“South African Simone Botha Welgemoed, 27, has been deaf since birth and was 22-months-old when she was fitted with a Cochlear implant in 1992. But when she saw the Virgin Active advertisement on social media, she realised the implant had been edited out.”
And Thus Was The Angriest Librarian Born…
“While I never intended to become The Angriest Librarian, a lifelong inability to hold my tongue—and my frustration with the permeating stereotypes of 1950s-era public libraries—seems to have made it inevitable. So, when I was confronted with yet another blowhard who couldn’t see the value his tax dollars were placing right in front of his face, I had no choice. Over the next few days, I picked up 15,000 followers and found myself in a position to become a public face for my besieged profession.”
Albany Symphony Gets Largest-Ever Donation: $7 Million
The late Heinrich Medicus, a philanthropist and a professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in nearby Troy, NY, bequeathed the money specifically for the orchestra’s endowment. “The symphony will also be the beneficiary of half of the undesignated residuals from Medicus’ estate, including property and his art collection, part of which is up for sale this weekend at the Stair Galleries auction house in Hudson.”
Some Thomas Hart Benton Murals Have Been Removed From View At Indiana University. Does This Make Any Sense?
“In the controversial panel, Benton painted a reporter, a photographer and a printer into the foreground – an homage to the press of Indiana for breaking the power of the Klan. In the center, a white nurse tends both black and white children in City Hospital (now Wishard Hospital). The sinister figures of the Klan are visible in the background, behind the hospital beds – a reminder, perhaps, that racial progress can always slide backwards.”
Actor Anthony Rapp Claims ‘Sexual Advance’ By Kevin Spacey When Rapp Was 14
“As Spacey’s star began to rise through the 1990s and 2000s — including a Tony Award, two Oscars, a decadelong run as the creative director of the Old Vic theater in London, and six seasons and counting on the hit Netflix series House of Cards — Rapp’s frustration, anger, and incredulity with the sexual boundary he said Spacey crossed with him grew as well. Seeing Spacey now, ‘My stomach churns,’ Rapp said. ‘I still to this day can’t wrap my head around so many aspects of it. It’s just deeply confusing to me.'”
Jane Juska, The Woman Whose New York Review Of Books Personal Ad Birthed A Book About Sex For Older Women, Has Died At 84
The book, A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance, came from a rather literary place: It “grew out of a personal ad Juska placed in the New York Review of Books in 1999. Inspired by an Eric Rohmer film, Autumn Tale, it read: ‘Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.'”
A Death-Obsessed Canadian Composer Who Died Young And Violently Gets A Moment Of Warmth And Performance
“The Canadian composer Claude Vivier should be the great downer of modern music. But so shimmering are Vivier’s drones, so sweetly childlike his invented languages and mystical geographies, so energetic his need to communicate his cravings and insecurities, that the effect is one of warmth rather than dread.”
Police And Prosecutors Seize An Ancient Limestone Relief At The European Fine Art Fair In Park Slope
Friday around 2 p.m., “cursing could be heard coming from a London dealer’s booth, breaking the quiet, reverential atmosphere. To the consternation of several art dealers looking on, the police and prosecutors seized an ancient limestone bas-relief of a Persian soldier with shield and spear, which once adorned a building in the ruins of Persepolis in Iran, according to a search warrant.”
Charges Of Animal Cruelty For An Art Installation With Live Mice
It’s not just those afraid of mice who are being tortured in this installation, say mouse experts: “There are 70 white mice in individual boxes set like tiles on the floor of a gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In clear plexiglass cages, designed to be stepped upon, they peer up underfoot in an exhibition exploring phobia.”
Linda Nochlin, The Trailblazing Feminist Art Historian Whose 1971 Essay Changed The Discipline, Has Died At 86
The article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” – which argued quite clearly against the canon as well as against male-dominated notions of greatness – “would have been enough to secure her place as one of art history’s most important writers, but over the course of her six-decade career, she also made formidable contributions to the study of Realism and Gustav Courbet, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and numerous contemporary artists.”
The Next Thing In Public Transit: Retro Metro Cards With Art By Barbara Kruger
The themes will be similar to anyone who has followed the artist’s work. “‘These issues of power and control and physical damage and death and predation are ages old,’ Ms. Kruger said in a phone interview from Los Angeles. ‘I wish some of these issues would become archaic.'”
How Joan Didion Escaped The Writer Publicity Grind (And Sure As Heck Isn’t On Twitter)
Despite two highly autobiographical books and a new movie about her, Didio “isn’t fully a celebrity. She isn’t fully an author, in the modern way of it. To be an author, today, is generally to be required, repeatedly, to acquiesce: to give in to demands of omnipresence, of performative relatability. To live-tweet The Bachelor. To write op-eds in the Times. To accept that being part of the zeitgeist requires that one first accept the terms of geistiness: disembodied, environmental, miasmic. To be an author, today, is in some part to sacrifice oneself.”
Top AJBlogs For The Weekend 10.29.17
Tea for Three? Take a Seat
Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer get together at Saint Mark’s Church. (L to R): Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, and Steve Paxton rehearsing. Photo: Ian Douglas “It is better to have loved and lost … read more
AJBlog: DancebeatPublished 2017-10-28
A Turning of The Tide?
SINCE I turned my book Culture Crash in four years ago, a few things I described have proven me a bit pessimistic. (Visual art may be healthier than I predicted, and music steaming has … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrashPublished 2017-10-27
Three critics in a studio, wrangling
The second episode of Three on the Aisle, the new podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading. In this … read more
AJBlog: About Last NightPublished 2017-10-27
Almanac: Hermann Hesse on classical music
“We consider classical music to be the epitome and quintessence of our culture, because it is that culture’s clearest, most significant gesture and expression. In this music we possess the heritage of classical antiquity and … read more
AJBlog: About Last NightPublished 2017-10-27
A Timely Movie About Making Art – In Complete Anonymity – Under Dictatorship
The film’s director, Paula Markovitch: “My parents were artists and they were intelligent at a terrible time. The dictatorship not only persecuted academics, it persecuted anyone intelligent. In that sense they were internal exiles. Exile are those who fled, those who escaped the dictatorship going to other countries. And the internal exiles were those who hid within the same territory.”
An Older Queen’s Unlikely Friendship Brought Curry To The High Tables Of Britain (And Beyond)
Abdul Karim, sent to England as a gift to serve at Queen Victoria’s table, became one of her closest confidants. Though the relationship, says NPR, was “clearly maternal” on her side, the outcome of the friendship wasn’t simply that she learned some Urdu. “A spicier outcome of this friendship was the elevation of a dish already popular in England: curry.”