Mark Fiore: “Looks like some guy named Steve Jobs was able to nudge my app past the gatekeepers.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
A 1773 Protest Poem, In A Mouse’s Voice
In the 18th-century lab of Joseph Priestley, “animals didn’t last long,” so the chemist’s “lab assistant, a young woman named Anna Barbauld, decided that Priestley should give his lab animals a little more respect.” She wrote “a protest poem” and “called it ‘The Mouse’s Petition to Dr. Priestley, Found in the Trap where he had been Confined all Night.'”
Georgia Senate Panel Restores Arts Funding To Budget
“The Senate Appropriations Committee restored the $890,735 that the governor had recommended for [the Georgia Council for the Arts], but the House had cut out. The Senate version of the budget keeps the agency going, but with about $1.6 million less in state backing than it has in fiscal year 2010.” Even so, the funding isn’t a sure thing.
David Ives On His ‘Translaptation’ Of Corneille
The playwright, whose version of “The Liar” is having its world premiere at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre, says he was “handed a gorgeous, intricate plot with extraordinary comic turns. And so all I had to do really in taking this was turn it up to 11 and increase the dials and increase the comic turns.” But, you know, in rhyming couplets.
Touting Film Locations, The World Flocks To L.A.
“Reflecting the more austere climate, there were a few notable absences” from the annual Locations Trade Show, “including film commissions from South Africa and China,” yet “there were several new foreign participants eager to tout their locations and new film programs” — such as Abu Dhabi, which helpfully pointed out that it has both “modern architecture and desert islands.”
The Trouble With Mary Sue
“Whenever a character serves as an improved or idealized version of his or her author, as a vehicle for the author’s fantasies of power, allure, virtue or accomplishment rather than as an integral part of the story, that character is a Mary Sue.” And what do all Mary Sues have in common? “They irritate readers.”
On Architecture’s Troubled Relationship With The Future
“To the extent that we are now designing brand-new cities at all, they tend to be marked more by wariness and anxiety — particularly about looming environmental disaster, terror attacks and global epidemics — than sweeping optimism. If Brasilia embraced the future, in other words, today’s cities seem to be on guard against it.”
When A Revival Isn’t A Revival
“In recent times, theatergoers expecting a musical revival have frequently gotten a ‘revisal.’ It’s not simply that the libretto has been updated in the name of appealing to contemporary audiences or that … offensive dialogue [has] been expunged. It’s that the performers have been belting out numbers [that] weren’t part of the score the first time around.”
At New York City Opera, Reason For Optimism
Unlike its fall season, New York City Opera’s spring season wasn’t a “must-see affair,” but “over the course of the three stagings, there were signs that somebody has good artistic instincts.”
Bill: No Arts Requirement For Calif. Tech School Students
Proposed “legislation is supposedly designed to boost California’s high school graduation rates. It would allow students to replace the current requirement for a course in visual or performing arts or foreign language with one in career technical education.”