Basically, blame our ‘interesting’ times: “We’re living in a world that suddenly seems less certain than it did even two years ago, and the natural reaction is for people to try and find out as much about it as possible. … People have a hunger both for information and facts, and for nuanced exploration of issues, of a sort that books are in a prime position to provide.”
Month: July 2018
This Director Plans To Subvert Audience Expectations, Please A Repressive Government, And Bring Some Avant Garde Theatre To Beijing
That’s the goal in Chen Shi-Zheng’s adaptation of The Orphan of Zhao, anyway. “Despite the familiarity of this 13th-century play to spectators in Mr. Chen’s homeland, they might have trouble understanding all the lines. The principal actors Mr. Chen has cast for this staging in China are almost all Americans, and they will speak in English. In fact, very little about the production will signal the story’s Chinese origins.”
The Beauty Of Brancusi’s Work Leads To A Massive – Posthumous – Ascent In The Art World
“For years, Brancusi made hardly enough money to eat. In 1926, a version of one of his most extraordinary subjects, Bird in Space, was famously held up at the US border because customs officials didn’t think it was art.” In May of 2018, one of his sculptures sold for $71 million. What happened?
Without Using ‘Uncanny Valley’ Technology, Disney Plans To Feature Carrie Fisher In The Next Star Wars Film
What? The star died in 2016, but the studio says there’s enough leftover footage from the 2015 film The Force Awakens to include General Leia Organa in the next episode. “We were never going to recast, or use a CG character,” director J.J. Abrams said.
Accused Concertmaster Resigns From Professor Post At Cleveland Institute Of Music
William Preucil, who was suspended by the Cleveland Orchestra (where he was concertmaster) after an investigative story about sexual assault in the classical music world came out in the Washington Post, has resigned as Distinguished Professor of Violin at CIM. “In a letter to the school’s students, faculty, and trustees on Saturday, [CIM President Paul W.] Hogle announced that Preucil had tendered his resignation effective immediately.”
How Can Cities Make Scooters, Bikes, Segways And More Microtransit Devices Safe For Humans?
Design, of course. “Cities need to design for the modes they want people to use because they already lost the opportunity once, says McPherson. In the 1890s, American cities experienced a bicycle boom so pervasive it changed women’s fashion. Bikes were such a popular mode of urban transportation that cities scrambled to build cycling superhighways for them. Yet bikes lost that valuable urban real estate as sprawling cities prioritized cars.”
How To Make A Chamber Music Group Hip And Fun
In Cincinnati, the Chamber Orchestra director says, “Since we don’t have to sell 3,000 tickets, we can be more inventive, we can forge ahead, we can go to bars and do little shows there. … We can look to the next way of what to do with this medium, classical music. How do we stay relevant?”
Classical Music’s #MeToo Stories Are Just A First Step
Last week’s Washington Post stories about sexual harassment in the classical music world are an important first step. But where’s the institutional accountability?
Why Are Humans So Obsessed With Labyrinths?
Maybe because we think they’re like our brains or our pasts: “For Sigmund Freud, the unconscious resembled the dark corridors and hidden places of a labyrinth. Navigating the chaos of that maze – achieving mastery over it, mapping it, finding one’s way out of it – was the work of psychoanalysis, he told an interviewer in 1927.”
The Perils Of Mainstream Stardom
There have been two recent documentaries about Whitney Houston’s life, and they “shed new light on many of the particulars of Houston’s life and death: her upbringing in the church, her turbulent marriage to Bobby Brown, her shortcomings as a parent. But at a moment when musicians, generally, have greater control than before over the production and distribution of their work, the films also consider the immense pressures Houston navigated in order to appeal to a white mainstream — pressures still faced today by black and queer artists seen as crossover pop acts.”