Thomas Larson, former music critic for the Santa Fe New Mexican (1980-82), now a staff writer at the San Diego Reader: “Figuring out that the thing words do for music is not a musical problem. It’s an aesthetic one, which adds more ambiguity, not less. Good ears and smart criticism trail the music like a bloodhound, howling out the moving location of its prey, but more often, baying about its own doubt and inconsistency.” – 3 Quarks Daily
Time To Take Bernard Henri Levy Seriously?
For nearly half a century, Lévy has been one of the most visible public intellectuals in France and a master at manipulating philosophical and political controversy. With his good looks and outsized ego, Lévy is a compelling performer. He is also an irresistible target for critics from the left, right, and center. – Foreign Policy
How A Gentle Little Movie By One Of Pakistan’s Favorite Directors Got Banned For Blasphemy That Isn’t There
Novelist Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) writes about the strange case of Sarmad Khoosat’s film Zindagi Tamasha (“Circus of Life”), which has won multiple prizes at international festivals, was cleared by three Pakistani boards of censors, made the country’s official entry for the Best International Film Oscar, glommed onto as a political football by people who hadn’t seen it, protested by enormous mobs who knew nothing about it, uncleared by those same boards of censors, and then re-cleared. The movie still hasn’t been shown there. – The New York Times
France Is Allowing Auction Houses To Keep Operating During Lockdown, But Not Galleries. Galleries Are Suing
“Late last month the president of the Conseil des Ventes, the regulatory authority for auction houses, gave notice that the government would in fact permit sale rooms to remain open with public safety restrictions in place. Allowing galleries’ main competitors to remain open evoked the ire of art dealers, … [and their] trade association brought the suit against the French state, the prime minister, and the health minister, and it was the latter who appeared in front of a judge to answer the suit.” – Artnet
Singing By Hand: How To Translate Songs Into American Sign Language
“A good A.S.L. performance prioritizes dynamics, phrasing and flow. The parameters of sign language — hand shape, movement, location, palm orientation and facial expression — can be combined with elements of visual vernacular, a body of codified gestures, allowing a skilled A.S.L. speaker to engage in the kind of sound painting that composers use to enrich a text.” Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim watches how a couple of pros signed their own cover of the old Gladys Knight and the Pips song “Midnight Train to Georgia.” – The New York Times
Where Second City’s New Chief Means To Lead The Improv Institution
Says Jon Carr, who came to the company’s Chicago headquarters from Dad’s Garage in Atlanta four months ago, “It’s a little strange, because there’s nothing routine happening at any of [our theatres] right now, so it’s a lot of rebuilding of things from scratch.” – American Theatre
Is The CEO Who Saved Waterstones Turning Around Barnes & Noble, Too? Well, He Says So
To be fair, James Daunt was not at all as self-aggrandizing as that headline suggests when he spoke to the Independent Book Publishers Association last week. But he did say that the long-troubled chain has been hanging on despite the pandemic, and that B&N has used the lull in business to start making in earnest the changes that Daunt had introduced at Waterstones in the UK with so much success. – Publishers Weekly
Doubting Thomas: Greenville County Museum Sells “Alma’s Flower Garden” in a Non-Transparent Transaction
Taking a page from the problematic playbooks of the Berkshire, Everson and Baltimore museums, the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina, has become the latest poster child for deplorable deaccessions. – Lee Rosenbaum
Steven Leigh Morris On What Did In LA Stage Alliance
“When members of the community say about LASA that they didn’t feel included or respected, my heart goes out to them. I ran the organization, and I often felt the same way.” – Stage Raw
The Boston Symphony’s Lucia Lin Says Classical Music Is Not Eurocentric
And she has the duet series to prove it. Lin, who commissioned duets before adding interviews to her presentation of new work: “In the beginning I just wanted to have these duos written. Then I decided, you know, part of the reason people are afraid of new music is they don’t understand it. What happens if people get to know the composers a little bit?” – Boston Globe
The New Ascendance Of The Nature Memoir
We’re all looking for something – solitude, connection to nature, an escape from our houses and apartments – and so, publishing is providing us with many (many) nature memoirs. But where to start? Check out this heavily annotated list. – LitHub
The Hollywood Bowl Is Back, With Celebration And Caution, For The Summer Of 2021
Though the bowl will be limited to 4,000 in a venue that seats 17,500, the excitement is real. “The organization is still ramping up to tackle the complexities of reopening, but Smith said the L.A. Phil is planning 45 to 60 concerts.” – Los Angeles Times
Gianluigi Colalucci, Restorer Of Michelangelo’s Colors, Has Died At 91
In the 1980s, Colalucci led the team that restored the Sistine Chapel. “To paint the Sistine ceiling, Michelangelo labored atop a towering scaffolding, his neck craned skyward and paint dripping onto his face. In an enterprise that captivated the international art world, Mr. Colalucci assumed the same position for the delicate task of cleansing the chapel of the layers of filth that had accumulated during the intervening centuries.” – Washington Post
Performers In South Africa Protest For More Government Help During The Pandemic
For the performing arts community, the closure of Cape Town’s Fugard Theatre was something of a last straw. “In just a decade of existence the theatre, named after world-renowned playwright Athol Fugard, had become a much-loved venue that put on work by local writers as well as internationally known plays and musicals.” Artists are asking their government to do much, much more for them – and their strapped venues. – BBC
Scott Rudin’s Abusive Behavior Was An Open Secret
Why did the media not come out and treat it as the truly awful (and unacceptable) fact that it was? “Unlike past stories, The Hollywood Reporter’s offers, for the first time in Rudin’s almost 40 years as a producer, an unromanticized affirmation of the seemingly endless anecdotes about him as a manager. It details his alleged misbehavior as well as his influence, which has arguably made the industry and the journalists who report on it more likely to accept workplace aggression as a condition of great art.” – The Atlantic
New Guidelines Suggest Actors Set Nudity Boundaries Before Filming
To keep actors safe – and, of course, to cover their own liability – some productions are now employing intimacy coordinators. But contracts can go farther, and the #TimesUp group has suggested that “a so-called ‘nudity rider’ or ‘simulated sex waiver’ should be in place before filming begins.” – BBC
This One Key Trick Predicts Blockbuster Success
Despite what every podcast host says (is forced to say?) and what your author friends tell you, it’s not five-star reviews. Those are literally a dime a dozen. This is a different appeal, according to a study, and it explains why people crying about books on TikTok can juice those books’ sales. – Fast Company
Anne Beatts, Who Broke Into National Lampoon And Saturday Night Live Before Getting Her Own Sitcom, 74
Beatts helped shape the early days of Saturday Night Live. “‘It was pretty much any adjective you want to throw at it,’ she told the Orange County Register in 2013. ‘It was exciting, stimulating and fabulous. It was also horrible, boring and exhausting.'” – Washington Post
Frieze Los Angeles Writes Off 2021, Makes Plans For 2022
The art fest was planned for February, then July, and at locations all over the city (supposedly to promote social distancing). But as July get closer, organizers decided to move it once again – to an online-only location, and to try a 2022 restart in real life. Pandemic uncertainty strikes again. – Los Angeles Times
We’re Living In A Golden Age For Documentaries, But They Have To Drop Their Cheesy Re-enactments
The rush of documentaries – they are cheaper to make, and especially if they’re true crime, there’s a willing and eager audience – has some aesthetic issues. “Cornball fuzzy re-creations lack credibility. … It doesn’t have to be like this. Plenty of recent shows and movies have made compelling artistic choices that enliven the storytelling.” – The New York Times
Taylor Swift, Reclaiming Her Music With A New, Re-Recorded Release Of An Early Album
The business side of music can be vicious for its musicians, and when a label owned by a man you loathe gets to profit off your music? Well. “The debut this week of the now 31-year-old Swift’s full rerecording of that album she made at 18, under the title Fearless (Taylor’s Version), is a reminder of how inextricably blurred the creative and the commercial always are in pop music. Rerecording the albums is a business strategy that, by its self-consciously meta-narrative nature, can’t help but also become a piece of conceptual art.” – Slate
A New Cache Of Money For Strapped Venues – If Only The Website Would Work
The Small Business Association opened a grant portal for arts venues closed down by the pandemic – and, after a few hours of deep misery for every arts venue trying to apply, took it all offline, indefinitely. “Anyone who tried to log on to apply for grants when the portal first opened was met with different error messages at each step. The SBA clarified in a tweet that they did not accept any applications or distribute any funding.” – NPR
The Show Wynonna Earp Came At A Dark Time For Queer Women On TV, And It Bucked A Bad Trend
In 2016, 25 queer women characters on TV died on scripted TV and streaming shows. But Wynonna Earp promised to be different. With the choices the writers’ room and showrunner made, viewers saw “an acknowledgement of — and a direct rebuke to — a hurtful trope.” They rewarded the producer with trust and increased interest. – Los Angeles Times
The Inevitability Of Fake Art
It’s every art dealer’s nightmare, but if a fake is a beautiful painting, what’s our problem with it? We care about authorship is why – but humans didn’t always care. “What mattered before the Renaissance was the meaning of an image, not the ineffable singularity of the image-maker’s touch.” – Hyperallergic
Ethel Gabriel, Who Ran Parts Of RCA Victor For 40 Years, Has Died At 99
Gabriel began working at RCA when she was a student at Temple University, testing records for manufacturing imperfections. And she didn’t leave. “Gabriel often said that she had produced some 2,500 records. [Documentary researcher April] Tucker said officials at Sony, which now holds RCA’s archives, had told her that the number may actually be higher, since contributions were not always credited.” – The New York Times