While learning an instrument is all of that and more for some people, music lessons can also be the locus of a very particular set of traumas, from the indignity of being forced to practise the piano with teacups on your hands to the paralysing performance anxiety that might surge forth at a dreaded recital. – Aeon
How Hollywood Fueled William Faulkner
Hollywood became synonymous with increased income and long absences from home. The manna from Faulkner’s work on screenplays and the movie options on his novels was very welcome indeed, but it did not come without cost to his marriage. When Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered six weeks at $500 a week in May 1932, the couple was significantly overdrawn and without credit. Faulkner literally spent his last few dollars wiring MGM that he would accept their offer. He then asked his uncle for a five-dollar loan. John Falkner instead offered a $500 loan to cover his nephew’s overdraft, but Faulkner declined and held out for a studio advance. – Los Angeles Review of Books
Ethics Issue With Ousted Director Is Least Of Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s Problems
“The turmoil will only further damage an institution that has, for most of its existence, failed to live up to its name while presenting one mediocre exhibition after another.” Aaron Betsky argues that the root of the problems at the Smithsonian’s design museum (and its only branch in New York) isn’t the fault of anyone in particular, but it will require the equivalent of radical surgery. – Dezeen
Artist Pyotr Pavlensky Is In France As A Political Refugee, But He’s Burning Banks And Messing With Elections. What Is He Really Up To?
His various art “actions” (as he calls them), along with his apparently high pain threshold, have earned him international notoriety and a good deal of sympathy. Yet he seems to have squandered quite a bit of that sympathy in France, where his actions haven’t gone down so well. Valeria Costa-Kostritsky talks to associates and observers of Pavlensky in Russia and France and tries to unpack it all. – Apollo
Two Playwrights Embedded In A Newsroom. They Had To Rewrite Their Play When The Paper Started Laying Off Reporters.
“Janielle Kastner and Brigham Mosley thought they had finished writing their play about journalism when The Dallas Morning News announced layoffs in January 2019. They had spent more than a year and hundreds of hours embedded in the newsroom, interviewing and shadowing the paper’s staff to come up with what Mosley calls ‘a really beautiful, clean play.'” – Dallas Morning News
London’s Leicester Square Is Decorated With Statues To Mark A Century Of British Film
Why Leicester Square for the statues commemorating various decades of film (including Mary Poppins, Gene Kelly, and Paddington Bear)? “Leicester Square was first home to a cinema in 1930, with the first premiere taking place there in 1937. It has subsequently cemented its place in British cinema history and regularly plays host to some of the most high-profile events in the country’s film calendar.” – BBC
The Downside Of Learning With YouTube How-To’s
Many of these videos fall into what Carlson calls “infotainment,” where the goal isn’t to teach, but to pass on information, even if it doesn’t lead to understanding. “They’re not saying, ‘Here’s how you would do the problem yourself,’” Stephen agrees. “They’re just handing you a bunch of microwaved facts.” – Fast Company
Trump Gets 45-Minute Briefing On The Play “FBI Lovebirds: Undercovers”
Trump hasn’t seen the play, according to playwright Phelim McAleer, but praised its concept: a script based entirely on congressional testimony and the text messages between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who discussed the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s campaign and Russia while having an affair. The play’s leads—Superman actor Dean Cain and former Buffy the Vampire Slayer actress Kristy Swanson—also attended the White House meeting. – The Daily Beast
Roberto Bedoya On Expressing Oakland Creatively
Bedoya describes the culture of the city as “the embodiment of forms of knowledge and wisdom people have gained through their different lived experiences.” Another way he expresses this idea is that culture is the frame within which the arts provide “the power of shared sensibility and memory… kindling the emotions that make us aware of our shared humanity.” – Reportage From The Aesthetic Edge
Reconsidering The 1980s Soap Opera Boom
“The shifts across the network era, magnified in the early 1980s, help us to see how variable the category of soap opera, and perhaps the ordering concept of genre itself, may be.” What’s more, that boom changed the acting profession. – Literary Hub
Why Has A Cookbook About ‘Rage Baking’ Enraged The Social Justice Twitterverse?
“When Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices dropped earlier this month, it was poised to become an instant hit. The anthology, a mix of recipes and essays about baking as an outlet for women’s political rage, is the latest in a series of books that address the organizing power of female anger, including Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her. However, Rage Baking is now on the receiving end of women’s anger over a controversy about who owns — and profits from — the concept of ‘rage baking.’ Here’s what you need to know.” – Slate
Jennifer Higdon’s New Opera Will Have Three Different Endings
Woman with Eyes Closed, commissioned by Opera Philadelphia for its O20 festival this September, has a plot inspired by the 2012 theft, from the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, of seven paintings now thought to have been burnt in Romania by the mother of one of the thieves. Jerre Dye’s libretto and Higdon’s 80-minute score, written for five singers and 11 instruments, will have three alternate endings; the choice of which one to perform will be made the day of each performance. – Yahoo! (AP)
DC’s National Symphony Cancels The Rest Of Its Asia Tour
Three weeks ago, due to the coronavirus epidemic, the orchestra cancelled three concert dates in China that were part of a planned eight-concert tour of East Asia March 3-12. Now the orchestra has withdrawn from the remaining five dates, all in Japan. – The Washington Post
We’re Recreating The Nature Around Us With Technology
Under the rubric of “ubiquitous computing,” “smart dust,” and the “Internet of Things,” computers are melting into the fabric of everyday life. Light bulbs, toasters, even toothbrushes are being chipped. You can summon Alexa almost anywhere. And as life becomes computerized, computers become lifelike. Modern hardware and software have gotten so complicated that they resemble the organic: messy, unpredictable, inscrutable. – Nautilus
Eight Trends That Are Changing The Non-Profit Sector
There has also been unprecedented leadership turnover across the classical performing arts sector. “Furthermore, the pipeline for leadership is not there to meet the demands. Changing tastes, an oversupply of product and the delta between the availability and demand for leadership will lead to bankruptcies and dissolutions of many of the classical arts organizations.” – Hunt Scanlon Media
While We Weren’t Looking The Robots Became Our Bosses
The robots are watching over hotel housekeepers, telling them which room to clean and tracking how quickly they do it. They’re managing software developers, monitoring their clicks and scrolls and docking their pay if they work too slowly. They’re listening to call center workers, telling them what to say, how to say it, and keeping them constantly, maximally busy. While we’ve been watching the horizon for the self-driving trucks, perpetually five years away, the robots arrived in the form of the supervisor, the foreman, the middle manager. – The Verge
Roman Polanski, Saying He Fears ‘Public Lynching’, Withdraws From French Academy Awards
When the director’s latest film, An Officer and a Spy (about the Dreyfus Affair), was nominated for 12 César awards, many people in France and beyond were outraged and threatened a boycott, and the entire board of the César Academy later resigned. While Polanski hasn’t pulled his movie from consideration (the awards ceremony is tomorrow night), he says bitterly that “we know how this evening will unfold already” and he will not attend. – Yahoo! (AFP)
Having Realized That His Apology Included A Confession, Plácido Domingo Tries To Walk It Back
“On Tuesday, [he] apologized to women who had accused him of sexual harassment. … But on Thursday, as some of Europe’s leading opera houses considered canceling future engagements, Mr. Domingo said he wanted to ‘correct the false impression’ his statement had created.” – The New York Times
Plácido Domingo Starts Losing Engagements In Europe — And In His Birthplace, No Less
The continent had been resistant to the accusations of sexual harassment that ended Domingo’s U.S. career, but following the AGMA report, Spain’s Culture Ministry cancelled his invitation to perform in Luisa Fernanda at Madrid’s Teatro de la Zarzuela in May, following which Domingo withdrew from La Traviata at the city’s Teatro Real the same month. (Meanwhile, news of the AGMA report has inspired another accuser to come forward publicly.) – Yahoo! (AP)
What Do We Want From History?
What might I want history to do to me? I might want history to reduce my historical antagonist—and increase me. I might ask it to urgently remind me why I’m moving forward, away from history. Or speak to me always of our intimate relation, of the ties that bind—and indelibly link—my history and me. I could want history to tell me that my future is tied to my past, whether I want it to be or not. Or ask it to promise me that my future will be revenge upon my past. Or warn me that the past is not erased by this revenge. Or suggest to me that brutal oppression implicates the oppressors, who are in turn brutalized by their own acts of oppression. Or argue that an oppressor can believe herself to be an oppressor only within a system in which she herself has been oppressed. – New York Review of Books
Journalism Is Broken. Can It Be Saved?
What has happened in journalism in the twenty-first century is a version, perhaps an extreme one, of what has happened in many fields. A blind faith that market forces and new technologies would always produce a better society has resulted in more inequality, the heedless dismantling of existing arrangements that had real value, and a heightened gap in influence, prosperity, and happiness between the dominant cities and the provinces. – New York Review of Books