“Suddenly the worst thing that can happen to a creative person has happened to me. … Somehow I became respectable. I don’t know how — the last film I directed got some terrible reviews and was rated NC-17. Six people in my personal phone book have been sentenced to life in prison. I did an art piece called Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot, which is composed of close-ups from porn films, yet a museum now has it in their permanent collection and nobody got mad. What the hell has happened?” – The Paris Review
Why Anna Deavere Smith Created ‘Notes From The Field’, Her Documentary Play About The School-To-Prison Pipeline
“I was in hair and makeup next to a [Nurse Jackie] castmate, British actress Eve Best, and I told her I couldn’t get out of my mind a news story I had just heard: that a kid in Baltimore, my hometown, had peed in a water cooler at school and they were going to send him to jail. Eve responded, in her fabulous accent, ‘Oh, well, whatever happened to mischief?’ That was when it struck me: rich kids get mischief, poor kids get pathologized and incarcerated.” – Literary Hub
Voice-Of-America-Service For Cuba Fails To Meet Basic Journalism Standards: U.S. Study
“The analysis of content aired and published by Radio and Television Martí, a sister agency to the better-known Voice of America, was launched by the broadcasters’ parent organization.” It found that Martís content routinely fails to meet standards of fairness, sometimes descends into outlandish propaganda — and that none of this is due to the direction of any Trump administration official. – The Washington Post
Michigan Lawmakers Say There’s A Crisis With The State’s School Libraries
“Michigan ranks 47th in the nation for its ratio of students to certified librarians — it’s also in the bottom five in literacy. The two statistics have legislators like State Rep. Darrin Camilleri questioning why more isn’t being done to increase the presence of librarians in schools.” So he and colleagues have introduced three different bills to address the problem. – WXYZ (Detroit)
The Mozart Problem: Revolution In Tight Form
Stephen Brown: “This is the problem that Mozart poses for our contemporary ears. His music is so balanced, clear, rational in its order, especially in comparison to the music that has come after, that it is easy – for performers as well as listeners – to miss the drama.” – Times Literary Supplement
Political Protest Becomes Conceptual Art: Kazakhstan Police Arrest Man For Silently Holding Up A Blank Poster
The “culprit” was Aslan Sagutdinov, a blogger in the city of Uralsk. In a video taken of his arrest, he said, “I want to show that the idiocy in our country has gotten so strong that the police will detain me now even though there are no inscriptions, no slogans, without my chanting or saying anything.” (The writer of this report compares Sagutdinov’s action to John Cage’s 4’33”.) – Hyperallergic
Butterflies, Roasted Pigs And Radios: Christopher Rountree And The Music Of Anything
And he’s having a moment now, with the LA Philharmonic’s FLUXUS Festival. – San Francisco Classical Voice
Study: More Millennials Are Defining Themselves By Their Work
According to Jobvite’s annual Job Seeker Nation survey, 42% of American workers define themselves by the jobs they perform and/or the companies they work for, and that number rises to 45% among those under the age of 40. Furthermore, of the 42% who say that they define themselves through their work, 65% say it’s “very important” to who they are as people. – Fast Company
Are You Obsessive Compulsive? You Fit The Age In Which We Live
“There’s no sugar-coating it: full-fledged OCD is pathological. It renders you unable to function, as I have experienced firsthand. But at the same time, obsessiveness suits our current cultural moment, and functional obsessives are often found perched at the top of social and vocational hierarchies.” – Aeon
This Year’s NEA Jazz Masters
Jazz’s highest public honor will go to Roscoe Mitchell, Dorthaan Kirk, Reggie Workman and Bobby McFerrin at a ceremony in April 2020. Held at the SFJazz Center in San Francisco, it will be the first Jazz Masters gala in California since 2005. Awardees receive cash prizes of up to $25,000. – The New York Times
Before The Kremlin Could Stop It, Rap Spread All Over Russia
It was the Web, and especially V Kontakte (Russia’s Facebook), that made it possible, and, as always in such cases, the old fogeys in charge didn’t catch on until it was too late to stop or co-opt it. So now the Kremlin is nervous. – The New York Times
Study: To Teach Music To Students, Ditch Mozart And Add Hip Hop
A four-year study by Youth Music concluded that too many schools fail to include current musical genres and recommended that lessons should focus on “Stormzy rather than Mozart” in order to engage hard-to-reach young people. – The Guardian
Yes, Antonio Banderas Is Totally Playing Pedro Almodóvar In Their New Movie — And Yes, Says Banderas, It Was Weird
“It’s weird to play a character who lived, more weird if he’s still alive — because he’s producing more information every day — and extraordinarily rare that he is behind the camera saying, ‘Action!’ to you. To deal with all of these things was not easy.” – The New York Times
‘Sex, Money And Idiots In Power’ — Why Restoration Comedy And Drama May Be Just The Entertainment For Our Times
“Ever worry about getting paid, getting laid or finding love? Does social anxiety prickle your palms? Do you despair of a world slipping its moorings? Restoration drama may speak to you.” David Jays makes the case — and looks into why actors find the genre so daunting. – The Guardian
China Has Blocked Access To Wikipedia In All Languages
The obvious explanation would be that the 20th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre is upcoming (June 4). “When Wikipedia’s official account tweeted that the reasons for the total block were ‘unknown to us,’ a Shanghai-based user responded, ‘Don’t be daft.'” – Slate
This Opera Company Went Out And Asked Folks What They Want From Opera
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis did some research to find out what could get new people in the door — and, just as importantly, what doesn’t work. – American Theatre
Alabama Public Television Just Blocked Broadcast Of The Cartoon Wedding Of A Rat And An Aardvark
“When the children’s television show Arthur made headlines last week for an episode in which the beloved teacher Mr. Ratburn marries his male aardvark partner, Alabama viewers saw only a rerun of an old episode.” In explanation, APT’s programming director said in a statement, “parents trust that their children can watch APT without their supervision.” – Slate
Nôtre-Dame’s Walls Are So Unstable That A Strong Gale Could Knock Them Over: Study
“A mechanical engineer at the University of Versailles has modelled the engineering of the structure and shown that the walls of Nôtre-Dame could collapse under the pressure of wind speeds higher than 90km per hour, while before the fire they could withstand winds of up to 220km per hour.” – The Art Newspaper
Did We Just Get A Sign That Hilary Mantel Has Finished Her Cromwell Trilogy?
“On Tuesday (21st May), Waterstones Piccadilly sparked excitement online when it tweeted out a prominent sign, said to be spotted in London’s Leicester Square, which appeared to hint at news on the novel, titled The Mirror and the Light.” The sign has since disappeared from the billboard, and HarperCollins has no comment. – The Bookseller (UK)
Everyone Thought Aretha Franklin Left No Will. Turns Out She May Have Left Three
“In a court filing on Monday, the personal representative of Ms. Franklin’s estate disclosed that three handwritten documents had been discovered just weeks ago at Ms. Franklin’s home — one in a spiral notebook under her sofa cushions, the others in a locked cabinet — and asked a Michigan probate judge to decide whether any of them are valid wills.” – The New York Times
Man Booker International Prize, For First Time, Goes To Arabic Novel
“Jokha Alharthi, the first female Omani novelist to be translated into English, has won the Man Booker International prize for her novel Celestial Bodies. Alharthi … shares the [£50,000] prize equally with her translator, American academic Marilyn Booth.” – The Guardian
One Of The World’s Great Collections Of Soviet Avant-Garde Art, All Saved From Stalin, Is In Deepest Uzbekistan
And “deepest” doesn’t mean Tashkent, Samarkand, or the other Silk Road cities visited by tourists; this is in far-off Nukus, near the now-dead Aral Sea. Yet this distance from Soviet power centers is the reason an ex-electrician could amass the trove of once-forbidden art at the Savitsky Museum. – The Guardian
Perilous orchestra life
Another subject that ought to be in the book I’ve imagined, one about the history of US orchestras from the 1980s to the present: structural deficits. – Greg Sandow
Get Ready: Now We Have Virtual Celebrities (And They’re Popular)
Miquela Sousa, also known as Lil Miquela, is a fictional character created by a Los Angeles startup called Brud. Miquela has 1.5m followers on Instagram, where she shares pictures of her imaginary life and proclaims her support for LGBT rights and Black Lives Matter. In the past few years, the virtual model has become a veritable celebrity: starring in Ugg ads, interviewing artists at Coachella and collaborating with Prada. – The Guardian
Germany Is Returning Stolen Papers Of Kafka Executor Max Brod To Israel
“[The handover] will end a decade-long struggle to retrieve the missing Brod papers which, according to Israel’s National Library, were stolen 10 years ago in Tel Aviv. The documents, letters and memoirs re-emerged in 2013, when two Israelis approached the German Literary Archives in Marbach, and private collectors, with a huge collection of unpublished documents belonging to Brod.” – Yahoo! (AFP)