Maria Dahvana Headley, whose Mere Wife and new translation of Beowulf have electrified readers (and listeners) on a teenage inspiration: "I happened upon The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, who was a surrealist painter and writer. ... I didn’t really know anything about surrealists then. The novel is full of wild characters that are very elderly women. It’s also...
Silver had to forge her own way in the 1970s and 1980s, including with her first feature, Hester Street. "The 1975 independent film ... was the story of a Jewish immigrant couple in the 1890s. The low-budget black and white film, in Yiddish with English subtitles, proved a hard sell to studios." But it won rave reviews, made money,...
As regular ArtsJournal readers have probably noticed, brutalist buildings are at risk all over the world. But basically, in the north of England, brutalist architecture has met a deliberate lack of maintenance, and so "a mix of mismanagement and a general undervaluing of brutalism was leading to unnecessary demolition." - The Guardian (UK)
Maldonado's family moved from Puerto Rico to New Jersey and then to the Bronx when he was a teenager. "The experience left him with a sense of displacement that would be the driving theme of his art and make him a quintessential 'Nuyorican' — one who straddles New York and Puerto Rico and feels entirely at home in neither."...
Kyle Cassidy uploaded a photo of Peter Sagal in 2013 to Wikimedia Commons, with the subject's permission, the correct attribution, and the correct info about what kind of camera he used. Years later, things got weird. With a little digging, he (and Wikimedia Commons) discovered that the weirdness was part of a widespread massive linkbait scam. - Hyperallergic
Step one is to fight against 1980s racist tropes. Tamlyn Tomita: "I said I would love to, this would be so fun, but the only caveat is that because I’m older, because I’m a little bit more knowledgeable and I’m going to fight for it anyway — I need to be able to inject a truer picture of Okinawa."...
Pam Jenoff - you may know her from The Diplomat's Wife, The Lost Girls of Paris, and many other novels - started taking writing classes just as soon as she began practicing law. "She has learned to be a tireless reviser — a skill acquired in the legal world, where 'people are always marking up your work.' She says,...
That is, their business muscles. They became bakers, started resource centers, trained non-dancers, and gotten into fashion - among many, many other second, third, fourth, and fifth jobs in 2020. - Dance Magazine
Is it too little, too late? "Unlike other business sectors that have been hit hard by the coronavirus, performance centres are in a uniquely challenged position due to thin profit margins that rely on large audiences." - BBC
The headlines say it's a record, but is 16 percent something to brag about? Hollywood thinks maybe. (It's certainly a better record than 2018's 4 percent. Four.) - Variety
The anthem - which replaced "God Save the Queen" only in 1984, though it had been written in the late 19th century - previously had a tweak from "Australia's sons" to "Australians all," and now it's from "young and free" to "one and free" - including the peoples who have been on the continent for 60,000 years. - The...
Positive cases have been identified - in one case described as a cluster of infections - in several of the studios where production won't return for an extra week or two. - Los Angeles Times
As with every other kind of theatre, Jewish theaters and playwrights, actors and tech people, had a lot to figure out. The Jewish Playwriting Contest completely reimagined what it was asking, and to whom it was advertising - and got a huge bump in engagement. "It actually ended up being a really successful year for us." - Forward
A lot happened to the moviemaking business in 2020, but not a lot of it by choice. "Since March, the industry has, in effect, attempted to defibrillate its own heart attack while also reattaching its severed limbs and recover from a grand mal seizure, all at the same time. We’re lucky to have Croods 2." Yikes. (And here's a list...
Bolling's fusion of jazz and classical made him the most popular pianist, composer, and bandleader in Europe for a time. "A devotee since childhood of Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and other eminences of American jazz, Mr. Bolling grew up listening to their music on the radio until World War II intervened. 'Jazz was all but banned by the Nazis...
