The test events will feature the London Symphony Orchestra at St Luke’s Church, as well as performances at the London Palladium and Butlin’s holiday parks. “This is an important milestone for our performing artists, who have been waiting patiently in the wings since March,” Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said. – BBC
Author: Douglas McLennan
Steve Martin Remembers Carl Reiner
When I perform comedy, I can still hear echoes of my influences coming through. Jack Benny, certainly, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Steve Allen, Carl Reiner, too. But it is not Carl’s comedic advice I cherish. Rather, it was how he affected my everyday life, the part that has nothing to do with movies or acting. – The New York Times
Uh Oh – Report Says Only 8 Percent Of Users Who Downloaded Quibi For Free Trial Have Stayed To Pay
The bad news, according to the report: Only 72,000 subscribers stuck around and decided to pay $5 a month (or $8 without ads) for the service. That conversion rate, around 8%, does not bode very well as Quibi battles its way through COVID-19 and a crowded streaming field.About 4.5 million total downloads of the app have occurred to date, Sensor Tower estimates. – Deadline
How Instagram Changed How We Looked At The World
“Instagram was one of the first apps to fully exploit our relationship with our phones, compelling us to experience life through a camera for the reward of digital validation.” – New Statesman
The Harper’s Letter Has Stirred Up Debate. Why Now?
“You can criticize what people say, you can argue about platforms. But it seems like some of the excesses of the moment are leading people to be silenced in a new way.” – The New York Times
Melbourne Won’t Ease COVID Restrictions, Arts Companies Cancel Plans
“We were going to do two sittings each night and the shows sold out straight away. We knew there was an appetite among audiences to come back. But when restrictions weren’t relaxed, we had to cancel. This is our business now – planning with enough flexibility and contingency so that you can shift or delay if you have to. We’re having to delve deep into our reserves of resilience as well as our creativity.” – The Guardian
Theatre As Radio Drama In The Age Of COVID
“This is theater of the mind, you know?” Wild says. “We do so much vocal work in the program, so much text work, so much breaking down a scene — What is this character doing? What do they want? What are they after? How do we portray that? — and it all transfers to radio.” – Washington Post
Big Blowback Against Letter Supporting Free Speech Signed By Prominent Artists
The letter—whose endorsers included everyone from Noam Chomsky to Gloria Steinem to Margaret Atwood to Salman Rushdie to Wynton Marsalis—applauded “powerful protests for racial and social justice [and] police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society.” But it also decried “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.” – The New York Times
Re-imagining Manhattan Without Cars
The Brooklyn Bridge, for example, was originally built for trains, bicycles and pedestrians. More than 400,000 people a day on average once crossed it. Then it was “modernized” for cars. Now it handles less than half that number of people. As recently as the 1950s, overnight street parking was still illegal in New York. Some 11,000 miles of New York City streets are now given over to parked cars, 10 times the space devoted to bike lanes. – The New York Times
An Academic War On Free Speech?
There are four problematic recent norms in academia: first, an academic career depends on personal and political matters; second, compliance is rewarded over scepticism; third, academic complaints are increasingly anti-intellectual; and fourth, logic and evidence are subordinated to feelings, even in the hardest of hard sciences. – The Critic