If the body-shaming tactics allegedly employed by many NBA dance teams are troubling, the dancers’ stories suggest that the compensation is worse. Three women remembered getting paid $50 a game; one said she took home $65. Three others said they made just $25 a practice, and one said that she and her teammates weren’t paid for practice at all. To put all that in perspective, the average price of a single NBA ticket during the 2012-2013 season (the earliest year this salary was mentioned) was $50. – Yahoo News
Easter Island’s Mayor Says That Giant Statue Might Really Be Better Off In British Museum
“Pedro Edmunds Paoa said Easter Island had a ‘thousand’ of its iconic statues, known as the Moai, ‘both buried, ignored and discarded’, and lacked the means to maintain them. “Those thousand are falling apart because they are made of a volcanic stone, because of the wind and the rain are. We need global technology for their conservation.” — Reuters
Queering Cambodian Classical Dance
Prumsodun Ok is a Cambodian-American who studied Khmer court dance in the US and ultimately in Phnom Penh. Now he’s the founding artistic director of Natyarasa, Cambodia’s first LGBTQ dance company, which performs traditional dances in (what’s the best word?) gender-fluid form as well as newly-created works. (video) — Atlas Obscura
Walmart Buys Art.com
Initially Art.com will operate independently as a standalone company, but the announcement states that soon Art.com’s collection of two million images ranging from posters to limited-edition prints on paper and canvas, as well as frames, wall décor and custom framing services for uploaded photographs, will be added to the Walmart.com, Jet.com and Hayneedle.com sites. – Forbes
Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre A Cautionary Tale For Regional Theatre?
Liverpool’s plight is a reminder of just how close to the edge many regional theatres are operating and how perilously near many are to breaching their NPO agreements. As one leading industry insider put it to me: “There are many canaries in cages coughing, if not yet falling off their perches.” As with Liverpool, it wouldn’t take all that much to knock them off, and when one tumbles – particularly one as big as Liverpool – the fear is that more may follow. – The Stage
What We Learned About Making Good Plays: “We Don’t Care If They’re Any Good” (At Least For Awhile)
“What we learned working on Sinan’s play, and several others at that time, completely changed our DNA. We learned that the pressure of rushing to production forced us to take safer approaches and to marginalise the most important visionary of all, the writer.” After Pera Palas, the Lark changed its approach. “We became what I like to call a ‘rehearsal company’. We would be a play lab, a think tank for theatre.” – The Stage
Literary Hoaxes: Why They Work, And Why They Make Readers Angry (And Some Onlookers Gleeful)
Louis Menand: “If we pick up a novel about life in the barrio, or a book by a Tibetan monk, or an avant-garde literary magazine, we know what we expect to find. We are complicit in the attempt to get us to believe because we already want to believe. Writing … has to rely on readers bringing a lot of preconceptions to the encounter, which is why it is so easily exploited. Does this mean it’s all a game? Yes, in a sense.” — The New Yorker
Motion Picture Academy Seriously Considers Letting Oscars Go Hostless
After the Kevin Hart debacle, which they had not expected, the Academy powers-that-be are having a hard time finding someone willing to host the Academy Awards ceremony, and that very much includes people who’ve already done it. — Variety
AI Will Make Humans Better But Cost Us Control
The experts predicted networked artificial intelligence will amplify human effectiveness but also threaten human autonomy, agency and capabilities. They spoke of the wide-ranging possibilities; that computers might match or even exceed human intelligence and capabilities on tasks such as complex decision-making, reasoning and learning, sophisticated analytics and pattern recognition, visual acuity, speech recognition and language translation. They said “smart” systems in communities, in vehicles, in buildings and utilities, on farms and in business processes will save time, money and lives and offer opportunities for individuals to enjoy a more-customized future. – Pew Research Center
What Arthur Mitchell Meant To Dance
“Because of him, ballet could not exclude us,” said Virginia Johnson, one of Mitchell’s first dancers and the current artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem. “We were his army, united in the love of an art form.” Dance Theatre of Harlem’s entrepreneurship and success became “the impetus for what we know as culturally specific dance companies” today. – The Guardian
London Dance Critic Luke Jennings Steps Down From The Observer
The veteran journalist, who is also the author of the novels on which the TV series Killing Eve is based, tweeted that, after 14 years, “it’s time to step aside and pursue new projects.” — The Stage
Getting Inside Our Obsession With Sleep (Or Lack Of It)
According to the neuroscientist Matthew Walker—in his 2017 book, “Why We Sleep”—insomnia, strictly defined, is a clinical disorder most commonly associated with an overactive sympathetic nervous system, and it is triggered, typically, by worry and anxiety. Insomniacs can write twee lists of their blessings until the cows come home, but their cortisol levels will still tend to look as if they’re gearing up to storm the Bastille. – The New Yorker
Caught In Plagiarism, Minneapolis Star Tribune Film Critic Colin Covert Resigns
A statement from the editors, who were first alerted by a reader, says that “the reviews by Covert in question span many years, but one was published as recently as November 1.” He had been on staff at the paper for more than three decades. — The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
Artists Weigh In: What We Have Lost In The Contemporary World
Because the ideologies of the past century have been largely discredited as false utopias, we are bereft of the notion of a better future. Whether the idea of a utopia ever returns will depend on our spirit, our faith in what is to come. Yet who are we to make demands of the spirit, which will wander as it will? – The New York Times
Listener Suffers Cardiac Arrest Mid-Concert; Four Doctors In Audience Save Her
One Sunday last month, the Boston-area chamber ensemble Mistral was about to begin the third work on its program when 89-year-old Ingrid Christiansen slumped over in her front-row seat. Zoë Madonna reports on what happened next. (She didn’t want to go to the hospital, she wanted to hear the concert.) — The Boston Globe
David Sedaris Shows Us Tidbits From The Archives He Just Sold To Yale
Among them, the handmade books he turned in as papers in art school and Macy’s behavior guide for Santaland elves. As he tells Jennifer Schuessler, “There’s no way I could have ever gotten into a place like Yale. So it thrills me that horrible first drafts of stories I wrote when I was stoned got into an Ivy League school.” — The New York Times
American Poetry Is Political Again. The U.S. Poet Laureate Looks At How And Why
Tracy K. Smith: “Political poetry … has done much more than vent. It has become a means of owning up to the complexity of our problems, of accepting the likelihood that even we the righteous might be implicated by or complicit in some facet of the very wrongs we decry.” — The New York Times
Meet Dance Magazine’s 25 To Watch In 2019
This year’s list includes an amputee tap dancer, a young man whose star-making performance was partnering a wooden stool, and a dancer-cum-planetary geologist whose TED talk about choreographing for near-zero gravity is titled, “Netflix and Chill at 0 Kelvin.” — Dance Magazine
Man Attacks Art At The Denver Art Museum
“Artworks were compromised,” museum spokesperson Shadia Lemus told Westword. “The individual was arrested at the museum and taken into police custody.” Whether the destruction of the works was some sort of artistic statement or just “a teenager on drugs,” as one museum visitor suggested, has not been determined. – Westword
Protesters Rally At The Whitney Museum Over Board Member
The protest, organized by a group called Decolonize This Place, was to demand the resignation of the museum’s vice chairman, Warren B. Kanders, 12 days after it was revealed by the website Hyperallergic that he is also the owner, chairman, and CEO of the company Safariland, which manufactures law enforcement gear—including the tear gas reportedly being used on migrants at the southern border. – The Daily Beast
Can You Be A Successful Artist Without Being On Instagram?
If an artist is supposed to propose new ways of seeing and creating, it’s worrying when social media platforms feel like they’re turning us all into sycophantic clones. – New York Magazine
Movie Special Effects Are So Astonishing We’re Bored. So What’s Next?
How have we gotten to the point where we somehow feel like we’ve seen it all before, even as movies desperately keep trying to show us things that we’ve never seen before? – New York Magazine
Kristin Korb Christmas
Kristin Korb, That Time Of Year (Storyville)
Winter holiday albums began showing up in the Rifftides mailbox well before Thanksgiving. They’re still coming. It’s time to call some of them to your attention. — Doug Ramsey
Bestselling British Author Says He Wants To ‘Safeguard’ Libraries
Even as hundreds of libraries have closed and thousands of professional library staff been laid off, there are still libraries in Britain left to safeguard. And comedian turned bestselling children’s author David Walliams wants to save them. – The Guardian (UK)
The Evolving Ethos Of Literary Hoaxes
The literature professor’s point is that placing social value on concepts like authenticity is an invitation to manufacture them. A certain style of writing can come across as more authentic, and this can help a book gain status in the literary marketplace. – The New Yorker