“The story behind the work, [Balthasar van der Ast’s Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase,] which was originally part of the collection of the Suermondt Ludwig Museum in Aachen and then went missing for 75 years, is fit for Hollywood.”
Why Theatre Productions Rights Should Be Free For Underfunded Schools
“Licensing fees for shows can often be the highest expense on a school production’s budget. Depending on the show, amount of performances, ticket prices, etc, they can often range to $2,000-$3,000. In fact, according to MTI’s Cost Estimator, a 4 performance run of “Annie” with an auditorium of 200 seats, tickets at $15 and a 4 performance run(standard for most high schools) would likely cost between $1,998 – $2,703. That’s a lot for any school but near impossible for one with very little funding.”
How Stress Actually Changes The Brain And Body (For Better As Well As For Worse)
Rockefeller University neuroendocrinologist Bruce McEwen gives a rundown of the mechanisms and the (worrisome) effects.
When Stress Makes You Fall Asleep
Oh, yes, it definitely happens – far more often to young children, but to some adults as well. (Hey, it takes away the dread, at least temporarily.) It’s all about glucose in the brain.
Sacramento Ballet’s New Artistic Director Spent Years Dancing Under The Old Ones
In January, the company’s board of directors decided not to renew the contracts of Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda, who had led Sacramento Ballet for three decades and developed it into a fully professional outfit. They’re being replaced, as of next season, by Amy Seiwert, who spent most of the 1990s dancing in the company under Cunningham and Binda.
Has The Music In Musicals Become Too Ingrown?
“I go to a lot of musicals. I listen to a fair amount of pop music. A lot of pop music that is successful is catchy. A lot of musicals that aren’t successful aren’t catchy. Brit composers seem addicted to wordy exposition that furthers the plot but leaves the brain the second the song has stopped. Even pop stars who should know better – *cough, cough Gary Barlow* – seem to think a musical is more about a thesaurus than a chorus.”
Musical Theatre Is Flourishing Across Europe In A Way In Never Used To
Time was that big musical hits on Broadway or in London’s West End would get limited runs in the rest of Europe. No more. Audiences are flocking to the theatre.
Report: Depictions Of Smoking In US Movies Is Dramatically Up
“Depictions or suggestions of tobacco use in top-grossing movies rose 72 percent from 2010 to 2016, according to the report, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The increase was especially large among top-grossing movies with R ratings, which saw a 90 percent rise in tobacco-use imagery, though researchers noted with special concern that movies rated PG-13 also saw a sizable increase: 43 percent.”
Why Are Some Of Us Still Reluctant To Take Sylvia Plath At Her Word About Ted Hughes’s Abuse?
“[There’s a] cultural bias against women’s voices and the domestic truths of women’s lives and the deep role this has played in painting Plath as both a pathetic victim and a Cassandra-like, genius freak. It is only in a culture where these two things be claimed simultaneously that Hughes, a known philanderer and violent partner, can spend forty years botching the editing of, or outright destroying, his estranged, now dead wife’s work, then win every conceivable literary prize and be knighted by the Queen.”
Quentin Tarantino’s Next Film Will Be About The Manson Family Murders
Oh, dear – this isn’t going to be pretty, even if it is good. “If the … project does become Tarantino’s next film, it becomes unique in that it will be his first movie to be based on true events.”
‘The World’s First Kung-Fu Holocaust Exploitation Flick!”
“Exodus to Shanghai is a film that claims to tell the story of Ho Feng-Shan, Chinese consul for Vienna, a rescuer of Jews in prewar Austria. While indeed based on true events, it may be the first Holocaust film that heavily features martial-arts-action scenes. The cast includes German actors, as well as Romanians, some Asians, and two young blond models. It was completed in Israel and sponsored by the Fashion TV channel. Sounds delusional? Not in the eyes of the filmmakers.”
Why Do Languages Have Contractions?
As Slate puts it, “John McWhorter explains why we love shrinkage.” (podcast)
Bolshoi Canceled ‘Nureyev’ Ballet, On Culture Minister’s Orders, Because Of Gay ‘Propaganda’ Law: Report
“Just days after the Bolshoi called off the premiere, Russia’s state-run TASS news agency quoted an unidentified ‘source’ as saying that Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky ordered the show postponed because it may constitute gay ‘propaganda’ [under a notorious] 2013 law.”
Someone Is Flooding The FCC With Fake Comments Asking To End Net Neutrality
The fraudulent letter-writing campaign wasn’t a small-time operation. Thousands of form letters had been filed online, fraudulently signed under the names of real people, from Utah to Maine. “Whoever set this up got a large cloud service to a rate-limited public FCC API that doesn’t allow many submissions. They had to spin up a huge number of servers to make it work.”
Conspiracy Theorists “Love” The Public Art In Denver’s Airport
Conspiratorial “experts” like Jay Weidner assert that the airport’s murals and capstone prove the existence of a secret government plan for a “New World Order.” Others implicate the airport in the murder of JonBenét Ramsey. One local Evangelical Christian group, Cephas Ministries, claimed that the DIA was built as part of a plot to murder the “people that Lucifer hates.”
Ten Years Ago It Became Illegal To Smoke In Public Buildings In The UK. It Had An Effect On The Role Of Smoking In Movies
“Smoking used to be significant, especially on film and TV. It is now even more so. At first, it was a prop; famously, or so it was said, a way of giving actors something to do with their hands. I prefer to think that it is a way of expressing, or evading, some deep inner turbulence. It signifies nonchalance and its opposite, while providing for the camera and our gaze a curling backdrop of smoke with which the cinematographer can make play.”
Polly Carl Writes About What Democratization Of Our Arts Really Means
“The demand for democratization isn’t rebellious, but rather, our responsibility as citizens—to push our field to be more representative of the America we live in. The “gatekeeper types” have represented a small and exclusive part of our democracy and we must be challenged, and we don’t have to react defensively. Rather, we might have to feel the precariousness that women and trans people and people of color know so very well.”
Majority Of Republicans Now Distrust Colleges. Is This Why?
Megan McArdle: “Republicans apparently kept right on loving their colleges until 2015. After all, many Republicans can thank college for getting them a good job. A team to root for on frosty autumn days. Some lovely, hazy memories of beer pong tournaments. Heck, maybe they even learned something. So why, just in the last couple of years, would conservatives turn against colleges with a vengeance?”
The High Cost Of Rape Scenes In Today’s Movies And TV
“Media attention to rape in film is targeted mostly at how audiences perceive the scenes and lamenting the studios’ sheer mass of sexual violence on screen. Many articles ask the question: Are these scenes gratuitous? But rarely do we think about the filmmakers, actors and crew who make on-screen rapes happen, like MacNair. How do they feel? Are they tired of rape scenes? Or what if portraying rape could actually be a positive thing?”
Founder Of Death Cafe Movement Dies Suddenly At Age 44
“From the basement of his house in Hackney, an artsy borough in London’s East End, [Jon] Underwood perpetuated a movement that spread to more than a dozen countries with more than 1,000 gatherings. … These were not grief support groups or end-of-life planning sessions, but rather casual forums for people who wanted to bat around” – over tea and cake, a key element of the project – “philosophical thoughts. What is death like? Why do we fear it? How do our views of death inform the way we live?
When A Famous Dance Venue Offers To Showcase A Young Choreographer’s Work, How Does She Scare Up The Money To Make It Happen?
“When invited by the Joyce Theater to return to its Ballet Festival, a biennial event spotlighting independent and emerging ballet choreographers, [Emery LeCrone] thought back to the 2015 festival when her troupe made its Joyce debut, performing for two nights. Despite selling out both shows, she came out of that experience in a state of what she calls ‘burnout, completely.'” Happily, “financially, this time is different.”
I Tried SFMOMA’s ‘Send Me’, And Here’s What They Sent
Matthew Olson started with “send me a landscape” and was chagrined to receive Robert Gober’s Prison Window. (“What does it say about me that my landscape riffs on a prison cell?”) So he kept trying – and moved on to requests like “send me an idea” and “send me joy.” (The response to his final request, the notorious eggplant emoji, suggests that SFMOMA may need to tweak its algorithm a little.)
The Slow Fade Of Classical Music Journalism – And The (Early) Signs Of Its Revival
A longread by Joseph Carman surveys the damage of the past few years, especially at regional newspapers, and the newer fora in which coverage of classical music is surviving and growing. As ArtsJournal’s own Doug McLennan tells Carman, “We’re in that period where it’s not obvious yet what’s going to win out as the best way of doing all this. But I have no fears at all that it’s simply going to vanish. It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s an evolution. And evolution is painful sometimes.”
Dallas Will Get To Keep One Of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms Permanently
The Dallas Museum of Art has acquired All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, completed last year and Kusama’s first pumpkin-themed installation since 1991. The work goes on display Oct. 1.
Kenneth Silverman, 81, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographer
“Trading bombast for rigorous research, he wrote acclaimed biographies of American innovators as varied as Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Morse, John Cage, Harry Houdini and [Cotton] Mather himself, in a research-intensive process that Dr. Silverman described as ‘wrestling with an angel.'”