For the past 17 years Cameron, 61, lived and worked in New York City. He was program director for the arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation since 2006 and executive director of the Theatre Communications Group, a professional organization, for eight years before that.
Muslim Fiction: Not Just For Fans Of Literary Realism Anymore
“Genre is ‘a way of exploring a rich religious tradition that looks beyond the mundane and tries to relate the spiritual to the mundane.'”
Making Ballet (Explicitly) Queer
“Queerness specifically in ballet is a funny thing; ballet does have a history of having a lot of gay men perform it, and you can read into certain ballets’ narratives about gay men. There’s a lot of coding there. So it’s not like there hasn’t been any queerness in ballet, but related to the representation of women, I don’t think there has been.”
When You Nostalgia-Watch – And Then Figure Out The Villains Are Actually The Good Ones
“Leona Barrett, Lean On Me. … She’s a parent/activist who seems genuinely committed to getting the best possible outcome for all the children of Paterson. She’s also absolutely right: keeping every entrance and exit chained and locked is an unconscionable fire hazard and Clark never should have done it.”
Ursula LeGuin: My Beef With Amazon
“If you think Amazon is a great place to self-publish your book, I may have a question or two in mind, but still, it’s fine with me, and none of my business anyhow. My only quarrel with Amazon is when it comes to how they market books and how they use their success in marketing to control not only bookselling, but book publication: what we write and what we read.”
Supertitles Have Saved Opera, Says Dramaturg
Cori Ellison: “In a perfect world, everybody would understand every language and every singer’s diction would be perfect, and we wouldn’t need supertitles. That is never going to happen and it never has been the case. … Also, you can read the libretto of Barber of Seville until the cows come home but it’s not going to give you the same moment-to-moment comprehension as when you’re in the theater and seeing something that is so coordinated with the translation of it.”
Dust On Our Furniture, Dust On Our Minds
“Dust is everywhere. We contribute to its multiplication through our polluting industries, by wearing clothes and using things around us, and in the course of merely living – shedding skin cells, hair, and other byproducts of our life. But we also are it. Both the Bible and William Shakespeare would have us believe as much.”
David Byrne: In A World Swimming In Choice – Algorithms Or Curation?
“Our past choices in all areas can be analysed to predict future choices. Our taste in music, movies, books, news articles and clothes can be analysed – but also our sexual proclivities, political alliances and moral decisions. Those can be deduced and used to make recommendations. Everything we think we are, it seems, can be predicted, the probabilities sifted – and the chances are that what we do will fall inside the bell curve of predicted behaviour. Free will? Are you kidding?”
This Florida Artist Wrapped His House And Trees In Aluminum Foil. The Neighbors Object…
Tarpon Springs police Sgt. Ed Miller claims residents have called his landlord and city arborists have inspected the trees, but so far no one can find any justified reason for Janowski to be forced to remove the foil. “Code enforcement is still trying to determine if the project is violating any ordinances.”
Harmonia Mundi Record Label Sold
“Independent music group [PIAS] is acquiring the established French record label and distributor Harmonia Mundi, according to local reports. Established by Bernard Coutaz in Paris in 1958, Harmonia Mundi remains one of the biggest independent players in the classical music sector.”
Neuroscience And Neighborhood Blight
“Blocks and neighborhoods aren’t concrete concepts that mean the same thing to everyone, unlike, say, things like ‘apple’ or ‘sky.’ Points of reference shift depending on the person that’s using that reference, so blocks/neighborhoods are more like alternate realities laid atop one another, like plastic sheets on an overhead projector. There’s even a phrase for the study of this murky concept: mental maps. They can help us understand why some neighborhoods thrive, others die, and how changes are made.”
Why Philip Larkin Refused Oxford’s Super-Prestigious Poetry Professorship
There was one part of the job that he dreaded above all others …
Can A New App Bring Young People To Broadway?
There’s certainly a market opportunity. The global theater industry generates tens of billions of dollars in revenue each year. That puts theater in comparable territory to the global film industry, which according to the MPAA made $36.4 billion in revenue in 2014. Yet approximately twenty percent of tickets go unsold on Broadway, and about thirty percent go unsold in London’s West End, TodayTix says.
Anti-Democratic? Why Do Museums Hide So Much Of Their Collections?
“Big museums have long refused to recognize their unexhibited collections of duplicates and minor works as a financial resource. As a consequence, they are wasting value by keeping these works hidden. If they were redistributed to smaller institutions, and even to private collectors and businesses, they would fund an explosion of the value for which we have museums in the first place: people looking at art and getting more out of it when they do.”
Paris Begins Removing Bridge’s Love Locks
“Tying a “love lock” on to the Pont des Arts before throwing the key into the River Seine beneath has become a tourist tradition in recent years. But part of the bridge’s railings collapsed under the weight last year.”
Silicon Valley Has Been Great For Art! (No It Hasn’t)
“The global industry of technology has so many synergies with art and it’s such a creative community that it only made sense to bring a high quality fair to Silicon Valley. We believe they will be the next great caretakers of the art market. You could talk about just the wealth and you need a certain level of affluence to collect art, but we think it’s beyond that.”
Saudi Arabia Is Mired In Artistic Conservatism. But Once Upon A Time, Not So Long Ago…
Jeddah, the “ancient city near Mecca is home to one of the world’s most spectacular arrays of open-air modern sculpture. Perhaps aware of the kudos its neighbours are getting from their Guggenheim branches and skyscrapers, Jeddah has just restored these modernist marvels and moved a selection into a new seaside sculpture park.”
These Muslim Brotherhoods – Of Musicians – Fight Back Against Extremism
Morocco’s Gnawa practice a powerful variety of ecstatic Muslim mysticism. Says one prominent Gnawa musician, horrified by the depredations of ISIS and Boko Haram, “They are ignorant. They don’t know what they are doing. They are stupid. Islam is not that. It’s peace, music, colour, respect … it respects other religions.”
‘Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time’, ‘Hamilton’ Win Big At 2015 Drama Desk Awards
“Off Broadway hit Hamilton and Tony contender The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time topped the 2015 Drama Desk Awards, with Hamilton taking seven awards including the title for new musical, and Curious Incident claiming six including the award for outstanding play. Broadway musical An American in Paris, one of the frontrunners in the Tony race with a dozen nominations, danced away with four trophies.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 06.01.15
Dismissive Missive: Could Peer Pressure Put an End to Guggenheim’s Abu Dhabi Misadventure?
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-06-01
Dresden highlights
>AJBlog: Sandow Published 2015-06-01
Museum Pictures To Warm Your Hearts
>AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2015-06-01
Monday Recommendation: Carmell Jones
>AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-06-01
[ssba_hide]
No, David Oyelowo Is Not Going To Play A White Man’s Black Friend
“‘Don’t send me your script if you want me to play the black best friend,’ he said. ‘I just won’t do that. You can feel when it’s literally an afterthought; you can feel when it’s like, “Oh quick, let’s get some colour in here.” That I won’t do.'”