“Chinese artist Ai Weiwei says he has been ordered to shut down four live webcams at his home, which he set up as a nod to the 24-hour police surveillance he has lived under for the last year.”
Month: April 2012
Ãngel Corella To Retire From American Ballet Theater
“Mr. Corella, 36, was born in Madrid and joined the company as a soloist in 1995. He has danced leading roles throughout his career from the company’s stable of story ballet classics.”
Günter Grass Attacks Israel In A Poem
“Never in the history of postwar Germany has a prominent intellectual attacked Israel in such a cliche-laden way as Günter Grass with his controversial new poem, ‘What Must Be Said’.”
Books As Apps – Is This The Future?
“Perhaps the most wildly divergent book app I’ve encountered so far is Chopsticks, which is another Penguin book, but one that’s vastly different than their amplified editions. It’s described as a novel, but it’s vastly different than a traditional novel. As you turn the pages, you aren’t confronted with a traditional narrative, but rather interact with different pieces of the lives of Glory, a teen piano player, and the boy who moves in next door. The story’s told through newspaper clippings, pictures, songs, and more. It’s a rather fascinating way to tell a story.”
Looking For New Ways To Remind The Audience To Turn Off Their Damned Cell Phones
“Once upon a time, stage actors worried about tomatoes. Now, they worry about T-Mobile. Thus, the ubiquitous reminder to listen up and power down. While some preshow messages are direct and unadorned, many directors and producers view the recording as an occasion for a bit of creativity, an opportunity both to set cellphones on silent and to set the tone for a production.”
Now This Is Making Classical Music Accessible: $5 A Month, Up To 100 Concerts A Year
“The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra is raising the bar for lowering ticket prices through an innovative membership program. For $5 a month, members can get a ticket to each of the SPCO’s 100 concerts during the 2012-13 season.”
Rage Against The Machine: Peter Gelb On Robert Lepage’s Ring Cycle At The Met
“This backstage drama should not matter to the public,” but Gelb, “the Met’s general manager since 2006, has been living it, attending every stage rehearsal and ‘complaining bitterly,’ he said, about the persistent clankiness of the so-called machine, the 45-ton set of movable planks that dominate the production.”
How (Pay) Television Got To Be Better Than Movies
James Wolcott: “As I write this, the Academy Awards are a few days away, with The Artist the odds-on best-picture winner. Does anyone think The Artist is better than Mad Men?”
Freudian Slips Are Overrated
“But decades of research in psycholinguistics reveal that speech errors are rarely this incriminating. The vast majority of them come about simply because of the sheer mechanical complexity of the act of speaking. They’re less like Rorschach blot tests and more like mundane assembly-line mistakes that didn’t get caught by the mind’s inner quality control.”
Even Mark Rylance Piles On Shakespeare’s Globe Invitation To Habima Theatre
“Shakespeare’s Globe’s former artistic director Mark Rylance has become the latest figure to call on the London venue to withdraw its invitation to Israeli company Habima to perform as part of the London theatre’s Globe to Globe festival this summer.”