"Heading into 2024, one of the most noticeable things about the ties that unite the live theater-scape, from the Great White Way through to touring houses around the country, is how it is happily riddled with all that is Stephen Sondheim." - The Smart Set
Wow: "U.S. politicians have called for new laws to criminalise the creation of deepfake images, after explicit faked photos of Taylor Swift were viewed millions of times online." - BBC
Hollywood, of course. But also, an understanding of the supernatural: "In L.A., bizarre gods have tended to operate more in realms of grand fantasy. It's not the power of specific individuals that need scare us but power, period." - MSN (Los Angeles Times)
Basically, indies. (And, don't tell the Oscars of 2025, but a lot of women directors crushed it at Sundance too.) In the Summers, the movie that won the top dramatic prize, "snuck up on us," wrote the jury. - The New York Times
It's not just TikTok - "The average song length peaked at 4 minutes 21 seconds in 1992," or about 30 years before TikTok came on the scene, but now, a need for quick-engagement dances and memes means the average song length is plunging again. - Washington Post
"Why would you scrap a movie that is all but finished before anyone except studio suits have had a chance to see it? The answer, for Hollywood bigwigs, is a tax write-off." - The Guardian (UK)
The show was focused on the legacy of Michael Fried's 1965 show Three American Painters. The new show, Three American Painters: Then and Now, was conceived and organized by SBMA’s former Deputy Director and Chief Curator Eik Kahng." Now show, and curator, are gone. - Hyperallergic
Peck isn't giving up the stage at City Ballet; indeed, she wore pointe shoes as she choreographed her new work. "If they tell me that something I want them to do can’t happen, I can be like, Actually, it can!" - The New York Times
In LAX's Orchestrina, "he light dims to a soothing cerulean. Swells of ambient music rise to meet passengers as the moving sidewalk whisks them through the terminal. Along the way, the music shifts between 30 compositions written in a single key (C major)." - Los Angeles Times
Even now, after mask and vaccine card protocols have abated, most theatergoers rely upon proof of purchase displayed on a screen. Will call is increasingly the domain of blue-hairs; the young and tech-savvy use apps like SeatGeek and TodayTix. - Public Books
A generation ago, this kind of laziness didn’t exist in the music business. Before streaming, everybody in the value chain needed new music. The record stores would go broke if people just listened to the old songs over and over. -
Gen Z seems to love public libraries. A November report from the American Library Association (ALA) drawing from ethnographic research and a 2022 survey found that gen Z and millennials are using public libraries, both in person and digitally, at higher rates than older generations. - The Guardian
Over the last three decades, a number of French movies have earned Oscar recognition, but none have been the official French Oscar submission. - Variety
Teaching a subject is important; it is also in a sense incidental. The classroom is, first and foremost, a place to train young minds toward a yearning for knowledge and a taste for argument — to be intellectually curious — even if what they wind up discovering challenges their most cherished convictions. - The New York Times
