“It’s time to fight the canons that be. Slate asked more than 20 prominent filmmakers, critics, and scholars – including Ava DuVernay, Robert Townsend, Charles Burnett, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Wesley Morris, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. – for their favorite movies by filmmakers of color and used their picks to shape our list of the 50 greatest films by black directors.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Read A Never-Published Story By Langston Hughes
“It was Marcel’s apartment, and seven people were dancing. Six were colored and one was white. Marcel himself was colored, a muddy brown and not good-looking. It was he who danced alone. His dancing was too fanciful to be masculine and too grotesque to be feminine. But everything that he did was like that.”
Bolshoi Dancer Convicted Of Acid Attack On His Boss Now Out On Parole
“Bolshoi soloist Pavel Dmitrichenko, who was sentenced to six years in prison in 2013 for orchestrating the attack on artistic director Sergei Filin, has been granted parole and is already ‘back at home in Moscow,’ his lawyer Sergei Kadyrov told TASS news agency.”
The Paris Bridge Once Covered In Locks Is Now Covered With New Sculpture
“For years, lovestruck visitors to Paris had affixed locks, often inscribed with their initials or names, to the wire mesh panels along the Pont des Arts, flinging the keys into the Seine River below. But last year, after a section of the bridge’s railing collapsed under the weight of some 700,000 declarations of fidelity, the city removed the locks, citing reasons of aesthetics and security.” Now, though, the bridge really is a pont des arts.
Can China Pull Off The Bilbao Effect In Harbin?
“It’s only May, but the international architectural press has already highlighted the Harbin Opera House, designed by the bad-boy architect Ma Yansong, as one of the year’s most interesting new buildings. … While cultural (and financial) capital becomes ever more concentrated, the dream of creative rebirth can be a seductive Pied Piper for administrators of languishing cities. After all, if every reader of design websites knows where Harbin is, then a full-throated recovery can’t be far off, right?”
What Is Awe, Exactly? Psychologists Try To Figure It Out
“First, what is it? And, second, is there a way to use its emotional power in other contexts?”
Bronx Museum Of Arts Plans Expansion And First-Ever Endowment Campaign
“The Bronx Museum of the Arts, whose attendance has quadrupled since it instituted free admission in 2012, announced Wednesday that it had started a $25 million capital campaign to renovate and expand its building along the Grand Concourse and to establish an endowment for the first time.”
So Little Changed So Much: What Soviet Censors Did To The First Film Hitchcock Worked On
“Hitchcock remembered that his early work had taught him to ‘change the way audiences read an action or an expression by changing the intertitle’.” Anna Aslanyan explains how that concept reached an apotheosis in the Soviet release of the 1922 British silent Three Live Ghosts.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.31.16
Hard Times at NYC Museums: National Academy Homeless (with video); Staffing Cuts at the Metropolitan Museum, Brooklyn Museum, MoMA
Unlike the 2008 meltdown, there’s currently no major economic recession in the U.S. to blame for the recent epidemic of belt-tightening by three major New York City art museums – the Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art, … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-05-31
The Milt Jackson Quartet, Then And Then
A video of The Modern Jazz Quartet has been getting wide viewership on the internet. The YouTube presentation does not disclose that the group we see and hear is the MJQ’s predecessor, the rhythm section … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-05-31
Instead of Alexander Nevsky
For every screening with live orchestra of Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (music by Prokofiev), there should be at least a dozen screenings with live orchestra of Paul Strand’s Redes (music by Silvestre Revueltas). … read more
AJBlog: Unanswered Question Published 2016-05-31
Making Friends
It has been over a year since I found an excuse to write about Nala (our dog). The time to do so again has come. … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2016-05-31
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You’ll Probably Marry The Wrong Person, So The Best Approach Is Pessimism
Alain de Botton: “This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.”