Why is our language so eccentric? Just what is this thing we’re speaking, and what happened to make it this way?
Critic Goes To Concert. Critic Loses Patience. Critic Writes An “UnReview”
“Why would those institutions change a system they’re benefiting from? Why would they stop throwing concerts of dead composers’ music when they can sell the same stodgy audience members tickets season after season? I don’t know, but I have an answer for why they should: they’re killing the tradition they claim to love.”
Why Has Arts Coverage Dropped Out Of Newspapers?
Because we have the data, my friend, and they are sobering. As former Globe editor-in-chief John Stackhouse reports in his new book, when the paper analyzed its online traffic, they found that fully 40 per cent of the paper is read by fewer than 1,000 people. This benighted, much-ignored category includes “baseball, tennis and theatre reviews” – basically, a lot of arts and culture coverage. Including, probably, this book review.
Much-Loved Public Art Sculpture Removed After Blogger Spots Anti-Semitism
“A well-known piece of art in Shorewood’s Atwater Park will be removed and altered after a New Jersey blogger’s accusation that it contains hidden anti-Semitic messages went viral, generating concern among village residents and local Jewish leaders.”
Can These Architects Bring Back Mexico City’s Ancient, Buried Lakes?
“The Lakeside City (‘La Ciudad Lacustre’), which set out to recover the ancient Texcoco lake in the east of Mexico City, is the most comprehensive urban plan the city has ever seen. Kalach and fellow architect, Teodoro González de León, proposed to limit urban growth, clear and curtail development on the original lake bed, and allow the groundwater and rain to restore the body of water.”
Sesame Street To Concentrate Less On Puppets, Pop Culture
“Parents watching the show may notice fewer pop culture references in future episodes. That’s because, as humorous as they are to grownups, such references are typically lost on the preschoolers who watch the show. And as it turns out, fewer parents are watching Sesame Street these days, compared to when the show first aired.”
Networks Are Starting To Negotiate With Netflix For Branding Rights
“As networks struggle to keep their brands relevant, making sure viewers know the origins of a show and where to go for fresh episodes is paramount. Also, if the network is identified, the hope is that users will eventually be able to search Netflix by network for content instead of just by show titles and actors.”
Peggy Guggenheim Was Flamboyant, True, But Also A Real Art Patron
“The new documentary on her life, ably directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, is a reminder of what an engaged patron Guggenheim was. At one point in the film, an interviewer asks her what the role of her gallery was in the realm of American painting. ‘To give birth to it,’ replies Guggenheim. ‘I was the midwife.'”
Was This Play Canceled ‘Because Of Race’ Or Because The Director Ignored The Playwright?
“I cast it without thinking what color people were at all. I would have cast a black Jesus if I had the right person for the role. I wasn’t thinking that this was a play about race. When I do plays about race, I try to be extraordinarily sensitive to those issues.”
Carlos Acosta Retires From The Royal Ballet – But What’s Next?
The 42-year-old dancer, who is heading back to Cuba to run a dance school there: “Allow yourself to make mistakes. There is no such thing as failure because life is a learning process. … Be curious and enjoy, enjoy enjoy because one day you will blink and realise that 70 years have gone by.”
When The Only Visibility For Actors Of Color Means Characters Who Suffer
“Actors of color who already have visibility in the mainstream want to maintain their platform. For Hollywood, these select few become representatives for diversity; they are able to play lead roles outside the usual tropes for people of color, while the rest as Viola Davis pointed out on Oprah’s Next Chapter, are on “crisis mode” competing over a “piece of cheese.” Competition is the implicit consequence of the narrow and reductive roles available. What choice do actors of color have except to play the game and start running for a seat?”
How To Keep Yourself Humble When You’re One Of The Greats Of Jazz
“Take off all your awards. Go on the stage naked. Or your pajamas. And go out there and do what you can do to inspire something greater than yourself.”
English As A Language Is Super Weird, And We Just Need To Accept That
“Even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels ‘normal’ only until you get a sense of what normal really is.”
Can Architecture Help Heal The Rift Between Police And African American Communities?
“The police station Gang envisions would be more like a town center than a fortress. A gym, open to the public as well as the police, would rise across the street. Cops, teachers and firefighters would live in nearby housing. Some of the parking lots around the station would be transformed into parks. The idea is to have police rub shoulders with residents, building bonds of trust.”
How The Artistic Director Of The Toronto International Film Festival Moved Toward Art
“The art world at that time, for better or worse, was full of these people who had these long treatises on their work. I think the art world has changed a little bit since then – there’s been a return to more direct practice and less thinking through the art before you make the art. But when I was coming up, it was all about the ideas, and the ideas I was familiar with were from literature and film.”
Stand Aside, ‘Jane Eyre’ – New, Unpublished Charlotte Brontë Works Discovered
“Both the poem and the prose piece deal with characters from Angria, a fictional kingdom that Charlotte created with her brother Branwell, and wrote about in several stories, some of which were originally scrawled in small handmade books.”
What’s Under Malevich’s Black Square?
Examinations with a microscope reveal a racist joke.
Sotheby’s Offers Staff Buyouts
The auction house’s stock price has been steadily declining over the last six months. On Monday the company released its third-quarter results, showing that commissions from Sotheby’s auction sales during the period were $56 million, a decrease of 12 percent from the same period in 2014.
The World’s Most Musical Languages
“Tone languages are spoken all over the world, but they tend to cluster in three places: East and Southeast Asia; sub-Saharan Africa; and among the indigenous communities of Mexico. Why there and not elsewhere?”
Micro-complaining My Way Into Unhappiness
It was once considered unbecoming, or annoying itself, to moan publicly about trifling personal ordeals. Now, in a seismic shift for the moral culture, abetted by technology, we tolerate and even encourage the “microcomplaint”: the petty, petulant kvetch about the quotidian.
Strike At La Scala
“The theatre in Milan had been due to present Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon”, the tragic tale of an avaricious courtesan, but one union decided to walk out, leaving the theatre without enough staff to secure the stage for the dancers.”