“Out-of-home entertainment had a down summer in general. Attendance at Major League Baseball games is expected to fall for the fourth consecutive season, according to Two Circles, a sports marketing agency. Broadway attendance has declined 2.6 percent from a year earlier, according to the Broadway League. Full data was not yet available for concerts, but early numbers suggest a decline, according to statistics from Pollstar, a trade publication.” – The New York Times
Author: Douglas McLennan
How Words Attach Themselves To Meaning
“Our language is full of interjections and verbal gestures that don’t necessarily mean anything beyond themselves. Most of our words – ‘baseball’, ‘thunder’, ‘ideology’ – seem to have a meaning outside themselves – to designate or stand for some concept. The way the word looks and sounds is only arbitrarily connected to the concept that it represents.” – Aeon
New Understanding Of The Brain Argues For Lifelong Plasticity
It’s no longer a question of our brains being a product of either nature or nurture but realizing how entangled the “nature” of our brains is with the brain-changing “nurture” provided by our life experiences.” – Literary Hub
Fox News Commentators Ridicule GMA Apology For Dance Comments
In comparing Lara Spencer’s apology to a politician apologizing to an ethnic group, Arroyo is saying that he finds that practice laughable as well. But the most blatant example is Ingraham’s comment that the ballet class looks like “tai chi people.” – Dance Magazine
An Artist Is Turning A New Orleans Flood Wall Into A Mile-Long Story Of The City
With the permission of the Flood Protection Authority and funding from the Walmart Corp., the artist embarked on the first 400 feet of a historical mural that will depict major moments in New Orleans’ three centuries. If all goes as planned, the painting could eventually stretch a full mile. – NOLA.com
When Joshua Met Michael
Joshua Robison and Michael Tilson Thomas met in their junior high orchestra in North Hollywood when they were 11 and 12 years old (Robison is a year and a half younger). “I played cello, and across the room playing the oboe was this Jewish, nerdy looking guy,” says Robison of his first memory of Thomas. “I really remember him because at recess I’d hang around and he’d play piano. I never heard piano playing like that.” – San Francisco Chronicle
Christian Marclay Turns Snapchat Into Sound Into (Fleeting) Images
“What’s surprising is the similarity and the banality,” he says. “And the fact that people around the world do the same things with their phone. … It’s a new form of language — a very visual language.” – Los Angeles Times
Is A Market Correction Coming To Humanities Studies?
“There is a certain truth to this recent narrative of humanistic decline as it plays out in liberal arts schools, but it is not that of obsolescence or expense. Nor is it reducible to the liberal arts school itself, even as such schools often stand in for the fate of humanities in recent academic debates. Rather, this moment reveals shifts in the coalition among the humanities, government budgets, and institutional finance as each has assumed new dimensions since the 1970s.” – Los Angeles Review of Books
What Does The Kennedy Center’s New “Reach” Want To Be?
Phil Kennicott: “When the Kennedy Center was built, it was designed to fulfill a specific sets of needs and functions. Now it is has been expanded to enfold an unknown number of new functions and needs, in spaces that are flexible and multipurpose. On any given evening, the old building hums with activity, despite its dated interiors and problematic furnishings. In five years, let’s put the new building to the same test. If the majority of its new spaces are active and throwing off sparks, it will be a success. If not, the problem will almost certainly be a lack of institutional foresight rather than architectural planning.” – Washington Post
Kiril Petrenko Takes Over The Berlin Philharmonic And Wows
Mark Swed: “I’m not so sure I buy the mystique business. The ego issue is clearly complicated. But his two concerts in the Festspielhaus in Salzburg, the first a repeat of the Beethoven Ninth and second featuring a performance of Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto with Patricia Kopatchinskaja of speechless greatness, left no doubt about just how special Petrenko is.” – Los Angeles Times