The new director of Long Beach Opera talks about making more with less. "There are people who are really comfortable with being very elite and exclusive and get wrapped up in the cachet of it all — the red carpets and the evening wear. I don’t think that’s helping sustain the art form. It alienates younger generations who don’t...
Mars House—which is staged on Mars in the promotional video—was designed in May 2020 using what is called “Meditative Design” principles. Jeff Schroeder, guitarist for The Smashing Pumpkins, partnered with Krista Kim to provide a prog-rock-inspired and suitably space-y accompanying soundtrack. - The Architect's Newspaper
"We experience art as a repository of our humanity, a representation that tries to capture the meaning we seek in our lives. Treating art as a means to an end feels degrading, like reducing the worth of a service worker to the service she performs. The best self-improvement scheme I can think of is to prove ourselves better than...
Despite the fact that they can sometimes feel like (as one literary manager put it) "the Hunger Games of playwriting," prizes do help bring new voices into an industry that can be very much a closed shop. Lyn Gardner talks to people who run competitions, and people who've entered them, about the difference prizes make and the issues involved...
"She was brilliant, funny, warm, and sometimes quite daunting. I have a memory of Mark Lamos and John Conklin hiding from her at one point during the endless tech for the six-hour Peer Gynt – lest she unleash her wrath upon them." - Live Design
The van Eyck masterpiece is the most stolen individual artwork we know of (one panel is still missing after 87 years), and its Flemish custodians have given it a €5 million, 20-feet-tall, meticulously climate-controlled, bulletproof display case as part of a €30 million installation at St. Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent. - The Guardian
Sure, audacious goals can be energizing. But a fixation on them can lead to big disappointments. Worse, when your eyes are constantly on the horizon, you can miss what is right in front of you. For happiness, we need a better approach to setting goals—one that sets us up for success in life and lets us enjoy the here...
"Even in the world of podcasting, Google Podcasts … stands alone among major platforms in its tolerance of hate speech and other extremist content. A recent nonexhaustive search turned up more than two dozen podcasts from white supremacists and pro-Nazi groups, offering a buffet of slurs and conspiracy theories. None of the podcasts appeared on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or...
Producers and engineers have come to rely on specialized apps, and they’ve developed workarounds for the shortcomings of Zoom’s recording functions, among other solutions. - Current
"Over more than five decades, Mr. McMurtry wrote more than 30 novels and many books of essays, memoir and history. He also wrote more than 30 screenplays, including the one for Brokeback Mountain … for which he won an Academy Award in 2006." But he was best known for three novels which were adapted for the screen: The...
The Music Center in downtown Los Angeles says that it is the first performing arts organization in the country to receive a UL “healthy building” verification, representing high standards for air quality at four venues — Walt Disney Concert Hall, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson Theatre. - Los Angeles Times
Don't worry: so far, there's no evidence that they're forgeries. But "the editors of a scholarly volume in which the circumstances of the discovery were detailed have formally retracted the chapter because the manuscript's 'provenance is tainted'" — which is to say, the story told to researchers by the current owner of the manuscripts of how he acquired them...
Timothy Jones's completion of several fragmentary violin-piano sonatas by Mozart "is unusual, though, in its choose-your-own-adventure approach. Jones, testing different aspects of Mozartian style, made multiple completions of each fragment, and the album includes some of that variety, giving a heady sense of how open-ended creative production is." - The New York Times
"More than 100 San Francisco artists will be guaranteed $1,000 a month for six months under a pilot program set to launch in May, following similar efforts by Stockton, Oakland and Marin County to support struggling residents during the pandemic." - San Francisco Chronicle
"The filmmaker, cineaste and critic who emerged in the wake of the French New Wave with such classics as The Clockmaker of St. Paul, A Sunday in the Country and 'Round Midnight, … five-time César Award winner (two prizes for directing, three for screenwriting) … was accomplished in a wide variety of genres and epochs, from gritty crime...
