A reporter and photographer travel to Orlando to see 44-year-old Michael Job acting his role at a Biblical theme park called The Holy Land Experience. — National Geographic
A Symphony Orchestra In Kinshasa Changes Congolese Lives
A reporter travels to the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to meet the conductor and musicians of the Kimbanguist Symphony Orchestra and its choir as they rehearse Mendelssohn. (video) — Deutsche Welle
Cleveland Orchestra Is Making Digitized Archives Accessible In Two Ways
First, the orchestra is gradually making all its historic scrapbooks (with concert flyers, program booklets, newspaper articles, etc.) available online. Second, a new touch-screen terminal called the “Magic Box” will make background materials on current concert programs available to audience members at Severance Hall. — The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
‘Building A More Inclusive American Theater’: The New Director Of The Long Wharf In New Haven
Jacob Padrón: “When I’m thinking about what plays to put on stages I ask: one, does the story reflect the community I am in and, two, is the story in conversation with the world? Those are the two big questions that will guide a lot of my thinking at Long Wharf.” — Connecticut Magazine
Mapping The ‘Cartography’ Of Conscious Feelings Onto The Body
When a team of research psychologists asked subjects to describe where in their bodies they experience various emotional states, they were surprised by just how consistent the correspondence of emotion to bodily area was. — Aeon
Here’s What Happens When Two MIT Folks Teach AI Software To Generate Christmas Movies
Karen Hao and Will Knight “fed plot summaries of 360 Christmas movies, courtesy of Wikipedia, into a machine-learning algorithm to see if we could get it to spit out the next big holiday blockbuster. Suffice it to say I now empathize with researchers who describe training neural nets as more of an art than a science. As I also discovered, getting them to be funny is actually pretty damn hard.” — MIT Technology Review
‘Merry Jinglelog’, ‘Cinnamon Hollybells’, And Other AI-Generated Christmas Carols
“[The Swedish firm Made by AI] fed 100 Christmas songs into a neural network, then waited for the bells to start ringing. While the resulting tunes are kind of a jingly mess, the titles are genius.” — Smithsonian Magazine
When Arts Funding Is Cut, Arts Orgs Lose More Than Just Government Money
An analysis of the situation in the English city of Bath, which steadily reduced its arts grants over a decade before ending them entirely last year, shows that such local funding leveraged three times as much money from other sources — and that those sources cut their giving in tandem with the cuts from the local council. — Arts Professional
Mexico’s Presidential Palace Had An Impressive Art Collection. Where Did It Go?
The official residence, known as Los Pinos, had been off-limits to the public ever since it was built in the 1930s, but new president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has opened it to the public. (He will live elsewhere.) But now that regular people can visit, the mansion’s art collection, including works by Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo, is nowhere to be seen. — The Art Newspaper
The Hague’s Art Museum Changes Its Name Because Foreigners Can’t Pronounce It
As the director of what is currently the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag says, “The [Dutch] ‘G’ is a very strange sound for people from abroad.” Not to mention that most of them don’t understand the word gemeente (municipal). The new name will be Kunstmuseum Den Haag. — The Art Newspaper
Does Non-profit CEO Pay Matter?
You may be surprised to learn that those big, prominent nonprofits soliciting your holiday donations, and maybe a place in your will, are very profitable for the administrators (and in some cases, the artists) in charge. How did that happen? Mostly because executive salaries are set by boards of directors, and these boards, especially at prestigious institutions, are comprised of the richest people those same administrators can round up, folks to whom a half-million dollars sounds like, if not pocket change, nothing more than a reasonable salary. – Chicago Reader
Doctors Perform Brain Surgery While Patient Plays The Guitar
The technique, known as “awake craniotomy,” allows doctors to operate on delicate areas of the brain — like the right frontal lobe, the site of Mr. Manzini’s tumor — without causing damage. Presumably, had he hit a wrong note, it would have been an immediate signal for the surgeons to probe elsewhere. – The New York Times
Facing Campus Protests, ‘Hamilton’ In Puerto Rico Moves Into The City Of San Juan
Lin-Manuel Miranda is set to return to the stage in this version, which abruptly moved to a theatre in the capital city after producer Jeffrey Seller determined that there wouldn’t be enough police protection on campus. Seller “said he welcomed activism — noting that Hamilton, a show about the American Revolution, is essentially a celebration of protest.” – The New York Times
As Advertisers Flee, Will Tucker Carlson’s Show Survive?
The Fox News host has lost advertisers en masse after “recent on-air comments that described mass immigration as making the country ‘poorer and dirtier and more divided.'” – Los Angeles Times
Classical Ballet Is Rooted In One Russian’s Sexist Assumptions, But Is That A Problem?
Marius Petipa’s 19th century choreography for Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and many more classical ballets is focused on how a ballerina becomes a sculpture in male hands. “The woman goes on point; the man does the partnering. The positions may not be reversed. What’s going on here? Is he serving her or controlling her? He subordinates himself to making her all the more spectacular, but which one is in charge? We can say that such behavior glorifies women — or that it falsifies them.” – The New York Times
The Tell-Tale Horror Of Christmas
In Britain, ghost stories – not only in Christmas Carol – are a vital part of the holiday season. – Paul Levy
Three Recent Shows All Depict Drag Queens In Positive Ways – But Also As Inspirational Props
And that’s really not OK. “Because all of these projects are about straight women, the way they depict drag queens feels little more progressive than the convention of the gay best friend, popular in 1990s romantic comedies like My Best Friend’s Wedding.” – The New York Times
A Comics Creator Says The Genre Is (Finally) Opening Up To Everyone
Creator and editor Tameka Stotts won an Eisner Award for her anthology Elements: Fire — A Comic Anthology by Creators of Color, and she’s making plans for a lot more. “We’re the main characters, we’re not the token characters, and we’re taking our adventures on a completely different level where our narration is no longer whitewashed and it’s no longer controlled by a medium that would like to see us palatable for a national audience.” – NPR
Alice Walker Defends Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theorist As ‘Brave’
The writer she praised in an interview that caused protests both against her and against The New York Times for running the interview (or not better editing it) is David Icke, who, among other things, “has posited that a cabal of a child-sacrificing, bloodthirsty lizard people, many of whom are Jewish, are secretly running the world.” – The New York Times
Not To Go All ‘Black Panther,’ But Is The British Museum Ever Going To Return Its Loot?
Nigeria, among others, would really like to know. “In 1897, British troops stole some 4,000 sculptures after invading the Kingdom of Benin (now southwestern Nigeria). Over a century later, surviving bronzes are on display at museums in the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria and the United States, but not in Nigeria, their country of origin.” – History
The Brand Hellscape That Is An Ice Cream (Or Avocado) ‘Museum’
Just because you can Instagram something doesn’t make it a museum. “We go to museums to see our humanity reflected back at us; at the very least, what we expect when we visit one is a bit of cultural centering, some provocation, and intellectual inquiry.” – Eater
Chicago Lyric Opera’s Subscription Problem
The decline in subscribers is upending the already fragile economics of opera, changing how companies operate and what they program. Lyric now gives a quarter fewer main stage opera performances than it did two decades ago — it gave 60 last season — and has started presenting a musical each spring. – The New York Times
Has Twitter Made This A Golden Age Of Aphorism?
“‘You’d think so,’ says the poet and aphorist Don Paterson. ‘But there’s absolutely no evidence of it.’ As he sees it, the aphorism is a different thing altogether from what he calls ‘wisdom literature’. Yet aphorisms – even though they haven’t much of a tradition in the anglophone world – are poking green shoots into the likes of Waterstone’s.” — The Guardian
Chunky Move, Melbourne’s Leading Contemporary Dance Company, Names New Artistic Director
Antony Hamilton, a longtime dancer and sometime choreographer with the company, replaces Anouk van Dijk as artistic director. Joining him as executive director is Kristy Ayre, also a former Chunky Move dancer; the two will be joint CEOs. — The Age (Melbourne)