Ultimately, crosswords can get you to see preconceptions that you might not have realized you held. Once words signify, the puzzle gets political. Crosswords quietly have an ideological agenda: to shake up your assumptions and put ideas from everywhere next to each other. – The New Yorker
Month: September 2019
Nature Calls: Blenheim Palace Gives Thieves a Golden Opportunity to Steal Cattelan’s Toilet
Q: How do you invite thieves to steal a famous, expensive, publicly exhibited artwork? A: Publicly announce that no guards are protecting it. – Lee Rosenbaum
Recent Listening: Dave Douglas & Friends + Mary Lou Williams
Dave Douglas is a trumpeter whose adherence to basic jazz values fully justifies the title of the new album he shares with pianist Uri Caine and drummer Andrew Cyrille in their unusual trio. Unusual? Yes. – Doug Ramsey
How Country Music Became The Heart Of Nashville
Nashville attracted—first downtown, because that’s where the Opry was located, and then on Music Row—a creative community, and that creative community feeds off of itself. I teach at Belmont College, and my students are always saying, “Where I come from, I’m the only person that writes songs; I’m the only person that plays the guitar. I get here and everybody writes songs and everybody plays the guitar.” It either inspires you to get better or causes you to go home, and that’s been a key right there. – CityLab
Meet The UK’s New Minister For Arts
The MP for Faversham and Mid Kent replaces Rebecca Pow, who held the role for only four months. Pow is moving to a position in the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Helen Whatley will work under the recently appointed Culture Secretary Nicky Morgan, who remains at the head of DCMS. – Arts Professional
Marian Godfrey On The State Of The Arts
“It’s my personal opinion that at this particular moment, the greatest challenge arts philanthropy faces is to decide what our responsibility is to the institutional nonprofit arts infrastructure that our investments have helped to build over the last 70 to 80 years.” – Barry’s Blog
Why It’s Important For Us To Understand The Language Of Numbers
The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.’ Not only has someone used extensive judgment in choosing what to measure, how to define crucial ideas, and to analyse them, but the manner in which they are communicated can utterly change their emotional impact. – Aeon
Actors’ Equity Expels Former Artistic Director Of The Citadel Theatre
“Acting on the findings of a Disciplinary Committee relating to a safe and respectful workplace complaint, Equity’s national Council ratified the recommendation of the Committee and expelled Bob Baker from Equity membership on June 23, 2019,” a notice on Equity’s website reads. “A possible appeal period has now closed.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
Rethinking Susan Sontag
Sontag’s fraught relationship with her body wasn’t simply about physicality; it was about her tormented relationship to need itself—her shame at having needs in the first place. – The New Republic
Tim Page: What We’re Losing Without Critics
“Music criticism will go on – in a few papers, in small journals and on the web (some of the record reviews on Amazon are startlingly erudite, but they are in the minority). Still, for better and worse, there are few gatekeepers, people to guide a curious reader toward writing that will be both authoritative and as open-minded as possible. And with the near-disappearance of copy editors at most daily newspapers, all sorts of factual and lingual mayhem slip through into what you read. Worst of all, almost nobody gets paid.” – 21CM