“I have a fear of everything – of not fitting into that slot, of not fulfilling that piece you are asked to do. I get more frightened [the more I do]. The more you do, the more frightening it is anyway as you are much more aware.’
Disney Theme Parks Have Priced Themselves Out Of The Middle Class
“For America’s middle-income vacationers, the Mickey Mouse club, long promoted as “made for you and me,” seems increasingly made for someone else. But far from easing back, the theme-park giant’s prices are expected to climb even more through a surge-pricing system that could value a summer’s day of rides and lines at $125.”
What’s The Opposite Of Schadenfreude?
And why didn’t anybody think of a word for it before now? And will this word catch on?
This Is How To Create A (Really Good) Opera Festival In Your Backyard
“Martin Graham is quietly spoken and not easily fazed, but he has a countryman’s beady eye for detail and disdain of needless extravagance. He knows every inch of the barn theatre and proudly strokes the fine joinery executed by his old friend George from the village. Framed pictures on the walls show blown-up pages taken from Percy Scholes’s The Oxford Companion to Music, a great source of instruction and inspiration when Graham was a lad.”
How Podcasts Are Saving National Public Radio
“While the nonprofit’s stations are primarily dependent on federal funding, corporate sponsorship, and individual donations to stay on the air, the company has suffered from deficits and leadership changes in the past few years, leading to cutbacks and layoffs of its talented staff. But not this year. Along with some steps to reduce costs and develop new strategies, the Internet is helping to save the radio star.”
How Did Music On The Radio Get To Be So Homogenized?
I can’t find one that’s widely available and ventures outside of the tightly programmed, not-so-distinct-sounding formats that its corporate overlords have decreed from the home office somewhere in not-Chicago. Indeed, I like to lump all those formats together into one uber format I’ll call “obvious music,” the songs you’ve heard before and expect to hear again from yesterday, today and, soon enough, tomorrow.
What John Waters Told Graduating Art Students
“Today may be the last day of your juvenile delinquency, but it should also be the first day of your new adult disobedience. … Think about it: I didn’t change. Society did. Who would’ve ever thought a top college like RISD would’ve invited a filthy elder to set an example to its students?”
‘The Most Famous, Most Enigmatic, And Most Frightening Painting Known To Man’: Tatyana Tolstaya On Malevich’s ‘The Black Square’
“With an easy flick of the wrist, he once and for all drew an uncrossable line that demarcated the chasm between old art and new art … In his own words, he reduced everything to the ‘zero of form.’ Zero, for some reason, turned out to be a square, and this simple discovery is one of the most frightening events in art in all of its history of existence.”
‘An Argument Ends’: What We Lose When A Bookstore Closes
Adam Gopnik: “It is rarely the book you came to seek, but the book next to that book, which changes your mind and heart.” But, more than that, “restaurants, bookstores, cafés – on a grander scale railway stations, on a lesser one chessboards near park benches – are the sinews of civil society.”
Remember The Notorious ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’? It Didn’t Necessarily Tell Us What Everyone Thought It Did
Back in 1971, a group of Stanford students participated in a role-playing experiment, with some taking the role of guards in a make-believe prison and others playing inmates. The latter became so passive, and the former so abusive, that the experiment was called off halfway through. Most people concluded that the project demonstrated the darker sides of human nature, but Maria Konnikova suggests that the results were more about institutions and rules.
The History, In Pictures, Of The NYPhil’s Summer Concerts In The Parks
“In 1979, the Times investigated picnic habits among Central Park concertgoers, discovering cream of plum soup, pork loin à l’orange, lobster claws, and vichyssoise.”
Responding To The UK Election Results With Urgent Devised Theatre
“We’ve been looking at other models for making political theatre. We’ve found that devised theatre, collaboratively made over an intense period of four to five weeks, gives us a chance to react immediately to the changing tensions in the world around us.”
A Pre-War European Orchestra, Brought Back To Life
“Most powerful for me was the depth of meaning to recreate something like this. Most all the original members went to Treblinka extermination camp. It just carries this weight.”
The Man Who Stole History From The Nazis And Just Couldn’t Stop
“Mr. Szajkowski (pronounced shy-KOV-skee) took home disturbing memorabilia, too, like Hitler’s stationery and antlers from Hermann Göring’s hunting lodge. He sometimes tore apart books to cram them into shipping containers. ‘I’m doing my barbaric work with a clean conscience,’ he wrote to a friend in 1945.”
The Family That Watches TV Together …
A longitudinal study “found positive outcomes for families that used media such as TV, movies and the Internet ‘as a tool — to laugh together, to become informed, to connect, to spark discussion.’ Such shared activities led to greater levels of personal disclosure for adolescent boys, more positive family functioning for adolescent girls and greater parental involvement for both.”
How Drawn & Quarterly Transformed Comics From An All-Male Bastion To Something Slightly Different
“While D&Q has championed female artists, those creators have also helped the company succeed. Its three best-selling cartoonists are Tove Jansson (the ‘Moomin’ series), Lynda Barry (‘What It Is’) and Kate Beaton (‘Hark! A Vagrant’).”
The Real Problem With Men, Women, And ‘Goodfellas’
“There was a smarter column to write about gender divides over different movies. Those divides surely do exist, and just as surely have something to do with cultural assumptions and education and respective experiences, and do not require reducing a movie to unpersuasive tabloidisms like ‘GoodFellas [is] Entourage with guns instead of swimming pools.'”
Why Do So Few Comedians Receive Knighthoods?
“The idea of a mirth-maker being granted a title was preposterous. No entertainer ever received a knighthood before the actor Henry Irving in 1895.”
What’s New In Sculpture? Live Bees
“The bees that inhabit Untilled‘s hive are free to roam as they please, and visitors will find them buzzing about within a pretty wide radius of the work. (If you’re allergic, we wouldn’t recommend you get too close.)”
Is Technology Killing Collaboration In Theatre Sound Design?
“Any good sound designer understands that technology is making our jobs more fulfilling and manageable. But it is also making it easy for noncollaborative design to emerge. Anyone can, at this moment, find a specific piece of music, from a specific place anywhere in the world, by clicking a few buttons on multiple devices. However, this does not mean that what is found is the right choice for the production.”
Let’s Talk Velvet Painting (There’s More To It Than Elvis And Sad Clowns)
“This past week, Velveteria added a new portrait of Caitlyn Jenner following her highly publicized gender transition. Baldwin likes to stay on top of the news and pop culture, frequently commissioning works from established velvet painters he has come to know in Tijuana and Juarez, Mexico.”
The Woman Who Runs Wolf Trap Opera Company
“Kim Witman, 58, is celebrating her 30th year at the Wolf Trap Opera. When she started in 1985, she was a coach, new to the opera world, playing for rehearsals and earning intern-level pay. And even now that she’s leading the company — her official title is senior director of the Wolf Trap Opera and classical programming at Wolf Trap — no job at the center is beneath her. She does a lot of things that many general directors don’t do: accompanying singers, making casting and repertoire choices, and, yes, blogging.”
Synonyms And Metaphors – Should Dance Be About Something?
“George Balanchine, the greatest choreographer in the art, believed that ballet needed no external subject to give it meaning: We can’t dance synonyms, he liked to say. But one major part of the history of ballet, of course, is a history of attempts at various synonyms.”
That Moment In An Opera Performance When You Realize Your Star Is Going Down And You Scramble For The Understudy…
“While he was literally going voiceless on the stage, I was looking into the wings to see if they were telling me to bring the curtain down, because of course I had no communication with anybody,” says conductor Jonathan Darlington, who had the orchestra with him on stage rather than in the pit.
Marginalized LA Dodgers Organist Retires In Frustration (Then Unretires After A Quick Phone Call)
The longest-tenured stadium musician in Los Angeles sports history confirmed that at the end of her 27th year as Dodgers organist, she would be unhappily walking away