Chipaul and Mille Cao, who grew up as members of wartime Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese minority, met at a dance party just six months before the Communist takeover of the entire country; they fled separately and were apart for years. They ultimately reunited in Southern California, married, and took up competitive ballroom dancing — and now a 20-minute film about them, Walk Run Cha Cha, has made the shortlist for the Best Documentary Short Oscar. – Los Angeles Times
Author: Matthew Westphal
‘Her Invention Is Ceaseless, Her Influence Is Profound’ — Playwright Lucy Kirkwood Pays Tribute To Caryl Churchill
“In the course of a writing life that spans 60 years, she’s changed the dramatic landscape of two centuries, and evolved more than any other British playwright our conceptions of what a play even is. She’s even changed the way we write them down.” – American Theatre
Which Nights Sell Best For Dance And Classical Music?
In Pittsburgh, at least, it seems not to be nights at all: it’s weekend matinees, across the genres. Sara Bauknecht and Jeremy Reynolds get into the details. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Asia Gets Its First-Ever LGBTQ-Focused Streaming Service
“GagaOOLala brings more than 1,000 feature films, shorts, web series, and documentaries to people across Asia, where censorship and traditional attitudes mean there has been little in the way of gay content in the mainstream media. After launching in 2017 in Taiwan, a beacon for gay rights since becoming the first place in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage, it has expanded to 21 territories including several that still criminalise homosexuality.” – Yahoo! (AFP)
How The 2010s Became The Queerest Decade Ever On Screen
“It feels like we’re leaving this decade light years ahead of where we entered it. In 2010, salacious stories about queer people were still routinely seen in tabloids and on TV. Today, LGBTQ+ people are heralded for being themselves, and our stories are being normalized and told with a broader range of diversity and experiences than ever before.” Writer Jill Gutowitz talks with four leading queer media creators about how it happened. – them
Barbara Testa, Who Discovered One Of American Literature’s Great Missing Links, Dead At 91
“Barbara Testa had enjoyed a perfectly anonymous life in Hollywood until she crawled up in the attic one day and opened a steamer trunk left behind by her grandfather, a 19th-century attorney with powerful friends. Inside … was a handwritten manuscript that would solve a century-old literary riddle and plunge Testa into the headlines in a mounting dispute over ownership of the precious document, the missing first half of the original [manuscript] of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” – Los Angeles Times
Newseum Faces Its Closing Day As A Painful Symbol
As the year and decade end, “it will shut its doors for the last time, becoming a glass-and-steel white elephant – and an almost-too-obvious metaphor for the crisis facing America’s newspaper industry.” – The Guardian
Remains Of Ancient Mayan Palace Discovered In Yucatán
“At the archaeological site of Kulubá, nestled amid the lowland forests of Mexico’s Yucatán state, experts have unearthed the remains of a large palace” — six rooms, 180 feet long, 50 feet wide, 20 feet high — “believed to have been used by Maya elite around 1,000 years ago.” – Smithsonian Magazine
Alasdair Gray, Godfather Of Scotland’s Late-20th-Century Literary Renaissance, Dead At 85
“Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, AL Kennedy and Janice Galloway, among others, were all Gray’s bairns. Authors invited Gray to illustrate their books. Little magazines sported his self-portraits and cursive designs on their covers. A graphic artist known locally for his eccentric appearance and behaviour became, at the age of nearly 50, a central figure of the literary world.” – The Guardian
A Finger Picker Salutes Herbie Nichols
Spinning Song: Duck Baker Plays The Music Of Herbie Nichols
In the New York jazz scene of the 1950s and early sixties, the breadth and depth of his talent won enormous respect for pianist and composer Herbie Nichols. One of those affected by Nichols is Duck Baker, a fingerstyle guitarist from Richmond. – Doug Ramsey