“His path crossed Buddhists and crusading warriors, the Bedouin and Venetian sailors, ambassadors, monks, sorcerers, and snake charmers. Along the way he wrote the Seyahatname (‘Book of Travels’), a magnificent ten-volume sprawl of fantasy, biography, and reportage that is utterly unique in the canon of travel literature, and which confirms Evliya [Çelebi] as one of the great storytellers of the seventeenth century.”
Battle Cry In Birmingham: ‘Save Our Brutalism!’
“The Brutiful Birmingham Action Group (see what they did there?) is fighting an uphill struggle to preserve the city’s best examples of 1950s and ’60s concrete and glass minimalism.”
West End Staffers Sue Britain’s Largest Theatre Owner, Alleging They’ve Been Shortchanged On Pay
“Entertainment union BECTU is representing 38 front-of-house workers across all of [Ambassador Theatre Group’s] West End venues, claiming they have been paid less than the agreed Society of London Theatre rate.”
Why Do So Many Arts Organizations Fail At The Audience Experience?
“Even as we demand more flavor from our coffees and breads – they’ve got to be artisanal, you know – we seem willing to accept patron experiences that are increasingly diminished. Character is an important consideration when you’re buying a $1 doughnut. But it doesn’t seem to be as crucial when purchasing a $100 pass to a music festival.”
Why The Beatles’ ‘Revolver’ Still Matters After 50 Years
Scott Timberg: “Even if you scorn Boomer myth-making, the 50th anniversary of Revolver – perhaps the Beatles’ best album – is a big deal. It not only sent the band in a new direction, it showed new possibilities in rock music.”
Uncovering The Secrets Of A Hidden Degas Portrait – With A Particle Accelerator
“For decades, a mysterious black stain has been spreading across the face of an anonymous woman in Australia. She is the subject of a painting by Edgar Degas, the French Impressionist painter, and since the 1920s, the oil paints in her portrait have gradually faded, revealing the hints of another, hidden portrait underneath.”
The Sweet Spot Between Being Too Content And Being Too Unhappy With Our Personalities
“Changes from within do matter—and these changes may indeed be undervalued in their role in determining happiness. In fact, they may even have strong economic consequences.”
No, We’re Not Actually ‘Wasting Time’ On The Internet
“Theorists say the internet is making us dumber, but something magical happened when my students wasted time together. They became more creative with each other. They say we’re less social; I think people on the web are being social all the time. They say we’re not reading; I think we’re reading all the time, just online.”
The Last Journalists Left Turn Out The Lights On Fleet Street
“I was standing by the window once a few years ago, and a tour bus had stopped outside. I heard the guide tell the passengers that Fleet Street no longer had any journalists working here. I stuck my head out and shouted: ‘We are still here’.”
Why Are British Audiences Eating Up An American Comedy About An Entitled, Self-Flagellating Asshole?
“I feel like out of every kind of performance I’m involved in, theater is still the best way to communicate a story to a group of people. I think there is so much value in putting myself through the very difficult experiences of the character eight times a week because I think it communicates — on a macro-level, the human condition, and on a micro-level, third-generation malaise, self-loathing, the fear of immigrants usurping positions of power from hegemonic cultures like mine.”
What Hollywood Can’t Touch
“Thinking about [Kiarostami’s] films while watching an American film leads to a sobering realization: all the things that Kiarostami could not show in his films became the only things Hollywood filmmakers chose to show in theirs. What he showed in his films were the things abandoned by Hollywood: conversation, friendship, understanding, compassion, and empathy.”
When The Cast Of ‘Fun Home’ Went To Orlando After The Pulse Shooting
“In murky, frightening times like these, that is the most essential thing theater offers an audience: a brief community, connecting us to one another in larger, lasting ways.”
The First (Rock) Gateway Song For Children Was ‘Yellow Submarine’
“I love that my son loves the Beatles, and I am optimistic that this will lead him down a path not unlike my own upbringing immersed in music.”
How’s Thomas Adès’ Opera Adaptation Of A Buñuel Movie Going?
“The acting, with certain exceptions, is quite restrained. With an opera, one’s doing in a way the opposite and bringing out the latent psychological and emotional meaning. The music underlines the power of the feeling. In some ways, I found that operatic subjects, whether it’s a source that you use or a real-life thing, are subjects that seem to invite a further dimension that in a way would bring them to some kind of new stature.
When Humans Can Control Each Others’ Brains Remotely, What Will Happen?
“These systems are potentially more precise and less invasive than existing techniques for altering brain activity such as deep brain stimulation. With so much progress on a variety of fronts, some form of human mind control – and the treatments and benefits it confers – should be here before long.”
Seeing A Bunch Of Tennessee Williams’ Flops Reveals A Lot About The USA’s Greatest Playwright
“Although skeptical about religion and its repressive demands, Williams maintained an open mind when it came to spirituality, believing that sex could lead one to God perhaps even more directly than sublimation and sacrifice.”
What Does London Sound Like? Ask The Sound Hunters
“I mean, could you imagine if you could hear the sounds of 18th-century London today? … Even if it was just the sound of people spitting in the street, coughing — and a lot of people were sick back then, so it probably would be — it’d be fascinating.”
The Evidence Is Mounting: Rembrandt Used Optics For His Self-Portraits
“A number of these smaller self-portraits are etched onto copper, a surface upon which projections can be seen extremely clearly. Two early painted self-portraits are also made on copper — an unusual choice of surface for a painting, but perhaps telling of an artist working from a projection.”
Why Does Canada Hate Canadians?
“If Canadian curators cannot aspire to eventually manage the museums where they work, or Canadian stage directors need never consider running Canada’s festivals, they will not give their institutions the best of themselves. They will either slump into the self-fulfilling prophecy of lower expectations or they will go abroad.”
This Greek Statue Of Zeus Was Lost In The Fifth Century, So – What The Heck – Let’s Just 3D-Print Another One
“It took two days to 3D print Zeus’s body and 20 hours to print his legs.”
The Librarian Who Changed Children’s Literature (And Children, And Libraries) Forever
“Her end-of-year lists were sacred anointments of the chosen titles; she was reputed to be able to make or break a book, much as the New York Times’ theater critic was said to determine the fate of a new play.”
So, Where Are The Native Peoples Of The U.S. In ‘Hamilton’?
“The thing is, Natives were a huge point of discussion, contention, concern, admiration, emulation, disgust, and more during this time period. Native representational democracies were also large part of the conversation in trying to build the new system of government.”
Top Posts From Today’s AJBlogs 08.05.16
Metropolitan Museum Boasts Record Attendance; Attributes Deficit, in Part, to Younger Demographics Is an increase in young visitors too much of a good thing? The Metropolitan Museum late yesterday issued an upbeat press release that painted a much rosier picture of attendance figures than my doom-and-gloom post… read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-08-05
When We Allow Technology To Police Our Culture… Last year I was producing the live streaming of the Ojai Music Festivaland we decided to use YouTube to carry the streams. In a small outdoor venue, the number of seats is limited to … read more
AJBlog: diacritical/Douglas McLennan Published 2016-08-05
Propwatch: Richard III’s spine When archaeologists excavating a Leicestershire car park in 2013 uncovered a battle-scarred skeleton, the emergence of its severely curved spine was the first strong indication that these were the remains of Richard III: England’s … read more
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2016-08-05
Trump Wrestles for President A friend tipped me to this video. It’s no secret. Hundreds of thousands of viewers have seen it, but I hadn’t. My friend also sent along his comment: How could the man in … read more
AJBlog: Straight|Up Published 2016-08-05
One song, no plot In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the new Broadway revival of Cats. Here’s an excerpt. * * * Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” opened in New York in 1982 and closed 18 years later, the …read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-08-05
Rewriting The Rules Of Ballet Class
“In Ashley Tuttle’s increasingly popular ballet classes, actual dancing is encouraged — something that’s less common than you might expect. Ballet class is usually a place to hone an impossible technique, and dancing is for the stage. But Ms. Tuttle doesn’t subscribe to that notion; what’s startling about her classes is the freedom she pulls out of her students. She cares deeply about technique, but for her, ballet is about more than positions; by the end, even beginners find themselves linking academic steps into swirling dancing phrases.”
“Augmented Eternity” – The Machines That Will Learn Enough About Us To Be Us
Augmented Eternity doesn’t just ingest the data someone leaves; to create a convincing facsimile, it analyzes how they think and act. The “presentation layer,” could take many forms: a chatbot, a voice interface, or even a 3D avatar in virtual reality.