Archaeologist Timothy Darville: “Much of [the heated debate over the project] has been fuelled by negative publicity and misunderstandings about the processes by which archaeological concerns feed into planning and delivering development. But I want to offer a rather different perspective, and argue that this is the most ambitious conservation project ever undertaken to protect and enhance Britain’s archaeological heritage.” – Apollo
Jazz Drummer And Bandleader Ralph Peterson Jr., 58
“The sheer, onrushing force of Peterson’s beat, paired with his alert ear and agile dynamism, made him one of the standout jazz musicians to emerge in the 1980s. Part of a striving peer group known as the Young Lions, which coalesced around the resurgence of acoustic hard bop, he distinguished himself early on as a powerful steward of that tradition.” – WBGO (Newark, NJ)
Study: Yes, People Really Don’t Know When To Shut Up!
“Only 2 percent of conversations ended at the time both parties desired, and only 30 percent of them finished when one of the pair wanted them to. In about half of the conversations, both people wanted to talk less, but their cutoff point was usually different. Participants in both studies reported, on average, that the desired length of their conversation was about half of its actual length.” – Scientific American
Battleground Over Truth (Whatever That Is)
“A striking feature of our current political landscape is that we disagree not just over values (which is healthy in a democracy), and not just over facts (which is inevitable), but over our very standards for determining what the facts are. Call this knowledge polarization, or polarization over who knows—which experts to trust, and what is rational and what isn’t.” – Boston Review
Explaining Taylor Swift Musicologically (It’s Cool!)
Alex Ross: “Music appreciation is having a resurgence, although the music being appreciated has changed. Early in the twenty-tens, song-explainer videos began proliferating on the Internet. When podcasts took off, dissections of the innards of pop hits were in demand. Now TikTok has its own pithy army of music theorists. I occasionally checked up on the trend, usually when musicologists became incensed about something on social media.” – The New Yorker
Alt-Weeklies Looked Doomed Even Before The Pandemic. Here’s How Some Of Them Have Hung On
The structural troubles those papers were facing before 2020 were bad enough; then COVID shut down their main sources of ad revenue (performance venues, bars and clubs, restaurants). “[Yet] there are many that, against all odds, have survived. In true alt-weekly edge, it’s a stubborn, punk refusal to let go. Here are four of their stories.” – The Daily Beast
How Weird Are This Season’s Tony Awards Going To Be?
Weirder than ever before, no doubt. As the voters fill out their ballots this week and next, none of the shows they’re considering have been onstage for a year, and they can’t vote in a given category unless they’ve seen all the nominees. What’s more, one of the major awards has only one nominee, but it’s still possible for him to lose. – The New York Times
The Virtue Of Ethics
“Until quite recently there was a concern that ethical relativism had become the dominant cultural assumption, which meant that ethics was all just a matter of opinion, every view was ‘equally valid’ with no objective standard. We seem now to have been catapulted to the other extreme. Ethical positions are often held with a fervent certainty that would embarrass a medieval monk.” – 3 Quarks Daily
So Who Made Pantone The Boss Of Colors Anyway?
Pantone started out, under another name, as a printing company, and one of its employees, Larry Herbert, got tired of trying to figure out exactly what hue his clients meant when they said things like “I want kind of a wine red” or “Sort of like a sky blue, but darker.” He was the one who realized that the printing industry — and, ultimately, the rest of the design world — needed a standardized color reference, and he created one; now its descendants are used the world over. (How Pantone got to be the one to name a “Color of the Year” is a different, more irksome story.) – Slate
Ice Music: Performing Pieces On, And For, Literally Frozen Instruments
“Carved instruments can be either completely made of ice, such as horns and percussion, or hybrids, like harps, in which the main body is ice with metal strings attached. … By studying and intricately blending materials — such as homemade clear ice and carbonated water, plus crushed mountain snow — [a master crafter] can make instruments like violins and tune them as close to perfect as nature allows.” And once the performance begins? “Ice is always in motion; expanding, contracting and sublimating away into the atmosphere. Warm bodies melt instruments. Audiences increase temperatures because they are breathing. Instruments need to be re-tuned differently. Some drop several notes, others rise.” – National Geographic
Mausoleum Of Emperor Augustus, Long Neglected, Now Restored and Reopening
“Still imposing after 2,000 years, a vast funerary monument that was once the resting place of Rome’s emperors is to reopen to visitors on Tuesday after a [five-year,] €12 million restoration. … It is a place that, despite being right in the heart of the capital and just a stone’s throw from busy shopping streets, restaurants and hotels, has rarely been open to Romans during the last 80 years.” – Yahoo! (The Telegraph, UK)
Bookshop.com Generates £1 Million For Indie UK Bookstores
Bookshop.org was launched in the US a year ago and in the UK in November. Pitching itself as a socially conscious way to buy books online, it allows booksellers to create a virtual shop front. For books ordered directly from these online stores, booksellers receive 30% of the cover price from each sale without having to handle customer service or shipping. When a sale is made and not attributed to a specific bookseller, 10% of the cover price goes into a pot that is split between all of the shops. – The Guardian
Survey: When Theatre-Goers Will Be Ready To Return To Theatres
With the disclaimer that this wave of the research reflects current expectations about the pandemic, based on anxieties about vaccine distribution and the spread of COVID variants, and that theatregoers may adjust attitudes if they see prospects improve, the findings are unavoidably bleak for theatres. – American Theatre
Moving Berlinale Film Festival Is An Economic Blow To Berlin
“Our entire industry is in the worst crisis since World War II,” says Thomas Lengfelder, chief executive of the Berlin Hotel and Restaurant Assn. (DEHOGA Berlin). “Even today, there is still no telling where the pandemic will lead us. Unfortunately, political leaders are still not giving us any prospects.” – Variety
What’s Anthony Hopkins’s Secret? ‘No Acting Required’
“If you follow a superb screenplay, the language is a road map, and so you don’t have to act.. … When you learn that language you pack that into the suitcase of your brain, and those words inform your body. They move you around the set. … It’s there for you, all written down. But we tend to make mincemeat of it by wondering what it all means.” – The New Yorker
Has COVID Shutdown Made Dancers More Adaptable?
“I am hopeful that we will see a generation that has built a confidence and competence of cognitive flexibility. That is the ability to shift how one thinks about things, and use their own internal and external resources to figure out a solution to an otherwise difficult problem.” – Dance Magazine
A Little Island Grows Off Manhattan
Little Island completes the transformation of the Meatpacking District, where for decades freight cars delivered animals to slaughterhouses that lined and bloodied the nearby blocks. Now it’s a high-end neighborhood of sleek apartment towers, unaffordable art galleries and fashion retail. The long-abandoned freight viaduct has become the iconic High Line park, while the Whitney Museum of American Art sits just to the south, nudging its grey-metal prow toward the river along Gansevoort Street. – Aerate
Reviewing The First Play Written By An Artificial Intelligence Bot
“The biggest revelation, though, is that while a computer’s imagination touches, somewhat randomly, on themes of love, loneliness, clowning and performance, it is most often obsessing about sex, which may not be surprising, given the prevalence of internet pornography.” – The Guardian
How To Reopen Theatres Safely? Artists Turn To Global Network
The protocols these countries have developed the past year to permit some live performances depend greatly on the magnitude of the pandemic and the efforts by government to contain it. South Korea, for example, has operated some theater almost completely uninterrupted since the coronavirus manifested itself, and Australia has been inching back to widespread theater openings since the fall. American arts workers and theatergoers alike are entitled to ask: Why not us, too? – Washington Post
Glimmerglass Opera Festival To Build Outdoor Stage For 2021
The opera festival in Cooperstown, New York, directed by Francesca Zambello, will offer — in “the most ventilated area we could find” — 90-minute abridgements of Il trovatore, The Magic Flute, and La Périchole as well as a Wagner concert program featuring bass Eric Owens, an evening of musical theater hits, and world premieres of a new dance work, a one-act opera about US military spouses, and a play (starring Denyce Graves) about America’s first all-Black opera company. – The New York Times
Stratford Festival Will Open This Summer, But With A Short Season Held In Tents
In a regular year, it’s North America’s largest summer theatre festival, but with the pandemic only barely starting to subside, Stratford is planning to present just a dozen or so performances, each featuring no more than eight cast members and running about 90 minutes, on two stages under large canopies outside their theatres in central Ontario. – Global News (Canada)
Pandemic Polemics: Metropolitan Museum’s Off-Key NPR Message vs. Cleveland’s Harmonious Storage Show
The Met’s premature revelation that it might take advantage of the AAMD’s relaxed deaccession standards, selling art to pay for “care of the collection,” was an object lesson in how not to roll out a controversial, temporary policy change. A palate-cleansing corrective to that unappetizing situation can be found in Stories from Storage, a current show at the Cleveland Museum of Art. – Lee Rosenbaum
What The Writers Guild Learned From Its Fight With The Agencies
For one thing, it’s OK to fight. Writers are also seeing back pay come in – and letting the union win it for them instead of fighting alone. And then there’s at least one intangible: “I have seen … an improvement in terms of how a writer looks at themselves and their value next to their representatives, that the representatives work for them.”- Los Angeles Times
Off With All Our Heads – The Online World Loves To Misquote Lewis Carroll
But why? Alison Flood investigates why Britain’s Royal Mint and an actual Carroll commemorative collection have been getting quotes wrong … and then printing them on coinage. Cue the facepalm emoji: Turns out it’s all the fault of Goodreads. – The Guardian (UK)