Whoever utters “Kafkaesque” has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka’s devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque.
Remember That Thing With Amazon And Drones? Not A Joke
“Not only is the delivery drone program happening, but according to the CEO, it’s well underway. ‘The Prime Air team is already flight testing our 5th and 6th generation aerial vehicles, and we are in the design phase on generations 7 and 8,’ he writes.”
What Does The Real Philomena Think Of Judi Dench?
“When they suggested Judi Dench, I couldn’t believe it. I nearly fell off my chair. She’s famous all over the world, you know! I was over the moon. A lot of my friends thought I’d gone soft, because they didn’t believe that it was true. I was so glad to be able to say, ‘Actually, look, it is true.'”
Costuming James Franco For Broadway
“He’s trying to operate under the radar, so he has to appear like everybody else, like he could fill any post at any time. … There’s nothing remarkable about him.”
The Scholar-Tramp Of Shakespeare, And The Things He Discovered
“In his log-cabin retreat Halliwell-Phillipps kept, and obsessively curated, his huge collection of ‘Shakespearean rarities’. This consisted of ‘about fifteen hundred separate articles’ – a cornucopia of manuscript papers and parchments, early quarto editions, play-bills, portraits, maps and curios carved from the sacred mulberry tree.”
Why Aren’t Americans Writing About Pakistan, A Pakistani Writer Asks
Kamila Shamsie: “I am deeply critical of American writers for their total failure to engage with the American empire. It’s a completely shocking failure.”
Guess What, Audiences? Those (Non-Equity) Actors Probably Aren’t Paid
“That hot four-star show? Those incredible performances? Surely, those actors are getting paid, right? Usually not. Or if they are, it is a flat-fee stipend of a couple hundred dollars for the entire run (rates vary among theaters) that might average out to $30 or $40 a week. That’s not including all those weeks of rehearsal, which come with no wages at all.”
Putting The F Back In Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
“There was the shy bookworm my mother described, and the charismatic young literary star who drank with F. Scott Fitzgerald my uncle remembered being told stories about. The Skull and Bones member. The World War II spy. The man who took Carl Jung’s hand at an open window in his study and astral projected over the skies of Manhattan. The short-tempered redhead. The gay, closeted alcoholic. The failed poet. The fading not-quite retiree who read manuscripts at his apartment on 96th Street until he died.”
In Mexico, Artists Can Pay Taxes With Their Art
“As legend has it, muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, one of the most influential artists of his generation, approached the secretariat of finance in 1957 with a proposal to keep a friend and fellow artist out of jail for tax evasion: Let him pay his debt in art.”
San Diego Opera Hires A PR Person To Deal With All The Publicity
“Fabiani’s many clients have included Lance Armstrong, who hired Fabiani during the doping scandal that plagued the cyclist; and Goldman Sachs, for whom he worked when the firm faced fraud charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
Music Criticism Has Changed Dramatically – Thanks, Internet!
“By now, Cultural Studies has infiltrated nearly every corner of the humanities and social sciences, and so a generation of educated, internet-addicted music listeners has spent their formative university years questioning the primacy of their own tastes and interrogating bricolage in early-nineties hip hop.”
New York Theatre Thrives On Unpaid Interns – And That’s Possibly Illegal
“Unpaid internships are supposed to be about training, education, and be for the benefit of the intern, not the institution. Yet imagine if theaters suddenly lost all of their interns? Who would be doing all of that grunt work?”
How The Best Cinema App Rose, Succeeded, And Died – All In A Few Days
“Unlike Netflix, the service offered a catalogue of films that was theoretically infinite – including lots of new releases – all for free. It did so by making use of the age-old BitTorrent protocol, which allows users to download files in ‘bits’ from countless other individuals around the world.”
Going Backstage With Paul Taylor
“On days that Paul was not in the studio, … the camera could get right up close to the dancers. For visual continuity, the dancers agreed to wear the previous day’s sweaty dance clothes all over again.”
Stephen Petronio Company Celebrates 30 Years
“When I hit 50 I stopped dancing for a while because the memory of how I used to dance was too painful for me. But there are things I can do now that I couldn’t then. When you’re young it’s all about how fierce it feels. Now it’s about how deep it feels, and I’m really enjoying that.”
Four Years After Gorecki Died, His Fourth Symphony Will Get Premiere
“The question was, how would Górecki follow the Third when he came to write his Fourth Symphony, three decades later? At his death, the Fourth was completed only in short score – a composer’s shorthand rather than a full-fleshed orchestral version.”
Why Does Anyone Care About Late Night Hosts Anymore
“It’s certainly not because they’re big draws anymore: Fewer and fewer viewers are watching shows such as Late Night and The Tonight Show when they air, while the smartest among these hosts– namely Jimmy Fallon — approaches his program as if its main purpose is to generate viral videos.”
Novelist Sue Townsend, 68
“She was best known for the fictional diaries of Adrian Mole, who began confiding his deepest desires and ambitions in the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole 13 3/4 in 1982. His teenage years were recounted in the Growing Pains of Adrian Mole and further novels dealt with married life and middle age.”