The arts figures receiving this year’s $625,000 genius grants include choreographers Alexei Ratmansky and Kyle Abraham, authors Karen Russell and Donald Antrim, pianists Jeremy Denk and Vijay Iyer, playwright Tarell McCraney, and photo and video artist Carrie Mae Weems.
Author: Matthew Westphal
When Jim Henson Was An Experimental Live-Action Filmmaker
The great Muppeteer had several career tracks during the 1960s, before Kermit and Big Bird took over everything. One of those tracks was making some daring fiction and documentary shorts, including the one that won Henson his only Oscar.
An Arts Center Where Corporate Funders Are Side-By-Side With Their Sponsees
“Now Matadero [in Madrid] is evolving into a cultural laboratory, where a new arts financing strategy is being tested. Companies and institutions are providing financial support to supplement dwindling government arts subsidies, but with a twist: they don’t just send checks, they move in.”
What’s Choreographer Crystal Pite After?
“I’ve got an obsession with narrative. … [It’s] kind of a taboo subject. … “‘m trying to recognise and excavate what’s true. I’m looking for moments of resonance.”
How Posterity Changes The Way Almost Everyone Lives
“Astonishing though it may seem, there are ways in which the continuing existence of other people after our deaths – even that of complete strangers – matters more to us than does our own survival and that of our loved ones.” Samuel Scheffler offers two thought experiments to demonstrate why.
Actors In Anti-War Play Arrested At Belfast Airport For Carrying Live Bullets
Four cast members of an Irish-Bosnian co-production of The Conquest of Happiness “were detained … on Monday evening after the bullets, which were sewn into the lining of a jacket worn by one of the actors on set, were discovered by a scanner.”
What George Orwell And Edward Snowden Have In Common
Morgan Meis: “Whenever I see Edward Snowden, the NSA whistle-blower, I think of a young George Orwell standing in the field in Burma. … Like Orwell in the elephant story, Snowden comes off as someone trapped in a bad situation. He has unpleasant facts to show us. He knows what happens to messengers bearing bad news.”
Letting In Americans? “Well, That’s The End Of The Booker, Then”
Philip Hensher: “When eligibility shifts from the UK, Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe to English-language novels published in the UK, it is hard to see how the American novel will fail to dominate. Not through excellence, necessarily, but simply through an economic super-power exerting its own literary tastes, just as the British empire imposed the idea that Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived throughout its 19th-century colonies.”
Of Course The Booker Prize Should Be Open To The World’s Writers!
Sophie Hardach: “All over London, Spanish-staffed coffee chains sit next to West Indian chicken stalls and Turkish hairdressers. Britain is becoming more like America: a magnet to migrants from all over the world. This includes migrant writers, and not ones just from former colonies. The Booker’s old criteria, then, were out of step with reality.”
When They Let Ain’t Into The Dictionary
Author David Skinner talks with the Lexicon Valley guys about the hell that broke loose in 1961 when Merriam-Webster’s Third American Dictionary admitted words like ain’t and beatnik, cited Mickey Spillane and Betty Grable instead of Shakespeare and Lincoln, and changed the entire philsophy behind American lexicography.