Changi in Singapore, which has long striven to enthral and entertain its users, outdid itself with its new “Jewel” extension to its existing terminals, essentially a shopping mall and nature-based theme park. From a great oculus in its glass roof descends the “rain vortex”, a funnel of falling water described as the “world’s tallest indoor waterfall”. It has a “butterfly garden”. It has the Shiseido Forest Valley, a 900-tree, 60,000-shrub indoor landscape named after the Japanese-based personal care company Shiseido. The forest concept is, in marketing terms, a good fit with its corporate mission: “Beauty innovations for a better world.” – The Guardian
Is Walt Whitman The Writer We’ll Need In 2020?
“Watch clips of fevered crowds, from today or the past, chanting against ‘enemies of the people’; they are malignant scenes, but ones that in no small part mimic religious revivals. … Human beings are meaning-making creatures. A politics that is unable to translate its positions into some sort of transcendent language, pointing to something greater than the individual, is a politics that will ultimately fail. Whitman understood this.” – The New York Times
The Snopes Of Musicology? No, Linda Shaver-Gleason Has Been Much More Than That
“Since 2016, California musicologist Linda Shaver-Gleason has been using [her] site” — called Not Another Music History Cliché! — “to compile a clear-eyed and level-headed accounting of the ways in which the conventional wisdom about classical music (like conventional wisdom in all walks of life) consistently leads us astray.” Alas, as Joshua Kosman writes, she’s leaving all too much unfinished. – San Francisco Chronicle
New York Is Losing Its Human Scale – Here’s How It’s Happening
“If we continue to allow the erosion of the human-scale city and long-evolved urbanism on which it depends, then I fear for the future. The first thing needed is a public exhibit of the many empty sites across the boroughs of New York, and a representation of what further, unchecked upzoning will it make possible to build in the future. But without a well-organized, well-financed campaign like the effort to save Grand Central, or a singular leader like Jane Jacobs able to take on the powers that be and a press willing to give these battles full coverage, the perilous undermining of authentic urbanism will continue.” – New York Review of Books
Historic San Francisco Printing Plant To Become Arts Space
“The long-term vision is to create a constellation of buildings to address the whole issue of affordable space for artists.” – San Francisco Chronicle
Russia Relaunches Its First (Post-Soviet) International Film Festival
“Titled Kinotavr. Special Edition as a reference to the Russian national festival Kinotavr, … the festival will run for the first time in Moscow from late January through early February. … In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Kinotavr had an international competition that featured films by celebrated international directors. The new festival is viewed as a continuation of that effort focused on bringing the best global films to Russian viewers.” – The Hollywood Reporter
How Clyfford Still, For Better And Worse, Kept Iron Control Over The Market For His Paintings
“In 1951, the Abstract Expressionist stopped working with galleries and became his own dealer. He continued to paint for nearly three decades, retaining complete authority over his canvases’ whereabouts: Until his death in 1980 at age 75, no one could purchase a Still on the primary market without going through the artist himself. This was no easy task. Content to live and paint in Maryland, selling the occasional work in order to get by, Still made admirers prove themselves worthy of his art.” – Artsy
Lily Tomlin At 80
The comedy legend talks to David Marchese about what she couldn’t do when she was starting out in comedy, marrying Jane Wagner after more than 40 years as a couple, how she almost came out on the cover of Time in 1975, and the story behind that infamous fight on the set of I Heart Huckabees. – The New York Times Magazine
The Most Important Decade for Movies About Black Lives
Lawrence Ware: “I’d argue that the 2010s were the most important decade for black film in America. We see dramas (12 Years a Slave), comedies (Girls Trip), horror (Get Out, Us) and documentaries (13TH and O.J.: Made in America) all being taken seriously critically, and most were successful financially. So, the question I’d like to consider is a rather simple one: What were the best black films of the past decade? Here are my answers, in alphabetical order.” – The New York Times
What the Foundry’s Melanie Joseph and Playwrights Horizons’ Tim Sanford mean to theater
“Founded by Joseph in 1994, the Foundry, which produced artistic offerings, community programs and activist conferences on issues ranging from genocide to economic inequality, created a model that proved a theater company could examine its relationship to the world while upholding the most rigorous aesthetic standards. Playwrights Horizons has been quite simply the most important crucible for contemporary playwriting in America. … But does the theater have a sensibility today? Certainly, the old taunt (Gay Whites Horizons) no longer resounds now that the programming has become more widely inclusive.” – Los Angeles Times
Legendary Leaders: Foundry’s Melanie Joseph and Playwrights Horizons’ Tim Sanford Talk About What They Did Right
Passion for artistic freedom is ballasted by a concern for the economic welfare of artists. Whatever excitement the future holds for the American theater, it’s thanks to artistic leaders likes these whose ethics have been as forward-thinking as their aesthetics. – Los Angeles Times
Notre Dame’s Risky New Phase
The removal of melted scaffolding requires “three levels of steel beams to be positioned around its exterior to form a stabilising “belt”. Once this operation is complete, the same firm that built the scaffolding (Europe Echafaudage) will start to dismantle it, using telescopic crawler cranes that will allow roped technicians to descend into the forest of pipes and gradually cut them away after having coated them with a protective layer to avoid spreading the pollution caused by the melting of the lead roof.” – The Art Newspaper
Disruption? You Can Measure The Cognitive Dissonance
Connected technologies put pressure on our normative concepts like privacy, autonomy, and manipulation by changing the world so that our old concepts no longer apply and by pushing us to come up with new or revised concepts, creating conceptual confusion. – 3 Quarks Daily
How The Cha-Cha Led A Refugee Couple From Boat People To Oscar Contenders
Chipaul and Mille Cao, who grew up as members of wartime Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese minority, met at a dance party just six months before the Communist takeover of the entire country; they fled separately and were apart for years. They ultimately reunited in Southern California, married, and took up competitive ballroom dancing — and now a 20-minute film about them, Walk Run Cha Cha, has made the shortlist for the Best Documentary Short Oscar. – Los Angeles Times
‘Her Invention Is Ceaseless, Her Influence Is Profound’ — Playwright Lucy Kirkwood Pays Tribute To Caryl Churchill
“In the course of a writing life that spans 60 years, she’s changed the dramatic landscape of two centuries, and evolved more than any other British playwright our conceptions of what a play even is. She’s even changed the way we write them down.” – American Theatre
Which Nights Sell Best For Dance And Classical Music?
In Pittsburgh, at least, it seems not to be nights at all: it’s weekend matinees, across the genres. Sara Bauknecht and Jeremy Reynolds get into the details. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Asia Gets Its First-Ever LGBTQ-Focused Streaming Service
“GagaOOLala brings more than 1,000 feature films, shorts, web series, and documentaries to people across Asia, where censorship and traditional attitudes mean there has been little in the way of gay content in the mainstream media. After launching in 2017 in Taiwan, a beacon for gay rights since becoming the first place in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage, it has expanded to 21 territories including several that still criminalise homosexuality.” – Yahoo! (AFP)
Even With Mega-Franchise Movies In 2019, Box Office Declined. Now What?
“The slide in revenues is still disappointing because it occurred at a time when Walt Disney Studios put nearly all of its major franchises on the field — a show of firepower that enabled the company to pulverize records, racking up more than $11 billion at the global box office. With an arsenal that includes Lucasfilm, Marvel, Pixar, and — thanks to its $71 billion acquisition of much of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — 20th Century Fox, Disney was able to control roughly 40% of the domestic marketplace.” – Variety
Why Do Other Art Forms – Books, Movies, TV – Make Fun Of Theatre?
As if theater weren’t already mocked enough for its hysteria and jazz hands, it now seems to be pop culture’s punching bag. – The New York Times
Jimmy Iovine: The Music Business’s Looming Problem
“Margin. It doesn’t scale. At Netflix, the more subscribers you have, the less your costs are. In streaming music, the costs follow you. And the streaming music services are utilities — they’re all the same. Look at what’s working in video. Disney has nothing but original stuff. Netflix has tons of original stuff. But the music streaming services are all the same, and that’s a problem.” – The New York Times
How The On-Demand Economy Is Changing Our Experience of Cities
“The 2010s were the decade the city became an App Store: an online marketplace where our choices were closely tracked, where that data became part of the products we were using, and where digital clusters of activity displaced real-world transactions. Yes, we still go downtown for drinks, meals, and shopping experiences. But, more and more, we live in cities of the cloud.” – CityLab
Smartphones Changed The Way We Document Our Lives
And that’s a good thing, not something we should be worried about. Having a camera in your pocket all of the time is “an opportunity to capture your own life more honestly—a way to remember what you were really like in one season of life, the mundane food photos alongside shots of scenic vacations or birthday parties. The mundane things you use your phone to document are the details that add up to a full life, what it was like to be alive right then.” – Slate