Some things have changed. But the news affiliates? Oof. The details of CBS Television Stations President Peter Dunn's racism - saying of an anchor, "He’s not doing that ‘jive talking’ anymore? Sometimes, he’s just not speaking my language," for instance - and sexism are damning. - Los Angeles Times
The designer of the exhibit: "Duke Kahanamoku, on a wooden board with no fins, surfed a wave that was over 25 feet tall on its face. And he surfed it for over a mile. And we wanted to have the audience experience that moment. So we built a 27-foot tall wave and put a replica of Duke's board in...
Online drawing classes are, for many people in lockdown in Britain, a lifeline to the outside world. And there's a plus: "Individual sessions can attract hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people, and moving everything online has made life drawing more accessible to a diverse crowd." - The Observer (UK)
Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero, who directed and wrote the new film Identifying Features, "don’t believe Mexican storytellers have the luxury of creating apolitically. Not at a moment in history when thousands disappear or are murdered as a consequence of drug-related violence and the widespread state complicity that enables it. Neither of them set out to make movies with...
Because we can't trust the art world to the elites. For instance, in recent years, "Major art collectors (mostly white) were benefitting from the Trump deregulation and tax cuts, while investing some of their surplus wealth into the rebranding opportunity offered by the anti-Trump resistance. They could literally turn a profit on fulfilling the activist demand." - Hyperallergic
It's an urgent question for many in lockdown - and in the UK, "whether we are in lockdown or not, four fifths of the UK population lives in an urban environment and one in eight homes do not have a garden."- BBC
For white Southern writers, especially, "the deconstruction and demolition of so many of the myths about Southern culture and identity has been ongoing in literature for a long time but seems to have accelerated at a stunning rate in the past four years, and especially at the start of this year. The combined effects of these historic circumstances are...
Bernstein's "career as a top film and television screenwriter was derailed by the McCarthy-era blacklist, and decades later turned that experience into one of his best-known films, The Front." - The New York Times
Lee's speech for the New York Film Critics Circle Awards was filmed on January 6 - the day when insurrectionists broke into the U.S. Capitol Building, hunting legislators and raiding offices. "We’re at the crossroads now. And everyone please be safe, this is not a game. These people have guns with ammunition. ... This president, President Agent Orange, will go...
Director Tabitha Jackson was lucky in 2020 - her hiring was big news at last year's Sundance Film Festival. Then, of course, a global pandemic hit. "To say her inaugural year heading the most influential film festival in America was rife with unpredictable challenges is an understatement." - Los Angeles Times
Mance was "a buoyant, bluesy jazz pianist who worked with some of the biggest names in jazz, including Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley and Dinah Washington, before establishing himself as the leader of his own groups." - The New York Times
And what Emerald Fennell delivers - which is something different - in Promising Young Woman. "How do you write a revenge movie that feels like something real and that is based in real trauma and grief? Because I suppose the other thing with the revenge that we don’t talk about very much is revenge and vengeance aren’t good...
The chair, Pam Rorke Levy, says that despite controversy over the attempted sale of a Diego Rivera mural, among other things, "she has acted to save the school and that she was taking necessary steps in keeping one of the last remaining colleges on the West Coast exclusively dedicated to contemporary art in operation." - The New York Times
And, because of social media and marketing, it's making a serious comeback. The projects "are magnified again by technology, by the software that enables architects to visualise complex shapes and engineers to calculate them, by the photorealistic visualisation techniques that make a project seem physical before it is, by the construction techniques that turn these shapes into reality and,...
Michelle Burford has co-written, or really, written after many hours of absorbing interviews, quite a few celebrity memoirs. She calls herself a "story architect," and her name appears on the covers of the memoirs alongside the famous counterparts. But as a Black woman, she has to tell publishers not only to think of her for Black women's memoirs: "I’ve...
