“Unknown to those outside Hollywood, the lawyer Nina L. Shaw is a secret weapon, a behind-the-scenes power player adept at striking deals that cultivate freedom of voice, especially for black members of the creative class whose mission it is to be artist and advocate.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Hard To Believe, But The Met Opera Is About To Do Its First Opera Written By A Woman Since 1903
The Met hasn’t performed an opera written by a woman since Ethel Smyth’s “Der Wald” in 1903. (Read that sentence one more time, and think about it hard.) So it’s a major statement for the company to be adding Ms. Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin” to its history — though this is a slightly delicate matter, since she has long resisted being categorized (read: ghettoized) as a “female composer.”
With A New Oscar-Contending Movie, Amazon Is Disrupting The Movie Industry
“Along with fellow streaming service Netflix, Amazon represents a serious threat to the bedrock institutions that traffic in prestige film – the art-house heavyweights (Fox Searchlight, Weinstein, Focus, Lionsgate, Sony Pictures Classics) that thrive under the shadow of the Big Six (Paramount, Sony, Fox, Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal) largely thanks to the Oscar contenders they produce.”
How Vancouver Opera Is Navigating Uncharted Waters To What It Hopes Is The Future Of Opera
Last year the company announced it was moving to a festival format. General Director Kim Gaynor: “I don’t want to abandon our presence throughout the year. The festival I really believe in because a festival allows you to do things you can’t do in a regular season. But at the same time, we must maintain our traditional audience until they die or they go to Florida or Mexico to retire. We must do that because those audiences still are the lifeblood of the organization.”
Evidence That Our Brains Grow And Change With New Experiences (So Challenge Yourself!)
When we have new experiences and encounter unfamiliar ideas, clusters of neurons are formed and existing clusters connected with previously learned behaviors are strengthened. Through the right kind of training, our brains can adapt to perform at higher levels than many of us tend to think—pushing us past what we believe our “natural abilities” to be.
80 Years Ago Dale Carnegie Published “How To Win Friends And Influence People”. It’s Still On The Bestseller List
“Why on Earth are people still buying a self-help book from 1936? Carnegie’s principles of relentless positivity are right at home in a culture of ingratiation, from the widespread drive to amass online friends by liking their posts (and thence to become an influencer) to the way every interaction with someone in the service industry feels like the prelude to a customer satisfaction survey. His ideas retain a startling currency in a society whose very drives and mores he helped to create.”
UK Arts Organizations Have Saved £8.7m since 2012 By Reducing Carbon Emissions
“Compared to doing nothing, the reduction in energy emissions has saved £8.7m since 2012/13. The report predicts that if the 4.5% annual decrease continues until 2019/20, emissions will be 46% lower than in 2012/13 and £54m will have been saved in energy costs.”
McKinsey Study: Automation Will Eliminate A High Number Of Jobs In Coming Decades (Maybe Yours)
“McKinsey estimates that about 45% of all activities in the economy can be automated. How many people will that affect? They estimate that bots can pick up about a third of all the work in 60% of occupations. That figure is based on technologies that already exist and are in use, not capabilities that may arrive in the future. Global trends already show that the growth of jobs is starting to decline or even dip into the negatives in countries around the world; now robots are poised to take more work away.”
We’re Hurtling Towards A Post-Job Future (Because There Won’t Be Any) What Might That Look Like?
“What would society and civilisation be like if we didn’t have to ‘earn’ a living – if leisure was not our choice but our lot? Would we hang out at the local Starbucks, laptops open? Or volunteer to teach children in less-developed places, such as Mississippi? Or smoke weed and watch reality TV all day? I’m not proposing a fancy thought experiment here. By now these are practical questions because there aren’t enough jobs.”
Sometimes Black And White Open Possibilities We Hadn’t Thought About. Rauschenberg Took The Opening
“As Cage demonstrated in 4’33”, a piece for piano inspired in part by the White Paintings in which nothing is played for that exact duration, there is no silence in music that is not also an opening to sound of other sorts, and so it is with these monochromes: the visual realm is opened up even as it appears to be evacuated. The Black Paintings also point to a space outside painting, which Rauschenberg called the ‘gap between art and life’, and it was capacious enough to contain the Elemental Sculptures as well as the Combines – combinations of painting, collage and sculpture – to come.”