“It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen: 100 rock climbers abseiling down the façade of the Reichstag, slowly unfurling this huge silvery curtain.” While Jeanne-Claude is no longer with us to give her testimony, Christo and project manager Wolfgang Volz give their accounts of Christo’s most successful project before The Gates.
How Anna Nicole Smith Went From Sex Symbol To Golddigger To Punchline To Martyr
“No matter how hard Americans tried to regard Anna Nicole Smith with apathetic dismissal, they couldn’t hide their fascination – and still can’t. Why? Was she just another model, another B-lister, another early casualty of reality TV? Or did she show us something about ourselves, about our country, that frightened us more deeply than we could ever admit?”
What’s So Terrible About Instant Gratification?
“While all that instant gratification [that the internet and e-commerce provide] may be convenient, we are warned that it’s ruining a long-standing human virtue: the ability to wait. Well, it’s not waiting itself that’s a virtue; the virtue is self-control, and your ability to wait is a sign of just how much self-control you have.” Alexandra Samuel explains that it’s not really so straightforward.
So, Like, Where Did Everybody Saying ‘Like’ Come From?
Yes, the usage exploded in the 1970s and ’80s, but it didn’t originate with Valley Girls or even hippies – it goes back at least to the 1770s. In this Lexicon Valley podcast, John McWhorter and sociolinguist Alexandra D’Arcy talk about the history and (yes) grammar of “like.”
‘Recruit Rosie’ – ‘Saturday Night Live’ Has Now Joined, Or Been Memed Into, The Resistance
It took one news report that Donald Trump was upset that SNL cast a woman as Sean Spicer for Twitter to erupt with calls for the show to cast Trump’s number one bête noire, Rosie O’Donnell, as Steve Bannon. Megan Garber points out that this is no longer just a joke: “It operated on the premise that jokes can effect significant changes in the daily operations of the White House.” (We want Steve Buscemi as Kellyanne Conway!)
Rajiv Joseph Wins $25K Horton Foote Playwriting Award
The author of Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo and Guards at the Taj will receive the prize at the end of this month. The award from the Dramatists Guild of America was launched just last year, with Stephen Karam (The Humans) the winner.
John Adams Wrote An Opera About Nixon, But He Will Not Be Writing One About Trump
In a Q&A with Gabe Meline, Adams explains the difference he sees between the two men that makes the one more opera-worthy, talks about the other politically oriented work he has written and is still writing, and why his latest arrival at the airport reminded him of the ’60s.
‘Spiral Jetty’ May End Up High And Dry As Its Habitat Evaporates
The Great Salt Lake is drying up at a worrisome rate.
Recreating Martha Graham’s Comic Ballet (Wait, What?)
Yes, Martha did one comedy, a Punch-and-Judy piece from 1941. And audiences did find it funny. The Martha Graham Dance Company found some archival footage of the piece, and hired choreographer Annie-B Parson (herself a “wait, what?” choice) to devise a new piece based on it. Siobhan Burke talks with Parson about how she did it.
Report: Last Year There Was A Surge In Violations Of Artists’ Rights
According to Freemuse, an independent international organization that researches violations of artists’ rights, that global number has more than doubled that for 2015, increasing by 119%.
How Live Nation Came To Dominate The Booming Live Concert Business
“It used to be that you toured to help sell the record. Now the record helps support the tour.” How has this come to be? In the case of Live Nation, it’s the result of systematic growth over a decade that has seen the Beverly Hills-based company establish a presence in more than 40 countries via acquisitions or partnerships.
London’s New Tall-Building Boom Is Wrecking Its Urban Heritage
“The Paddington cube offends every principle of a conservation area. It demolishes old buildings. It pays no respect to the district’s character, brutalising it with one overpowering structure. Westminster’s own published plan for the area stipulates that “tall buildings could not be accommodated without detriment to the townscape”. As for flexible uses, the collapse of the luxury property market means that the cube is entirely for commercial use.”
What If You Could Upgrade Your Brain? There Are Complicated Moral Issues At Play
Confronting this tendency toward the commodification of persons, and counteracting it with effective cultural strategies for ‘re-humanisation’, will pose one of the most important moral challenges of our time.
Lessons In The Power Of Diversity From A Portland Theatre
“There are, unsurprisingly, literally hundreds and hundreds of contemporary writers of color whose plays will move, engage, titillate, outrage, and delight audiences.”
A Central Role For Dance In A New Netflix Hit
Can dance change lives? In “The OA,” it does. “When people say, ‘I was crying when I was watching it,’ it’s like, exactly. That is exactly what dance has the power to do. Whether or not it’s true — which I think is a beautiful question in the series — I know that it can heal.”
Kill The Corporation For Public Broadcasting? Big Stations Will Do Fine. It’s The Small Rural Stations That Will Be Hit
“So for KPCC, our CPB grant comes to about 5 percent of our overall operating budget. For stations in Alaska, for stations in a number of rural states, it’s as high as 40 percent. So there’s a real disparity in the impact that would have between rural and urban stations, and I think from a public policy perspective, that’s a concern.”
Broadway Is Finally Addressing Its Bathroom Problem
“Theater owners, confronted day after day by long lines of women (and, sometimes, men) clogging lobbies and snaking down stairwells while nervously waiting for an available bathroom, are excavating, annexing, converting and renovating their buildings to remedy the chronic inconvenience. The biggest landlords are also retraining ushers, experimenting with new methods of crowd control, and even reversing the genders on restrooms.”
Actor Alec McCowen, 91
“‘I have always wanted to be an entertainer rather than an actor,’ McCowen once wrote, but the truth is he was both: he could immerse himself in a character but also hold an audience spellbound, as in his celebrated one-man performance of St Mark’s Gospel.”
Why Art-World Resistance To Trump Probably Won’t Accomplish Much
Tom Rachman, writing from the Verbier Art Summit (a would-be Davos for artsy types), is not encouraged: “Politics in the arts often looks more like group bonding than anything that might effect change.”
Sting And Wayne Shorter Win 2017 Polar Music Prize
The rock star and jazz saxophonist “are no stranger to awards: they have 26 Grammys between them.”
Philadelphia Orchestra Renews Stéphane Denève As Principal Guest Conductor
Among the things he’d like to do in his next three-year term is include one contemporary work on each program, as he does with his concerts in Europe. (Jennifer Higdon, who lives just down the street from the orchestra’s hall, was mentioned as a possibility.)
Svend Asmussen, Beloved Jazz Violinist, Dead At 100
“If [Stéphane] Grappelli was a flashy diamond, Mr. Asmussen was a hidden gem. He found a devoted following of jazz critics and discerning listeners who admired his facility as a multi-instrumentalist (vibraphone, flute and conga), sometime crooner and occasional clown in the mold of a fellow Dane, the pianist and satirist Victor Borge.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 02.07.17
Universality/Particularity
A view of the universality of an art (or any element of culture) is at odds with the reality of different cultures and different forms of cultural expression. … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2017-02-07
From London to New Jersey
The Richard Alston Dance Company at Montclair State University’s Peak Performances, February 2 through 5. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2017-02-07
The Japanese Wizard Of Concert Hall Acoustics
Yasuhisa Toyota’s Nagata Acoustics has just 20 employees globally, but it dominates acoustics work for halls in Japan and is expanding abroad. He’s designed the acoustics for orchestras in Los Angeles, Helsinki, Paris and Shanghai. Another of his projects, the Elbephilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, opened Jan. 11.”
Judge Orders Vandals To Read Books
A judge sentenced the teenagers to read the books, as well as watching 14 films, visiting two museums and writing a research paper to encourage “a greater appreciation for gender, race, religion, and bigotry” (sic) after they were caught vandalising the Ashburn Colored School in Virginia.