“Some of the best known lurid ‘facts’ about Jayne Mansfield, the American film star of the ’50s and ’60s, are based on rumour. So the directors of a new documentary about her short and scandalous life faced a difficult task. Was Mansfield, one of the first actresses to be marketed as a ‘blonde bombshell’, also a violin-playing intellectual with superb comic timing who spoke five languages? Or was the star who came to be known as the ‘working man’s Marilyn Monroe’ actually a devil worshipper who was decapitated in a car crash as the result of a curse?”
Read Excerpts From Zora Neale Hurston’s Interviews With The Last Slave To Survive The Middle Passage
Hurston trained as a cultural anthropologist, and Barracoon, which languished in her archives for decades and is only now being published, is the result of months of interviews with Cudjo Lewis, who was kidnapped in what is now Benin and brought to Alabama in 1860.
NEA Chairman Jane Chu To Step Down
“National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Jane Chu said in a statement that she will resign June 4, after four years at the head of the federal arts agency. The Trump administration has twice targeted the NEA for elimination, but Chu made no reference to this turbulence in her statement, saying only that it has been an ‘honor and privilege’ to serve as the agency’s chairwoman.”
What Larry Harvey Created With Burning Man
Burning Man is far, far, far from perfect. It’s still mostly hedonistic (with some awesome exceptions) and corny at times. It’s very white (The Root and The Guardian have both done great interviews with black Burners talking about why). There is always some percentage of douchebags (usually around 20-30 percent) who suck and do stupid things. And, sure, there’s plenty of sex and drugs and music, and some people can’t handle that in a mature way. But I can’t overstate how much I owe to Larry Harvey. Thanks to him, I learned what it is to be inspired by astonishingly creative people, weird people, sexy people, challenging people; to let go of the New York cynicism for a little while; to experience some of the most intense, vivid, and alive times of my life. I learned how to live.
Avengers Sets New All-Time Opening Weekend Box Office Record – $630 Million
Internationally, Infinity War dislodged Jurassic World ($316.7M) at No. 2 (that movie also had China at open). In comps that did not include China at the bow, Infinity War‘s overseas start blew past Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – Part 2 ($314M) and Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($281M). Worldwide. Only three movies had previously topped $500M in their openings: F8, The Force Awakens and Jurassic World.
How Theatre Can Help Us See Bodies Differently
The power of theatrical visibility has the potential to create real change in society towards the acceptance of “othered” individuals, as we have seen from the power of queer characters onstage, which translated from the stage to movies and TV, and, finally, into the national vocabulary. But this progress has notably lagged when it comes to the representation of disability onstage.
Are We Really Facebook’s Product?
Behind the aphorism’s sudden ubiquity lies a long and surprising history—one that yields a fresh perspective on our present technocultural moment. It suggests that Facebook’s business model is neither as novel as it might seem, nor as deterministic of its values as critics assume. The pithiness that makes “you are the product” so quotable risks obscuring the complex pact between Facebook and its users, in ways that make social media’s problems seem inevitable and insoluble. They’re not—but if we want to fix them, the first thing we need to do is redefine our relationship.
‘Hair’ Is Fifty, And The Nude Scene Is Still A Big Deal
Parliament had to intervene so the show could be produced in London – yes, it took an act of government to allow the actors to be naked onstage. Back on Broadway, during previews in 1968, show co-writer Gerome Ragni explained that the rules about nudity were flexible in the production: “Anybody who feels like it can take his clothes off. Everybody wants to now, even the stagehands. We turned them on.”
Dear TV, YouTube Is Coming For Your Ad Revenue
Why? It’s obvious: “More than 50% of U.S. consumers aged 18-49 in U.S. are ‘light’ TV viewers (in the bottom one-third of the total TV audience based on minutes viewed), according to Nielsen. However, 90% of that group watches YouTube videos.”
In A Los Angeles Neighborhood Suffering From Longterm Lack Of Investment And Few Parks, Residents Take To The Streets To Play
In Boyle Heights, there’s a delicate balance to maintain – the city knows Boyle Heights residents are not interested in a threatening wave of gentrification. So a one-day “play street” plan might actually be a good solution. “What a play street is not is a replacement for permanent parks. … But it bridges the gap in a way that’s really needed.”
It’s Time For A Reckoning On *The Simpsons*
Hank Azaria, the white actor who has voiced Apu for 29 seasons, says he’s ready to step down, and that a South Asian actor could step in – but, while that would be welcome, the problems with Apu stem from areas far beyond his voice.
The Best Way To Document Beijing? Walk Around It, Of Course
That’s what one artist believes. “Fuller said he was inspired after a cycling tour of the Great Wall of China in 2014 and ‘felt compelled” to move to the ‘Chinese mega city’ last year. He said he ‘underestimated’ Beijing’s scale after walking 861 miles (1,386km) in nine months around its ring roads.
Don’t Think Boring Old Board Games Will Escape The Cleansing Fire Of ‘Augmented Reality’
Ohhhhkaaaay, Silicon Valley PR machine: “AR board games promise a host of advantages over their real world counterparts. They eliminate the need to set up complicated boards and remove the foot-piercing pieces you eventually need to round up and put away (and the mess when someone flips the board in frustration). Perhaps even more importantly, augmented-reality board games let you play your favorite titles with friends and family regardless of whether you’re in the same room.”
The Erie Chamber Orchestra Ends A Four-Decade Run
Whoa: “The orchestra, founded in 1978 by Bruce Morton Wright and supported by Gannon University, announced it would officially disband at the end of its current season after 40 years of offering free concerts.” Its final concert was Saturday night.
Top AJBlogs Stories From The Weekend 04.29.18
Leonard Bernstein at 100: An American Archetype
My 5,000-word piece on the Leonard Bernstein Centenary, in The Weekly Standard this week, begins with a story you’ve never heard before: “In 1980, at the age of 62, Leonard Bernstein undertook the composition of a … read more
AJBlog: Unanswered QuestionPublished 2018-04-28
Barnes Foundation to Subdivide (& monetize?) 137 Acres; Offloads Costs of Lower Merion Properties
Some six years after it controversially moved to Philadelphia, the Barnes Foundation appears to have decided to monetize the original properties of its founder, the legendary collector Albert Barnes, in both Lower Merion and Chester … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrlPublished 2018-04-27
Replay: Bernadette Peters sings “Broadway Baby”
Bernadette Peters sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Broadway Baby” (from Follies) on The Tonight Show. The performance, originally telecast by NBC on July 27, 1989, is followed by a segment in which Peters is interviewed by Johnny … read more
AJBlog: About Last NightPublished 2018-04-27
Homer And His Unique Way of Seeing
Winslow Homer has always been a complicated artist, and now he will be viewed as an even more complicated one. What’s going to do that is an exhibition opening in June at the Bowdoin College … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear ArtsPublished 2018-04-26
Almanac: Solzhenitsyn on Chekhov and the future of Russia
“If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov, who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years, had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be … read more
AJBlog: About Last NightPublished 2018-04-26
An Educated Guess: What Did the Lucas Museum Pay for Rockwell’s “Shuffleton’s Barbershop”?
In the two weeks since the announcement of the Berkshire Museum’s widely deplored sale of Norman Rockwell‘s “Shuffleton’s Barbershop” to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, none of the parties to the transaction … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrlPublished 2018-04-25
The Women Who Will Run Venice’s Architecture Biennale
The new “queens of Venice” are Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell of Grafton Architects, a practice that’s been doing the work without getting starchitect status – but that could change now. Their philosophy: “The unsolicited ‘spatial gifts’ that architecture can add could be at the scale of city – a free public garden, for example – or at the scale of a surface you touch. It may not involve construction – ‘sitting under a cherry blossom is as happy an architectural space as you’ll find’ – but these ’emotional components’ are what make architecture worth doing.