I’ve more or less resumed my normal performance-going ways, meaning that it’s been awhile since I’ve had time to put together a link-intensive post. Sorry about that! Here are some of the things bouncing around the blogosphere that have caught my eye:
– Modern Art Notes offers wicked speculations on the effects of last week’s West Coast power failure on the Monets currently hanging at Las Vegas’ Bellagio Casino and Gallery of Fine Art Borrowed from Greedy East Coast Museums:
Among the reasons that accredited museums should not be sending their art to non-accredited spaces is the lack of climate control systems in those non-accredited spaces. Why something like this might happen: The power in the entire Bellagio complex might go out, leaving the MFA Boston’s Monet’s to cook in the Vegas heat. That would never happen, would it? Oh, but it has….
– Household Opera lists fourteen things she’d rather do than grade papers:
1. Clean the refrigerator.
2. Go to the nearest big grocery store, which is two or three miles away. On foot. (Actually, it’s a nice energetic 45-minute hike if the weather is good and I’m in the mood for exercise, which I was yesterday. And I take the bus home, because another 45-minute hike with groceries is too much. But still.)
3. Visit my local knitting store and fondle every type of yarn in succession — though, to be fair, I do that on non-grading weekends as well….
14. If it comes down to it, chew off my right arm so I’ll have an excuse for not writing any more comments.
Writers will sympathize. Especially this one.
– Critical Mass links to David Mamet’s reflections on the new London production of Oleanna:
The play’s first audience was a group of undergraduates from Brown University. They came to a dress rehearsal. The play ended and I asked the folks what they thought. “Don’t you think it’s politically questionable,” one said, “to have the girl make a false accusation of rape?”
I, in my ignorance, was stunned. I didn’t realise it was my job to be politically acceptable. I’d always thought society employed me to be dramatic; further, I wondered what force had so perverted the young that they would think that increasing political enfranchisement of a group rendered a member of that group incapable of error – in effect, rendered her other-than-human….
To which Critical Mass responds:
What Mamet wasn’t around to see: Brown’s own real life staging of an Oleanna-esque tragedy-cum-farce just four years later….Mamet’s play may not have been PC–but in telling the truth as he saw it, and in concentrating on producing powerful drama rather than on driving home a political message, Mamet managed to be quite prescient indeed about what kinds of procedural and personal horror lie latent in the seemingly innocuous question, “Don’t you think it’s politically questionable … to have the girl make a false accusation of rape?”
What they said.
– Cup of Chicha raids the commonplace book she kept as a teenager, with rich rewards, followed by another posting in which she serves up some of her favorite sentences from novels.
The Man With the Almanac has his eye on you, Chicha.
– SlowLearner on gigaplexes for live theater:
I remember when George Lucas was suggesting in interviews that huge twenty-screen multi-plexes would actually be a good thing because the exhibitors would have to fill some of those screens with artier or foreign films. I thought this was a pretty stupid thing to say, as I regularly passed theaters with Gone In 60 Seconds on nine screens or whatever, but in the five years since then, at least in New York, Lucas’s prediction has been coming true. They can’t fill all those screens with Hollywood product, so I keep finding myself watching The Barbarian Invasions or something at the AMC 25 on 42nd Street, of all places.
I bring it up because…what if something similar, on a smaller scale, could work in regional theater. Maybe no one wants to buy complete subsription packages anymore. Maybe no one wants to leave the house to see a play by someone they’ve never heard of. Fine. But maybe if that unknown play was playing across the hall, or just down the stairs from where the umpteenth Dancing At Lughnasa is playing, and maybe if the crowds for each mingle a little bit after their shows…maybe a little bit of curiosity is aroused out of sheer proximity. As long as I’m here–what’s the thing in the little theater about anyway?…
– …something slant discovers that Brits and Yanks don’t punctuate the same way:
I didn’t even know that the rules were different until I was in grad school, and then, well, it was too late. [In undergrad I would consult the copy of whatever novel I was writing about (Austen, Woolf, Forster, Byatt) to refresh my memory about the “proper” rules and then despaired when I got them all wrong. So much for that.] For the record the punctuation goes inside the quotation marks if you’re using US rules, outside if you’re using British. Frankly, the British rules make more sense….
– From the Detroit News, yet another installment of Calling All Line Editors, or, Columns We Never Finished Reading:
I would not normally pick up a book written by a politician whose positions I don’t necessarily ascribe to….
– Reflections in D Minor wonders why Sir Malcolm Arnold’s Ninth Symphony, composed in 1992, “is not considered one of the greatest symphonies of all time.” So do I. (I also rank it with Sibelius’ Fourth and Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphonies as one of the saddest symphonies of all time.)
– Instapundit wins the Alexander Pope “But Ne’er So Well Expressed” Prize for Pithiest Sentence Blogged in the Month of April:
George Washington is an icon, and like most icons, he has attracted attention mostly from iconoclasts.
– Johnny Apple has been eating hot dogs in Chicago on the New York Times‘ tab:
But no place else this side of Frankfurt has a frankfurter stand every three or four blocks, as Chicago does. And no other place anywhere has a catechism of condiments as rigorously defined as Chicago’s. A proper Chicago hot dog must be served on a warmed poppy-seed bun (preferably from Rosen’s bakery). It must be dressed with a crisp pickle spear, a sweetish fluorescent green relish, a slice or wedge of raw tomato, some chopped onions (or very occasionally grilled onions), a dab or two of yellow mustard, a dusting of celery salt and two or three hot little green chilies, which Chicagoans for some reason always call sport peppers….
Memo to OGIC: discuss. Memo to self: I want this man’s job.
– Finally, Return of the Reluctant pays a visit to Fantasy Island, inspired by a Washington Post story about “turf wars” and “low-level spats” in the blogosphere:
NEW YORK (AP): Lit blogger Edward Champion was announced as Maud Newton’s bitch last night. Mr. Champion, who lost his right to blog about literature shortly after being beaten to a pulp by Ron Hogan in a backalley brawl last April, had long been targeted by the Final Three: Sarah Weinman, Jessa Crispin and Newton.
Mr. Champion’s hair has been shaven off and his limbs have been replaced by QWERTY keyboards connected to Google News. Newton and her gang plan to use Mr. Champion as either a modular bookshelf or a footstool….
Don’t get your hopes up, Ed. Supermaud can rest her feet on my forehead any old time.