Since 2004, Òran Mór in Scotland’s largest city has been presenting A Play, a Pie and a Pint, which is exactly what it says: a meat pie and a pint of ale for lunch, along with an hour-long play, all for just £12.50. A new script is produced each week for 35 weeks a year (plus holiday pantos), and the series is about to present its 500th play. Audiences just (ahem) eat it up. – The Guardian
Watching Together: TV Is As Much A Community Experience As It Ever Was
Twitter has, for two complementary reasons, been a sustaining force for event television. The fans want to avoid spoilers. They also want to enhance the collective experience by chattering on the platform as events unfold. In the current century, the world is not only watching together, it is also talking to itself as it does so. – Irish Times
As The Met Puts ‘Camp’ In Its Collection, Some Wonder If It Still Truly Means Anything
Camp relies on a sensibility that is deliberately not mainstream. So: “Is camp still ‘lots of fun’ when everyone’s on board, aboveboard? The ‘fugitive sensibility’ Sontag hoped to capture is now enshrined in the museum.” – The New York Times
The Former Heart Of The Confederacy Gets A New Civil War Museum That Refocuses The Lens
It’s got the collection of the former Museum of the Confederacy, so can it ever truly tell all of the stories suppressed and neglected over the years? Well, that’s the plan: “It’s unprecedented in its attempt to tell the entire story of the war, not just from the Northern and Southern [white men’s] perspectives but through the eyes of women, immigrants, Native Americans and enslaved African Americans.”- NPR
David Cameron Gave Tina Fey A Secret Mission To Change British TV
Well, why not? “‘Come and convince our showrunners that they can’t just make six episodes of things. Like you guys, they should make 200 episodes,’ she recalled him saying. Fey rejected the request, however, explaining that US writers were, in fact, jealous of the less-is-more British approach.” – BBC
From ‘Audition From Hell’ To Tony Nominee
Amber Gray auditioned as well as she could for the Broadway-bound Hadestown: She “couldn’t read sheet music but had prepared for the tryout by diligently listening to the assigned song from the production’s buzzy concept album — which had since been tweaked.” Oops. – Los Angeles Times
The People Involved In NBC’s ‘Must-See TV’ Are Still Innovating And Changing The Media Landscape
The 1990s really did last into today: “Must See TV veterans have helped shape some of the most groundbreaking shows of the Peak TV era, including Homeland, The Handmaid’s Tale, Atlanta, The Americans, Orphan Black, Fargo and The Shield. And five executives from the Must See TV era, are currently running network TV entertainment operations. – Los Angeles Times
Ben Heller, Powerhouse Collector Of Abstract Art, Has Died At 93
Heller blurred the line between collector and dealer – and caused an international incident because of it. “Heller’s sale of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles to the National Gallery of Australia, then under construction in Canberra, the nation’s capital, was announced in September 1973. The news caused an uproar in the New York art world; in Australia it nearly brought down the Labor government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who had to sign off on the $2 million sale.” – The New York Times
Harper Lee Started A True Crime Book, But Never Finished It – Why?
What a heartbreak her life was after To Kill a Mockingbird, and her attempted true-crime book turned out similarly: “Despite amassing more than enough Maxwelliana for a book, she could not get traction in the prose. That’s a common enough problem, of course; nothing writes itself, and no matter how many pages a reporting trip yields, the one that matters most always starts out blank. Everyone told Lee that the story she had found was destined to be a brilliant book. But no one could tell her how to write it.” – The Guardian (UK)
This Sacred Greek Island Hasn’t Had New Art For 5,000 Years, But That’s About To Change
The Delos experiment: “In the absence of human contact – only guards and archaeologists have inhabited Delos in more recent times – the remains of a sanctuary and entire city have survived like nowhere else in Greece. It is in this unspoilt idyll that Greek authorities have undertaken an experiment as exciting as it is ambitious. At its centre is Sir Antony Gormley. The British sculptor has created 29 iron ‘bodyforms,’ several cast from his own body, that are to be the first artworks to be installed here since the outpost was inhabited more than 5,000 years ago.” – The Observer (UK)
The Architectural Problem Of Abandoned Malls
Are abandoned malls a special category, or are they more like abandoned warehouses, boarded-up downtowns, left-behind elementary schools? Right now, they seem to be bleak – and a growing issue. – The Atlantic
Did Leonardo Stop Painting Because Of A Fall And Resulting Nerve Damage?
Some have suggested it was as stroke, but he showed no other signs of impairment. His injury suggests it may have been something else: “The ulnar nerve runs from the shoulder to the little finger, and manages almost all the intrinsic hand muscles that allow fine motor movements, so a fall could have caused trauma to his upper arm, leading to the palsy, or weakness.” – BBC
Almost Thirty Years Of A Famous, Fan Fave Comic Series Focused On Latina Punks
The comic, or maybe graphic novel series, Love and Rockets is “the rare pop cultural artifact that renders Latinas not as archetypes, but as rich and profound human beings full of messy contradiction and ambivalence. Over the years, Hernandez’s characters have aged and their hairstyles have become more sedate. Some of their faces have grown angular; their bodies, more doughy. In the new comic, in which a group of former punks attempt to relive their youth for a weekend, a group of women joke about menopause in refreshingly real ways.” – Los Angeles Times
Rachel Held Evans, An Evangelical Christian Writer Who Questioned Everything About Her Faith, Has Died At 37
In her writing on her site and in her massively popular books, Evans “confronted every controversial issue in American evangelical culture. She wrote about biblical literalism, racism, abortion, evolution, theology, marriage, patriarchy, women in leadership, and evangelical support for Donald Trump. She advocated for the full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the church and analyzed her own complicity in racial bias after the police shooting of Michael Brown.” – Slate
If You Were In Kentucky But Skipped The Derby, Maybe You Were At This Family Bookstore?
Carmichael’s is the oldest independent bookstore in the city, and the founders just passed over the reins to their daughter and niece. How do you “modernize” a bookstore – or do you? – The New York Times