What Makes A Great Blog(ger)? Five Observations
As inconsistent and distracted a blogger as I am, I am hardly a great blogger. But as someone who runs a network of arts blogs, I do have some observations. Great bloggers don’t just … read more
AJBlog: Diacritical Published 2016-01-21
Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Half-Baked Idea
Celebrate it or hate it as you will, Wikipedia has metamorphosed from its beginnings as a gangly cultural interloper into the de facto reference work of first resort. … read more
AJBlog: Quick Study Published 2016-01-21
Objects of Creative Attention
Here’s an obvious premise: As we grow from children to adults, we gain proficiency in engaging the world around us. We learn its conventions, assumptions, and physical laws, and we learn to occupy, navigate, and … read more
AJBlog: The Artful Manager Published 2016-01-21
Meier, Ingels, Seldorf, Cook: My Storify from Architects’ Panel on NYC’s Skyline
I would have hoped for more incisive questions from journalist/moderator C.J. Hughes for the inter-generational panel of major architects who shared tidbits last night in a conversation at the 92nd Street Y in New York. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-01-21
Historical Materialism 2016
It’s not complete, but I’ve received a list of things scheduled to run in the journal Historical Materialism in 2016 and it’s impressive. Here it is: … read more
AJBlog: Quick Study Published 2016-01-21
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Author: Matthew Westphal
Remembering The Great Hollywood Choreographer We’ve All Forgotten
But you remember his work if you’ve seen Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. And Jack Cole’s dances “are often the most compelling reason to revisit movies like Down to Earth, On the Riviera and The I Don’t Care Girl. … It’s hard not to be drawn in – and sometimes taken aback – by the vitality and sexual exuberance of Cole’s dance numbers.”
Stripper Karaoke Is Portland’s Latest Contribution To The Culture
“Perhaps the most unlikely pairing in live performance has become a Sunday night favorite of [the hipster mecca] – and it’s starting to spread across the US. Our correspondent visits Devil’s Point Strip Club, originator of the trend.”
As Human Beings, What Do We Owe To The World’s Swelling Ranks Of Refugees?
“Now, in Germany and elsewhere, doors are closing. But what are the potential consequences of this resistance to outsiders, to those in need? Is it justified? Do we owe the suffering and dispossessed something more, if we are to call ourselves ethical beings?”
Philly’s New Theater Center Is Ready For Opening Night
The Drake – just behind the Kimmel Center on Spruce Street, once an Art Deco hotel and apartment building – is the new home for five of the city’s small companies, “who felt the need for place, permanency, and identity, stepped in quickly to establish a theatrical world amid the ghosts of dance and the bustle of a reviving downtown.”
Turning The Art Of Knot-Tying Into Theatre
“With naked torsos shining, artists Daniel Kok and Luke George slowly, carefully, bind each other in rope. They string themselves – and later audience members – from the ceiling, like colourful trussed chickens. … [Their piece] Bunny explores the ancient Japanese knot-tying technique of shibari, but also taps into bondage and rock climbing.”
Why Memoirs By Dying Authors Are Always So Popular (And Critic-Proof)
“These memoirs hold out the promise that you, too, will be able to cope once the eye of Sauron falls on you. Even if the tips are not practical in nature, often the mere lyricism people are able to bring to their tragic situations serves as its own kind of succor. When it comes your turn, you too may be able to make sense of it all by elegant resort to, say, the French existentialists.”
Blue Notes: What Makes Music Sad?
Ben Ratliff: “What is sadness in sound per se? Nothing. It doesn’t exist. There is no note or kind of note that in and of itself is sad and only sad. … But the construct of sadness, and the attendant contract that it helps build between musician and listener, has to do with how we might recognize it person-to-person.”
An Anarchist Education: The Unlikely History Of Tolstoy College
“Tolstoy College was an educational community based on the anarchist principles espoused, late in his life, by the author … It ran from 1969 to 1985, and was part of a project by the president of [SUNY] at the time, Martin Meyerson, to transform the Buffalo campus into the ‘Berkeley of the East,’ a quest for prestige and higher enrollments that required something of an image change for a university in a freezing steel town suffering the effects of a long economic decline.”
Hollywood’s Turn Against Digital Effects
“We’ve reached a point where directors and audiences no longer derive authenticity from what looks ‘real’ but from what looked real in seventies, eighties, and nineties blockbusters. And real is an awfully flexible word. … It’s as if directors – especially the reboot generation – have finally become self-conscious about C.G.I.”