Producer Gabriella Tana: “What started out as a documentary and seeing where it went, has evolved, and changed and grown. It’s become much more about making something together (with Polunin) and more of a collaboration. And when David LaChapelle (who contributed several clips) got involved it became more exciting, and it wasn’t just about documenting a life, but about creating something.” (includes video clip)
Author: Matthew Westphal
‘I Got Death Threats For Not Liking A Sondheim Musical’: John Lahr On Being A Theater Critic
“People piss on theatre critics from a great height. But in the end, they are the record. You can’t replay this stuff. They are the only way we can find a way back. … If you’ve been really engaged and the artist realises that, and you still don’t like the work, well, they don’t love it – but they don’t feel offended.”
How Ballet Turned A Profoundly Autistic Boy Into An Independent, Functional Young Man
At age 3, Philip Martin-Nielson couldn’t communicate in any way, make eye contact or concentrate on a task; doctors said he’d never be able to live on his own. Now, at age 21, he’s a full-time member of the Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo troupe – and a genuinely cheerful, chatty person.
‘We’ve Made Every Possible Mistake’: The Director Of ‘Russian Ark’ On The Problem With Russia
Alexander Sokurov: “We can blame [Putin] for many things, but in reality it’s because there’s huge support from the people. It’s just like a ring, a circle, and the question for Russian society is how to get out of this vicious circle. But we haven’t been able to get out of this circle since the time of the Romanovs. … There is a way out of a crisis of any kind, but from the moral crisis – you can spend centuries getting out of the moral crisis, and that’s our problem.”
Where Wim Wenders Went Wrong
Richard Brody: “[His] career is marked by a break that occurred between 1975 and 1977, between the films Kings of the Road and The American Friend. … In that shift, Wenders went from being one of the most intrepid and riginal directors of the time to being himself an art-house signifier.”
How I Became Julie Taymor
The director tells Alec Baldwin about her youth at Boston Children’s Theater, her time at Oberlin majoring in anthropology (“but I couldn’t stay away from theater”), what she learned watching shadow puppet plays in Java, and how her career metamorphosed – several times – once she returned to the U.S. (podcast)
Oliver Sacks On His Life WIth Gefilte Fish
The Yiddish fish balls had powerful associations for the late neurologist and writer, and he alternated years-long periods of eating it regularly and avoiding it completely. During his final illness, he found it was one of the very last foods he could eat. “Gefilte fish will usher me out of this life, as it ushered me into it, eighty-two years ago.”
An Interactive Guide To Ambiguous Grammar (And The St. Louis County Police Department)
Watch how “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” can be gradually converted into the kind of quasi-meaningless statement delivered somewhere or another every day by ass-covering bureaucrats and spokespeople.
The Internet Of Way Too Many Things
Allison Arieff argues that the development of the so-called “Internet of Things (“you know, that thing where a bunch of other things will be connected to the Internet”) is now plagued by “the tendency … to throw excess technological capability at every possible gadget without giving any thought to whether it’s really necessary.”
Fifty Shades Of Fake Blood: In The Aisles At One Of Hollywood’s Largest Prop Houses
“Inside a 110,000-square-foot warehouse in northeast Los Angeles, Gregg Bilson Jr. is showing me his blood. There’s drinkable blood, chunky blood, dried blood, and flowing blood, all sitting in tidy rows on a display shelf. Puddles and pools of blood – resin blood – of varying sizes are affixed to a nearby wall.”