Zaeth Ritter Arenas, music director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Sinaloa de las Artes in Culiacán, was rushed to a hospital for emergency surgery on Sept. 27 but died a week later. (in Spanish; Google-translated version here)
Brain Eno Talks About The “Ecology Of Culture”
For BBC Radio 6’s annual John Peel Lecture, “Eno will seek to demonstrate how the whole complex of individuals and institutions engaged in culture – artists, broadcasters, gallerists, promoters, DJs, managers, lawyers, fans – are symbiotically connected parts of a single huge organism which we call Culture.” (audio)
The Most Ambitious Effort To Boost Canadian Music
The $168-million complex represents one of the most ambitious showings ever of public support for music in Canada. “This is the largest effort ever to celebrate our music,” says Andrew Mosker, CEO of the NMC. Of the $168-million budget, about $125 million has been raised so far, including $95 million from three levels of government.
Book Blurbs Are A Scourge, A Blight, A Fraud. On The Other Hand…
And if no less a luminary than George Orwell — way back in 1936 — credited the decline of the novel (even then!) with “the disgusting tripe that is written by the blurb-reviewers,” one question naturally arises: Why are blurbs still around — and still, at least among publishers, so popular?
Brian Eno: We Need To Rethink The Place Of Culture
“I think we need to rethink how we talk about culture, rethink what we think it does for us, and what it actually is. We have a complete confusion about that. It’s very interesting.”
Seattle Repertory Theatre Deals With A Big Deficit By Going Big
“You might expect the Rep to tighten its budget, to produce fewer or smaller shows. But board members and top staff are not going that route. Rather, they’re gambling that financial risk will yield eventual reward — and that mounting large-scale, crowd-pleasing shows can keep the box office flush, and the cash contributions flowing.”
An Art Garden In The Heavily Polluted Gowanus Canal
“The floating island was to be filled with multiple tubes. In a poetic twist, the tubes were to be made of the same culvert pipe used to dump pollution and sewage into the canal.”
Kara Walker Takes Her Art About The U.S. To London
“There is this mountain that I grew up in the shadow of, kind of literally. The mountain was claimed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1915 as their spiritual birthplace and the carving was proposed in 1916. It was finally completed in 1972. So we came down to photograph it, and this show arose out of that.”
NYT Contributors Panic About ‘Water Cooler Conversation’ Being Destroyed By Too Much TV
“The diversity of offerings while catering to a diversity of tastes has also produced a splintering of experiences. I’m finding that even people who seem very much like me are watching different shows than I do. This leaves us little to talk about aside from work and politics.”
Shakespeare’s Dad Was Rich, Not Poor, And His Shady Dealings Helped Fund His Son’s Theatrical Aspirations
Waaaaait, what? “It was also wool, not the theatre, that prompted William to leave Stratford-upon-Avon for London in 1585, where he could act as the family’s business representative.”
The ‘Stonewall’ Movie With The ‘Straight-Acting’ Lead Completely Tanked
“The drama has a 9% positive rating, with many critics lambasting its attempt to depict a pivotal moment in American history. Vanity Fair critic Richard Lawson called the film ‘terribly offensive, and offensively terrible.'”
The Tale Of A Documentary Maker Growing More Bold After Her Oscar Win
“Poitras and the documentary-world veterans Charlotte Cook and A.J. Schnack have created Field of Vision, a company that will commission short-form documentaries and make them available for free streaming on its website.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 09.27.15
From Sweden: Taped and Set Free
AJBlog: DancebeatPublished 2015-09-27
Hayes Cannonball Legacy At The Seasons
AJBlog: CultureGrrlPublished 2015-09-25
What’s The Story Behind The Melting Streetlamp In The Lobby Of The New Broad Museum?
“Is the Broad’s lobby lamp a nod to LACMA’s sidewalk lamps — and a tribute to Burden, who died of cancer in May at 69?”
How Do Groups Doing Community-Based Work Know If They’ve Done Anything Right?
“Community-based arts projects face a unique challenge in maintaining their impact after the practitioners and organizers move on to other projects.”
The (Surprisingly Sordid) History Of Book Blurbs
Gary Shteyngart: “‘I’ll look at a first sentence [of a galley], I’ll look at the cover and it just comes to me,’ he says. ‘Reading randomly from a book is also very helpful. Sometimes I try to read further — but you know, how far can you get? Does anyone even read these books anymore?’ That said, he doesn’t hold back. ‘I’ve compared people to Shakespeare, Tolstoy or whatever.'”
How Will We Talk To The Technology Of The Future?
“They have taken that most inscrutable of interfaces — the Check Engine light — and forced it to explain itself. It can hear you, and speak back, all over the din of the open road.”
Ballet By The Numbers
“720: Cans of silver sparkle body paint used by dancers playing the role of snowflakes in The Nutcracker.”
Yep, Hollywood Is Still One Big Sexist Industry
“From 2007 to 2014, women made up only 30.2% of all speaking or named characters in the 100 top-grossing films distributed in the US, according to research conducted by the University of Southern California for the Geena Davis Institute. A staggeringly low 1.9% of those films were directed by women.”
The Lives Of Characters Who (Long) Outlast Their Creators
“The question for authors to consider in this brave new world of mimicry, both professional and otherwise, is to what extent they consider their characters to be theirs and theirs alone. For most, it isn’t something that will become an issue during their lifetime: Copyright law stipulates that books only enter the public domain 70 years after the death of the author, even if most fanfic writers aren’t limited in terms of what they can post online.”
When Lupita Nyong’o Was Given Her Choice Of A Play To Star In, This Is The One She Chose
“A few days after arriving at the Yale School of Drama from Kenya in 2009, Lupita Nyong’o found herself understudying in a professional production of Eclipsed, Danai Gurira’s harrowing play about women in the second Liberian civil war.” So when, following her Oscar for 12 Years a Slave, the Public Theater offered her a chance to return to the stage, she had no doubt about the script she wanted.