On stage, she starred in High Button Shoes, Make a Wish, and Love Life (for which she won a Tony). On the big screen, she’s remembered for Vincente Minnelli’s MGM musical The Band Wagon (she was one of those bratty baby triplets). But television was where she made her biggest mark – costarring with Sid Caesar in sketch comedy (for which she won three Emmys), playing the mothers of the lead characters in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and One Day at a Time, and appearing on countless variety and game shows, from Ed Sullivan to Carol Burnett and Hollywood Squares to Match Game.
Archives for February 2018
Humorist Cynthia Heimel, 70
“In her books” – among them Sex Tips for Girls and If You Can’t Live Without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet? – “and columns, Ms. Heimel wrote about bad boys, bad dates, bad sex and bad birth control, with the occasional reminiscence of blissed-out pleasure thrown in. ‘God protects drunks, infants and feisty girls,’ she once observed, and in a tumultuous, three-decade writing career, she was feistier than most.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 02.26.18
Making Things Together
The Bebe Miller Company and Susan Rethorst share their processes and a program at New York Live Arts. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2018-02-25
Gray-Haired and Dying
I heard yet another talk about audiences last week that used two adjectives interchangeably to describe them: ‘gray-haired’ and ‘dying.’ I get it. The young demographic is a big prize: get listeners hooked in … read more
AJBlog: Infinite Curves Published 2018-02-26
Monday Recommendation: Magris In Miami
Roberto Magris Sextet Live in Miami @ the WDNA Jazz Gallery (J Mood) … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2018-02-26
Why Movie Audiences Don’t Turn Out For Smart Science Fiction
“Sci-fi is a fun genre to work in; it tests creativity, but it seems like it also tests audiences’ patience. They don’t turn up for it. You really have to make a world that audiences are willing to step into and that’s proven the most difficult thing.”
Artistic Director Mark Baldwin To Leave Rambert Dance After 15 Years
“I have commissioned over 60 works, both new and revivals, for the Rambert dancers, who in my opinion have the richest embodied knowledge in the world. This is the beginning of my 16th year as artistic director which is the longest stint of any artistic director of this company, and I think it is the perfect moment to hand over. I arrived as a choreographer and my heart tells me it is time to return to that,” he said.
The Internet’s Post-Text Future
The shift to a thoroughly video-driven internet is indeed on its way, and it will be terrible. To the extent that it attempts to cash in on original content, it will necessarily be terrible, in the conventional sense, because there is not enough talent to go around—ever wonder why British television (and film) relies on the same five actors and actresses? On the other hand, American art has a long history of inspirational terribleness, of sublime trashiness and no-budget artistry that far surpasses, in quality, critically sanctioned prestige. I have no confidence that Google or Facebook will recognize such non-talent for what it is or could be.
How Could A Museum Lose An 83,000-Pound Richard Serra Sculpture?
In 1986, the Madrid museum, one of the top contemporary art destinations in the Spanish capital, commissioned the famous sculptor to create a piece for a landmark exhibition, References: An Artistic Encounter in Time. Their idea was to show the work of three famous Spanish artists next to that of three renowned artists from the 20th century, including Richard Serra.
How Universities Were Taken Over By Administrators
Administrators control the modern university. The faculty have “fallen,” to use Benjamin Ginsberg’s term. It’s an “all-administrative” institution now. Spending on administrators and administration exceeds spending on faculty, administrators out-number faculty by a long shot, and administrative salaries and benefit packages, particularly those of presidents and other senior managers, have skyrocketed over the last 10 years. Even more telling perhaps, students themselves increasingly resemble administrators more than professors in their ambitions and needs.
When Aesthetics Meets Politics In A Triennial Survey, Naivete Abounds
Peter Schjeldahl: In principle, the show’s aim reflects the New Museum’s valuable policy of incubating upstart trends in contemporary art. But it comes off as willfully naïve. Nearly all the artists plainly hail from an international archipelago of art schools and hip scenes and have embarked upon normal career paths. Noting that they share political discontents, as the young tend to do, is easy. Harder, in the context, is registering their originality as creators—like bumps under an ideological blanket. But there’s insight to gain about emergent sensibilities in world art, without hustling everybody toward illusory barricades.
In The Internet Era, Dictionaries Seem Almost Quaint. But We Need Them More Than Ever
At one level, few things are simpler than a dictionary: a list of the words people use or have used, with an explanation of what those words mean, or have meant. At the level that matters, though – the level that lexicographers fret and obsess about – few things could be more complex. Who used those words, where and when? How do you know? Which words do you include, and on what basis? How do you tease apart this sense from that? And what is “English” anyway?
The Artist Whose Medium Is Big Data
Laurie Frick imagines a future in which your smart watch will know how your body is responding to someone. Then it will combine with Facebook data about their personality. And that will let you know whether that person makes you lethargic, raises your blood pressure or depresses you. “If you start training people that, ‘Look at what’s happening to your inflammation levels or whatever. This is the best thing for you and you can let go of the guilt.’ “
Those Articulate Florida Kids Leading The #NeverAgain Movement? Theatre Nerds
Are you surprised that these teenage drama nerds are now taking the international stage by storm? I’m not. A theatre class is more than an artistic distraction for students. It can serve as a lightning rod of empowerment for young people. For many teens, the experience of standing in a spotlight on a stage in a play or musical, galvanizing the attention of adults in the audience, is the first time a young person discovers that what they say matters. They learn that words have power, that their voice can move and inspire others.
JoAnn Falletta: Are Orchestras Opening Up To Women Conductors?
“It seems that orchestras are open to looking at women, at young women, at young conductors in general. It’s a time when people are saying, ‘Maybe we can change the way we think about programming and, hopefully, presentation.’ And it’s not as if women are not ready. All of these decades women have been studying, filling spots in smaller orchestras, and the women stepping into these roles come from solid backgrounds.”
How Cincinnati Invested In Selling The Arts To Sell Itself
Regional Tourism Network provided a half-million dollars that was matched by ArtsWave to co-create the region’s first arts marketing campaign outside of a 100-mile radius. The result: Their $1 million campaign in fall 2016 reaped $14 million in hotel stays. Arts audiences across the region increased 3 percent. Surveys showed that Cincinnati was gaining a reputation as a place people might like to live, work and visit.
Canada’s Public Broadcaster Says It Will Destroy Archive Of 200,000 Recordings
The main French-language production centre of Radio-Canada in Montreal has been digitising its collection. However recently it was revealed that most of the collection of over 200,000 CDs will be destroyed when the process is completed in 2019, prior to the move to new quarters in 2020.
When Art Became A Commodity, Things Turned Ugly
As contemporary art is increasingly viewed as an asset class—alongside equities, bonds, and real estate—Georgina Adam sees artworks often used as a vehicle to hide or launder money, and artists encouraged to churn out works in market-approved styles, bringing about a decline in quality.
Should The Press Really Be “Objective”? That’s A Relatively New Idea
Widespread objective, nonpartisan media did once exist in this country, from roughly the 1950s to the late 1970s. But at the time, that was something new, too. Before that, there was no press other than the partisan press. Newspapers controlled by the Federalists branded Thomas Jefferson an “infidel,” while the Democratic-Republican press called George Washington a “traitor.” Before journalism became a “profession” in the Progressive Era, newspaper editors organized parties and held meetings in their offices. So if the passage of modern objective news is lamentable, it is also not all that surprising.
The Goal: Learn All There Is To Learn About Vermeer’s ‘The Girl With The Pearl Earring’
The method: Use every noninvasive technique known to art, and medicine (yes, medicine), in a two-week blitz of discovery. The paintings conservator at the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery says: “The expertise and the scientific equipment are coming from the whole world, converging on this one painting, this one masterpiece. … We’ll see how much information we can gain with the technology at our disposal in a very short period of time — two weeks, working 24 hours a day, day and night.”
An Author Apologizes After Lambasting His Book’s Cover (And The Cover Artist) In A Public Facebook Post
Fantasy author Terry Goodkind definitely does not like the cover of his latest book. “Offering 10 randomly selected readers a chance to win a hardback copy in return for their thoughts on the cover, Goodkind published a poll that included the voting options ‘laughably bad’ or ‘excellent.’ While almost 12,000 readers took part in the vote, some pledged to never buy another book by Goodkind again.” Even his apology was … well, some might call it laughably bad.
The Great Mound Cities Of The Midwest Were So Amazing, White Archaeologists Decided They Were Made By Aliens (Or Anyone But Native Peoples)
The large earthen mound complexes lie everywhere in the river valleys of the Midwest and Southeast. But “early archaeologists working to answer the question of who built the mounds attributed them to the Toltecs, Vikings, Welshmen, Hindus, and many others. It seemed that any group — other than the American Indian — could serve as the likely architects of the great earthworks.”
French Celebrities, Including Brigitte Bardot, Are Wading Into Lawsuits Over The Estate Of Johnny Hallyday
The French rock star left everything to his wife and stepchildren, and nothing to his children, who are suing – with support from many, apparently. “A number of big names in the world of French entertainment have spoken out on the matter.”
A ‘Clumsy, Silly’ Golden Bear Winner Highlights The Collapse (In One Critic’s Opinion) Of The Berlin Film Festival
Peter Bradshaw is not taking any prisoners, comparing the win of Touch Me Not to Brexit and the current U.S. president. “This is a quasi-fictional documentary essay about sexuality, which deluged me in a tidal wave of depression at how embarrassingly awful it was, at its mediocrity, its humourless self-regard, its fatuous and shallow approach to its ostensible theme of intimacy, and the clumsy way all this was sneakily elided with Euro-hardcore cliches about BDSM, alternative sexualities, fetishism and exhibitionism.”
The Medieval Origins Of The Word Craft, Not To Mention Craft Beer
You can start a big fight by calling something a craft instead of an art, but that’s not how it got started. “The Anglo-Saxon word ‘craeft’ is distinct from our modern word ‘craft’ in spirit and in practice. ‘Craeft’ means having the wisdom of one’s surroundings, understanding nature and the seasons, and knowing one’s materials, as well as how objects and systems fall apart.”
What’s It Like To Be The Ballerina Body Double For Jennifer Lawrence?
ABT principal dancer Isabella Boylston, who does the dancing body double work for the star in the new movie Red Sparrow, says the adjustment from stage to screen wasn’t big – it was small: “When I performed in the Met in front of 4,000 people, everything had to translate to the back row, so you had to do things really big, dance big, with acting and gestures. Everything has to be magnified to carry through the theater, and for film it’s the opposite; everything has to be subtle because you can read every little detail.”
The Great Book Acquisition Adventures Of The 17th And 18th Century
Yes, it was partly about European colonial greed. “In Istanbul, the buying of books by foreigners eventually got so out of hand that in 1715 or 1716 the grand vizir, Şehid Ali Pasha, himself a book collector, ‘enacted a law … banning the sale of books to foreigners.’ This protectionist measure was designed to prevent the disappearance of valuable intellectual resources from the capital.”