“YInMn Blue, the brilliant pigment discovered in 2009 at an Oregon State University lab, … was finally approved by the EPA for use in artists’ materials last May. Chemist Mas Subramanian and his team serendipitously came upon it while conducting experiments with rare earth elements as part of their work with semiconductors.” – Artnet
Helga Weyhe, Germany’s Oldest Bookseller, 98
The store, which has endured through the creation of Germany, two world wars, Communism, and reunification, not to mention Amazon, was a family affair. “Weyhe was a lifeline of sorts to her customers. She traveled far and wide after East Germans were generally allowed to leave for tourism, bringing back her infectious enthusiasm for the outside world. ‘She brought a little bit of the world to Salzwedel,’ Ms. Lemm said.” – The New York Times
The Gatsby Glut
Hurrah for copyright expiration: There are many new editions, with introductions and critical essays by voices that haven’t been heard enough in the American canon. Then there are the graphic novels, editions with lavish new art, a novel about Nick Carraway’s life before Jay Gatsby, The Gay Gatsby (Just how is that different from the original, you may wonder? It’s overt), and, well, vampire Gatsby. We eagerly await the musicals. – The New York Times
Mary Catherine Bateson, Author Of ‘Composing A Life’ And Daughter Of Margaret Mead, 81
Bateson, an anthropologist like her famous parents Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, had a busy and famously documented life. “Still, it wasn’t her babyhood, her lineage or her scholarship — an expert on classical Arabic poetry, she was as polymathic as her mother — that brought Dr. Bateson renown; it was her 1989 book Composing a Life, an examination of the stop-and-start nature of women’s lives and their adaptive responses — ‘life as an improvisatory art,’ as she wrote.” – The New York Times
Unlocking The Technology Of Relationships
What does it look like when a small-scale, long-term community effort in Detroit is connected to a small-scale, long-term community effort in Seattle or Dallas? What is there to learn and exchange in that story being shared? In a national or federal approach to storytelling, you lose so much texture, so much detail, because in an effort to make stories accessible to more people, to build power on a bigger scale, stories get reduced. – Howlround
Brexit Deal Visa Requirements Stymie UK Musicians
As it stands, British musicians may be forced to pay for country-specific visas and equipment carnets when touring the continent – a situation that has been decried by the British music industry as prohibitively expensive and laborious, potentially limiting its £5.8bn contribution to the economy. – The Guardian
Lessons From 40 Years Performing Online
“Everything about the experience of using a computer is still flat, everything uses these windows, but then we also have high-speed processes that allow for these windows to actually be functional.” – Howlround
Ten Takeaways From Variety’s Entertainment Summit
“A common misconception is that niche shows geared toward specific audiences will not fare as well as more universal programs, but Lucinda Martinez, executive vice president of HBO and HBO Max brand marketing, says fan marketing is more focused on quality of connection rather than quantity.” – Variety
Learning How Not To Read Like A Critic
“One of the first lessons you learn in grad school is to hide your personal taste or risk being shamed for liking the wrong sorts of things. Scholars have been conditioned to respond to talk of likes and dislikes with embarrassment, if not outright contempt. The facade of critical detachment may be on the way out, however.” – Public Books
Will Self: How Should We Be Reading?
“There’s always this quality of endeavor about reading—and at the same time, in cognitive terms it’s hard work. When someone reading complex passages of prose—ones, say, that attempt to convey human lives in all their manifold sensuous and intellectual complexity—is placed in a MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner, we can see on the machine’s visual display that almost all of their brain is lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree. Not only that, but the parts of the brain employed when actually talking, walking or making love are illuminated by the very act of reading about talking, walking or making love.” – LitHub
How Paris Theatres Keep Putting On Plays While The Pandemic Has Stopped Public Performances
Shows were running in the French capital for a few months last year, before a big new wave of COVID infections led to a new lockdown and a crop of new productions were going to waste. But not anymore: leave it to Parisians to find an inventive way to break the rules while officially obeying them. – The New York Times
Guggenheim Museum Names Its First Black Deputy Director
Naomi Beckwith, 44, who since 2018 has served as senior curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, will oversee collections, exhibitions, publications, curatorial programs and archives in her new position, which starts in June. She will also provide strategic direction, the museum said. – The New York Times
Do We Want Uplifting Entertainment In These Difficult Times? Not Me!
“The temptation to simplify morality when social injustice is rife is understandable, but reading Dostoevsky makes me impatient with the schematic bent of our age. To be fully human is to acknowledge, as Prospero puts in “The Tempest,” “this thing of darkness” as our own.” – Los Angeles Times
With Michael Apted Gone, Can His ‘Up’ Documentaries Keep Going?
Beginning in 1964 with Seven Up!, Apted made a series of nine films, shot at seven-year-intervals, following the lives of a group of 14 Englishmen and -women from ages 7 through 14, 21, 28, etc. (63 Up was released in 2019.) After his death last week, the 12 remaining subjects and several longtime crew members are considering whether to proceed on to 70 Up, and, if so, how. – The New York Times
Amazon Sued For Colluding With Big Five Publishers In E-Book Price-Fixing
“The suit, filed in the Southern District of New York on January 14 by Seattle-based firm Hagens Berman, … currently names only Amazon as a defendant. However, it labels each of the Big Five publishers — Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin Random House — as ‘“co-conspirators’ in an alleged scheme … to squelch consumer price competition and keep e-book prices artificially high.” – Publishers Weekly
In Ontario, Even Livestreamed Performances Without Audience Are Now Banned
As the number of COVID cases continues to spike, “organizers behind a number of livestreaming concerts and theatre shows in Ontario say the province’s stricter stay-at-home orders have forced them to sideline an array of upcoming virtual events. … The changes come after Premier Doug Ford introduced a new directive which, as of Thursday, requires residents to stay home, unless their activities fall under a list of ‘essential’ reasons.” – Yahoo! (Canadian Press)
This Year’s Kennedy Center Honorees
The Kennedy Center Honors announced today that the lifetime artistic achievement recipients for its 43rd ceremony will be choreographer and actress Debbie Allen; folk singer-songwriter Joan Baez; country singer-songwriter Garth Brooks; violinist Midori; and actor Dick Van Dyke. – New York Magazine
Capitol Offense: Metropolitan Museum Blasts “Domestic Terrorism” by “Treasonous Rioters”
Throwing caution to the winds, the Metropolitan Museum today went beyond the more measured words of a few other museums in its angry call to “bring to justice those responsible” for the “criminal actions” at the Capitol on Jan. 6. – Lee Rosenbaum
Paris Opera Ballet Says It Will Get Rid Of Racial Stereotypes, And Conservatives Flip Out
Talking to Le Monde about diversity, racial equity, and blackface/yellowface in the ballet company, the world’s oldest, new Paris Opera chief Alexander Neef said, “Some works will no doubt disappear from the repertoire.” Critics on the political and cultural right in France immediately attacked the arrival of North American-style “cancel culture”: Marine Le Pen tweeted about “anti-racism gone mad,” and Le Monde‘s editor in chief groused that France is “slowly going down the American road, consisting of the runaway self-censorship of artists and programmers in order to avoid trouble.” – Yahoo! (AFP)