“Jazz doesn’t get much coverage in the mainstream media, and hasn’t for many years. But something strange has happened during the last four months. Over a period of just a few weeks, a host of high profile periodicals have published smug, scornful dismissals of the music. Is this just coincidence, or has something changed in the cultural dialogue?”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Atlanta Symphony Negotiations Are On Again
“As they approach a negotiating session with a federal mediator on Wednesday, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra management and players are closer to a deal than they have been during a two-month musician lockout or in eight months of talks that preceded it.”
New York City Ballet’s Web Documentary Is Back (And All Too Brief)
Margaret Lyons: “I generally prefer longer-form, more in-depth pieces. But city.ballet captured me completely, and the series’ second season, which premiered yesterday, is much of the same: a fascinating, moving, sometimes transcendent behind-the-scenes look at the New York City Ballet. I just wish there were more of it. The longest episodes of the new 12-episode season are still only clocking in around eight minutes.”
More Jian Ghomeshi Fallout As Publishers Cancel His Book
“[Penguin Random House’s] Viking Canada imprint released Ghomeshi’s bestselling memoir, 1982, in 2012. [A spokesperson] would not comment on what had been expected from his next book, and would only say that the decision was made ‘in light of recent events‘.”
Sherlock Holmes Is Absolutely, Positively In The Public Domain, Says U.S. Supreme Court
The justices rejected an appeal by Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate, “which claimed that authors who wanted to publish stories about Holmes needed to pay the estate a licensing fee. This leaves intact a June decision by 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, which held that most of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are no longer protected by copyright.”
Is The National Gallery Of Canada Preparing To Lock Out Workers?
That’s what the Public Service Alliance of Canada fears. “The museum’s management had previously scheduled two weeks of talks with the union for September, but canceled the negotiations the day they were due to begin … [and] then applied for conciliation, a provision that, per Canadian labor laws, would allow them to lock out the union workers beginning next month.”
Jez Butterworth Downsizes After “Jerusalem”
“The River is a different beast: eighty minutes to Jerusalem‘s three hours and contemplative where the earlier play was raucous, turning on the intimacies of a couple rather than the carnival-like energy of a cast of fourteen.” What’s more, as the playwright says, the star of the show is arguably a dead sea trout.
“Team America: World Police” At 10: What Has And Hasn’t Changed
“Many of the issues that were both so consuming and combustible back in 2004 seem largely absent from [today’s] political terrain. … But, perhaps, nowhere is the gulf between then and now more evident than in the way we talk about America’s place in the world.” On the other hand, “a good part of what has changed is exactly what made the America of then, both left and right, so worthy of satire.”
An African Elephant And The Rise Of Hype-Driven Celebrity Culture
The sad story of Jumbo and P.T. Barnum.
Paris Festival Censors Photo Of Mother-Daughter Embrace – After Complaints About An Entirely Different Image
“The photograph in question, titled Mother and Daughter II (2014), is a composite of four images showing the artist, Diane Ducruet, cuddling with her daughter. Both of them are nude.” A gallery removed it from a current exhibition after receiving complaints that a photo in the show’s brochure – but not actually in the show – portrays incest.