“Bong’s last two films, 2013’s Snowpiercer and 2017’s Okja, were his first to be made in English: they weren’t exactly misfires, either critically or commercially, yet both clearly had designs on being bigger deals than they were. … A globally minded film-maker with big-dreaming genre nous, he spent the last few years making a bid for mainstream Hollywood clout, only to finally make an international phenomenon from his own doorstep.” – The Guardian
Author: Matthew Westphal
Ciaran Carson, Poet Who Captured Belfast, Dead At 70
“With a rich accumulation of poems, metafictions and other unclassifiable prose works, … he superimposed a psychic overlay on the city’s mundane streets and terraces, its feuds and factions, the aggravations and atrocities of the bloody 30-year Troubles.” – The Guardian
How Do You Translate The Life Of A Forgotten, Insane Swiss Novelist Into Dance Theater?
Marina Harss: “The material feels both so deeply literary and, at the same time, so utterly deflating. The subject is a solitary man” — Robert Walser — “whose writings tended to track the minutiae of his solitary life, and who died alone in the snow — this hardly sounds like something to dance about. But that is precisely what the choreographer John Heginbotham and the illustrator Maira Kalman have set out to do … [in] Herz Schmerz.” – The New Yorker
The Banjo And The Ballot Box: Country Music As Political Tool
“[Historian Peter] La Chapelle explains how fiddler-politicians and politician-fans have used this oddly flexible genre to advocate for the poor and dispossessed, fight for racial justice, fight against racial justice, lobby for gun rights, and articulate a whole range of sometimes contradictory positions. (audio) – The American Scholar
The Time I Played Chess Nude With Marcel Duchamp
Eve Babitz: “I took the smock off, letting it fall beside me, but Julian kicked it far across the slippery floor, out of the way in a corner. I sat down quickly at the chess set and wondered if we could just pose or did we actually have to play, but Marcel — whose obsession with chess made him give up not only art but girls — was waiting for me to make the first move.” – Literary Hub
Did The Philly Fringe Risk Its Patrons’ Safety By Including This Event?
“The 2019 Fringe Festival page touting [a solo biofeedback session with psychologist Gary Ames] reads biofeedback will open the bridge ‘between conscious and subconscious realms. Let creativity and talent arise.’ So why shouldn’t Fringe patrons try it? Perhaps because sending unwitting ticket-buyers alone to someone’s suburban home for a therapeutic session could result in major problems — for Ames, for the Fringe, and for the ‘audience’.” – Broad Street Review (Philadelphia)
Why Netflix On Broadway Is Good For Both Of Them
The streaming giant is renting the Belasco Theatre in midtown Manhattan for a four-week, eight-shows-a-week Broadway-style run of its latest major feature, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. Howard Sherman explains the benefits that Netflix, the Shubert Organization (owner of the Belasco), and Broadway more generally could get from the unusual arrangement. – The Stage
They’ve Rediscovered The Naughty Bits From Europe’s Most Famous Medieval Romance
Fragments of a manuscript of Le Roman de la Rose — containing a double entendre-filled episode about a pilgrim at a shrine — were found in a centuries-old book binding in the public records office of the English city of Worcester. – Live Science
MoMA’s Expansion Is ‘Smart, Surgical, Sprawling And Slightly Soulless’: Michael Kimmelman
“For all its intelligence and skill and its obvious desire to make the place feel friendlier, the expansion seems to me not to have solved the problem of the Modern’s ambience. … You may feel like you’re entering an Apple store. Everything is crisp and coolly engineered.” – The New York Times
The Real Test Of MoMA’s Expansion Will Be Traffic Flow: Justin Davidson
“MoMA is a machine for viewing art, and the success of this latest incarnation will be gauged by how many visitors the facility can process in any given day. … The 2004 expansion created escalator bottlenecks, Pollock and Picasso choke points, and the slightly desperate atmosphere of a shopping mall on Black Friday morn. This time, the architects … calculated [everything] to smooth the passage of humanity.” – New York Magazine