Noticing before knowing
My favorite books about writing are really books about thinking, and crafting those thoughts into powerful, public form. So, whenever I’m in a thinking thicket … read more
AJBlog: The Artful Manager Published 2016-06-20
Monday Recommendation: Chris Ziemba
Chris Ziemba, Manhattan Lullaby (Outside in Music). His abilities honed by studies at the Eastman School of Music and Juilliard, 29-year-old pianist Chris Ziemba is in demand on the New York scene. His debut recording … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-06-20
The adventure of the bungled capper
Ivy Compton-Burnett admitted in old age that she could no longer read the novels of Jane Austen, which she loved, because she knew them so well that they could no longer hold her attention. Much the same thing happened to me with … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-06-20
Broken Link: Sree Sreenivasan, Metropolitan Museum’s Chief Digital Officer, to Depart
This bombshell (in the form of an internal memo) has just been dropped by Thomas Campbell and Daniel Weiss, director and president, respectively, of the Metropolitan Museum. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-06-17
Jam Sessions
Jam sessions are not exclusive to jazz. They happen in virtually every genre of music — folk, bluegrass, rock, Indian, Afro-Cuban, freestyle rap, sometimes even among highly trained and disciplined classical musicians, when they think they won’t … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-06-17
Anywhere but here
We take the world with us when we go to the theatre. Our private swirls of panic and joy. Whatever public pains have been doled out. I came to Shoreditch Town Hall to see YOUARENOWHERE just a short while after hearing that MP Jo Cox had been murdered. … read more
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2016-06-17
Weekend Extra: Roland Kirk
I once wrote about the Roland Kirk of the days — ”long before he added ‘Rahsaan’ to his name, before he became famous, when he was a tornado roaring out of the Midwest, totally blind and full of insight, playing three saxophones at once, … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-06-18
Painters’ Paintings: Who Owned What When
You never know what might spark the idea for an exhibition, and at the National Gallery in London it was a 2011 gift left to the U.K. by Lucian Freud. He bequeathed a work called Italian Woman by Corot, which he had purchased 10 years earlier … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2016-06-17
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Author: Matthew Westphal
Uncovering The Bits Of Video Games The Developers Hid From You
“As anyone who has ever used a Game Genie could tell you, there are things that developers don’t want you to see … Recently, I discovered that many of these discarded concepts and ideas not only remain on the cartridge or disc after their release, but that there’s a fairly significant community working to find these missing items, with the goal of bringing them to life.”
Garrison Keillor Is Not The Man You Know From His Radio Show
“Performers often cultivate alternate personas, but with Mr. Keillor the difference is startling. … ‘Garrison in person is quite different,’ said his longtime friend, the writer Mark Singer. ‘Garrison does not express emotion in interpersonal conversations the way the rest of us do.'” (And if you think of him as kindly, remember what he wrote about Bernard-Henri Lévy: “a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore.”)
Interviewing Vanessa Redgrave Is A Very Strange Experience
Simon Hattenstone: “I have never met somebody who can go from wilfully cantankerous to heartstoppingly tender so quickly; who can make me want to scream with frustration and move me to tears in the same sentence.”
We Have An Official World’s Ugliest Color – And A Defense Of It
“Also known as ‘opaque couché,’ the drab hue of greenish brown has drawn endless comparisons to baby poop.” (We think it looks more like guacamole that’s been in the fridge too long.) “Researchers first discovered widespread repulsion to this particular tone in a 2012 study intended to help the Australian government come up with unappealing packaging for cigarettes.”
Herman Melville Was In Love With Nathaniel Hawthorne – Five Pieces Of Evidence
“Melville fell in love with the dashingly handsome older author the first time they met, and his forbidden passion drove him to create the symbol of impossible longing that now represents American literature to the rest of the world: the white whale. Moby-Dick has never before been considered a work of romantic longing, but here are five reasons to believe that Melville’s masterpiece is a profound statement of love denied.”
Is It Even Worth Attempting To Make ‘Taming Of The Shrew’ Tolerable In The 21st Century? Female Directors Keep Trying
Laura Collins-Hughes: “I have always hated The Taming of the Shrew. Of all of Shakespeare’s plays, it’s the only one that upsets me just to think about.” But Julie Taymor loves the piece, and Phyllida Lloyd and Tina Packer are but two of numerous female directors who try to come to terms with it.
Did Mrs. Eakins Paint Over A Work By Mr. Eakins?
“The Bibliophile is a painting by Susan Macdowell Eakins, wife of the celebrated Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins. An accomplished painter, Susan had studied with Thomas at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. … Now a graduate student in the Winterthur/University of Delaware program in art conservation has detected, beneath the surface, a separate painting.”
Gregory Rabassa, 94, Giant Of Literary Translation
Perhaps the greatest tribute to Rabassa, whose work brought (among others) Mario Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, Jorge Amado, and Clarice Lispector to the English-speaking world, came from Gabriel García Márquez, who called Rabassa “the best Latin American writer in the English language” and said that his translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude was a better book than the original.
I Went Bankrupt Paying Actors Minimum Wage, Says Producer
“Producer Paul Taylor-Mills has claimed he was forced to wind up his production company after being financially crippled by a duty to pay actors … consistent with [Equity’s] fringe guidelines.”