If you liked Black Panther, listen to the music that introduced and embodies Afro-Futurism. Photojournalist Marc PoKempner captured a bit of the celestial magic of the Sun Ra Arkestra during its November touchdown in New Orleans’s Music Box Village. — Howard Mandel
Author: Matthew Westphal
How Do You Put Conrad’s ‘Heart Of Darkness’ Onto A Stage In 2019? Interrogate It — Hard.
“Heart of Darkness is, to use today’s parlance, problematic. … Whether [the novel] is ‘offensive and totally deplorable’, as [Chinua] Achebe insisted, or a searing critique of colonialism trapped in its time, putting it on stage pulls it into the present. Literature might be excused, though not absolved, by context. Theatre isn’t.” Matt Trueman looks at the approaches two directors are taking with their adaptations. (And some of the commenters administer thoughtful interrogations of the projects’, and the article’s, premise.) — The Guardian
A Bit Of Stalinist Utopian Design, Now Available On AirB&B
A pair of architectural history buffs bought this 377-square-foot apartment in a 1932 Constructivist building in Moscow, restored it, and furnished it with copies of avant-garde Soviet furniture and design, including the famous Suprematist chair and table by Nikolai Suetin and upholstery from a design by artist Lyubov Popova. All yours for a mere $75 a night. — The Art Newspaper
The Semi-Secret Bootleg Video Vans Of The Soviet Union
Elmar Hashimov writes about how he and his peers, the last generation of kids to grow up in the USSR, watched still-illegal American films (and learned English) on VHS tapes, dubbed on the down-low, inside parked transit vans tricked out with a TV and VCR. — The Atlantic
New Awards, And A New Sense Of Community, For Chicago’s Latinx Theatermakers
“Latinx theatre and theatremakers in Chicago are consistently ignored, erased, or misunderstood by both critics at mainstream publications and the city’s one major awards body, the Joseph Jefferson Awards. And this is not to mention the wider demonization of Latinx people by the current political administration and the long history of racism and state violence facing people of color that is endemic to the United States. The ALTAs” — presented and produced by the Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists of Chicago — “were a response to a deeply felt need by the community and offered an alternative to majority-white modes of professional recognition and prestige.” — HowlRound
Has Twitter Made This A Golden Age Of Aphorism?
“‘You’d think so,’ says the poet and aphorist Don Paterson. ‘But there’s absolutely no evidence of it.’ As he sees it, the aphorism is a different thing altogether from what he calls ‘wisdom literature’. Yet aphorisms – even though they haven’t much of a tradition in the anglophone world – are poking green shoots into the likes of Waterstone’s.” — The Guardian
Beyond Scrooge: Charles Dickens’s Strong, Strange Relationship With Christmas
“From his early short essay ‘A Christmas Dinner’ in Sketches by Boz (1836) to his incomplete final novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), in which an uncle appears to have murdered his nephew on Christmas Day, Christmas is sunk into his imagination like a watermark. … [And some friends] observed that Dickens’s enjoyment of Christmas seemed more determined, even ruthless, than one might expect from someone with a genuinely boyish sense of fun.” — Literary Hub
David Shepherd, Granddaddy Of Chicago Improv, Dead At 94
In 1955, Shepherd co-founded Compass Players with Paul Sills, and, as one comedy historian put it, “Without David, no Compass. Without Compass, no Second City.” Which means no North American improv or sketch comedy as we know it. — Chicago Tribune
No Selling Of Secondhand Digital Recordings The Way You Can Sell Your CDs And LPs, Rules Federal Court
A company called ReDigi had developed a platform for people to offer their “pre-owned” MP3s and FLACs while making sure that the sellers didn’t keep a bootleg copy for themselves — or so they thought. Capitol Records sued, and now a federal district court and the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled that ReDidi’s business model is illegal. Cullen Seltzer explains. — Slate
NPR Develops Open-Source Tool For Getting Podcast User Data, And Feelings Are, Well, Mixed
Until now, the only tools for telling how long users actually listened to the podcasts they downloaded were the proprietary ones of Apple and Spotify. So NPR developed an open-source tool to get data beyond download figures. But with the privacy scandals that have broken over the past year, some podcasters are leery. — Columbia Journalism Review