Month: September 2020

Critic Stanley Crouch, 74

Mr. Crouch was an actor, playwright, jazz drummer and college professor — without benefit of a college degree — before he emerged in the late 1970s as one of the country’s most original, contentious and (sometimes literally) combative writers. He was a bare-knuckled literary provocateur — erudite and fearless (some would say reckless) — while reveling in his often truculent takedowns, often of works by other African American artists and intellectuals. – Washington Post

15,000 Audience Complaints To BBC Over Dance Broadcast Demonstrates Racial Problems

The incomprehensibly high number of complaints, though astonishing, speaks to Britain’s problematic conceptualisation of race and its relationship to racism. It shows a general intolerance to confront it. This, in part, is based on the denial of racism and a mythical idea of Britain as post-racial, where racism and racial inequality no longer exist. – The Conversation

Young Japanese Musicians Rally To Save The Art Of The Shamisen

The centuries-old three-stringed lute, a mainstay of traditional Japanese art music, remained popular up at least to the turn of the millennium, but most of the remaining players today are well over 60. With the pandemic paralyzing an already shrinking market, the country’s largest shamisen maker was about to close when it was rescued (for now) by an online fundraising campaign. There’s some hope that a newer style called tsugaru shamisen, livelier and less austere than the genteel music of Kyoto geishas, can keep interest in the instrument alive. – The Observer (UK)

What The Arts Can Learn From The NBA’s Bubble

The NBA used theatricality to replicate the essence of a live game — fans cheering, sound effects, music — and gave viewers the opportunity to be visible to both the players and to themselves in the live performance space. As performing arts venues make decisions about the future, creating hybrid events that include virtual presence and audience recognition will be important for developing investment in their work. – The Conversation

Randall Kenan, Magical Realist Writer Of The American South. Dead At 57

“[He was] an award-winning gay Black writer whose fiction, set largely in a North Carolina hamlet similar to the one where he grew up, artfully blended myth, magic, mysticism and realism.” That village, a sort of Macondo, N.C., was called Tims Creek and, in Kenan’s fictional world, had been founded by a runaway slave named Pharaoh. – The New York Times