratitude does not arrive when we take things for granted. It’s precisely this gratitude that leaves us content to cede control of what the world has already removed from our control anyway.”
Working Close To The Art, As A Museum Jill Of All Trades
“Everyone wears a lot of hats. I also sweep the floor, take the garbage out and lay bug traps. I always thought when I reached this point that I’d wear pencil skirts and kitten heels and look fancy, but the reality is I spend a lot of time on the floor.”
Are Cinema’s New Shared Universe Sagas A Good Thing?
“There’s a chunk of every Marvel movie that doesn’t belong there, either because it’s effectively a trailer for a subsequent film, or because it’s an arch allusion to an earlier one. The danger is that as the MCU gets more byzantine, and the intertextual nods and winks become more common, its films won’t make any sense unless you’ve seen all the others.”
Will The San Fernando Valley Finally, Like, Get Its Own Museum?
“‘We’re on the verge of a cultural renaissance in the Valley,’ Sterling says. ‘It’s happening really fast, and people are getting behind it. If we were a city, we’d be the fifth-largest population base in the U.S. The Valley needs a world-class museum.'”
Gender And Writing, Blah Blah Blah – But Yes, It’s Still Important
“Everyone is shaped by their experience of gender, whatever that experience is; there is no view from nowhere. Men’s experience is no less specific than women’s; it’s just that we fail to see it as such.”
About To Go To Sleep? Put Your E-Reader In A Different Room
“The use of such devices ‘has unintended biological consequences that may adversely impact performance, health and safety,’ according to a research team led by neuroscientist Anne-Marie Chang of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.”
The Ideals Of ‘Rent’ – And What It Got Completely Wrong, Too
“It depicted what to me was a fantasy as attractive as any I’d ever seen: that you could be in your twenties, living in New York City, surrounded not by the family you’d left behind but by the ones you’d made. That you could pursue above all else art and love. At its end, I leapt to my feet in applause.”
Streaming Liberates Obsessive Collectors From Endless Record Shows (And More)
“I had arrived in the promised land — or at least Spotifyland — no more bulky records and CDs strewn about my home requiring alphabetization, no more ripping, no more glitchy files downloaded nefariously from KaZaa needing to be retitled and volume equalized, no more agonizing how I would parse my eMusic allowance, no more checking and unchecking tracks in iTunes so I could get just the right 19,873 songs on my iPod classic.”
Ballet Is Ruthlessly Darwinian, Not To Mention Dangerous
“Ballet is a high-risk activity, and a slippery patch of stage or a split-second’s inattention in a leap can spell serious injury and months of rehabilitation.”
Cuban And U.S. Artists Have Always Found Ways To Collaborate Around The Embargo
“The announcements by Obama and Castro won’t affect the particulars of any of these projects in progress. But the move does have many people in the cultural sphere considering what might be artistically possible between the two countries down the line.”
Funding Is A Struggle Even For Big-Name Hollywood Projects, If They Feature African Americans
“Despite America’s changing demographics, Hollywood’s most powerful industry leaders have been slow to respond to a demand for movies that reflect cultural and racial shifts that have long been underway.”
Before ‘Google It,’ We Had ‘Call The Reference Librarian’
“Here’s one salacious example: ‘I went to a New Year’s Eve Party and unexpectedly stayed over. I don’t really know the hosts. Ought I to send a thank-you note?’ asked a ‘somewhat uncertain female voice’ during a mid-afternoon telephone call on New Year’s Day, 1967.”
Buddy DeFranco Played The Clarinet With Frank Sinatra, But His Great Jazz Skill Shone In Other Venues
“Captivated by the complex, challenging new sounds and increasingly aware that the music market was evolving, Mr. DeFranco moved quickly to carve out a fresh career in bebop, a perilous undertaking on an instrument that requires nearly superhuman skill and dexterity to keep up with bebop’s sometimes freakishly fast tempos.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs For 12.28.14
This Art Map Will Startle You
AJBlog: Real Clear ArtsPublished 2014-12-28
Ruskin’s Influence on Ives
AJBlog: PostClassicPublished 2014-12-28
Price discrimination in the air
AJBlog: For What it’s WorthPublished 2014-12-26
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Janis Martin Sang In Italian Restaurants To Survive, And Then Became A Celebrated Soprano And International Star
“From the early 1970s on she became identified with Wagnerian soprano parts like Isolde, Brünnhilde and Kundry in ‘Parsifal,’ as well as the title role in Puccini’s ‘Tosca’ and Strauss roles like Elektra and the Dyer’s Wife in ‘Die Frau Ohne Schatten’ (‘The Woman Without a Shadow’).”
Cutting Lines – And Cutting Profanity – For An American Audience
“Terrible things happen, wonderful ones, too. There are big events, big emotions and the occasional influx of lobsters or Nazis. Her characters have juicier things to bite than their tongues.”