Cultures seemed to build up their color vocabularies in a predictable way. Languages with only two color categories chunked the spectrum into blacks and whites. Languages with three categories also had a word for red. Green or yellow came next. Then blue. Then brown. And so on. – Nautilus
School Maintenance Worker Gets Laid Off, Writes A Hallmark Channel Christmas Movie
“At the time I wrote this, I had lost my job after 37 years with an engineering firm. They called me in on a Wednesday afternoon and said, ‘We got to let you get, a reduction in force.’ So here I was at 56, wondering what am I going to do with my life,” he said. He took a year off to write. – Chicago Tribune
African Women Authors Make Historical Fiction Their Own
“African historical fiction is far from a new genre – is there a more globally known work of African fiction, after all, than Chinua Achebe’s 1958 classic story of Nigeria at the moment of British colonization, Things Fall Apart? But in recent years, the genre has been reinvented by a new generation of African writers. And this time around, most of them are women.” – The Christian Science Monitor
Remembering Jessye Norman
Alex Ross: “The grand-diva façade concealed a restless, exploratory spirit. In later years, Norman became increasingly adventurous in her choice of repertory.” The New Yorker
A Worldwide War On Books
Wherever authoritarian regimes are growing in strength, from Brazil, to Hungary, to the Philippines, literature that expresses any kind of political opposition is under a unique, renewed threat. Books that challenge normative values, especially those with L.G.B.T. themes, have been hit especially hard. – The New York Times
The ‘Wow’ Kid Continues His Special Relationship With The Group That Inspired His Outburst Of Approval
The child whose “Wow!” captivated the classical music world “is something of a celebrity at Symphony Hall.” The Handel and Haydn Society invited the 9-year-old and his grandparents to a recent dress rehearsal where he mostly got a concert directly for him. But “before the dress rehearsal, Ronan wandered the halls and rode the elevator a few times (he is passionate about elevators). Then he spotted two musicians practicing trombone. ‘Yeah, music,’ he said.” – The Boston Globe
Even After Hordes Of ‘New Yorker’ Publications, Authors Might Need To Be Rescued For Future Readers
Is this the most discouraging development ever, or is it just a sign of how many writers are forgotten as the relentless pressure of the new takes hold? Nancy Hale holds the record for the most short stories to appear in The New Yorker in a year – 12 between July 1954 and July 1955 (TWELVE?!). “She also put out seven novels and was a 10-time recipient of the O. Henry Prize for short fiction. Her writing is progressive and tackles issues such as infidelity, abortion, domestic abuse, motherhood, mental illness and female sexuality. … And despite this, most readers of short stories haven’t even heard the name Nancy Hale.” – NPR
Julie Delpy Was Paid One Tenth Of What Ethan Hawke Was Paid For ‘Before Sunrise’
And for the big sequel, Before Sunset, Delpy got half of her co-star’s salary. For the third movie in the trilogy, Before Midnight? She refused to do it without equal pay. – Variety
Roger Taillibert, The Architect Of Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, Has Died At 93
The French architect also designed the Olympic Pool and the vélodrome for the Olympics, a building that has become the Montréal Biodôme. The stadium was controversial at the time, and has stayed controversial – and costly – ever since. But the mayor who asked him to design these 1976 Olympics buildings had a different view. “‘Taillibert is the kind of architect who built the cathedrals of ancient times,’ said [Jean] Drapeau, calling Taillibert’s designs ‘poems in concrete.'” – CBC
Letters From A Young Jerome Robbins When He Was Trying To Make It As A Dancer (And Failing)
“I shall be firm straight and even cruel to be faithful. I SHALL DANCE. Yes . . . I shall dance. Say it over and over and over to infinatum [sic]. I shall dance I shall dance . . . I will live to dance, eat to dance, sleep to dance. My classes shall be my daily worship and workshop. Every moment shall be devoted to these purposes.” – LitHub
Students Sue Actor James Franco Over Sex Scenes Class
The two named plaintiffs seek to represent a class of more than 100 former female students at Studio 4. Their complaint alleges that Studio 4 set out to “create a steady stream of young women to objectify and exploit.” The complaint also contends that the school was “designed to circumvent California’s ‘pay for play’ regulations,” which prohibit making actors pay for auditions. – NPR
A Case For Reconsidering New Age Music As Art
How did New Age end up carrying so much baggage in our musical memory? Its fall from grace, when it once soared, might be due to New Age’s status as one of the most heavily marketed musical genres, making it the equivalent of aural snake oil, to be sold on the yoga-conference circuit and in corporate supplement chains. – The New Yorker
Arts Council England’s New Strategy For Culture Seems To Be More About Itself Than The Arts
Robert Hewison: “ACE’s response to its lacklustre level of achievement has been to invent three “outcomes” so inoffensive that no one would disagree with them: “creative people” – more emphasis will be put on helping individual artists – “cultural communities” – encouraging local collaboration – and “a creative and cultural country”. Are we striving for an uncreative and philistine country? Surely not.” – Arts Professional
Annie-B Parson On Choreographing For Non-Dancers (Such As David Byrne’s Band)
“Working with dancers, a lot gets communicated non-verbally, but with untrained dancers you need to find a specific and deliberate language around movement because there is no shared language, no baseline. I try to put myself in their shoes. It’s important to remind myself how scary and alien dancing is to the non-dancer.” – Dance Magazine
The Louvre Is Moving Around Its Collections And Rehanging Art
The Pyramid entrance was revamped in 2014-16, and a total rehang of the collections is under way, including rewriting labels for the 38,000 works exhibited in the galleries. – The Art Newspaper
Think Translating Opera For Surtitles Is Tricky? Try Putting ‘Porgy And Bess’ Into German Or Spanish
It’s not just a matter of slangy terms like “happy dust” (German and Spanish have their own words for cocaine). Finding equivalents for the contractions and non-standard grammar in the libretto’s “Negro dialect” (as the Gershwins and Heyward called it) is challenging in itself, let alone when you only have 72 characters per screen. Here’s how the translators did it. – The New York Times
Mind Meld: The Risks (And Rewards) Of Linking Our Brains With Computers
Neural lace and other AI-based enhancements are supposed to allow data from your brain to travel wirelessly to one’s digital devices or to the cloud, where massive computing power is available. – Nautilus
Chicago’s Museum Of Science And Industry Gets A New Name (And $125 Million)
“The sprawling science, tech and business museum on the city’s South Side will become the Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry after the museum’s board voted to accept Griffin’s $125 million donation, … one of the largest cash donations ever to a local cultural institution.” – Chicago Tribune
The Fraught Art Of Page-Turning
The page turner disturbs our illusion of musical command, threatening to shatter the audience’s suspension of artistic disbelief, where we disaggregate the magic of the sounds we experience from their more mundane physical and material realities: works that exist in published scores with broken spines and tweaked pages. – Van
If There’s A No-Deal Brexit, Many British Performers May Have To Give Up Touring In Europe At All
“Music industry figures have said a no-deal Brexit would make touring ‘simply unviable for many artists’, after new government guidelines for cultural, heritage and sporting professionals touring Europe signalled … [that] touring parties would face extra issues with documentation, travel and the transport and sale of goods as they take their work to individual EU member states.” – The Guardian
Staffers Convince Intiman Theatre’s Board Not To Shut The Company Down
Barely more than a week ago, the board of the Seattle company said there wasn’t money to continue operating even for another month and was prepared to close. (This just nine months after Intiman finally retired $2.7 million in debt.) Artistic director Jen Zeyl and her colleagues insisted that they could raise $200,000 by the end of the year, and the board has agreed to let them try. In fact, they’re already more than halfway to the goal. – The Seattle Times
Baltimore Symphony May Be Back On Stage, But It’s Not Saved Yet
Indeed, it has about one year to make itself sustainable: the musicians’ new contract expires next September, and the $1.6 million donated to cover the players’ pay while the orchestra is dark next summer was a one-time gift. But there may be some ways the orchestra can increase earned income as well as donations. – The Baltimore Sun
Uffizi Director Backs Out Of New Job In Vienna, And Austrians Are Furious
Just a couple of months ago, it looked like the foreign administrators brought in to reform Italy’s museums would all be chased out of the country by the populist government. Then that government fell, and the new one reappointed the culture minister who had hired the foreign experts in the first place. So Eike Schmidt decided he wanted to stay in Florence and continue his work at the Uffizi Gallery. But the fact that he’d already accepted an offer to direct Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum has made things a bit awkward. – The New York Times