He is best known for the series of three Paradise Lost films he made with co-director Joe Berlinger about the West Memphis Three, defendants in a controversial Arkansas murder case.
Archives for February 2015
U.S. Officials Return Tiepolo Painting and Etruscan Bronze to Italy
“Federal law enforcement authorities in New York announced Tuesday that they had returned to Italy two pieces of that country’s cultural heritage stolen decades ago before being brought to the United States: a painting attributed to the 18th-century artist Giambattista Tiepolo and an ancient Etruscan bronze statuette of Herakles.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 02.24.15
Superstars have always been with us
AJBlog: For What It’s Worth Published 2015-02-24
From “Griddle Griswold” to “Twister Griswold”: New Outreach by Cleveland Museum’s Playful Director
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-02-24
The Future of the Arts
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2015-02-24
Elling And Iyer At The PDX Festival
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-02-24
Hail to college jazz radio stations like WHPK
AJBlog: Jazz Beyond Jazz Published 2015-02-24
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Writing As A Lonely Tortured Struggle? Not So Much
“Take those demons, for example. For some of us, writing is not a matter of being driven by them, but casting them out. Difficult family relationships? Sort them out on the page. Horrible love life? Write it again with a better ending. Feeling your age? Slip into the skin of a 20 year old and go off and have some fictional adventures. It’s not a horrible, exhausting struggle; it’s therapeutic.”
Oscars Mop Up: Viewership Down, Petty Controversies, Relevancy Questions, And Then The Boringness Factor
“It’s sad, but most people have to finally accept that the Oscars have become, well, elitist and not in step with anything that is actually popular. No one really believes anymore that the films they chose are the ones that are going to last over time.”
Family Sues Germany Over Treasure Looted By The Nazis
“Two claimants to a collection of medieval Christian treasure filed a suit in the U.S. District Court in Washington on Monday against the German government and the government-controlled museum that owns the artifacts.”
Are Humans Smarter Than They Were 100 Years Ago? Here’s The Evidence
“Our improved ability to reason abstractly may also be the result of the spread of scientific thinking-reason, rationality, empiricism, skepticism. Thinking like a scientist means employing all our faculties to overcome our emotional, subjective, and instinctual brains to better understand the true nature of not only the physical and biological worlds, but the social world (politics and economics) and the moral world (abstracting how other people should be treated) as well.”
Here’s Why American Musical Theatre Has Slipped From The Mainstream
“Now that Broadway-minded songwriters no longer have a universal musical language on which to draw, it isn’t possible to write a show with genuine broad-gauge audience appeal. It says everything about the desperate state of the American musical that the last theatrical song to become an enduringly popular hit, Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” was written in 1973.”
Why Satire Is Important (Especially When It’s Offensive)
“If I try, in the aim of cool-headed analysis, to contain that dismay, I find that my American colleagues’ quasi-rationalization of the assassination of caricaturists is rooted in a failure to distinguish between certain basic varieties of the exercise of the freedom of expression. In particular, there seems to be a broad misunderstanding of the social function, and therefore also the necessity, of satire.”
St. Paul’s New Ordway Hall – Key To A Revitalized City
“St. Paul is as strong now as we’ve been in decades, with light rail in and a new regional ballpark coming,” said St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, an early champion of the project. “But the arts and culture stuff is what continues to drive development. The Ordway, which is so beautiful on Rice Park, is key to all of that.”
John Luther Adams: Making Music In A Time Of Crisis
“Today a growing number of geologists believe we have left the Holocene and entered a new period—the Anthropocene—in which the dominant geologic force is humanity itself. What does this mean for music? What does it mean for my work as a composer, or for any artist working in any medium today?”
Death Of A Dancer – How To Prepare?
“So how does one plan for a tragedy? You really can’t. You plan for your organization’s response to one. That is to say, put in place the information, guidelines, training, and materials needed to help company leadership and staff deal with a most difficult and often chaotic time.”
So London Needs A New Concert Hall For Simon Rattle? Is This The Real Priority?
“Is this more than a vanity project? Is Simon Rattle’s musicianship really worth it? Would such a “world-class hall” be sustainable after his departure? At 63 he would be, even by the gerontocratic standards of classical music, not a young man when his Berlin contract runs out in 2018.”
Big Improvements Ahead For Sydney Opera House?
“The proposed upgrades include a permanent function centre at the Opera House overlooking the harbour and a new waterfront public square at Walsh Bay. About $202 million would be spent on the opera house, which was completed in 1973 and attracts 8 million tourists a year.”
Early Music Leader Philip Pickett Gets 11 Years’ Prison For Rape
The founder and director of the New London Consort and Musicians of the Globe (the resident ensemble at Shakespeare’s Globe), with a discography of 48 titles, Pickett was convicted of assaulting several of his students at the Guildhall School.
René Magritte Was A Comedian
“A good comic can take something mundane and familiar and make you see it an unexpected way, whether it’s Dave Chappelle talking about ‘grape drink’, or Louis CK ranting about his four-year-old daughter. Magritte will do the same by sticking a silk mask on an apple. Or having a cloud enter a room by a door.”
Suzan-Lori Parks Wins $100K Playwriting Prize
“The critically acclaimed epic play Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, & 3) by Suzan-Lori Parks has won the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for a theatrical work inspired by American history … A check for $100,000 will also go to Ms. Parks, a Pulitzer Prize winner for the drama Topdog/Underdog.”
Rothschild Family Treasures Find A Resting Place In Boston
“The gift all but closes the book on a collection that was started in the mid-1800s by Baron Nathaniel von Rothschild and his brother, Albert, and became entwined with 20th-century history.”
How Mexican Filmmakers Reached Hollywood’s Top Tier
It’s not just Alejandro González Iñárritu’s wins for Birdman. Alfonso Cuarón won last year for Gravity, and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki won Oscars two years running for those movies. Then there’s Guillermo del Toro, Rodrigo Prieto, and others. “So who is this band of Mexican artists and how did it fight to the top of one America’s most competitive industries?”
Opening Up Paris Theatre To Visitors And Expats
“While the locals flock to the 300 or so venues, they are largely un-visited by tourists and expats because one of the main requirements for a visit is a good knowledge of French. At least that’s what Carl de Poncins says. He quit his job as the marketing director of a multinational company last year to focus on making theatre accessible for English speakers by introducing surtitles.”
How Much Should A Funder Be Able To Dictate What The Art It Funds Should Accomplish?
“It is a given now that in order to get a foundation grant, it’s often not enough to simply apply for funding of what you do day in and day out. What do funders want? Innovation! New ways of ‘engaging’ younger audiences! High-impact special projects that others will want to emulate!”
What Happens When You Let A Listicle Writer For A Finance Website Name The Ten Most Influential Choreographers Ever?
Well, for a start, you get Maurice Béjart and Pina Bausch ranked ahead of Marius Petipa and Bob Fosse. And there’s more to argue about where that came from. (On the other hand, at least she doesn’t forget about hip-hop and Bollywood.)
Relations With The U.S. Or No, Cuba Is Not Returning Exiles’ Art
“With the recent loosening of US restrictions on trade with Cuba, prisoner exchanges and the promise of warmer relations to come, the two countries are closer than they have been for 50 years. But for those Cuban exiles in the US whose art was seized by the Cuban authorities in the 1960s, restitution of their property is still no closer. Cuba continues to reject the charge that the art in question was stolen, and has no mechanism for its return.”
Henry Segerstrom, 91, Philanthropist Who Transformed Orange County, California’s Cultural Life
The scion of a lima-bean-farming family, Segerstrom turned some empty fields into South Coast Plaza, one of America’s high-end shopping meccas. He went on to donate the land and much of the money to build the venues at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, renamed after him in 2011.
Poetess, Actress, Aviatrix, Rockette, And Other Gendered Occupations
“Listen to Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo discuss the history and etymology of feminine suffixes – including -ess, -ette, and -trix – with University of Michigan professor Anne Curzan.” (podcast)