Per a strategic plan developed with Michael Kaiser, “We will feel a little less like Disney and a little more like a place where children are really exploring all the wonderful things that will make them want to be learners the rest of their lives,” says the Please Touch CEO.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Actor Mike Connors, Star Of ‘Mannix’, Dead At 91
“As the heroic good guy on the CBS action series, he was among the highest-paid TV actors in the early 1970s.”
Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard Wins €250K Siemens Music Prize
Recent winners of the annual lifetime achievement award from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts include Mariss Jansons, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Christoph Eschenbach, and Per Nørgård.
Musicians Have Faster Reaction Times Than Non-Musicians, Say Researchers
Says the study’s lead author, “These results suggest for the first time that long-term musical training reduces simple non-musical auditory, tactile and multisensory reaction times.” (But the study included no singers – what could that mean?)
The Hollywood Black List Everyone Wants To Be On
“The Black List [is] an anonymous survey in which industry professionals name the scripts they liked the most that year. [It] was started in 2005 by a 27-year-old film executive from west Georgia named Franklin Leonard, and has become an influential index of the most original and well-written – if not the most bankable – screenplays in Hollywood. Its power to launch careers and expedite projects is astounding.” (print and podcast)
Why So Many Actors Today Talk In An Alec Baldwin-Style Whispery Growl
“Just 25 years ago, Baldwin’s quiet growl was so uncommon that The Larry Sanders Show made a running gag of it, with Larry wrestling the upper hand from the much more attractive Baldwin by insulting his ability to project. Nowadays, Talking Like This is so ubiquitous that Will Arnett is about to launch a new children’s franchise based entirely on Batman’s harsh whisper. How did Talking Like This take over the male acting world?” Slate talks to voice (and stage and screen) actor James Urbaniak, something of a historian of acting styles. (includes video)
Taking Art Critics To See Yasmina Reza’s ‘Art’
Stephen Moss: “It is a clever, calculating piece of theatre, but does it really have anything to say about modern art? We set up our own three-hander to find out – Guardian art critics Adrian Searle and Skye Sherwin, and me in the middle, playing the part of the hapless Yvan, eager to get answers to big questions.”
America’s Very First Opera Company Was All African-American
“The Colored American Opera Company was born at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church – the first all-black church in the nation’s capitol – where an Italian priest invited a white Spanish-American veteran of the U.S. Marine Band … to teach a French style of Opéra Bouffe to an African-American choir. In doing so, in 1873, just a decade after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, together, they created the first American opera company – black or white – in the nation.” (podcast)
‘Wild, Grand, Delirious, Demonic’ – Alex Ross On ‘Guerrilla Minimalist’ Julius Eastman
Eastman earned some renown during the 1960s and ’70s as a singer of avant-garde music; through the ’80s, he gradually slipped out of sight as addiction and mental illness overtook him. But these days his music is getting some serious attention, and Ross explains why.
‘1984’ Isn’t The Only Classic Book Whose Sales Are Surging In The Trump Era
“1984‘s recent spike has been notable, but the novel has perpetually hovered on the bestseller list … For other works, though,” – by Sinclair Lewis, Hannah Arendt, and John Steinbeck – “their rise in popularity seems more directly linked to the emergence of Trump as a political leader.”