“It feels like we’re leaving this decade light years ahead of where we entered it. In 2010, salacious stories about queer people were still routinely seen in tabloids and on TV. Today, LGBTQ+ people are heralded for being themselves, and our stories are being normalized and told with a broader range of diversity and experiences than ever before.” Writer Jill Gutowitz talks with four leading queer media creators about how it happened. – them
What Defined 2019? Ideas? People? How About Stuff?
“Look at the stuff. The Things. Objects. The products that overflow our commercial marketplace, designed for our consumption, that we loved, loathed, mocked, coveted, worried about, or just found so baffling we couldn’t stop obsessing about them.” – Medium
The Quiet Death Of A Legendary Paris Bookstore (And The Rising Rents That Are To Blame)
Inside the last days of Le Pont Traversé – and the economics of a flashy Paris encroaching on the heart of the literary city. The shop is especially known for its poetry. “A few months ago, a gang of young women came in looking for female poets like Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Yanette Delétang-Tardif—considerably lesser known than their male contemporaries, but now revived thanks to French bloggers writing on poetry ‘Their enthusiasm is extraordinary,’ marveled Josée. ‘I feel that when young people fall in love with writers today, they fall hard.'” – Literary Hub
Banksy’s Depressing Holiday Mural Taken Off View By Welsh Government
“The Welsh first minister has defended his government’s handling of the festive Banksy work Season’s Greetings, which is to be locked behind closed doors in a former police station after being briefly put on show to the public.” – The Guardian
The Best Take-Down Reviews Of Terrible Books This Year
“Our friendly neighborhood book review aggregators put on our black hats and seek out the most deliciously virulent literary take-downs of the past twelve months. It’s a ritual blood-letting exercise carried out in an effort appease the Literary Gods, thereby guaranteeing a good book review harvest in the year to come, and we take it very seriously.” – LitHub
Insurers Are Very Reluctant To Cover Art Basel Hong Kong
“As dealers struggle to insure works of art bound for Hong Kong, where pro-democracy protestors continue to clash with police, Art Basel in Hong Kong organisers say they are working with a local insurance broker to offer cover — at 20 times the normal rate.” – The Art Newspaper
Why Paul Bowles Drew Such A Long Shadow On Morocco
I have tried not to think too often about the long shadow that Paul Bowles casts over Tangier, but this year’s commemorations have made it hard to avoid: the twentieth anniversary of Bowles’s death and the seventieth of The Sheltering Sky’s publication. In Tangier, celebrations to mark this “existential masterpiece” are under way, including balls and masquerade parties. And so I’ve found myself again asking how this genteel American writer came to be so bound up with Morocco, and how, in recent years, he has become a figure of both nostalgia and contention. – New York Review of Books
US Justice Department Dings Live Nation For Consent Decree Violations
The DOJ investigation found that Live Nation had repeatedly violated the 10-year consent decree signed after the merger, in which the company agreed to refrain from monopolistic practices such as withholding valuable shows from venues in order to force them to contract Ticketmaster for ticketing services. – Pitchfork
Workers At Mexico City’s Institute Of Fine Arts Protest Over Delayed Wages
The issue of delayed wages has been a thorn in the side of arts workers for months – or years. While unionized workers have shut down several museums over it, this protest was organized by non-unionized workers. “Among the texts written on the placards held up by Villalba and his colleagues were ‘Exhibitions are always on time, why aren’t our payments?’ ‘NO to work without rights;’ and ‘The love of art should not mean unpaid work.'” – Hyperallergic
At A Quasi-Secret Film Festival In Belarus, Trying To Stay Ahead Of The KGB
The organizers of the festival, almost all women, had to come up with Plans C and D after the Belarus KGB said no to showing films in the theatres or bank buildings. “The confidence to cover the screen in black, to ask such serious questions about liberty and cinema. Compared with this, most film festivals look meagre and transient.” – The Guardian (UK)
Sure, The New Cats’ ‘Memory’ Is A Popera Furball, But Whose Fault Is That?
Let’s talk more about what Andrew Lloyd Weber did with this music, and what’s been done to it since it premiered. Erm, the LAT‘s pop music critic isn’t a fan: “To hear the song’s dreary opening arpeggios now is to reflexively brush off the possibility of encountering something that might move you; the tune, a happily trashy bit of ersatz Puccini, has become a kind of showbiz parody of the emotion it once sought genuinely to embody.” – Los Angeles Times
Who’s Up And Who’s Down In Oscar Predictions?
Men are wimping out of seeing Little Women‘s award showings, which is tanking its chances; despite the awfulness of Cats, Ian McKellen’s chances are up; and more. – Vulture
Phase 2, An Innovator Of Aerosol Art, Has Died At 64
“In the South Bronx at the dawn of the 1970s, all the creative components that would coalesce into what became widely known as hip-hop were beginning to take shape. At the center of them all was Phase 2, an intuitive, disruptive talent who first made his mark as a writer of graffiti — although he hated the term.” – The New York Times
Building A Better (Well, Bigger) Sistine Chapel
It’s for Netflix, y’all. For The Two Popes. – Los Angeles Times
A Landline Lamentation
Roger Cohen misses the world of the landline. “In the landline world there was down time. You left the house, you looked around, you saw people, you daydreamed, you got lost, you found your way again, you gazed from the train window at lines of poplars swaying in the mist. Time drifted. It was not raw material for the extraction of productivity. It stretched away, an empty canvas.” – The New York Times
Vienna Ballet Academy Fires Director Over Abuse Claims
The academy had given its students “insufficient medical and therapeutic care,” a commission set up by the Austrian government, said in a report issued on Tuesday. There also seemed to be “no awareness” that it had a responsibility for its students’ health. The decision to effectively dismiss Simona Noja-Nebyla was announced in a news release on Friday by the company that oversees all of Austria’s federal theaters. – The New York Times
What Classical Music Needs To Do About Climate Change
Welcome work by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research examines all the areas of impact touring has on the environment and recognises that the issue is complex: it cannot be solved by planting a set number of trees per tour. From audiences travelling to concerts to the power required by the halls, this crisis is the responsibility of all of us. Everyone must be conscious of their behaviour and acknowledge the active part they have to play. Planning permission for all new concert halls, for example, should only be given if the buildings will be carbon neutral. Existing concert halls must make radical changes to ensure they are as close to carbon neutral as possible. – The Guardian
“Cats” Was Bad Theatre, An Even Worse Movie. So Why Does It Endure?
“Theater people resent “Cats” not just because it made Broadway uncool until “Hamilton” finally rescued it from the pop cultural stocks. What really infuriates buffs is that “Cats” ushered in an era of grandiose spectacle, the vacuous parade of shows from the 1980s and early ’90s that made it seem as if a musical had to have a helicopter or a crashing chandelier to be worth the rapidly rising ticket price.” – Los Angeles Times
“Beetlejuice” Has Been A Hit – What Its Surprise Closing Says About Today’s Broadway
Broadway’s supply and demand for theatres is a far cry from the mid 1980s, when commercial theatre in New York in general seemed like it might be on the ropes. Hamilton, Moulin Rouge!, The Lion King and Wicked all grossed more than $2 million last week, and To Kill a Mockingbird – a play – grossed $700,000 more than Beetlejuice – evidence of how expectations and earnings are being recalibrated. – The Stage
The Ten Top-Selling Books Of The 2010s
Though the list is all fiction, overall the trend is moving towards nonfiction on the best-seller lists. According to Lee Graham of the NPD Group, “In 2010, nearly 80 percent of the top-selling titles were fiction, and by 2019 that percentage dropped to 32 percent.” – LitHub
Requiem For The Newseum, A “Museum” For News
The Newseum was “prey to the economic and cultural forces that have bedeviled institutions as diverse as symphony orchestras and the electronic media. It had to compete for audience and achieve the right balance between substance and entertainment. Like so many organizations in American society, it struggled to find a compromise between being authoritative and being accessible.” – Washington Post
Cree Decree: Monkman Debunks U.S. Creation Myths in His Metropolitan Museum Commission
In my skeptical post last month about Cree artist Kent Monkman’s plans for the Metropolitan Museum’s Great Hall, I recklessly ventured some premature commentary. This “squeamish critic” has now eyeballed Monkman’s magnum opus is visually intriguing and intellectually thought-provoking. – Lee Rosenbaum
Tracking Down (And Saving) Hollywood’s Movie Backdrops
“Hollywood started as a green industry and then became brown. Everything was used repeatedly; nothing went into storage. Then when studios began to decline, they got rid of everything, sold things in auctions or just threw them away. And the first to go were backings. We will never know how many were lost, and if I go down that road I will just start to cry.” – Los Angeles Times
The Politics Of Self-Plagiarism
“As a transgression, plagiarism comes with a fully operational stigma attached. Not so with self-plagiarism. It can be forbidden but without the benefit of shame as a reinforcement. I did find it denounced as unethical while reading through some 50-odd articles or papers mentioning it, most of them from scholarly journals. At least as frequent, though, were suggestions that a certain amount of self-plagiarism is inevitable — and perhaps even necessary.” – Inside Higher Education