“Mr. Sheehan, the son of impoverished Irish-immigrant dairy farmers, graduated from Harvard University and served in the Army before joining the United Press International wire service. Reporting from Saigon in the early 1960s, he became known as one of the “fearless threesome” of Vietnam War correspondents.” – The New York Times
Record Number Of Women Directors For Big Hollywood Movies In 2020
The yearly Celluloid Ceiling report by San Diego State University found that women accounted for 16 per cent of directors working on the 100 highest-grossing films in 2020, up from 12 per cent in 2019 and only 4 per cent in 2018. – Irish Times
What If We Put Everyone Into A Giant Multi-Billion City?
What Editors Do
Lish’s job on Carver is perhaps too extreme to serve as an example of the role of the editor, but what any kind of boundary breaking always does is to draw attention to the boundary itself—in this case between editor and writer, who together with the text form a kind of Bermuda Triangle within whose force field everything said and done disappears without trace. – Paris Review
Ellen Burstyn On Her Fame (She’s Been *Very* Fortunate)
“It was never really my intention to be a movie star,” says the actress, who’s probably about to get her seventh Oscar nomination at age 88. “I’ve never been one of those celebrities who got chased down the street by shouting throngs. People are always very nice to me. It hasn’t been at all unpleasant.” – The Guardian
How Equitable Pay Leads To Better Theatre
“Since pay equity leads to higher quality work, any company interested in having the best product to share with their community will center pay equity within their company because the benefits to the business are undeniable.” – Howlround
How The UK Art World Will Change Post-Brexit
The symbolic implications of the UK leaving the European Union has hit the art world hard. But the deal will also have a concrete impact on the way the it does business. – Artnet
Could Percussion Ensembles Become The String Quartets Of The 21st Century?
After all, “in 2009, critic Allan Kozinn declared in The New York Times, ‘If you think about it, drums are the new violins,’ pointing out the newfound ubiquity of percussion on new music programs.” And with the 21st-century blossoming of contemporary classical repertoire in the U.S., percussion groups are getting ever more pieces to play and ever more opportunities to play them. Jeremy Reynolds on how and why it’s happening. – San Francisco Classical Voice
MD High Court Rules Rap Lyrics Can Be Used As Evidence Against Defendant
“Three weeks before trial, [defendant Lawrence] Montague used a jailhouse telephone to record a rap verse, which was then uploaded to Instagram. [In court], the State of Maryland introduced the telephone recording of the lyrics as evidence of Montague’s guilt, and [he] was convicted and sentenced to a combined fifty years [on murder charges]. Maryland’s highest court … affirmed [the] conviction, finding that the danger of unfair prejudice posed by the admission of the lyrics does not substantially outweigh the lyrics’ probative value.” – Variety
Parisian Billionaire’s Museum Is, At Last, Ready To Open
“At 84, the billionaire François Pinault will finally realise a 20-year plan to build a private museum for his contemporary art collection in Paris. France’s third-richest man is poised to open the Bourse de Commerce-Pinault Collection just two blocks away from the Musée du Louvre on 23 January — as long as pandemic restrictions allow.” – The Art Newspaper
Orbán Gov’t In Hungary Fans Rightist Backlash Against Black Lives Matter Artwork
“Commentators on pro-government television chatshows threatened to pull the statue down if it was erected, and compared it to putting up a monument to Adolf Hitler. Others laughed that it was an absurdity given there are few black people in Budapest. … Notably, most pro-government coverage neglected to note that the [three-foot-tall] statue will only be a two-week installation, not a permanent addition to the city.” – The Guardian
The Organization Working To Reimagine Public Monuments
The goal is to assess the country’s landscape of public memory in a time when our shared identity as Americans feels strained, if not broken. Then we can begin to understand where we go from here, says Monument Lab cofounder and director Paul Farber. – Philadelphia Inquirer
Ex-Employees Of The California Arts Council Speak Out
“When it comes to the arts program specialists, I and several of my former colleagues found it to be a space that causes fear of retaliation, targeting and silencing, and where leadership lacks accountability.” – Hyperallergic
The Fifteen-Minute City? Sweden Considers The “One-Minute City”
A plan piloted by Swedish national innovation body Vinnova and design think tank ArkDes focuses attention on what Dan Hill, Vinnova’s director of strategic design, calls the “one-minute city.” It’s a order of magnitude smaller than other recent think-local planning conceits. While Paris works with a 15-minute radius and Barcelona’s superblocks with nine-block chunks of the city, Sweden’s project operates at the single street level, paying attention to “the space outside your front door — and that of your neighbors adjacent and opposite,” Hill says. – Bloomberg CityLab
Australian Artists: Why Did The National Government Forget Us?
“For some, state governments stepped up and provided support. But the message to artists from the federal government was: you are not important to the national agenda, and therefore we can –and will – ignore you.” – ArtsHub
Why Doesn’t The Entertainment Biz Give Proper Credit To Its Choreographers?
The Emmys and Tonys give their Best Choreography trophies without the TV cameras running; the Oscars don’t even have a category for dancemakers, and the credits for music videos these days often don’t bother to mention them. With popular TV shows like So You Think You Can Dance making some choreographers famous, it’s time for the rest of the industry to follow suit. – Dance Magazine
Arts Organizations Turn To Stars For Fundraising
The pandemic has forced arts institutions on both sides of the Atlantic to swiftly up their online game. The New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet usually hold a big benefit event and a backstage tour for donors after a Christmas Saturday matinee of The Nutcracker. This time Tiler Peck, principal dancer, gave an online tour instead, while those who had bought tickets watched from home after receiving a package of treats delivered to their doors. – The Guardian
Analyzing The Fallout From The New York Times’s ‘Caliphate’ Podcast
The Peabody- and Pulitzer-winning audio series lost much of its luster (and gave up its awards) when its primary subject was revealed to be a big ol’ liar fabulist. Media columnist Nicholas Quah considers how the flawed material got past editors in the first place, what consequences have been suffered by the main people involved, and the complications the Times has faced in dealing with the matter. – Vulture
What The Reality Of Cows Has To Inform Humans
A cow sporting VR goggles is comedic as much as it is tragic. There’s horror, too, in that it may foretell our own alienated futures. After all, how different is our experience? We submit to emotion trackers. We log into biofeedback machines. We sign up for tracking and tracing. We let advertisers’ eyes watch us constantly and mappers store our coordinates. – The New York Times
A New Print Magazine (!) About Theatre Is Here
“The folks behind Encore Monthly, a brand new magazine about theatre that just published its first issue …, think the time is ripe to provide theatregoers, deprived as we are of theatre we can witness in person, to read about it, and they say they’re equipped to hang on until it comes raging back.” In a Q&A, founding editor-in-chief Robert Viagas talks about what Encore Monthly will focus on and why he thinks it can work. – American Theatre
Michael Bobbitt Is Tired Of Boards. What To Do?
Ugh. In our current structure, boards of directors for nonprofits don’t work. I’m sure there are outliers with highly functioning boards, but this is not the norm. How do we fix this? – American Theatre
How ‘American Dirt’ Went From Hot Title To PR Fiasco And Still Became A Bestseller
Despite the disastrous rollout of a book that had been advance-hyped by some as a Grapes of Wrath-level work of literature, Jeanine Cummins’s thriller about an Acapulco bookseller and her young son on the run from a drug cartel was the top-selling novel for adults of 2020. Here’s a report on how the rise and fall and rise of American Dirt happened: as one employee of the publisher put it, the particular circumstances “allowed for certain things to get out of hand.” – Vulture
Novelist Eric Jerome Dickey Dead At 59
“[He] was an aspiring actor and stand-up comic who began writing fiction in his mid-30s and shaped a witty, conversational and sometimes graphic prose style. It brought him a wide readership through such novels as Sister, Sister and Naughty or Nice and through his Gideon crime fiction series, which included Sleeping With Strangers and Resurrecting Midnight.” – Yahoo! (AP)
Film Version Of ‘Hamilton’ Is Eligible For Golden Globes And SAG Awards But Not Oscars. Here’s Why
Disney bought the rights to the specially shot and edited footage of the Broadway production and planned to release it in movie theaters — until the pandemic changed everything and the show was put on Disney+ instead. That’s similar enough to other movies from 2020 that the Globes consider Hamilton eligible; SAG, oddly, puts it in the TV movie category. The Motion Picture Academy, on the other hand, made a deliberate decision to exclude the project from the Oscars. Reporter Scott Feinberg provides an explainer. – The Hollywood Reporter
To Save Itself, San Francisco Art Institute Might Sell Its Diego Rivera Mural To George Lucas
The long-financially-strapped school — which shut itself down last March, only to reverse that decision a month later after raising $3 million — has one valuable asset other than its campus that it could sell: a piece of meta-art by Rivera depicting workers painting and installing a Diego Rivera mural. And the creator of the Star Wars franchise wants it for his Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. – Artnet