“To approach someone else convincingly you must do so with open arms and head held high, and your arms can’t be open unless your head IS high. … The key word is reciprocity.”
Why We Need To Overhaul The Humanities
“By the end of the 20th century, the humanities departments in universities had become closed enclaves. The writing of scholars in these disciplines had grown increasingly dense and jargon-filled, inaccessible to anyone without years of graduate study. For some academics, this enforced isolation became stifling. They sought new forms of expression. Thus literary theorists Wendy Steiner, Frank Lentricchia and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have turned to opera librettos, mystery novels and PBS documentaries.”
LOVE Conquered All: How Robert Indiana’s Sculpture Went From Artwork To Meme To Icon
“With its four letters stacked in a square and its O at a jaunty angle, [LOVE] is so famous that many millions of viewers may not even realise it’s an artwork at all. But it is an artwork – one that hovers over Indiana’s career like a helicopter, and that has obscured almost all his other work over the past six decades.” (If only he’d copyrighted it.)
Researcher: The Link Between Music And How Food Tastes
“One of the most common things we see is a relationship between pitch and taste. Lower pitches tend to be associated with bitter tastes and higher pitches with sweet tastes. There are possible health benefits to this: if you play music that makes people think their food is sweeter, the sugar content of the food could be lowered.”
Why Are Critics These Days So Defensive?
“People who enjoyed what were once known as guilty pleasures have absolved themselves of guilt. Arguments that people should be ashamed of lower-order tastes – like Ruth Graham’s attack on adults who read young-adult books – are actually quite rare. Yet anxiety about all this is pervasive, as if everyone’s high-school English teacher were lurking around the corner, ready to scold us for skipping Middlemarch on the summer reading list.”
A Pop-Up Arts Center In A Calais Migrant Camp
“The venue – a dome-shaped tent dubbed the Good Chance Theatre – runs workshops on writing, drama and choral singing, as well as poetry and spoken word events. It was founded by playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, who plan to stage weekly productions created by migrants, as well as host touring productions by theatre companies and artists from around the world.”
Watching 100 Volunteers Dance A Twyla Tharp Piece
Jean Lenihan joins a group of ordinary folks learning and dancing in Tharp’s The One Hundreds in Los Angeles.
Philadelphia City Paper Bought By Competitor And Closed Down
Last week, City Paper was “purchased by Broad Street Media, a small local media conglomerate that owns the city’s other alt-weekly, Philadelphia Weekly. The staff only learned that their publication, and their jobs, would soon cease to exist after other journalists started calling them for information.”
The Robot Gamelan – Traditional Indonesian Orchestra Gets Automated
“The Gamelatron is the world’s first completely robotic gamelan orchestra – a kinetic, site-specific structure created by Aaron Taylor Kuffner, who has rigged 27 Javanese gongs and mallets on five separate steel towers, programming them to play music that he digitally arranged.”
We Should Go Back To The Warmth And Immediacy Of Film To Win Back The Movie House
Christopher Nolan: “I have conversations with studio heads and at some point when I’m passionately advocating using film they’ll say ‘at the end of the day doesn’t storytelling trump everything?’ I say ‘no it doesn’t, otherwise we’d be making radio plays, it would be a lot cheaper.'”
The Boston Lyric Opera Is Looking For A Good New Home
“Punctuating a week of high drama on the city’s performing-arts scene, Boston Lyric Opera has decided that it will not renew its lease at the Citi Shubert Theatre, its home for nearly two decades. Next fall it will move its productions to a temporary venue, one yet to be announced. This is a seismic development for New England’s largest opera company.”
Who Has The Rights To This Picasso – The Actual Private Owner, Or Spain?
“At the heart of the matter are questions that many countries are now grappling with: What constitutes a national treasure? And what are the limits of private property rights when it comes to precious art?”
The Grim Toll Of Workplace Injuries On A Principal Dancer
“Dancing wasn’t the primary problem; Ms. Somogyi, 38, wasn’t sure if she would be able to walk normally again.”
Making ‘Diversity’ The Norm Instead Of The Niche In Theatre
“A single play may tick the diversity box, but it’s definitely not inclusion – that only comes when theatres commit to the development and support of playwrights over a much longer period, and consistently programme a range of plays that give the space for a critical mass of writers to emerge and dig in for the long term.”
The Newest Trash Dump: Turkey’s 2,400-Year-Old Tombs
“Today the tombs are Fethiye’s main tourist attraction. Which begs the question: how did they get to be filled with so much trash before authorities ever even noticed or took action?”
In Weird Music News, A Former Kmart Employee Has Digitized His Collection Of Kmart Corporate Tapes Of The Early 1990s
“Every month, corporate office issued a cassette to be played over the store speaker system — canned elevator-type music with advertisements seeded every few tracks. Around 1991, the muzak was replaced with mainstream hits, and the following year, new tapes began arriving weekly.”
How LitCrawls Have Made Readings Much – MUCH – Less Boring
“We asked the staff to turn down the music, and they just stared at us and said we needed to talk to the manager, who was not there. There were about five readers, and a cluster of people who wanted to hear them. TV screens were locked on some kind of game, the music was blasting. We were trapped. And then, hats off to the late David Poindexter, publisher of MacAdam, he grabbed a chair and hoisted it over his head, and we all followed him through the bar and out onto the sidewalk.”
Dismantled Banksy ‘Dismaland’ Parts Head To Refugee Camp In France
“It has all been taken down now and we are left with huge sheets of wood which we can use to build the shelters. Dismaland is also sending a team of chippies and builders out to the camp, who will be creating any structures that we need with the materials.”
If Broadway Saved NY, What Can Theatre Do For Chicago?
“Are there lessons here for Chicago? Sure there are. But it’s worth noting first that what one urban reformer sees as an improvement, another sees as the destruction of an indigenous culture. Riedel barely notes this issue, since the theater owners are the heroes of his story, but if you walk through Times Square today, as I frequently do, it has lost much of its character. “
New York Arts Groups Come Asking: Spare A Few Billion?
“It’s the kind of boom that can be stirring for art fans but that raises questions about how all this money can be raised simultaneously, particularly when foreign markets have created some financial uncertainty. It’s also not clear the city will continue to be as generous toward cultural capital projects as it was under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.”
Why Is Washington’s National Symphony Such An Underachiever?
“When you go to an NSO concert, you never know what you’re going to get. Sometimes, you get very good playing. Other times, you hear unpardonable sloppiness, sections drowning each other out in a soup of sound that you don’t expect from professionals. It’s curious that an orchestra with so much talent is still able and, in some sense even willing, to sound like such a mess. There are three places to look for the problem — and its solution.”
Big Plans For Boston’s Opulent Colonial Theatre
“The theater’s opulent, barrel-vaulted lobby — modeled on the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles — could be given over to booth-style seating, and the sumptuous ladies lounge, where Bob Fosse once tap-danced upon the room’s onyx table beneath its murals of cherubs, would become an auxiliary dining room, according to the architectural plans, dated Sept. 18.”
This Was The First TV Show To Use The Internet As A Plot Point
“Even as dial-up Internet connections went mainstream, television representations of the web lagged. Computers appeared on television mostly as props, boxy monitors sitting dark on desks. The arrival of Internet represented a huge cultural shift, but it was barely a plot point in the 1990s—with some exceptions.”
Philadelphia Orchestra Contract Talks Break Down (Though There May Be Some Progress)
“All-night negotiations over a new contract for musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra ended Thursday morning after the session failed to produce a tentative agreement. Concerts will continue uninterrupted as negotiators ponder their next moves. … While no agreement was reached, some parameters of a deal appeared to be falling into place.”
Mercedes Bass Named Acting Chairwoman Of Carnegie Hall
Ms. Bass, a well-known arts philanthropist who is currently a vice chairwoman of the boards of both Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera, was selected to step in following the end of the brief and contentious tenure of Ronald Perelman.