Boxy shapes, flat windows, bland façades. How did American apartment architecture get conquered by the style one wag calls “Spongebuild Squareparts”? Reporter Patrick Sisson writes that “it boils down to code, costs, and craft.” — Curbed
Author: Matthew Westphal
David Sedaris Shows Us Tidbits From The Archives He Just Sold To Yale
Among them, the handmade books he turned in as papers in art school and Macy’s behavior guide for Santaland elves. As he tells Jennifer Schuessler, “There’s no way I could have ever gotten into a place like Yale. So it thrills me that horrible first drafts of stories I wrote when I was stoned got into an Ivy League school.” — The New York Times
‘Crazy Money’ Has ‘Corrupted’ Architecture, Says Highly-Paid Starchitect
“In a keynote speech at the World Architecture Festival in Amsterdam [in late November], [David] Adjaye said that architecture should be the ‘arbiter of ideas’, yet many of today’s projects are driven by ‘elitism that is to do with hyper-commercial liberalism and who controls money’.” — Dezeen
American Poetry Is Political Again. The U.S. Poet Laureate Looks At How And Why
Tracy K. Smith: “Political poetry … has done much more than vent. It has become a means of owning up to the complexity of our problems, of accepting the likelihood that even we the righteous might be implicated by or complicit in some facet of the very wrongs we decry.” — The New York Times
Meet Dance Magazine’s 25 To Watch In 2019
This year’s list includes an amputee tap dancer, a young man whose star-making performance was partnering a wooden stool, and a dancer-cum-planetary geologist whose TED talk about choreographing for near-zero gravity is titled, “Netflix and Chill at 0 Kelvin.” — Dance Magazine
Amazon’s Prime Video Channels Will Pull In $1.7 Billion This Year
That’s more than double the revenue from last year, and analysts say that the figure should more than double again by 2020. — The Hollywood Reporter
Now That Belgium Has Opened Its New Africa Museum, Its Largest Ex-Colony Wants Its Art Back
The opening of the renovated and reorganized (with some input from Belgium’s African community) museum moved Joseph Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to call for objects taken during the colonial period to be returned for a new national museum in Kinshasa. — The Guardian
Documenting The Civil War Damage To Yemen’s Cultural Heritage
The good news is that there’s been very little ideologically-based destruction of the kind ISIS perpetrated in Syria and Iraq; the damage is almost entirely “collateral,” the by-product of the warring sides shooting at each other. The bad news is that the worst of the damage has been caused by Saudi Arabia with American and European weapons. — Hyperallergic
Gender Pay Gap In British Arts World Remains Serious Problem: Study
“Figures drawn from Arts Professional‘s 2018 online survey of pay and earnings reveal that on average, women in full-time employment in the cultural sector earn 10.6% less than men, … with women being only half as likely as men to reach senior roles by their mid-30s, and on average earning less than men as their careers progress.” — Arts Professional
Kristin Korb Christmas
Kristin Korb, That Time Of Year (Storyville)
Winter holiday albums began showing up in the Rifftides mailbox well before Thanksgiving. They’re still coming. It’s time to call some of them to your attention. — Doug Ramsey