“In Britain, I think it’s fair to say that we have a pretty established tradition, if not a hard and fast rule, that critics don’t read new plays before they see them. There are also cultural reasons why a British critic won’t read a play before they see it…”
Month: June 2008
Joan Tower At 70
As she approaches her 70th birthday in September, Tower is one of the deans of American composers. “Would that be dean-ess?” she says, laughing again. “I feel great to get to this age and have my music being played. I like the fact that my career has been one of slow growth. I feel sorry for composers who get major attention when they’re in their early 20s. It’s hard to go up from that.”
A Call To Excellence (Useless If You Can’t Define Excellence)
“My suspicion is that the reason that there has been so little debate about the McMaster review is not just associated with the timing of its publication, but to do with the fact that in laying down “excellence” as its central plank but failing to define it, McMaster has pulled off a conjuring trick in creating a document that is as fragile as an illusion and can mean all things to all people and also absolutely nothing at all.”
In Defense Of Romance Lit
“It’s odd, isn’t it, how squeamish we are about love as a topic. It’s fine for a hallmarked classic – Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina – but if the heroine is a modern girl commuting in to a dull job on the Central Line from Epping, we come all over contemptuous. We use words and phrases like shallow and frothy and only fit for women on sunbeds (so RUDE to readers).”
Pseudonymously Yours (I Wish)
“Back in the 18th century, when many of the freedoms we currently struggle to preserve enjoyed life merely as so many ideas printed in pamphlets, anonymity – or, more often, pseudonymity – was one of the writer’s most secure defences.” Today, not so much…
The Guardian’s Arts And Sports Writers Trade Places For A Day
“Sport and culture are often thought to have nothing in common. But is this really true? What would happen if the Guardian’s arts critics and sports writers swapped roles for a day? Today the critics get a taste of the sporting life, while tomorrow the sports team are set loose on the contemporary arts world.”
How Canada’s Most Famous Hockey Song Was Stolen
Not stolen, exactly. But ownership of the CBC’s iconic theme for Hockey Night in Canada was plucked away from the network by rival CTV, which came up with pots of money.
A Look At Renzo Piano’s New Whitney Museum
“Dare we call this block-long, 185,000-square-foot structure in the Meatpacking District a branch? Scheduled to open late in 2012, it’s three times the size of its uptown sibling.”
The Tony Speech That Confused The Heck Out Of Everyone
Mark Rylance’s “speech as Best Actor left some thinking that his Broadway debut in a very different role — as a virginal Midwesterner in the 1960s sex farce Boeing-Boeing — had somehow gone to his head. However, backstage, the actor explained that his words came from a prose poem, Back Country, by the Midwestern writer Louis Jenkins.”
Why I Collect Folk Art
“I think I’ve been emboldened to collect folk art because I have an unwavering confidence in my taste, something I wouldn’t claim when discussing, say, fine art or music. Long before Malcolm Gladwell celebrated the genius of impulse in “Blink,” I decided that gut instinct was the only way to go in collecting, whether the object costs a dollar or a thousand dollars.”