A 26-year-old Bostonian, originally from Virginia, Charles Overton “wants to be both the Yo-Yo Ma and Herbie Hancock of the harp.” (Might one say he is pushing the Overton Window?) – Ozy
City Of Seattle Creates A New Real Estate Company To Buy And Manage Arts Spaces
The city is taking the rare step of creating a “mission-driven” real estate development company so that it can create, purchase, manage and lease property for arts and cultural spaces — which could include a wide range of venues and organizations, including galleries, bookstores, nonprofit dance companies and cultural community centers. – Crosscut
The ‘School of Embodiment’: This Is How To Do Good Sex Writing
“[Garth Greenwell] is, a practitioner, with [Lidia] Yuknavitch and a few others, of what we might call the School of Embodiment: a kind of close tracking of sensation and response that we typically assign to poets or sensory neurologists. This doesn’t mean that work by these writers is stylistically similar, only that it seeks meaning in and through the body.” – The Point
Philadelphia’s Count-All-The-Votes Dance Party Was A Deliberate Plan To Avoid Street Violence
“It seemed impromptu. It wasn’t entirely. The undeniable joy before, on, and after Election Day was organic. But a coalition of Philadelphia progressive organizations, many of them Black-led, have for months planned for political tension and unrest, determined to turn down the temperature.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
A Historian Concludes Systemic Civilization Failure
“If you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly. The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch you now hear—steel twisting, rivets popping—is the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg.” – The Atlantic
Touting It Up: Public Radio’s Diversity Audit
Public radio has a problem. In 2019, NPR’s newsroom was more than 70 percent white. The same year, 83 percent of the voices heard on its national shows were white, too. According to the most recent State of the System report by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in 2018, just 23 percent of people working at member stations identified as people of color. That’s almost a full percentage point decrease from the previous year. – Columbia Journalism Review
Why Are Contemporary Writers Obsessed With Self-Awareness?
Critics—and the authors they cover—seem to be obsessed with self-awareness. Writing about oneself isn’t new at all, but what’s current (and quickly growing stale) is the overtly self-conscious way contemporary writers have chosen to go about it. – The Nation
Are Our Brains Wired To Want To Be Outside?
The evolutionary explanation for human connection to nature is a colossal safari through the African savanna, where our ancestors fought, fed, and frolicked for millions of years. The biologist E.O. Wilson speculated on this story in Biophilia, a slim volume on human attraction to nature. Wilson defined biophilia as an “innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.” – Nautilus
Founder Of Now-Defunct American National Ballet Charged With Murdering Husband
In early 2017, Doug and Ashley Benefield moved to Charleston with ambitious, high-profile plans to create a top-level ballet company and school there — and over that year, the project gradually and messily fell apart. Now Ashley has been arrested near Bradenton, Florida and charged with shooting Doug during an argument; the couple had separated and were in an ongoing custody dispute over their daughter. – The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)
Commercial Radio Is 100 Years Old. Where Can It Go From Here?
Kirk Miller: “Surviving 100 years is incredible. But I do wonder if it’ll make it through another 10, let alone 100. To get some outside perspective, I asked four people — two long-time DJs, a younger musician and a veteran music industry reporter — for their thoughts on commercial radio, both as it stands today and where it’s going.” – InsideHook
Playing Tetris With Patron Seating And Whack-A-Mole With Problems: How Front-Of-House Staff Reopened UK Theatres Under COVID
Before the latest lockdown, “it was all looking so hopeful. Reopening theatres after seven months was never going to be easy, but big and small teams across the country had been rising to the challenge and welcoming audiences back with gusto.” Here’s a look at how the ways they went about it. – The Stage
Young Opera Singers Are Paying To Audition Via Video. Does Anyone At Companies Actually Watch? We Can Find Out.
Zach Finkelstein, a professional data analyst as well as a lyric tenor, spoke with 15 applicants to young artists’ programs and looked at YouTube Analytics figures for their privately uploaded videos. “The data suggests that some companies rejected those singers without viewing any of their video auditions. YouTube reports also indicate that the average company isn’t considering more than a short section of those singers’ arias — the views registered by the platform last, for most, roughly a minute, less than half of one aria.” – The Middleclass Artist
Strand Bookstore’s Owner And Remaining Staff Aren’t At Each Other’s Throats, Exactly, But …
“Why, they wonder, are their fellow employees still out of jobs while the owner gets a government payroll loan and has the money to invest elsewhere?” (Owner Nancy Bass Wyden spent more than $100K on stock in Amazon this year.) “Bass Wyden … says she needs to spend money to make more money while the Strand isn’t performing, a means to keep it afloat in the long term. The workers … see her putting her personal wealth before the institution. The truth, it seems, lies somewhere in the middle, with both sides wanting the store to live forever and, in true 2020 fashion, having their nerves frayed to the limits.” – InsideHook
Movie Theatres Urge Lame Duck Congress To Pass COVID Relief
The Save Our Stages legislation, introduced by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), would allow Small Business Administration grants equaling 45% of a venue’s 2019 revenue or $12 million, whichever is less. Venue operators also would be eligible for a second grant equal to 50% of the first award. Save Our Stages was introduced as a $10-billion program to help venues such as live concert halls. It was later expanded to $15 billion in order to include movie theater operators. – Los Angeles Times
Video Of Alzheimer’s Patient Recalling “Swan Lake” Movement Goes Viral
The Spanish dancer, who reportedly died in 2019 after battling Alzheimer’s disease, has captivated social media since a video surfaced of Marta González, by then confined to a wheelchair, vividly recalling the upper-body choreography of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” — her delicate ballet hands graceful as ever. – New York Post
In Praise (And Condemnation) Of Gimmicks
“Although my calling something a gimmick registers a subjective response, it also demands agreement or invites confrontation, and more brazenly so than other judgments. Should a fan of robot chefs and Roombas question why I harbor such unwarranted suspicions about them, I will feel compelled to convince him that my suspicions ought to be felt universally. But I will also delight in a newfound sense of superiority, my belief that only I am discerning enough to see that these devices are overvalued, too good to be true.” – The New Yorker
Where Did The Expression ‘Peanut Gallery’ Come From? It’s Complicated
Early Boomers would associate the phrase with The Howdy Doody Show, where it referred to the studio audience of kids. In fact, the first known printed use of “peanut gallery” comes from an 1867 review of a vaudeville show in New Orleans, and it refers to the food item unruly patrons would throw at performers they didn’t like. (Warning: the sentence in question is pretty racist.) – The Conversation
Comedian Norm Crosby, Master Of Malapropism, Dead At 93
He was marketing shoes in Boston when he decided to try his hand at comedy, and he ultimately spent nearly fifty years in clubs and on television entertaining people with his (deliberate) misuse of vocabulary. For example: “He’s got a certain inner flux that excretes from this man, there’s an aura of marination that radiates out of him.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Should Britain’s Politicians Quit Bothering To Pretend They Stay Out Of Decisions On Who Gets Arts Funding?
“Indeed, a case can be made for greater government intervention in much of our cultural landscape. … Like it or not, public funding must come with public accountability. But defending the government’s right to interfere in the arts and museums becomes much harder when government funding keeps declining. Minority shareholders don’t get to tell a chief executive how to run their business.” – The Art Newspaper
Keys To: A Long Life In Dance
When it comes to the secrets of longevity in a dance career, Linda Austin and Bobby Fouther had similar thoughts: you do what makes you happy, just keep going, and ignore the pressures to be liked. In an interview for a book called Beauty is Experience: Dancing 50 and Beyond, by Emmaly Wiederhold with photographs by Gregory Bartning, Austin said, “If you are stubborn enough and love it enough, you’ll find a way to keep going. You do need some outside validation from time to time. I’ve always gotten just enough to keep me going but not enough to make me comfortable. The carrot is always just ahead.” – Oregon ArtsWatch
The Smithsonian’s Slow Walk To Re-Opening
“The building is cleaner than it’s been since 1964. It’s fabulous,” said Anthea M. Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History. Daily attendance there is about a tenth of normal, Hartig said, creating a different experience. “Instead of doing the rush through, people are spending more time because they can.” – Washington Post
Exploring What It Means To Live In A Body
The artist Senga Nengudi’s early sculptures became icons of the Black Arts Movement – and she’s still exploring the ways the body shapes art, and art, along with dance, can distort and reflect, especially, a Black female body. – The New York Times