“I really enjoyed it, but I understood what it was. It was a horror film. I mean I’m a dancer and I knew that it wasn’t supposed to be portraying what we are. The great thing about the movie was that it provoked people to think about ballet, which is always a great thing. But once they open up that conversation, it’s educating them on what ballet is.”
Month: November 2014
Dylan Thomas, The Last Rock-Star Poet
“Marshall McLuhan hadn’t yet given us the formula, but if Dylan Thomas was the medium, poetry was the message. Already a radio favorite in Britain, he blazed his reputation across 1950s America with a sequence of Led Zeppelin–esque reading tours, multicity road shows in which the dying throb of Romanticism met the incoming crackle of mass communication.”
How To Make Fewer Stupid Mistakes, From A Man Who Knows
Dr. David Dunning “is probably best known for the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect, … which argues, in short, that people without a lot of competence in a given area tend to overrate how good they are at the thing in question.” Here’s some advice he offers on how to avoid that effect.
Australian State Broadcasters’ Budgets Cut By $300 Million
“The ABC budget will be cut by $254 million over five years and the more efficient SBS will be forced to find $53.7 million in savings, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has announced today.”
And The Oxford Dictionaries’ 2014 Word of The Year Is …
… Well, you’ll just have to click to find out, but there’s a hint in the photo at left. (includes runners-up)
The Life Of A Modern-Day Dungeon Master
That’s as in Dungeons and Dragons, not … anything else. Yes, there are still D&D Dungeonmasters, and they’re by no means all geeky white boys anymore. (This one’s an Asian-American woman.)
L.A. Music Center At 50: How It Changed Los Angeles
“Not only had Los Angeles built the nation’s second major modern performing arts center, after New York’s Lincoln Center, we built it our way. And the world noticed. … Fifty years later we can look back and see the extent to which the Music Center shaped Southern California’s cultural identity. It got not only the world to take us more seriously but we began to take ourselves more seriously.”
How Dorothy Chandler Got The L.A. Music Center Built
“The campaign she led resulted in about $19 million in private donations – equivalent to about $146 million today – and a permanent home for the L.A. Phil. It was a feat that Time magazine called … ‘perhaps the most impressive display of virtuoso money-raising and civic citizenship in the history of U.S. womanhood.'”
We’ve Been Using The L.A. Music Center Backwards For 50 Years
“What most of us consider the front of the Music Center, along Grand Avenue, architect Welton Becket actually imagined as a secondary, less glamorous entrance. And what Becket designed as the public gateway to its plaza, along Hope Street, we think of as the back-of-house: as the spot for valet drop-offs and little more.” Christopher Hawthorne explains why – and how all this may change before too long.
Looking At L.A.’s Center Theater Group – And How To Wake It Up
“For Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty, Michael Ritchie’s 2005 takeover as artistic director of the Center Theatre Group was the beginning of a roller coaster ride. McNulty reflects on the ups and downs, and offers a plan to revitalize the Mark Taper Forum.”