The seven-day, 26-hour avant-garde behemoth requires not only vocal and instrumental soloists, choir, orchestra, ballet dancers, and electronics, but four helicopters as well. (Yes, the notorious “Helicopter Quartet” is from LICHT.) The Dutch, being practical folk, have now devised a smaller-scale adaptation: aus LICHT, which runs a mere 15 hours of music over three days. Reporter Simon Cummings finds out how they did it (and convinced the famously controlling Stockhausen Foundation to cooperate).
#MeToo Meets Reality TV (It Had To Happen): New Series Busts Harassers On Camera
“[The Israeli series] The Silence Breaker is billed as an investigative factual entertainment format that will expose real-life sexual harassment at the workplace. Using hidden cameras, the show will go undercover to document harassment while also telling the victims’ stories. Each story will end with an on-camera confrontation with the harasser.”
The Science Of Crowd Behavior: Every Crowd Has A Psychological Personality
Crowd psychology has been around since the 19th Century. But it’s only in the last few decades that there’s been a major shift to seeing crowds as more than mindless masses. “The crowd is as psychologically specific as the individual,” says the University of Sussex’s John Drury, an expert on the social psychology of crowd management.
So A Librarian Just Sits Behind The Desk And Reads All Day, Right?
Hahahahhahahaahah (despairing laughter): no. “I cling to these happy memories whenever somebody breaks the copy machine for the fourth time that day by jamming a ballpoint pen inside the feed tray. Or spills their kale smoothie down the side of the circulation desk. Or when a person decides to eat an extra large pizza while vaping in the women’s bathroom. I think: remember why you chose this job? The elegance? And I laugh.”
Scottish Arts Funding Mess Suggests Need To Reconsider How We Support The Arts
“The increase in the number of network bodies in the Creative Scotland portfolio signals an acceptance of a model of competitiveness inherited from the Thatcherite government. We quite liked pretending to be business people, but we didn’t anticipate that we would need to accept responsibility for the future of cultural delivery. It’s hard work running a successful non-profit organisation and it takes skill to get it right all the time. The priority of artistic quality can easily become lost in project managerialism.”
‘The Parrotheads Were After Me’ – New York Times’ Jesse Green On Writing Negative Theater Reviews
“I don’t take writing pans lightly. For one thing, I’m as thin-skinned as anyone else, and don’t enjoy being excoriated on Twitter or mocked as a theater snob or told on Facebook to just ‘relax’ – as if my being uptight were what made the show bad. … So when I get home from the theater with my notebook bristling with scribbles like ‘what is happening?’ and ‘kill me now,’ I ask myself a few questions. Was there anything at all I admired? Can I imagine why someone else might like it? Are there people I would send to the show despite my own distaste for it?”
Why Studying Dance Is As Important As Studying Math (Or Science)
“The low status of dance in schools is derived in part from the high status of conventional academic work, which associates intelligence mainly with verbal and mathematical reasoning. The studies collected by Nielsen and Burridge explore how a deeper understanding of dance challenges standard conceptions of intelligence and achievement and show the transformative power of movement for people of all ages and backgrounds. Dance can help restore joy and stability in troubled lives and ease the tensions in schools disrupted by violence and bullying.”
‘Opera Isn’t Elitist. If I Can Learn To Love It So Can Anybody.’
British comedian Chris Addison writes about how a chance event in a bar on a beer-soaked Friday night helped turn him into an opera fan – and how the same thing could happen to most anyone. “I’ve never seen a four-pints-down crowd focus like that; there was a stillness to the place – a wonder, really – as she sang. And when she finished, they went crazy. Standing screaming crazy.”
How Archie Bunker Transformed The American Sitcom
In the first generations of television, reflecting the idea(l) of the “classless” American society, the families in sitcoms tended to be solidly middle-class: Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver, I Love Lucy, etc. Even the Addams family and the Munsters were middle-class, if not wealthy. (The only real exceptions were The Honeymooners and the stereotyped “ethnic” comedies The Goldbergs, Amos ‘n’ Andy, and The Beverly Hillbillies, on which everyone but the Clampetts was rich.) Sascha Cohen offers a reevaluation of how things changed after Norman Lear created All in the Family.
What Exactly Do We Do? Everything! (A Librarian Tells You What The Job Is Really Like)
“Librarianship asks you to do 12 things at once and then when you’re in the middle of those projects wonders if you’ve got any tax forms left or an eclipse viewer. It’s endless questions. It’s ‘my two dollar fine pays your salary.’ It’s a grubby little hand at storytime grabbing your leg and smearing glitter glue down the side of pants you’ve already worn twice that week. It’s finding the right answer to a question and reveling in that small joy for a bare moment before another patron comes up to ask you something even weirder.”
ACLU Sues City Of New Orleans For Censoring Trump Mural
“[The suit is] on behalf of the resident Neal Morris, who is facing potential jail time over a mural painted on his private property that the city has demanded he remove. The mural, by the artist Cashy-D, depicts a quote from the 2005 Access Hollywood Tape in which US President Donald Trump brags about [you-know-what].”
Barbara Wersba, Whose Children’s Books Explored Alcoholism, Gay Relationships, And The Like, Dead At 85
“Ms. Wersba began writing in the 1960s, and her work reflected the era’s new realism in literature for younger readers with stories no longer confined to intact nuclear families and sanitized goings-on like prom nights. Some of her frank themes generated criticism; others generated praise.”
J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore Website Lays Off Most Editorial Staff
“The popular website was launched by JK Rowling in 2012 after the final Harry Potter film was released and was originally conceived as a way for the British writer to maintain and grow the online Potter fandom. According to a well-placed source, Pottermore sacked a string of editorial staff over the last few days, including both senior and junior staff who were making original content for the website.”
The Marionettes Bringing Health Education To Burmese Villages
“In the play, a puppet starts to offer a cigarette to a friend but his cough gets the better of him, which makes his voice a bit funny-sounding – eliciting peals of laughter from a roomful of a hundred schoolchildren.” Didem Tali reports on puppeteers who have adapted the traditional Burmese puppet theater yoke thay to improve public health in modern Myammar.
Royal Philharmonic Manager: Let’s Just Call Classical Music Orchestral Music
“Gone are the days of classical repertoire standing alone and just being enough,” James Williams said. “This approach would cater for less than half the new audience that wants to learn more about the genre. Classical music for a modern British orchestra has a new name – it’s simply called orchestral music.”
A New Generation Of Self-Help Book Recommendation Columns
A field of advice columns that lob texts at people’s troubles has flowered recently, from the Times’ “Match Book” to Lit Hub’s “Dear Book Therapist” to the Paris Review Daily’s “Poetry Rx.” The series run the gamut from straightforward recommendation engines (ask for a thriller, receive a thriller) to columns that see books not as frigates or loaded gunsbut as medicine, selected from the canon’s well-lit pharmacy by a critic in a smock.
What Will Our Society Look Like When Artificial Intelligence Is Everywhere?
“Will robots become self-aware? Will they have rights? Will they be in charge?” Stephan Talty offers five potential scenarios from a future when AI surrounds us.
Facebook Will “Never Be The Same” After The Analytica Scandal
“To some cynical journalists or techno-skeptics, this maneuvering might seem like Facebook just being Facebook—that the Cambridge scandal is merely the latest in a litany of privacy intrusions; that Facebook’s de facto response is, as Dance noted, disingenuous. But this scandal really is different, and everyone in Silicon Valley knows it. Since the story broke a significant investor and entrepreneur, who has worked in tech for over two decades, recalled to me that the incident reminded him of what happened to Microsoft in the 1990s, when years of pugilistic corporate behavior caught up to the company in the form of significant antitrust regulation.”
University Drops Humanities Courses For Those With “Career Pathways”
The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point has proposed dropping 13 majors in the humanities and social sciences — including English, philosophy, history, sociology and Spanish — while adding programs with “clear career pathways” as a way to address declining enrollment and a multimillion-dollar deficit.
An Oratorio About DACA And The Dreamers (Now There’s Relevant Classical Music For You)
Dreamer, with music by Jimmy López (the opera Bel Canto and text by Nilo Cruz (a Pulitzer winner for the play Anna in the Tropics), was commissioned two years ago by Cal Performances in Berkeley. In those two years, of course, quite a lot about the situation of the Dreamers has changed, and, as reporter Michael Cooper found out, that changed the piece itself.
Is This What MOCA’s Director Meant When He Said That The Fired Head Curator Was ‘Undermining The Museum’?
When director Philippe Vergne sacked chief curator Helen Molesworth last week, he reportedly told a board member that Molesworth had been “undermining the museum”. “One avenue that has gone largely unexamined thus far in the conjecture over Molesworth’s alleged ‘undermining’ are statements that she herself made in public during her time at MOCA. In general, she has been critical of museums and institutions – but, particularly in the past year, she aimed considerable criticism directly at MOCA itself.” So Sarah Douglas does some examining.
Comedian Howie Mandel Buys World’s Largest Comedy Festival
“Montreal’s Just For Laughs Group has been acquired by a group of investors led by ICM Partners and Howie Mandel. The acquisition covers the annual comedy festival held in July in Montreal and its offshoot events in Toronto, Vancouver and Sydney. The deal is said to be valued in the mid eight-figure range.”
Frank Avruch, Who Played Bozo The Clown, Dead At 89
“Avruch played Bozo the Clown [on the eponymous children’s television show] from 1959 to 1970, a clown character particularly popular in the U.S. in the 1960s because of widespread franchising in television. Avruch became the first nationally-syndicated Bozo.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 03.21.18
Getting Picasso Right: You Think It’s Easy?
In London a few weeks back, I was fortunate to be there on the day of the press preview for Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy at the Tate Modern. You might think. at first, that doing a Picasso show is easy, … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2018-03-21
Why Did the Attorney General Cave in Berkshire Museum Case? My Q&A with the Rockwells’ Lawyer
Those, like me, who were caught off-guard by the astonishing deal (now awaiting court validation) cut last month by the Berkshire Museum and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey feel justifiably blindsided by the AG’s about-face. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2018-03-21
Maija Kauhanen sings about Child Brides
As you might have noticed from my last posting, this past year’s WOMEX had some pretty powerful women performing. Among them was most certainly Finland’s Maija Kauhanen, whose day case was exceptionally compelling. … read more
AJBlog: OtherWorldly Published 2018-03-21
Will Democracy Die When Newspapers Shutter?
Social media platforms make the sharing of information ubiquitous and nonstop, but where will that information come from in the first place when all the reporters have been let go? What will happen when the newspaper model — what the government-commissioned report published by Public Policy Forum called “the model of journalistic ‘boots on the ground’ backed up by a second platoon in the office upholding such hallowed standards as verification and balance” — no longer generates that content at all?