“In Chu’s view, nerd-dom has a toxic, intolerant fringe, one that has gone unchecked in large part because nerds are awful at policing their own subculture, especially online. In an era when the nerds are increasingly ascendant, Chu wants to make nerd culture better — and to stop more of his fellow nerds from getting drawn into the worst of it.”
Inside Amy Schumer’s Parody Of ‘Twelve Angry Men’
Schumar: “I was at a party and these guys were talking about Michelle Williams, and they were like, ‘Yeah I don’t think she is hot actually.’ … These guys would be so lucky to even get to have a conversation with her but they were like really deliberating over whether or not they would fuck her. And I was like, ‘You know what, that scenario is never going to present itself, you guys.’ But that word ‘deliberation’ is what made me think, What is the ultimate deliberation? An actual jury deliberating. And I love the movie 12 Angry Men.” (includes video)
Cache Of Mark Twain Newspaper Stories From San Francisco Uncovered
“His topics range from San Francisco police – who at one point attempted, unsuccessfully, to sue Twain for comparing their chief to a dog chasing its tail to impress its mistress – to mining accidents.”
Read Some Of Mark Twain’s Rediscovered San Francisco Columns
To an editor about a previous story: “Please publish it again, and put it in the parentheses where I have marked them, so that people who read with wretched carelessness may know to a dead moral certainty when I am referring to Chief Burke, and also know to an equally dead moral certainty when I am referring to the dog.”
Pension Costs Have Norway’s National Opera And Ballet Company Reeling
“Having to pay pensions for so many years after such low retirement ages” – 41 for ballet dancers, 52 for opera soloists and 56 for chorus members – “at relatively high rates, has already rendered the Norwegian Opera and Ballet technically bankrupt. Pension costs have risen 50 percent just since 2013.”
A Golden Age For Tap
“The dance historian Constance Valis Hill claims that tap dance is the most cutting-edge dance form currently to be seen in the United States. What makes tap stand out for Hill is the intense innovation going on in the form, coupled with an attention to emotional and political content.”
Why The Closing Of The Tiny Museum Of Biblical Art Matters
“The absence of religious context for religious art in American museums was not, as one might assume, a product of the culture wars or a precocious expression of the new atheism. It was actually the result of several hundred years of aesthetic politics.”
YouTube’s Copyright Problems Point To Bigger Issues For Artists
“Here’s the thing: under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), YouTube is not legally obligated to have a mechanism for policing its content for infringement at all. The site is charged with taking content down when it receives notices to do so, but that’s the extent of it. Nevertheless, YouTube takes an overly active role in policing for copyright infringement, and the technology it employs to do so is flawed – which can end up hurting artists and other content creators who employ copyrighted works legally.”
Rem Koolhaas: Why Do We Destroy Buildings We Could Still Use?
“It would be madness for an entire period of architectural history — that had a major influence on cities around the world — to disappear simply because we suddenly find the style ugly. This brings up a fundamental question: Are we preserving architecture or history?”
How A Game-Show Champion Became The Embattled Conscience Of American Male Geekdom
Jeopardy! champion Arthur Chu “leveraged his 15 minutes of game-show fame into, of all things, a national platform for his opinions about nerds: What America gets wrong about nerds; what nerds – especially male nerds – get wrong about themselves; and why it matters. … Chu wants to make nerd culture better – and to stop more of his fellow nerds from getting drawn into the worst of it.”
Hollywood’s Native American Problem
“There’s a paucity of roles for Native Americans — according to the Screen Actors Guild in 2008 they accounted for 0.3 percent of all on-screen parts (those figures have yet to be updated), compared to about 2 percent of the general population — and Native American actors are often perceived in a narrow way.”
The New Influencers Hollywood Craves? Bloggers
“Major Hollywood studios such as Disney-owned Marvel are anxious to win over superfans, especially those who help build excitement online among other youngsters ahead of a movie’s debut.”
A Plea: Let’s Get Arts On The Political Agenda For 2016
“I hope we can finally appreciate that this is politics in the real world; that the most important story any interest group can tell (and frankly the one that counts the most) is that they have a large committed base that cares about their issue and votes for those who support them; that the most important numbers and data have to do not with how many jobs we create or how much we contribute to the economy, but with how many votes might be at stake for candidates considering whether or not to align with us, and how much money we might raise for those candidates.”
Academic Conferences Are A Dreadful Bore (So Why Do We Still Do Them?)
“Academic conferences are a habit from the past, embraced by the administrativersity as a way to showcase knowledge and to increase productivity in the form of published conference proceedings. We have been complicit. Until now.”
Has Los Angeles Become America’s Creative Capital? (LAers Are Amused By The Question)
It’s useful to know that both New York City and San Francisco imagine that they’re engaged in rivalries with Los Angeles, whereas an Angeleno asked about either city is most likely to say, “Nice place, I love to visit!”
Bartolomeo Cristofori Invented The Piano. So Why Did Everyone Forget About Him?
“It’s rare that such an old instrument has so clear an inventor and is so obviously a revelation. So why do we have to be reminded of Bartolomeo Cristofori’s name? After all, there must be a reason pianos aren’t called Cristoforis.”
Did Modernism Ever Even Happen In American Art? (Jerry Saltz And His Editor At The New Whitney)
“The real revelation in ‘America Is Hard to See’ comes in the works from before World War II – how not-European, not-modernism modern, not-programmatic, not-pure it looks. … At the same moment in the early 20th century when Europe and Russia, especially, were trying to make art dealing with the modern condition, Americans were actually just being modern, living it.”
‘The Game Done Changed’: Reconsidering ‘The Wire’ Amidst The Baltimore Uprising
“I am now seeing what the The Wire was missing, despite its much lauded, painstaking verisimilitude: the voices of people organizing together for change. Everyone on The Wire seeks individual solutions for social problems: the lone cop, the lone criminal, the lone teacher, the lone newspaper reporter. Yes, it is certainly true that when entrenched bureaucracies battle individuals, individuals lose. But when bureaucracies battle social movements, the results can be quite different.”
The Cat-Painting Renaissance Of The 19th Century
“Bourgeois collectors, interested in enhancing plush domestic interiors, bought the cat canvases. It became a good market for artists, some of whom became well known in the genre.” (slideshow)
Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.04.15
The Dangers Of Audience Gimmicks
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2015-05-04
Fight and flight
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2015-05-04
A Union of Four Unalikes
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2015-05-03
Weekend Extra: Whitfield And Greensill
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-05-03
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Art Museums: Intimidating To Racial Minorities? Literal ‘White Spaces’?
First Lady Michelle Obama at the opening of the new Whitney Museum: “There are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood.”
Why Trollope Is Trending: He’s Still The Novelist For The Way We Live Now
Adam Gopnik: “Words change meaning over time, and the quality of irony that we value today is omnipresent in Trollope – and that is the habit of turning objects and values upside down, of seeing big and little inverted.”