“The State Street Ballet, from Santa Barbara, California, was traveling from Spokane, Washington to Durango for their performance of The Nutcracker when they found themselves with a five-hour layover with nothing to do.” When they posted the video on Facebook, it got 1.8 million views in under an hour.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
New York’s Latest Hip Classical Venue? A Crypt In Harlem
“If Le Poisson Rouge is cool and Roulette is edgy among New York’s alternative venues, where does that put the crypt at the Church of the Intercession at 155th Street and Broadway? Slightly underground, with a performance area framed by discreet stained glass, dramatically vaulted ceiling and intimate seating capacity for 100, in the inaugural season of The Crypt Sessions.”
Here Are The Opera News Award Winners For 2016
The honorees include three singers now at the peak of their careers – Anna Netrebko, Joseph Calleja, Elīna Garanča – and two revered veterans, Waltraud Meier and José van Dam.
A Revitalized ‘South Park’ Is Nailing Our Era Of Outrage
“This season is sketching something like a grand – if messy – unified theory of anger, inequality and disillusionment in 2015 America. … South Park, Colo., [has been] taken over by a new school principal … and his crew of like-minded, jacked-up frat bros, who believe that being p.c. ‘means you love nothing more than beer, working out and the feeling that you get when you rhetorically defend a marginalized community from systems of oppression!'”
Teens Are Getting Famous On A Video Social Network You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
“YouNow says it records 150,000 broadcasts a day and 100 million user logins a month. According to its own internal stats, … 74 percent of its users are under 24 and 56 percent of them are female.” With 510,000 followers, YouNow star Zach Clayton “can launch a broadcast with no warning and coax tens of thousands of people to check in on him within the space of an hour.”
The Sex-Obsessed, Egomaniacal Poet Who Invented Fascism
Gabriele d’Annunzio “was a thrill-seeking megalomaniac best described as a cross between the Marquis de Sade, Aaron Burr, Ayn Rand, and Madonna. He was wildly popular … and he essentially invented Fascism as an art project because he felt representative democracy was bourgeois and lacked a romantic dramatic arc.”
How Karl Ove Knausgaard Writes Like A Woman
“We, all of us, men and women, encode masculinity and femininity in implicit metaphorical schemas that divide the world in half. Science and mathematics are hard, rational, real, serious, and masculine. Literature and art are soft, emotional, unreal, frivolous, and feminine.” Siri Hustvedt, who is both a novelist and a science writer, looks at that division, the ways Knausgaard’s My Struggle crosses it, and how that affects the way he is seen as a writer.
When ‘Candid Camera’ Went To Moscow At The Height Of The Cold War
“[Host Allen] Funt, himself the son of a Russian immigrant, didn’t buy into the antagonism and distrust. … Without telling his bosses at CBS, not to mention the authorities of either the United States or Russia, Funt took it upon himself to pull back the Iron Curtain and shoot a special Moscow episode of Candid Camera.”
Helvetica Man: How The Universal Symbols For Escalators, Restrooms, And Airports Were Designed
“Today, travelers rushing through an airport or pausing at a roadside rest stop barely notice the standard symbols that direct the flow of human traffic. The little rounded man indicating the restroom and his female partner with her triangular dress are too familiar to think twice about. The same goes for the ubiquitous No Smoking logo and the knife and fork symbol that point towards dinner.” Their origin goes back to the U.S. Bicentennial celebrations in 1976.
Museum Sues Wikimedia For Hosting Copyrighted Photos Of Its Public-Domain Artworks
“On October 28 the Reiss Engelhorn Museum (REM) in Mannheim, Germany, filed a lawsuit against the Wikimedia Foundation for making high-resolution images of public domain artworks from its collection available for download. … The institution is seeking the removal of 17 specific images of artworks that it commissioned from its in-house photographer, Jean Christen.”