Five-time Tony nominee Jan Maxwell: “The kinds of roles I was being offered were just – I’d been there and done that, and I just didn’t want to do that anymore. … I’m 58 years old, and it’s a lot of work and a lot of responsibility. It’s eight shows a week, and I’ve been disappointed in the kind of theater that you can make a living doing.”
Flexing: The ‘Bone-Breaking’ Dance Craze That Bubbled Up From Brooklyn
“The reflection in the mirror shows a wiry body tightly tensed, with a tattooed chest and hair tied up in two afro bunches. He lifts his shoulder and starts to twist it almost out of its socket, muscles knobbling and bulging, until it looks like something extraterrestrial.”
Good News From Timbuktu: Islamic Landmarks Destroyed By Invading Islamists Repaired
“A project to restore 14 historic mausoleums destroyed in Timbuktu three years ago by hardline Islamists is due to finish at the end of July. … Extremist groups targeted the tombs of Muslim saints as well as the city’s vast libraries when rebels occupied northern Mali following a military coup in March 2012.”
How Digital Analysis Is Changing The Study Of Literature
In the past decade, digital scholarship has gone from being a quirky corner of the humanities to a mainstream phenomenon, restructuring funding landscapes and pushing tenure committees to develop new protocols for accrediting digital projects. As the stakes have grown, so has an expectation about the role that the “digital turn” might play in revivifying the humanities, effecting a synthesis with the sciences, and other weighty causes.
What Librarians Thought Of The Future Of Their Profession In 1946
Some quotes: “We need an improved type of professional personnel, a conception of administration which would make use of all the thinking, all the ideas and potential planning of the entire professional body in an institution, not just of departmental heads.”
One Creative-Class Angeleno Explains Why He Just Can’t Stay
Scott Timberg: “Remember that bittersweet feeling, halfway between queasy and liberating, when you’ve decided you’re going to break up with someone but don’t know when, where, or how you’ll pull the trigger? Someone, that is, with whom you still share a connection but can no longer abide? I’ve lived with this weird ambiguity for almost a decade now. And I’m not talking about dumping my wife.”
The Mindfulness Guru For The iPhone Age
“He is bald, with blue eyes and a deep tan, and he looks as much like a personal trainer as like a personal guru. … He speaks with the kind of Estuary English accent that you might encounter in a London pub.” Andy Puddicombe “trained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk before creating an iPhone app called Headspace, which teaches meditation and mindfulness techniques [and] has been downloaded by three million users.”
Computer Breaks So Musician Finishes His Album At Computer In An Apple Store
“After a second computer failure left him without a means to record his album and no money to buy a replacement, Prince finished recording the vocals and backing instrumental tracks for his new album entirely in that one Apple Store. Prince Harvey sang, hummed, and rapped into a display computer at the SoHo Apple Store every weekday for four consecutive months.”
Fears About Investment In Canadian Literature After Mega-Merger
Laments about neoliberalism, globalization, Americanization and the need for the great revolution that will destroy “late capitalism” itself are lazy and unproductive, for they provide no practical way forward. “It’s society’s fault, man,” is no coherent cultural plan. It actually would be very bad for all of us if any one of these giant publishers were to fail. And a purely government-funded system would end up giving us a carefully inoffensive and good-for-you national literature.
Artists (And Arts Organizations) Are Getting Priced Out Of Some Cities (What To Do?)
“The increasing difficulty in living and working in some major cities affects not just the artists, but the newer and the smaller and the mid-sized arts organizations housed in these cities. Increasingly they too are being priced out. Some of these organizations are finding it difficult to continue to stay in the very cities they might have helped create.”
How A Public Radio Station Not Only Survived But Learned How To Thrive
“KPCC’s total audience has grown 27 percent, and Latino listenership has nearly doubled since 2009. At the end of 2014, the station was the highest-rated public radio station in Los Angeles. Its listener-sensitive revenue grew accordingly. The paper reports that KPCC’s listener support nearly doubled, from $6.5 million to $11.4 million; corporate underwriting revenue increased from roughly $5.3 million to $7.8 million between 2009 and 2014.”
“The Necessary, Inevitable Thing” – Adam Gopnik On Love Lyrics, From Shakespeare To Taylor Swift
“The love song, whether from Shakespeare or his lessers, is to the currency of our feelings what the dollar bill is to our economy, the dining-room table to our family life – the necessary, inevitable thing. Exactly because everything is a love song, we sigh at another one, even as we prepare to sing it.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 07.06.15
Valuable data, questionable field recommendations (a response to Irvine’s latest report on arts participation)
AJBlog: Jumper Published 2015-07-06
Li Po Refills His Cup: A Little Song for All Seasons
AJBlog: Straight|Up Published 2015-07-06
Weather in my head
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-07-06
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Move-In Day At The Broad Art Museum Is Taking Months
“About half of the Broad’s 2,000 artworks have made their way from warehouses around the city, where they had been stored by museum founders Eli and Edythe Broad. Now all this postwar and contemporary art, by some of the most recognizable names of the last 40 years, is heading to a single place for the first time. An inaugural exhibition will consist of 200 pieces, and the remainder of the collection will be stored in a museum vault that was constructed so that visitors can peer inside.”
Why Childhood Memories Disappear
“For the memory to remain accessible, my younger self had to remember those concepts in the same language-based way that my adult self remembers information. I formed earlier memories using more rudimentary, pre-verbal means, and that made those memories unreachable as the acquisition of language reshaped how my mind works, as it does for everyone.”
Surviving As An Artist Means Diversifying Your Art
“Here’s the old artist model: Sit in your studio and make paintings or sculptures and wait to be discovered. Jennie Jieun Lee represents the new artist model: designing clothing and accessories for Rachel Corney, vases and tableware sold at several New York stores, and creating fine art for shows at Martos Gallery downtown and galleries around the world this year.”
An Audience Member Tried To Charge His Cellphone On The Set Of A Broadway Show
“Upon receiving his phone back, he asked the usher, ‘Well, where *can* I charge it?'”
Turns Out Property Developers Are Threatening Tehran’s Built Heritage Too
A photo essay of old Tehran shows just what’s endangered right now.
How A Photographer Who Escaped The Nazis As A Girl Manages To Portray The World With Hope
Dorothy Bohm: “After what happened in my lifetime, and to me and my family, I just hoped that the world would be a better place, I think we all hoped.”