This aspect of theater hygiene has turned out to be little more than — well — hygiene theater. Experts have been saying since last year that the risk of surface transmission was tiny, and in April the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pegged the risk at just 1 in 10,000. – Variety
Trying Very Hard To Ask Bruce Dern Interview Questions
“‘Wait a minute, let me tell you about this first,” says Bruce Dern, embarking on what I think is his fifth discursive anecdote in six sentences. ‘Did you ever see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? Do you remember when Brad Pitt comes in and tries to wake me up?’ he asks. … ‘So I wake up eventually and start talking. But Brad laughs, which he’s not supposed to do, and Quentin [Tarantino] yells: ‘Cut!’ and says to Brad: ‘What are you doing?’ Brad says: ‘He’s not sticking to the script!’ And Quentin says: ‘Brad, that’s why he’s here. No one can write the shit that comes out of his mouth.”” – The Guardian
Did Kim Kardashian Traffic A Looted Antiquity?
According to a newly filed lawsuit, in 2016, U.S. Customs seized a fragment of an ancient Roman statue that it believed had been stolen from Italy and illegally sold. The seller was a Brussels gallery; the buyer, “Kim Kardashian dba Noel Roberts Trust.” – ARTnews
Why Broadway Isn’t Restarting Until September
“With as many as eight shows a week to fill, and the tourists who make up an important part of their customer base yet to return, producers need time to advertise and market. They need to reassemble and rehearse casts who have been out of work for more than a year. And they need to sort out and negotiate safety protocols. But the biggest reason is more gut-based.” – The New York Times
Fifty Years Ago Photography Was Barely Considered Art. Now…
“There are now more galleries showing contemporary art than those devoted to the entire rest of art history, with sales at auction houses following the same trend: in the years since photography entered the art world, contemporary art has replaced impressionist and Old Masters painting as the most sought-after, collected, exhibited, and expensive segment of the market.” – American Scholar
Great Writers On Their Best- And Least-Loved Punctuation Marks
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe on exclamation points, Garielle Lutz and Toni Morrison on commas, Norman Mailer on hyphens, Cormac McCarthy on periods, and Gertrude Stein on periods, commas, and semicolons: “They are more powerful more imposing more pretentious than a comma but they are a comma all the same. They really have within them deeply within them fundamentally within them the comma nature.” – Literary Hub
What If The Idea Of “The Tragedy Of The Commons” Is All Wrong?
Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom believed so. “While conservation almost always carries at least some short-term costs, researchers have found that many community-based conservation projects reduce those costs and, over time, deliver significant benefits to their human participants, tangible and intangible alike.” – Aeon
The First Opera Written For And Produced In Virtual Reality
“What is most radical about Current, Rising is not the technology but how the creative process has been flipped. Rather than the composer setting the librettist’s words to music and leaving the music to be interpreted by directors, designers and musicians, it was Annette Mees, head of Covent Garden’s Audio Labs, and [the CEO of Figment Productions] who initially developed the idea of a hyperreal opera and only later brought on board creatives.” – The Guardian
A Mysterious Group Of Ancient Monuments In Saudi Arabia Older Than The Pyramids
Scattered across 77,000 square miles of desert in northwest Arabia, the mustatils (the name comes from the Arabic word for “rectangle”) were built between 8,500 and 4,800 years ago, during the period known as the Middle Holocene, according to a report published last week in the journal Antiquity. – Artnet
New York Times Dance Critic On Writing About People’s Bodies
Gia Kourlas: “Generally, it doesn’t feel fraught, but at the same time I am aware of the sensitivity it takes to write about the body and how easily something could be misconstrued. I don’t want to hurt someone — and that’s not to say that I haven’t — but I try my best not to be cruel. And while I might love the way a dancer’s leg is shaped or the length of an arm, I don’t like to fetishize the body or dancers. To write about them as creatures or objects is really distasteful to me.” – The New York Times
W. Royal Stokes, Washington Post Jazz Critic, Dead At 90
“A onetime professor of classics who became a major presence in jazz as a Washington-based radio disc jockey, journalist and author known for his oral histories of musicians’ lives, … Mr. Stokes was, by his own admission, an accidental jazz critic with no formal musical training. His instrument was the typewriter.” – The Washington Post
Britain’s Reopening, But A Quarter Of Its Summer Rock Festivals Are Cancelled. Why? Insurance.
“According to the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF), which has been tracking festivals taking place in Britain this year, 26% of all festivals with a capacity of more than 5,000 people have been cancelled by their organisers. The AIF has projected that more than three-quarters of the remaining festivals could be called off imminently if action regarding cancellation insurance policies of large-scale events is not reviewed.” – The Guardian
How France Is Managing Reopening Of Arts Venues
Roselyne Bachelot, the culture minister, has outlined the planned stages of reopening and rules that will be in place beginning May 19: for instance, no food or drink sold inside venues (so there’s no excuse to take off one’s mask). Seating limits will be 35% of capacity until June 9, then 65% until June 30 and 100% thereafter. – Variety
UK’s Cinema Chains Are Reopening, Despite Shortage Of New Films To Show
“The UK’s biggest cinema chain, [Odeon,] which is sweetening its £9.99 monthly all-you-watch subscription scheme to get punters back indoors as summer nears, will welcome back film fans to most of the 112 sites it operates across the UK [on 17 May]. … Cineworld and Vue, the second and third biggest UK operators, are also set to reopen their cinemas, as are the Curzon and Everyman chains.” – The Guardian
Plexiglass, Screens, Headphones — A Return to Theatre Spaces?
In these uncertain, transitional days, theater companies remain perplexed about how and when to open their doors, and so many potential ticket-buyers fret over how safe it is to be in public. So at this point, my analytical eye is focused more on the rituals of theatergoing than on theater itself. – Washington Post
Carey Perloff Remembers Olympia Dukakis
She was an astonishing teacher, spending hours and hours in the classroom every time she came to ACT, and back home in New York, at NYU. She was a prolific performer, an acclaimed film actor, an artistic director of the Whole Theater Company, a deviser of new theatre pieces, a polemicist and a partisan. She believed in acting companies and great classical literature, she believed in training and generosity of spirit, she believed in community. – American Theatre
Alastair Macaulay Remembers Jacques d’Amboise
His charm was colossal and effortless, his love for many people effusive and happy. I keep coming across poems and messages he sent me. They were signed “Your Jacques.” How lucky was I? Everyone who knew him has similar tales to tell. How lucky were we. – Alastair Macaulay
How To Spend COVID Relief Money? Japanese Town Buys A Giant Squid Statue
It reportedly used 25m yen ($228,500; £164,700) of the emergency funding to build the statue. Noto officials have told local media it is part of a long term plan to lure tourists back after the pandemic. – BBC