“For most of their history, these companies scoffed at traditional media. Can’t measure it, can’t convert viewers into customers, not enough real-time data. Yet here are the 21st century’s most dominant brands behaving like their counterparts of the late 20th, using TV as a key tool to build image and consumer loyalty. Taking a half-step back, this development is a bit rich given that other than Microsoft, these are companies whose businesses are working, through digital advertising dominance and streaming content, essentially to destroy the modern TV industry.” – Fast Company
Author: Matthew Westphal
Planting Vineyards
If expanding our base to new communities is necessary, we need an appropriate metaphor for the process. I think I’ve finally stumbled upon something workable. – Doug Borwick
Beckett: A bit of Rough at the Old Vic
Daniel Radcliffe’s sense of physical theatre is magnificent, but, finally, the evening belongs to Alan Cumming. – Paul Levy
When Working Men Bought ‘Pride And Prejudice’ For A Penny
“Austen first emerged in penny editions in the 1890s. Penny versions were modeled on the sensational Penny Dreadfuls, those cheap stories of violence on which Britain’s lawmakers were known to blame the rise in urban crime. Operating in tandem, two newspaper giants stepped in to offer better entertainment to ‘the poorer millions.’ These alternatives were pushed as ‘Penny Delightfuls.'” And yes, poor working men and women bought and read them. – Literary Hub
How Intimacy Directors Do Their Jobs
No less than dance or fight choreography, intimacy choreography consists of specific, repeatable movements, and intimacy directors find desexualized language to use with actors (as opposed to “More passionate!”) to create the right effect for the audience. Holly L. Derr talks with some of the creators of the practice of intimacy direction about how they developed it and use it. – HowlRound
Long A Visual Desert, Baghdad Is Coming Alive With Political Art
“Where did all this art come from? How is it that a city where beauty and color have been largely suppressed for decades by poverty, and by the oppression or indifference of successive governments, suddenly came to be so alive?” – The New York Times
Alice Mayhew, Editor Who ‘Helped Pioneer The Modern Washington Political Chronicle’, Dead At 87
“A top editor at Simon & Schuster who assembled a roster of literary heavyweights, … Ms. Mayhew focused on popular histories and biographies as well as the journalistic genre known as “the Washington book.” Released only a year or two after the events they covered, the books featured heavily reported, insider accounts of Beltway politics and White House intrigue, tailored for readers who wanted details that were often unavailable to daily journalists.” – The Washington Post
A Right-Left Tug-Of-War Over Poland’s Museums
“Over the past five years, Poland’s art institutions have increasingly become a vehicle for the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party’s cultural reform efforts. … [There’s now] a nationwide battle over who shapes Poland’s cultural institutions, with both sides claiming that they are being silenced. The stakes are high: the dispute has the potential to shape the art shown in Poland and the history taught to the public for decades to come.” – Artnet
At Santiago’s Theatre Festival As The Chilean Uprising Continues
“Sometimes comic, sometimes earnest, always indignant, Chilean theatre repeatedly gives voice to the abused, the angry and the dispossessed. … All this is consistent with a festival that has its roots in the underground resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship. Fiercely independent, Santiago a Mil sees itself on the side of the people and has accessibility in its DNA; the three-week festival attracts audiences of 200,000, of whom 150,000 pay nothing.” – The Guardian
A Mural Helped Turn Around A Derelict SoCal Park — Until Unexpected Protests Got It Removed
For decades, Tony Cerda Park in Pomona was desolate, dilapidated, and dangerous. Last summer, artist Joe Ded painted a mural to honor the park’s namesake, a longtime leader of local Native Americans. People began using the park again, and the city started paying attention to it. Then some of the local Native Americans got a look at the mural, and they were not happy. – Los Angeles Times