Michael Phillips: “Whenever there’s another mass murder in our country, action films become a strange and ghoulish experience, beyond whatever the filmmakers have created for our consumption. There are times when the gun fatalities and revised statistics get to you. They’re too much. Too much. There are times when movie slaughter, and extravagant, adrenaline-pumping shootouts, cannot easily be enjoyed.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Trump’s Proposal To Kill The NEA And NEH Says Volumes About His Views On The Arts
“Americans,” Trump crowed during his State of the Union address, “fill the world with art and music.” And yet, his insistence that support of arts and culture should not be a mission of the government tells us what he actually believes about the arts.
World Trade Center Arts Space Announces $300 Million Funding And A New Artistic Director: Bill Rauch
The push to build a performing arts component at the World Trade Center site has had more reversals of fortune than a Greek drama. But the project took several steps forward this week with approval of an agreement for a 99-year lease; an announcement that nearly $300 million had been raised and the naming, Friday, of its first artistic director: Bill Rauch, who leads the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Judge Rules Against News Organizations That Embedded A Pic Of Tom Brady; Huge Implications For Publishers On The Internet
Justin Goldman filed the lawsuit after he snapped an image of New England Patriots quarterback Brady, Boston Celtics general manager Danny Ainge and others on a street in 2016. Shortly thereafter, he uploaded the photo to Snapchat. The photo then went viral, with others uploading it to Twitter. Subsequently, various news organizations embedded the tweets with the image in stories about whether the Celtics would successfully recruit basketball player Kevin Durant, and if Brady would help to seal the deal. Goldman sued some of these news outlets.
Here’s What Accessible Cities Can Look Like
Hundreds of millions of people with disabilities live in cities around the world. By 2050, they will number an estimated 940 million people, or 15% of what will be roughly 6.25 billion total urban dwellers, lending an urgency to the UN’s declaration that poor accessibility “presents a major challenge”.
Why Are Theatre Program Books So Useless?
Mark Shenton: “I always apply the test I also use on theatre tickets to assess how useful they are: would I pay ready money to have one? And the answer is hardly ever. Yet theatre programmes have become a habit for many. They are part of the theatregoing ‘experience’ and a happy aide-memoire of the show. But, I often find the information I need just as easily online. A front of house notice will typically list the cast at a particular performance – especially important with long-running shows where substitutions often appear. So I simply take a photograph of it.”
Here We Go Again. Why We Still Have To Defend The Existence Of Federal Arts Funding
Howard Sherman: “It’s hard to stay fully positive when, in the 35th year of my career in the arts, I realise the NEA has been under some form of attack almost annually since at least 1990 – fully three-quarters of my professional life. Trumpism may have us on ever more heightened alert, but there’s never really been a moment when we could truly relax regarding this issue. If our community did, we were losing ground.”
When Books Become Vessels Of Meaning They Weren’t Intended To Be
“What makes bibliomancy fascinating is that unlike other forms of divination, it trades in something which already has an interpretable meaning – words. Perhaps a butcher can figure out the narrative that a sheep’s liver conveys, but that The Aeneid, as indeed all texts, has a meaning requires no suspension of disbelief, even if the meanings which are being derived seem far from authorial intention.”
Audiences Are Livestreaming Theatre. What Could Be Wrong With That?
You can understand the confusion that could arise in an audience member who, aware that theatre performances are now broadcast live to cinemas via NT Live and the like, thinks they are entitled to act as a private broadcast channel to their friends at home. Theatre invites you to be uniquely ‘in the moment’ but, for many, it’s now important also to capture it so that you own it forever.
How To Read Better In The Age Of Digital Disconnect
As the art of close reading—a finely grained analysis of a text—has declined, a cohort of experts has emerged to reverse the trend and encourage stronger reading habits. Their solution has a kind of old-school simplicity to it: We need to allow the physicality of the book itself to lure us back into the pleasures of reading.