“Nature, in the form of the predominant gloom that pervades our skies for much of the year, forces us inward — to a creative frontier that matches the geographic one. Thus, an obscure poet at a midweek reading on a winter’s eve, hoping for an audience beyond a few bookstore employees, will be happily shocked to find the room packed. People in Seattle love to come in out of the rain and tell stories, or to hear them.” – Crosscut
Goodreads Is A Hopeless, Malfunctioning Mess. Is There Another Option?
The site was a great idea when it was launched in 2007; by 2013, when Amazon bought it, there were 15 million users. But the new owners seem to have done little with it: users frequently can’t find titles they want or get messages sent to other members; the site design “is like a teenager’s 2005 Myspace page”; Amazon either can’t or hasn’t bothered to create an algorithm that doesn’t spit out countless irrelevant recommendations. “But new competitors continue to enter the book-tech fray, and one in particular is beginning to make waves.” – New Statesman
Hong Kong’s Cautionary Tale: How 40 Years Of Neo-Liberalism Fueled A Crisis
This blurring of the division between public and private finds governments overtly working on the behalf of capital to extenuate an economic system that favors global capital over labor, private corporations over society and social welfare, and economic concentration over economic democracy. It is a system that is perpetuated by the attenuation of politics and capital, whereby the rich purchase beneficial economic policies that further insulate their position and wealth. Through political influence they obtain lower taxes, larger deductions, fewer regulations, and corporate protections, among other things. – Boston Review
Museum Votes To Sell Prized Jackson Pollock To Fund Diversity
Its sale will fund acquisitions of work by artists of color, women artists, and other marginalized artists underrepresented in the museum’s collection. The early Pollock painting will be included in Christie’s New York Evening Sale of 20th and 21st Century Art on October 6 and is estimated to sell for between $12 and 18 million. – Hyperallergic
The Science Behind That Bright Orange San Francisco Sky
The reason for the orange—and for the wan yellows and sickly grays that followed—is a combination of atmospheric chemistry and the physics of teeny-tiny things. – Wired
Why Is Congress Ignoring Help For The Arts?
One has to look only to such countries as Germany and the United Kingdom — whose governments have pledged $50 billion and $1.5 billion, respectively, in covid-19-related aid to the arts — to recognize a truism: that this country essentially pays its arts workers lip service. Sure, a few movie and recording stars make fortunes. But why do we treat rank-and-file employees in the arts industry like beggars? – Washington Post
Strand Bookstore’s Workers Are Very Unhappy
There’s the issue of not properly protecting workers in the pandemic. And in April, the Strand was approved for a PPP loan of $1–2 million to retain 212 jobs. Given that those jobs were not actually protected, workers in the store want to know where the money went. – The Baffler
How The Big Museum Audiences Have Changed Since Reopening
For the Met, long-haul travel is typically responsible for most of their visitors, who come from abroad. But with international plane travel halted, there’s a new focus on New Yorkers, which now make up over 90 percent of entrants. – Washington Post
An Initiative To Rebuild America’s Arts
Some actions within the 15-point plan could be achieved in one day through executive orders, such as directing federal departments to employ creative workers or completing the authorisation and funding of an ArtistCorps within AmeriCorps. Others involve the development and passage of new laws and policies in conjunction with Congress—for example, making permanent the ability of gig workers and independent contractors to access federal unemployment benefits, or taking up and passing legislation that would adjust existing federal policies to be more inclusive of creative workforce projects. – The Art Newspaper
What The Uk’s Music Organizations Are Learning About Streaming
“What we know is that the donation only model works well for the first two events that you do, and then it tails off dramatically, so our view is that the more sustainable model is pay-per-view.” – Bachtrack
Rethink: Time To End Playwright Submission Fees
It is exceptionally unusual to find a theatre that charges playwrights to read their script through conventional submissions. But look around at contests, competitions, workshops, residencies and more, and you’ll spot submission charges without having to look too hard. – The Stage
Team Digitally Recreating Venice To Preserve It
They have used a LiDAR (light-detection and ranging) scanner, which sends out a pulsed laser light towards the target object and measures the time it takes the laser to return. It calculates the distance the light has travelled, and plots that point in a digital 3D space. The LiDAR has recorded inscriptions so high up they cannot be read from the ground. – The Art Newspaper
New York’s Ice Dancing Company Takes To The Concrete
“So what happens when there’s no ice and the rinks are closed? During the coronavirus pandemic, the figure skaters of Ice Theater of New York have found their flow by trading ice for concrete and blades for wheels. They’ve taken to the streets — and parks and playgrounds and basketball courts — with inline skates.” Gia Kourlas reports. – The New York Times
Beirut’s Cultural Community Is In Tatters
The port of Beirut explosion left close to 200 dead, thousands injured and more than 300,000 people homeless, but it also attacked the very heart of the cultural community of the city. The quarters most affected—Gemmayze, Mar Mikhael and Ashrafiyyeh—had previously been spared much of the full-scale destruction of the Lebanon’s long civil war between 1975 and 1990. – The Art Newspaper
The Need For Facts, The Threat Of Feelings
When it comes to interpreting the world around us, we need to realise that our feelings can trump our expertise. This explains why we buy things we don’t need, fall for the wrong kind of romantic partner, or vote for politicians who betray our trust. In particular, it explains why we so often buy into statistical claims that even a moment’s thought would tell us cannot be true. Sometimes, we want to be fooled. – The Guardian
Giant Sculpture That Sings — Flight 93 National Memorial Is A Massive Wind Chime
To mark the place in Pennsylvania where the fourth plane went down on 9/11/01, architect Paul Murdoch and his team designed the Tower of Voices, a 93-foot-tall open-air structure with 40 specially designed and tuned aluminum chimes, one for each passenger and crew member. Carolina Miranda talks to Murdoch and others about the incredible technical and aesthetic (and, yes, political) challenges that building the memorial posed. – Los Angeles Times
Minnesota Public Radio Fires Its Only Black Classical Music Host
Garrett McQueen said he was taken off the air after his shift on Aug. 25. He was then given two warnings — one of which was about his need to improve communication and the other warning was for switching out scheduled music to play pieces he felt were more appropriate to the moment and more diverse, McQueen told MPR News. – MPR
How Does This Classical Music TV Series Attract Millions Of Viewers? It’s Made Like A Cooking Show
Each episode of Now Hear This “manages to turn its exploration of a single subject into a hybrid of travelogue, mystery, history, cultural study, documentary and performance — all with … intricate webs of narrative that connect composers across episodes and eras.” Showrunner Harry Lynch and host Scott Yoo freely acknowledge that they were inspired by the approach of food-TV stars such as Anthony Bourdain. – The Washington Post
#CancelNetflix Becomes A Thing As Anger Mounts Over Film Sexualizing Young Girls
“Controversial French film Cuties — about a young Senegalese girl in Paris who joins a ‘free-spirited dance clique’ to escape family dysfunction — has spawned a new backlash against Netflix by critics who allege it goes over the line in portraying children in a sexualized manner.” – Variety
TikTok Says It’s Paying Out Hundreds Of Millions To Video Creators. Some Of Those Creators Are Ticked Off
It seemed like very good news when the company said it was setting aside $200 million to compensate the users who make its mini-videos. It seemed even better news when TikTok raised the amount to $1 billion in the U.S. and at least $1 billion more overseas. Now some of those creators say they’re getting a few dollars a day even when they get six-figure view numbers; others say their traffic mysteriously drops after they sign up. Many say the program is far from transparent. – Wired
Canceled And Online Shows Will Be Eligible For 2020 Pulitzer For Drama
“Traditionally, eligibility rules required in-person productions. This year, plays that were scheduled to be produced in theaters during 2020 but postponed or canceled due to the pandemic, as well as plays produced and performed in places other than theaters, including online, outside or in site-specific venues, will be considered.” – Deadline
Ben Brantley Retires As New York Times Co-Chief Theater Critic
“‘This pandemic pause … seemed to me like a good moment to slip out the door,’ Brantley said in a statement. … [He] joined the Times as its second-string theater critic in 1993, taking the chief critic job three years later. His last day on the job will be Oct. 15. The paper’s newish co-chief critic title currently is shared by Brantley and Jesse Green, who will remain on board.” – Deadline
A ‘Hunger Games’-Style Arts Bailout In Australia’s Largest State, Say Smaller Groups
“The New South Wales government has been accused of creating ‘a Hunger Games atmosphere’ among 84 arts organisations over its $50m Covid-19 [‘Rescue and Restart’ program], which remains shrouded in secrecy. … There are misgivings among small-to-medium companies that the NSW government has elected to watch them drown, while the major flagship companies – a few with healthy reserves to ride out the rough seas – are thrown multimillion-dollar lifelines.” – The Guardian
Diana Rigg, 82
Three or four generations loved her for television roles from Emma Peel in The Avengers to Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca to Olenna Tyrell (the “Queen of Thorns”) in Game of Thrones; film roles from Tracy (the only Bond girl to get James to put a ring on it) in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service to Vincent Price’s daughter in Theatre of Blood to Miss Piggy’s employer in The Great Muppet Caper; and stage roles from Euripedes’s Medea to Shakespeare’s Cordelia, Regan, and Hermia to Edward Albee’s Martha to Henry Higgins’s mother (okay, Lerner and Loewe’s). – BBC
Here’s What The Classical Industry Thinks Of Anthony Tommasini’s Proposal To Scrap Blind Auditions
“[The] reaction to the essay was spirited — and mixed, a sign of how unsettled the debate remains. A sampling of artists and administrators spoke with The New York Times, sharing their thoughts on blind auditions and offering ideas to make orchestral hiring more equitable. Here are edited excerpts from the conversations.” – The New York Times