“[National] Lottery operator Camelot has warned it expects the decline in sales to continue this year, which means arts funding is also likely to fall further. It is launching an internal review of its operations.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
All-Star Group Of Actors And Playwrights Make Brexit Videos
“Kristin Scott Thomas, Penelope Wilton, Joanna Scanlan and Steffan Rhodri are among the stars performing the monologues” – a series of nine online videos collectively titled Brexit Shorts: Dramas from a Divided Nation – “by writers including Abi Morgan, Meera Syal, Maxine Peake and David Hare.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 06.20.17
Engagement Terminology
Since I got into the weeds of defining development terms last week (Development Terminology), I thought it was time to present the latest in my thinking about terminology related to community engagement. … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2017-06-20
Great new jazz photography: Marc PoKempner portfolio from New Orleans
Photos of musicians making music – visualizations stirred in the photographers by watching sounds manifest – are exciting, and as different in style as the photographers and musicians themselves. … read more
AJBlog: Jazz Beyond Jazz Published 2017-06-20
Daniel Day-Lewis Is Retiring From Acting
“The 60-year-old star, who has played presidents, writers, and gang leaders in a career that has spanned four decades, has one final film awaiting release, an untitled drama set in the world of high fashion” to be released this Christmas. He gave no reason, and his spokeswoman said, “This is a private decision and neither he nor his representatives will make any further comment on this subject.”
The Word ‘Interesting’ Has Lost Most Of Its Interest
Chris Townsend: “If we really believe that something is interesting, then surely its interestingness should be self-evident. Must it really be flagged up, in a flagrantly unsophisticated way? I wouldn’t write that I merely liked something, nor that a thing holds intellectual appeal to me, at least not without validating that statement. Yet, ‘interesting’ often sneaks by without making a case for itself. And once you start seeing it in your own work, you notice it everywhere. Interesting, despite its insufficiency as an autonomous unit, has a tenacious hold on writing and on everyday speech.”
Nietzsche Was Not A Relativist (And He Wasn’t Responsible For The World Wars, Either)
Patrick West: “Since his death in 1900, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has had the unfortunate distinction of being blamed for three catastrophes to have befallen Western civilization” – World War I (some of his bellicose writings), World War II (the whole Übermensch thing), and relativism (thanks to Foucault). “But is Nietzsche really to blame? And was he really a relativist? I would say that he isn’t and he wasn’t. I believe that it’s time that the great man and free-thinker par excellence was reclaimed by the school of the Enlightenment.”
YouTube Can’t Actually *Ban* White-Supremacist Or ISIS Recruiting Videos – But It Can (And Will) Bury Them
Videos that promote abhorrent ideas or ideology don’t violate YouTube’s terms of service if they don’t actually encourage acts of violence, and blocking content based on the ideas it contains is a slippery slope the company would rather avoid. But that doesn’t mean that it can do nothing …
A Dance Critic Gets To Dance (For Seven Seconds) In An Yvonne Rainer Work
Siobhan Burke: “‘Greetings, folks,’ the email began, addressing a BCC-ed list of recipients to which I was sure I had been added by mistake. I read it twice, three times, refreshed the page. Because it’s not every day that you hear from Yvonne Rainer – the choreographer, dancer, writer, filmmaker and game-changing force in dance history – with an invitation to dance in her work.”
Leonardo DiCaprio Turns Over His Picasso And Basquiat Paintings To U.S. Gov’t For Massive Malaysian Corruption Case
It’s the same case – the alleged theft of $540 million from 1MDB, the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund – that has the Justice Dept. trying to acquire the rights to such films as Dumb and Dumber To and The Wolf of Wall Street (which starred DiCaprio).
Alt-Right Sends Death Threats To Scholar For Article On Ancient Greek Statuary (To This We’ve Come)
Historian Sarah E. Bond wrote an essay reminding us, as others have before, that a great deal of Greek and Roman sculpture was not intended to be seen as milky-white marble – it was painted. As Bond puts it, the alt-right “viewed the piece as ‘liberal professor says that all white statues are racist.'”