“We’ve been building momentum over years, with the movie and with smaller productions. It’s like a band that toured for fourteen years. Slowly the rock kids who didn’t like theater found it and the theater people who didn’t like rock found it and then a core grew. … Our opening night sold out in like an hour – we were a hit before we opened, just based on the core audience.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
How Heavy Metal Tracks With The Wealth Of Nations
Richard Florida (in his urbanism-meets-Freakonomics mode): “Though metal may be the music of choice for some alienated working-class males, it … holds less sway in the ravaged postindustrial places of its birth, but remains insanely popular in Scandinavian countries known for their relative wealth, robust social safety nets, and incredibly high quality of life. ”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.27.14
How Many Museums Is Too Many?
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-05-28
A Mexican Composer Whose Time Will Come
AJBlog: Unanswered Question | Published 2014-05-27
Herb Jeffries, Singer
AJBlog: RiffTides | Published 2014-05-28
Offshoring Hollywood Musicians
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-05-27
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Opera’s Chubbygate: One Critic Recants (Sort Of)
Richard Morrison of Britain’s The Times: “The first responsibility of all reviewers is of course to tell the truth as they perceive it to their readers, not to avoid bruising the egos of performers. … Sometimes, however, critics – and indeed all journalists, bloggers and tweeters – need a reminder of how much their words can hurt and how carefully they should be used.”
The Anxiety Of Paris, Captured In A Single Department Store’s Renovation
“Does Paris risk being ‘frozen in formaldehyde’? The French capital’s strict historic building preservation has come under fire this month, after a major revamp of a Parisian landmark was shot down by the courts.”
Fundamentalists Haven’t Truly Abandoned The Enlightenment (Which Is Why They’re Flipping Out Over Neil deGrasse Tyson’s TV Show)
“The Christian right’s Cosmos agita actually indicates a far deeper problem in religious conservatism – the selective acceptance of Enlightenment values. Religious conservatives have selectively adopted the legacy of liberal Enlightenment, from free speech to science, and jettisoned it when it does not suit their narrow ideological aims.”
The Dark Room Where Contemporary African-American Poetry Was Incubated
“Distressed that they had never met an African-American literary lion of [James] Baldwin’s stature, the poets, Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange, hatched a plan: They would bring young black writers and artists together to read their work aloud, to bond with mentors and to foster the sort of comradeship that had nurtured many a cultural movement.”
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Slow And Steady Climb To The Cannes Palme d’Or
“For more than a decade, the Turkish director … has been reliably bringing a movie to the Cannes Film Festival every time he had a new one [Distant, Climates, Three Monkeys, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia] … at intervals of about every three years. He won at least one prize each time out.” This year, with Winter Sleep, he’s reached the summit.
Dancer-Choreographer William McClellan Dead At 36
“He danced on the tables at his grade school. … As an adult, he used his credit cards to co-found a dance troupe … [and] danced and choreographed for a decade with Ohio’s Dayton Contemporary Dance Company.” He had been continuing with a promising career in choreography and teaching when he began a struggle with limbic encephalitis.
Is The Philadelphia Orchestra Feuding With Its Summer Venue In The City’s Fairmount Park?
“Ever since 1976, when the orchestra moved into the Mann Center (then known as the Robin Hood Dell West), the two have played well together in Fairmount Park to establish a lively presence for orchestral music. But the post-bankruptcy Philadelphia Orchestra seems less concerned about sharp elbows.”