The verses, typically four lines long and metrical, are called daina. Thanks to an effort to transcribe them in the 19th and 20th centuries, there are now about a million of them collected at the national library in Riga. "Aficionados say this canon of folk poems is as significant as any body of classical literature. … For the past...
"In 2008, the AAM admirably pledged to fight the trade in looted antiquities by passing a set of guidelines for its member institutions that own or acquire archeological material and ancient art. We recently put AAM member museums to the test to see whether they were actually complying with these guidelines. What we found is gravely concerning, not just...
"In much of the dance world, the process of becoming successful as a choreographer can seem frustratingly oblique. On Broadway, however, that path is surprisingly linear and well defined. Most people end up following a sequence of positions that includes becoming dance captain of a show, then assistant choreographer, then associate choreographer and, finally, main choreographer. What boosts you...
“Right now, a streamed concert that sells well will just about cover the cost, and we have to proof every second of the video. Even once live performances come back, I highly doubt we could offer livestreams because of our small staff.” - Chicago Tribune
"When I wrote this book I could associate big-nosed Saleem with the elephant-trunked god Ganesh, the patron deity of literature, among other things, and that felt perfectly easy and natural even though Saleem was not a Hindu. All of India belonged to all of us, or so I deeply believed. And still believe, even though the rise of a...
"While a copyright dispute about computer code might not seem like a subject of particular consequence for them, an opinion from Justice Stephen Breyer concluding that Google made fair use of copyrighted material will very likely be discussed for quite some time and be invoked in other contexts. As such, a few lines in particular from today's opinion regarding...
"Crowds gathered on Saturday to witness the multimillion-dollar spectacle of 18 kings and four queens making the 7km journey (four miles) from the Egyptian Museum in central Cairo's Tahrir Square to … their new home in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation." - Al Jazeera
"With concerts in the hall canceled since March 2020, construction began in earnest over the past few months. Work is expected to continue for the next year and a half, with a reopening planned for fall 2022, the orchestra and center announced on Monday. That is a year and a half ahead of schedule." - The New York Times
"The producers of The Shape of Water will no longer have to contend with a copyright lawsuit that claims that Oscar-winning Guillermo del Toro film infringed the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Zindel. On Friday, Disney's Fox units, Guillermo del Toro and other defendants filed court papers indicating that the parties in the litigation had reached an agreement...
"The Kimmel Center is instituting a mandatory $1,000 donation for access to the best seats in its Broadway series. That's $1,000 up front, before the cost of the tickets themselves. The new policy goes into effect now for new subscribers and in the 2022-23 season for existing ones." - The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Like budding flowers awakening just in time for spring, music, dance, theater and comedy began a cautious return this past week as venues were allowed to reopen with limited capacity — in most cases, for the first time since March 2020. … Reporters from The New York Times visited some of the first indoor performances, and spoke with the...
There will be 80 events spread across four stages, three of them outdoors and two of those newly-constructed. (The old Dock Street Theater, site of the popular noontime chamber music concerts, will be this year's sole indoor venue.) Capacity will be about one-quarter that of a normal year. - Charleston City Paper
According to Nielsen, through Feb. 28, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and the CW, on average, showed a loss of 23 per cent from the comparable period a year ago. Slippage among Americans 18 to 49 was down by the same margin. - Toronto Star
Lawrence Venuti’s watershed book, The Translator’s Invisibility (1995), argued that the practice of ignoring the identity of the translator, to the point of being in denial that a work was even a translation at all, was part of an unhelpful hierarchical mindset that erroneously attributed absolute value to the original, ignoring the fact that each new translation was itself...
Let’s talk about the Burns Method: the frowning pan across the blotchy manuscript page, the dreamy plunge into the old photograph, the smatters of ambient sound, the talking head who is not so much a talking head as a deeply invested witness. How do you dramatize the interior life? How do you dramatize writing? If you’re Ken Burns, by...
