“Located just a few meters from the seashore [in Ashkelon], the structure, a public building” — known then as a basilica (not to be confused with the later, Roman Catholic use of the term) — “was divided into three sections: a main hall and two side parts. According to the archaeologists, the main hall was surrounded by massive marble columns as high as 13 m. and ornate with elaborated capitals, featuring plant motifs and in some instances an eagle, a Roman symbol.” – The Jerusalem Post
A Dissident Cuban Artist Is Released From Hospital
Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara “is the leader of the San Isidro protest movement (MSI) of artists and intellectuals pressing for free speech and other rights” in Cuba. He spent nearly a month in hospital after an 8-day hunger strike, without his phone or any means of communication. – Yahoo News (AFP)
Confusion And Upheaval At New Zealand Opera As One-Third Of Board Resigns
Three members of the national company’s governing body (reportedly the three with the most experience with and connections within the industry) stepped down in May. One of them has since spoken up to refute speculation about specific reasons for their departure, but his explanation is less than entirely clear: “What I saw was a huge upswelling of discontent and confusion about the artistic direction of the company. … This is not about editing opera … this is what we saw as a lack of thought and lack of responsibility toward those who love opera,” meaning the traditional opera audience. The only specific complaint he mentioned was about the company not offering enough work to New Zealand singers returning from overseas. – Radio New Zealand
How Wrens Coordinate Their Intricately Interlocking Songs
“A team of researchers studying brain activity of singing male and female plain-tailed wrens has discovered that the species synchronizes their frenetically paced duets, surprisingly, by inhibiting the song-making regions of their partner’s brain as they exchange phrases.” – Phys.org
Running The Rodgers And Hammerstein Organization For 40 Years (What A Job!)
“As new ways of making money from The Sound of Music and the rest presented themselves, the job of advising the heirs and maintaining their income became much bigger. It was no longer simply a matter of giving (or withholding) approval for major new productions but also a strategic puzzle: How do you uphold an artistic legacy while exploiting technology, adjusting to a changing theatrical environment and serving progressively larger corporations?” Ted Chapin, who did just that for four decades and recently retired, tells Jesse Green how. – The New York Times
In England, An Attempt To Redefine Culture
For Leeds 2023, the festival’s creative director says they’ll try to “let culture loose” to reach everyone in the city during their year. Lyn Gardner agrees it’s time for a change: “Food and sport and ballroom dancing are as much part of culture as the latest Tom Stoppard play. … Both have a value, bring people together and provide the glue communities need to thrive. But also funding has often favoured one over the other and has often favoured organisations that put on high art over those who work with communities.” – The Stage (UK)
What Brain-Computer Interfaces Will Do To Our Ideas Of Free Will
You can already see a divide in the literature – positive stories about people with ALS or locked-in syndrome learning to use neural transmitters to control movement; negative stories about the threat of law enforcement “reading” our intentions before we do. It’s the same tech, so what’s the real story? – Three Quarks Daily
Clint Eastwood Is 91, And He’s Directed 17 Films Just Since He Turned 70
And those 17 movies — which include no less than Mystic River (with Sean Penn and Tim Robbins), Million Dollar Baby (Hilary Swank), and American Sniper (Bradley Cooper) — have earned a billion dollars or so all together, not to mention a few Oscars and plenty more nominations. Maybe not every one of the 39 films he’s made over 50 years is a masterpiece, but some certainly are (Unforgiven), and the overall quality has been impressively high. What’s more, they aren’t just action films, westerns, and war movies: Eastwood, remember, directed The Bridges of Madison County and Jersey Boys. – Variety
Mexico Forcibly Halts Illegal Construction Next To Teotihuacán
“[Authorities] sent in 250 National Guard troops and 60 police officers Monday to seize land next to the pre-Hispanic ruins of Teotihuacán where authorities have said bulldozers were destroying outlying parts of the archaeological site. … Officials reported last week that they had been trying since March to halt the private construction project, but work continued on what local media says were plans to build some sort of amusement park.” – AP
Allegations Of Sexual Misconduct, And Even Assault, Rock English Drama Schools
“Former pupils have raised allegations including how tutors have ‘grabbed’ female students’ breasts, made sexual comments about their bodies and pressurised them to remove clothes during rehearsals or performances. … [At one of the schools,] a female student complained that a visiting teacher had sexually assaulted her at home.” – The Telegraph (UK)
The 106-Year-Old Dancer Who Hates The Word Old
Eileen Kramer still dances every day. And she also “writes a story a day from her Sydney aged-care facility, publishes books and has entered Australia’s most prestigious painting competition. After decades living abroad, Ms Kramer returned to her home city of Sydney aged 99. Since then, she’s collaborated with artists to create several videos that showcase her primary talent and lifelong passion: dancing.” – BBC
Mary Beard: Ancient Rome Never Disappoints
The Cambridge classics professor (and Twitter, TV, and book star) says that our desire to compare the U.S. to ancient Rome is normal – but not sensible. “Rome, in a way, doesn’t matter at all. It’s a very long time ago; no one’s going to get hurt by them. … Rome helps us stand outside ourselves. For me, Rome was a brutal and exploitative empire. But the idea of looking at a big, nasty imperial community who saw their origin in migration, in asylum, and that always traded on the incorporation of the foreign — it takes us out of some of our assumptions.” – The New York Times
The Prado Is Taking Its Art To The Streets
In replica form, that is. “Exact replicas of masterpieces from the Prado museum, including paintings by Goya, El Greco, and Fra Angelico, have been installed behind tree branches, inside airport security stations, on the sides of buildings, and along wrought-iron fences.” – Artnet
The Science Of Pleasure
It goes way – way – beyond dopamine. “You could say that dopamine is to happiness what petrol is to a car; it’s an integral part of making it work, but if you were to literally fill your car with petrol, to the point where it’s leaking out the windows, that wouldn’t help anyone.” – Psyche
Oh, Great — Now Going Back To Movie Theaters Will Become Part Of The Culture Wars
Owen Gleiberman: “To go or not to go? To believe in the primacy of the communal, cathartic big-screen experience or to see it as a stodgy, unhip relic? No one thought this way about the movie theater versus VHS or DVD; the industry wasted no time transforming those technologies into ancillary markets that helped keep movies afloat. But streaming has changed the chemistry. The two radically different ways of experiencing filmed dramatic entertainment (theater vs. home) will now be competing as never before, and in some ways it’s a battle of cachet.” – Variety
There Is No Such Thing As Renaissance Philosophy
The facts just don’t bear it out. “It’s questionable that there ever really was a ‘movement’ other than in the mind of 19th- and early 20th-century historians.” Perhaps one conclusion is that classifications like “the Renaissance” are not great mechanisms for understanding the world of ideas, or the historical world either. – Aeon
Raimund Hoghe, Who Created Dances For His Own Nonnormative Body, Dead At 72
Five feet tall and born with a curved spine, he was a young journalist interviewing Pina Bausch when she asked him to work with her; after a decade, he began making pieces of his own. His solo work, whether for himself or colleagues, tended toward the political; his dances for larger ensembles mixed contemporary ballet with butoh and set it to the likes of Liza Minnelli and Maria Callas. – The New York Times
These Unpublished Charles Schultz Cartoons Are About (!!) Adults
Here’s the story of a set of seven comic strips, called “the Hagemeyer strips” after their main character, set in an office, with protagonists who seem an awful lot like grownup versions of Charlie Brown and Lucy Van Pelt. (Poor Charlie Brown — the Lucy character is his boss.) – The Washington Post
At 4,300 Years, This May The World’s Oldest War Memorial
“A huge burial mound holding the corpses of at least 30 warriors in Syria could be the oldest war memorial ever discovered, dating back at least 4,300 years at the now submerged site of Tell Banat, said a team of archaeologists. The memorial is also the first example of a particular type of monument described in ancient inscriptions from Mesopotamia in which the bodies of either enemies or local battle dead are piled up to form a highly organized structure.” – Live Science
These Protesters Faced Down The Colombian Cops By Voguing
As a crowd marched in Bogotá against poverty and police violence, three twenty-something queer folks whose dance video had gone viral a couple of weeks earlier were urged by their fellow demonstrators to go right up to the riot police on the stairs at Plaza Bolívar and work it. And they did. – The New York Times
Los Angeles Is The United States’ Largest City-State
Or else it’s something else. But it’s no mere city. “Los Angeles fits the city-state frame well, certainly better than it does a lot of other possibilities—if we update the model a bit. In 2010, Forbes suggested that if the criteria for a place to be considered a city-state were modernized for the 21st century, certain global capitals might qualify thanks to a few key features: a big port to sustain trade; investors from overseas; money laundering; international museums worth visiting; multiple languages spoken in good restaurants serving alcohol; and an ambition to host the World Cup.” Check, check, check, check, check, and check. – The Atlantic
Swiss Ballet School Fires Director And Manager, Suspends All Classes
An investigation reveals psychological abuse, abuse of power, nepotism, and “serious pedagogical dysfunctions” at the Rudra Béjart School, “leading the Board to terminate the contract of the director, Michel Gascard and his wife Valérie Lacaze, manager of the school.” (Article in French; translation available using Google Translate.) – FranceInfo
Hollywood Producers Want A Union, Too
Can a producers’ union ever work in the biz? They need it. “More than 100 feature film producers … recently ratified the constitution for a new union they hope will provide the kind of basic healthcare, pay and protections afforded by most other unionized Hollywood workers.” – Los Angeles Times
Why A Photographer Asked Her Subjects To Pose In Victorian Dress
Zimbabwe-based photographer Tamary Kudita has her contemporary subjects pose in Victorian outfits – often made with contemporary fabric, by designers – to show links between present and past, to combine the two strands of her family’s history, and to immense visual effect. She says, “There are collective identities and there are also individual and incredibly diverse stories. All these together shape our self-perception.” – NPR
How Eataly Has Changed Our Understanding Of Italian Food
Eataly is not actually Italy, despite the advertising tagline. “Eataly celebrates agricultural life, but its urban stores feel miles away from a rural idyll. It champions hyper-local produce, while being wedded, not least through its name, to the idea of a national cuisine. Eataly presents itself as the whole nation in microcosm; the best of Italian cuisine, all conveniently collected under one roof – yet even if such a thing as the ‘essence’ of a nation or its cuisine existed, it would be impossible to encapsulate it in miniature.” – Vittles