As the state’s only member of the elite-tier League of Resident Theatres, with a $7 million budget and audiences in both Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona Theatre Company is better equipped than any other Valley company to be a leader on the issues of equity and representation for women and people of color — which, ironically enough, makes Ivers, who formerly led the Utah Shakespeare Festival, something of a “great white hope” for theater diversity here.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Jerry Lewis Dies At 91
The high regard in which his comic abilities were held in France — he received the Legion of Honor award in 1983 — became a running joke in the U.S. long after Lewis’ style of broad physical comedy fell out of fashion. His final film, “Max Rose,” screened at France’s Cannes Film Festival in 2013.
Trump Pulls Out Of Participating In The Kennedy Center Honors
A statement this morning reads “Each year, THE KENNEDY CENTER HONORS the careers and achievements of artists who have helped shape cultural life in the United States with a weekend that includes celebrations and events. The award recipients are recognized for their lifetime contributions in the arts and the positive change that they have made all over the world. The President and First Lady have decided not to participate in this year’s activities to allow the honorees to celebrate without any political distraction”
Why The President’s Arts And Humanities Council Quit As A Group
Kal Penn: “It became clear that the government became inoperative under this particular presidency. A lot of the work and the agencies have been frozen. There’s a big waste of taxpayer dollars. We had hope, but the president made comments that quite literally were in support of the domestic terrorists. It’s one thing to say you want to serve the programs you were appointed to serve, regardless of politics, but after a certain point . . . we just don’t want our names attached to this in any way.”
In The 1850s, A Scientist Decided To Study The Brain Like It Was A Secret Garden
For Santiago Ramón y Cajal the brain was a beautiful, inconceivably complex, and self-regulating ecosystem, and he set out to write the field guide to its flora and fauna: “Like the entomologist in pursuit of brightly colored butterflies, my attention hunted, in the flower garden of the gray matter, cells with delicate and elegant forms, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, the beating of whose wings may someday—who knows?—clarify the secret of mental life.”
What Should Be Done With Statues Honoring Confederates?
“In the wake of the controversy over removing American monuments to the Cult of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, Memento Park is not a bad model for us to consider following now — although certainly there are others. The dispute, which exploded into bloodshed, death and grinding national shame in recent days, demands hard thought. Decisions need to be made. Unlike sculpture, civic monuments are less the product of an individual artist than they are collaborations of entire societies. Civic monuments solicit a collective moral response. They invite an audience to affirm and applaud what it sees.”
What Should We Do With Books We Just Don’t Understand?
Could the book that initially seems plain wrong to us be precisely the one that allows us to understand something new about other people?
MoviePass Is Trying To Be The Netflix Of Movie Theatres. It’s A Daft Plan. (Or Is It?)
“AMC has come out guns blazing, even going so far as to include a solid alchemy burn in its press release trashing the company’s plan. As AMC points out, MoviePass — which buys tickets directly from the exhibitors, then redistributes them to its subscribers by way of a MoviePass-specific debit card — will lose money on every customer who sees more than one movie a month. So what’s MoviePass’s angle here? Is this a strange form of cinematic philanthropy? Or do they have a plan?”
Stephen Hough: Let’s Think About What Classical Music Does And How People Get It
I think the problem is that, since the Second World War, we have confused “daring” with “breaking rules for the sake of doing so.” Beethoven was a great rules-bender, rather than rule-breaker. Even his most outrageous pieces, like the late quartets, are still within classical forms. He doesn’t smash [the guidelines set down by his predecessors]. For me, that creates interesting tension.
Why Intellectual Critiques Of Populism Are Notoriously Unreliable
“Scholars have not always been the most objective students of populism, partly because their own interests are at stake, scholarship and expertise being so often numbered among the chief targets of populist abuse. Accordingly, scholars find populism to be too prone to ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and demagogy, and too vulnerable to capture by racial and ethnic and tribal bigotries, to serve as an authentic engine of positive social change.”