Producer Marie Cisco created a public Google spreadsheet and titled it “Theaters Not Speaking Out.” It was open for anyone to edit, and it had a simple directive: “Add names to this document who have not made a statement against injustices toward black people.” At 5:50 p.m. PDT on that Saturday, May 30, she shared the document on her personal Facebook page as well as with the Theater Folks of Color Facebook group to which she belongs. – Los Angeles Times
Author: Douglas McLennan
Viewer Numbers Show Black American Movie, TV Shows Do Well Internationally
Netflix has begun sharing viewership results with its creators, resulting in what DuVernay called “astounding numbers” that are in dismaying contrast to how her major studio films, “A Wrinkle in Time” and “Selma,” fared with limited international releases. – Baltimore Sun
Physics Or Free Will?
Consider that “everything we see around us – rocks and planets, frogs and trees, your body and brain – is made up of nothing but protons, electrons and neutrons put together in very complex ways. In the case of your body, they make many kinds of cells; in turn, these cells make tissues, such as muscle and skin; these tissues make systems, such as the heart, lungs and brain; and these systems make the body as a whole. It might seem that everything that’s happening at the higher, ‘emergent’ levels should be uniquely determined by the physics operating beneath them. This would mean that the thoughts you’re having at this very moment were predetermined at the start of the Universe, based on the values of the particle physics variables at that time.” – Aeon
When Will It Be Safe For Us To Sing Together Again?
To many scientists and doctors, the risk of singing is clear. “It’s not safe for people to simply return to the choir room and pick things up,” Lucinda Halstead, the president-elect of the Performing Arts Medical Association, said in a telephone interview. William Ristenpart, a chemical engineer at the University of California, Davis, who has studied how disease-carrying particles spread during speech, said in a Zoom interview that he “would strongly agree with the assessment that singing, especially indoors in enclosed spaces, is a terrible idea right now.” – The New York Times
MOCA Cleveland Cancels A Show About Black Victims Of Police, Then Apologizes
The museum withdrew the show when it got uncomfortable with the content. Shaun Leonardo, the artist, says he wasn’t consulted. Now the museum has apologized for the cancellation. – The New York Times
Dancers Speak Out About Racism In The Dance World
A handful of dancers have taken to Instagram to directly call out the problems they’ve seen in their own companies. – Dance Magazine
One Thing: Recording Labels Could Help Black Artists By Fixing Inequitable Contracts
“If the music industry wants to support black lives, labels and platforms can start with amending contracts, distributing royalties, diversifying boardrooms, and retroactively paying back all the black artists, and their families, they have built their empires on.” – Rolling Stone
Jane Goodall: COVID Is A Warning From The Natural World
“We have brought this on ourselves because of our absolute disrespect for animals and the environment,” she said. “Our disrespect for wild animals and our disrespect for farmed animals has created this situation where disease can spill over to infect human beings.” – The Guardian
Why We Don’t Collectively Dream Big Anymore
Questions about what sort of future human beings might create tend to be limited by the horizon of the management strategies of market capitalism. This version of the future isn’t about radical discontinuity at all, just an intensification of the business practices that promise to give us Amazon Prime by drone at the same time that the real Amazon burns. – Aeon
BBC Broadcasts Live Concerts From Empty Halls. A Way Forward?
Last week’s small beginnings showed a way forward, demonstrating what an crucial role the BBC can and must play to aid a potential recovery of classical music before it is safe for venues to open to the public. – The Guardian