“[She] earned two Academy Award nominations (for Midnight Cowboy and Farewell, My Lovely) and decades of glowing reviews for her acting before drawing equal attention for her midlife transition to constant partygoer and garishly flamboyant dresser.” – The New York Times
Author: Matthew Westphal
Museums And Galleries In Hong Kong Close In Support Of Demonstrations Against Extradition Law
“Around 100 Hong Kong arts organisations, including commercial galleries, signed up to call a strike on Wednesday as lawmakers were expected to begin a series of votes on the [law which would make it easier to extradite Hong Kong citizens to mainland China on political charges]. Those proceedings have been postponed as protesters and the police clash outside the legislature.” – South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
Ending A Turbulent Few Years, Berlin’s Volksbühne Appoints A New Director
The playwright and director René Pollesch will take the reins at one of Germany’s most important theaters in 2021. He succeeds Chris Dercon, formerly the director of London’s Tate Modern art gallery, who lasted only six months in the job in the face of regular protests over his presence there. “Those included personal attacks — feces were left in front of Mr. Dercon’s office at one point — and an occupation of the theater by left-wing activists.” – The New York Times
World’s Richest Prize For A Novel Goes To First-Time Novelist In Boise
Emily Ruskovich’s Idaho has won the €100,000 International Dublin Literary Award, for which books are nominated by libraries around the world. She said that when she first got news of the prize, she thought she was hallucinating. – The Guardian
New Online Platform For African Writers And Musicians To Reach The Global Market
A Q&A with Chidi and Chika Nwaogu, twin brothers from Nigeria and the creators and chiefs of Publiseer. As Porter Anderson observes,”What’s at issue … is the question of where and how emerging markets are being surfaced in African publishing today. A part of the premise of the program is that ‘digital transformation is allowing these developing publishing markets to leapfrog into the future,’ something that a combination book-and-music platform’s creators surely know something about.” – Publishing Perspectives
Narrative-Sharing and Narrative-Shifting With Digital Technology
Members of the Detroit-based collective Complex Movements discuss the connection between technology, performance, and social justice community organizing. – HowlRound
“Don’t make me go out there alone!” — Leonard Bernstein’s last tango with ‘Candide’
Bernstein’s December 1989 concert performances and recording were his answer to the surprisingly numerous Candide-ologists trying to figure out why a show with such sparkling music had never been a commercial success. And they were so eventful, they only just barely happened — as I saw up close. – David Patrick Stearns
‘An Overwhelming Sense Of Truth And Beauty’ — Simon Callow On Oliver Sacks
“This is an unusual boy, one who had, as he puts it, an ‘overwhelming sense of Truth and Beauty’ when at the age of ten he saw a periodic table in the Science Museum and became convinced that ‘these were indeed the elemental building blocks of the universe, that the whole universe was here, in microcosm, in South Kensington.’ … And it becomes increasingly clear that Sacks was that boy to the very end of his days.” – The New York Review of Books
We Tried An Entirely Different Model Of Arts Criticism, And Here’s What We Learned
“We laid out some pretty bold premises when The Commons Crit, a collaboration with Carolina Performing Arts’ Commons festival, began. Here’s how they look from the other side.” – Indy Week (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, NC)
What Did Old English Sound Like?
“No one living, of course, knows exactly what it sounded like, so scholars make their best educated guesses using internal evidence in the scant literature, secondary sources in other languages from the time, and similarities to other, living languages.” And here are some of those educated guesses, applied to excerpts from Beowulf, prayers, and even a casual conversation. – Open Culture