Sure, there are clips from Mork & Mindy, Dead Poets’ Society, Good Will Hunting and Mrs. Doubtfire – but there are also treasures like an old Richard Pryor roast, a 1977 pop-up on Laugh-In, and a phone company commercial.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Seeing The One Thing That Made Robin Williams Happy (Remembering A Day In The Recording Studio)
Dahlia Lithwick: “I was aware that I was in the presence of a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime talent who could not even for a moment settle down enough to breathe himself in. For the few minutes that he was himself, talking to me, he was this sweet gentle, big-hearted guy. But he was happiest doing the voices. And you see this quality in everything he ever did, including an interview about his history of addiction where he only really seems happy when he is doing the British, the French, and the Italians.”
Royal Ballet Of Flanders Fires Artistic Director
“Although the ballet did not provide an explanation for letting her go, from the beginning, [Assis] Carreiro was a controversial choice for the role of artistic director. … Dancers wrote a letter to the organisation’s board late last year citing that 69% of them had voted no confidence in the artistic director. Eventually, one-third of the company left.”
Hachette’s Plan To Buy Perseus Books Group Falls Through
“Although no one would comment on the particulars, Perseus’s unique position in the book world could have made valuing the company difficult, especially the company’s distribution arm; there has not been a major sale of a distributor since the beginning of the digital book age.”
Should The Arena Di Verona Get A Roof?
“Northern Italy has been pounded this summer by rain and thunderstorms. About 25 opera performances have been soaked … Determined to bring an end to this unpredictability, mayor Flavio Tosi says that he’s planning to launch an international competition to draw suggestions for how the massive architectural task should be accomplished.”
Idris Muhammad, Leading Jazz Fusion Drummer, Dead At 74
“[He] was a proud product of New Orleans, whose strutting parade rhythms always lurked just beneath the surface of his style.” He played for everyone from Curtis Mayfield to Roberta Flack to the original Broadway company of Hair, but “the heart of his work was at the intersection of jazz, R&B and funk, especially as they converged in the 1970s.”
Can Digital Tech Help Build A Better Piano?
That’s what acoustical scientists at NYU are trying to find out, as they bring banks of microphones and a Disklavier out to the Steinway factory to gather “a very dense acoustical scan of the radiation pattern of the grand piano.” (includes audio)
Inside Theme Park Musical Theater
“Theme park shows have a reputation like cotton candy’s: They’re sweet and they go down easy, but they’re not much to write home about. Part of that comes from how much they stick to a formula. Run times rarely exceed 30 minutes, the faster to get people dried off or cooled down and back to the rides. … But streamlined doesn’t mean substandard. Though the shows’ content may be lighthearted, the talent is often Broadway caliber.”
Dylan Thomas Is Underrated. Why? Embarrassment
“[There’s] a degree of cultural and political embarrassment to start with – over a writer whose near-total indifference to politics is still startling and whose attitudes to women are likely to win few allies today. But there is a deeper embarrassment yet. For so many male readers, he is the quintessential poet of adolescence. How many of us were convinced on reading him that this was what poetry was really like, heady, incantatory, obsessively sensual? How many proceeded to write terrible imitations of him in the back of school notebooks? That is what people wince over.”
Beware Los Huecheros: Mayan Tombs And The Men Who Loot Them
Huecheros is “the [Guatemalan] slang term for antiquity looters, derived from the Maya word for armadillo. On a building overlooking an ancient plaza, the looters scrawl a message, brazen and taunting: “We, the huecheros, stuck it to this place.” Here’s the who, what, where, and how.