Charles McNulty: “Not everyone will agree with my assessment that he was America’s best dramatist since Williams. But as someone who has taught playwriting for years, I can say that, if Samuel Beckett has been the god of modern theater, Shepard has been the more accessible demigod who has inspired more young talents in the last few decades than any other.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Do Dance Companies Pay Enough Attention To Dancers’ Mental Health?
“The same drive to succeed that make so many ballet students great may also predispose them to depression. And yet, as a dance writer, when I call up so many of the great training institutions in this country to ask for an interview with the psychologist they refer their dancers to, they can’t produce one.”
A Cancelled Memorial In Norway Speaks To The Fraught Nature Of Memorials
“All public memorials are vulnerable to disrespect—by pigeons on statues, wherever there’s a statue, and by selfie-snapping yahoos, everywhere. But that’s a reality of living in a teeming world. Monuments aren’t churches. The most affecting ones enable, but don’t seek to impose, fitting emotional responses.”
Jerry Saltz: The Art World Needs A Shakeup
“I love the art world; great art is getting made and shown. Art will live, as always. But we all have to admit that the art world isn’t the definition of radical right now. There’s still too much inbred art about itself or otherwise so specialized that it takes reams of explaining in almost unreadable texts just to say why it’s relevant at all — and those things that might feel relevant, or radical, in another context often get so buffered and wrapped in the wealth of the system — fancy museums, big biennials — that they cease to offer anything truly new-seeming.”
Why Shouldn’t Small Museums Be Able To Sell Art To Finance Their Survival?
“It’s an ideologically pure, dependably crowd-pleasing position to take. Its naiveté also makes me want to start throwing large objects long distances out high windows.”
HBO Confirms It Was Hacked; Hackers Say They’re Posting Unseen Shows To The Web
Hackers claimed to have obtained 1.5 terabytes of data from the company. So far, an upcoming episode of Ballers and Room 104 have apparently been put online. There is also written material that’s allegedly from next week’s fourth episode of Game of Thrones. More is promised to be “coming soon.”
USC Study: Hollywood’s Huge Gender Imbalance, In Numbers
“At USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL), Shrikanth Narayanan, the Niki and C.L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering, and a team of researchers used automated software to analyze the sophistication of language and character interaction in nearly 1,000 scripts, poring over 53,000 dialogues between 7,000 characters. What they found was a whole lot of men — 4,900 male characters to 2,000 female characters — doing a whole lot of talking — men participated in 37,000, the women got only 15,000.”
68-Year-Old Writer Files Age Discrimination Complaint Against Iowa Writers’ Workshop
Workshop officials deny that age is used as a factor in the consideration of any application, according to the university’s emailed responses to Thomson. All applicants, instead, are evaluated based on their writing samples. Dan Thomson, however, maintains that application statistics collected by the university show that, over the past five years, none of the 105 applicants age 51 or older were accepted into the workshop’s fiction program. Nearly half of the 135 fiction students accepted from 2013 to 2017 were between the ages of 18 and 25.
The Music Business Is Now Controlled By Concert Promoters (As Opposed To Record Producers)
As the traditional win-win equilibrium between act, management, record company and promoter falls to the wayside, just like the music industry itself, the balance appears to favour the profit-oriented large promoters.
Netflix Is Hugely Successful But $20 Billion In Debt. How Long Can This Go On?
Netflix has accumulated a hefty $20.54 billion in long- and short-term debt in its effort to produce more original content. The Los Gatos, Calif.-based company hopes more new shows will capture more subscribers, its primary revenue driver. It’s also under pressure to keep spending on new shows as streaming rivals such as Amazon and Hulu expand their own slates of original programming.