“Across the country, in city art collections and special collections of public libraries, one-of-a-kind items are routinely misfiled, misplaced, lost or stolen. And sometimes, routine mistakes and slipshod documentation grow into a much more intractable problem, with large portions of public collections being managed by institutions who have no idea what’s in them and no full inventory of their holdings.”
For The First Time, Pina Bausch’s Old Company Commissions New Works From Other Choreographers
“The 2009 death of the choreographer Pina Bausch plunged the future of her company, the Tanztheater Wuppertal, into doubt. … Now the [company] has announced that for the first time in its history, choreographers will be invited to create new pieces.”
At 96, Lawrence Ferlinghetti Isn’t Done Yet
“Sixty years ago, Ferlinghetti … was the principal publisher of an iconoclastic band of writers and poets known as the Beat Generation. Today, he’s still co-owner of City Lights, one of the most celebrated independent book stores in America. These are quieter days for the internationally acclaimed poet and painter. His eyes are going, but his mind and humor are sharp. And while he may have slowed down some, he’s still publishing three books this year.” (includes audio)
How God Turned His Twitter Account Into A Broadway Show
“In the beginning, there was Twitter. David Javerbaum – a seasoned comedy writer for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report who has won Peabodys, Emmys, and a Grammy – started the account @TheTweetofGod in 2010. Like God Himself, he quickly gained millions of followers.” (includes audio)
Much Maligned And Under Pressure, Library Of Congress Chief Retires
“In a 2013 audit, the library’s inspector general warned that millions of items, some from as far back as the 1980s, remained piled in overflowing buildings and warehouses, virtually lost to the world. In addition, just a small fraction of its 24 million books are available to read online, 200 years after Thomas Jefferson laid the foundation for a vast national library by selling Congress his personal collection of books after the War of 1812.”
Stop Defending Music Education
“Music programs are watching administrators race by, frantically chasing test scores and ignoring music in schools. So it may seem like a natural step to go running after the testing crowd hollering, ‘Hey, I can help with that, too.’ Don’t. Just don’t.”
Legendary Long-Serving Librarian Of Congress To Retire
“James Billington, 86, is a Russia scholar who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 as the 13th Librarian of Congress and leader of the oldest federal cultural institution. In a video message to his staff, he said he will leave Jan. 1.”
How Technology Is Ushering In A Golden Age For… Juggling
“Juggling has probably been around since a bunch of primates let go of their branches and wondered what to do with their hands. And yet this venerable entertainment is being transformed out of all recognition by recent technology.”
How The Music Business Squandered The Business Part – And Now Music Is Free
“Record company ignorance squandered billions in the early years of this century because the music people lost out to the tech people. The music people’s job had been to make hit records; technology was a tool to help this happen but nothing more.”
Does Theatre Matter Any More? Should It?
“Broadway attendance in 2014 was the highest it’s ever been, even if that is no great indicator of regional theater attendance. But it is the case that relatively few people are seeing any theater at all, and, apparently, theater is having such little lasting impact on audiences that its creators are all but unknown, even to the people who may be attending it. So what’s the point in restating this reality? Don’t we know it already?”
How To Get People to Read Your Movie Review: NYPost Critic Disses Women (Yep, That’ll Do It)
It hard to think that even with all of that, even with all those faux slights against women, that your column is going to cause much genuine interest or outcry, even if you were to complete it with an obviously attention-seeking headline such as “Women are not capable of understanding GoodFellas”.
Ohio Republicans Kill Historic Preservation Tax Credit, And Cincinnati Arts Leaders Fret About Music Hall Restoration
Developers who fought in an intense competition for the money were mystified that senators had slipped a couple of lines into the two-year state budget to eliminate the tax credit.
How Chile Is Changing How Movies Are Being Made Around The World
The term “Chilewood” refers to an emerging camp in its eponymous country where genre films are being made by a myriad of talents and attracting high-profile names like Eli Roth and Keanu Reeves. And the etymology of the catchy name originates with its creator Nicolás López, who dropped out of high school at 15 to produce a show for MTV Latin America and never looked back.
Last Month David Letterman’s Show Ended. Now All His Shows Are Off The Internet Too
“A source at CBS says that the videos have been removed from the site as the digital rights have returned to Letterman’s production company, Worldwide Pants, which owns the rights to the show, and that CBS no longer owns the rights.”
Dramatists Guild Protests Treatment Of Writers At Tony Awards
“Ironically it’s the theater that most esteems writers; we are generally recognized as the principal artistic force behind new work, and we even retain ownership and control over the material we create. Yet on the very awards show intended to celebrate our craft, we are effectively negated.”
Has Britain’s National Trust Lost Its Way In The “Visitor Experience”?
This idol now reigns supreme in the NT’s culture: the “visitor experience” of shop, café, loos, car parks and fun for all the family, banishing the dark spectre of “elitism” and making everything ever more “accessible”, has become its religion, superseding a basic respect for the integrity and dignity of what it is charged with conserving and cherishing.
Unknown Poems By Katherine Mansfield Found In Chicago Library
In the collections of the Newberry Library, a researcher discovered nearly 30 poems from the years 1909 to 1911, “the writer’s most painful and difficult period, the evidence for which she had later destroyed.”
No, Ursula K. LeGuin, Amazon Is Not Turning Literature Into Junk Food
Stephen L. Carter: “But now, according to Le Guin, Amazon’s quest for short-term sales is destroying serious literature. … I think Le Guin is half right – or, more to the point, she has identified the correct problem but chosen the wrong villain.”
This 93-Year-Old Ballet Legend Created A New Form Of Dance Therapy
“After she retired from the stage, María Fux, Argentina’s prima ballerina assoluta during the 1940s and ’50s, began teaching classes of blind and disabled students to dance, getting their bodies to do far more than had been thought possible.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 06.11.15
Being the Sea
AJBlog: Infinite Curves Published 2015-06-11
Trashing Tranquility: Pierre Huyghe Invades Oases at Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-06-11
Ornette Coleman returned music to freedom and basics
AJBlog: Jazz Beyond Jazz Published 2015-06-11
Getting Happy With Lester Young
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-06-11
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Actor Christopher Lee, 93
“Mr. Lee was 35 when his breakthrough film, Terence Fisher’s British horror movie “The Curse of Frankenstein,” was released in 1957. He played the creature. But it was a year later, when he played the title role in Fisher’s “Dracula,” that his cinematic identity became forever associated with Bram Stoker’s noble, ravenous vampire, who in Mr. Lee’s characterization exuded a certain lascivious sex appeal.”
Jazz Great Ornette Coleman, 85
“Mr. Coleman widened the options in jazz and helped change its course. Partly through his example in the late 1950s and early ’60s, jazz became less beholden to the rules of harmony and rhythm, and gained more distance from the American songbook repertoire. His own music, then and later, became a new form of highly informed folk song: deceptively simple melodies for small groups with an intuitive, collective language, and a strategy for playing without preconceived chord sequences.”
Cooper Union President And Five Trustees Quit In Bitter Dispute
“Recent controversial decisions — including the board’s announcement last year that Cooper Union would abandon its tuition-free model — and the dismissal of Jamshred Bharucha, who is deeply unpopular with many student and alumni groups and the New York State attorney general, have led to contention and unrest at the New York City college, especially among the leadership ranks.”
Ludvik Vaculik, Influential Czech Writer And Dissident, Dies At 88
“Mr. Vaculik was a key figure in the Czechoslovak underground publishing world in the 1970s and ’80s, helping to give voice to other dissident writers in the country who were banned by the government. He himself was censored for more than two decades, but still managed to write a series of influential articles, books and novels” – as well as the famous Prague Spring manifesto Two Thousand Words.
Judge Rejects Claim For A Pissarro By Heirs In Nazi Art Case
“The ruling came after a decade-long dispute over ownership of the 1897 canvas, Saint-Honoré, Après-midi, Effet de Pluie, a Paris street scene by Pissarro, which is in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.” In 1939, the work’s owner, a Jewish woman, was forced to sell it to a Nazi art appraiser for the equivalent of $360.