“The studios were originally constructed in 1909 as a short-lived rollerskating venue. The BBC took over the building in the 1930s and refurbished it to serve as studios, making it one of the broadcaster’s oldest buildings. However, the distinctive and unusual building is in a residential area and contains asbestos, increasing the cost of refurbishment.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Top Posts From AJBlogs 06.04.18
Color Wins The Day At the Cooper-Hewitt
Saturated: The Allure and Science of Color, now on view, is exactly the kind of exhibition I expect and like to see from the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum – which, frankly, came as a bit of a surprise. … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2018-06-04
Punk, Indie Rock and Power Pop With Chris Stamey
Though he’s hardly a household name, North Carolina’s Chris Stamey has been just alongside many of the key developments in left-of-the-dial rock music over the last four decades. … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2018-06-04
Tweets in search of a context: punching out
One problem with working at home and setting your own schedule, especially for writers, is that it can prove to be quite hard to shut the shop down and take time off. … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2018-06-04
Monday Recommendation: Roberta Piket
Roberta Piket, West Coast Trio, 13th Note Records
The seasoned New York pianist traveled west to record with a sterling rhythm section of veteran Los Angeles players. The bicoastal combination clicked. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2018-06-04
Did The Young Mark Twain Pull A Con Job On A Group Of Boston Abolitionists?
“The renowned Thoreau scholar Robert Sattelmeyer spotted an odd entry in the Boston Vigilance Committee’s accounting books and wondered: is that the Samuel Clemens, who grew up to be Mark Twain? The committee used most of its funds to help runaway slaves escape to freedom, in direct violation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. But in an unusual expenditure in September 1854, the radical abolitionists sent $25.50 to a Samuel Clemens for ‘passage from Missouri Penitentiary to Boston — he having been imprisoned there two years for aiding Fugitives to escape.'”
My Mother’s Brilliant Career As A Provincial Soviet Culture Worker
Anastasia Edel writes about her mother, a pianist and staffer at the Institute of Culture in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, where, for a time, she even had a local television show about classical music.
Should Theater Awards Stop Separating Acting Categories By Gender?
“Are ‘Best Actor’ and ‘Best Actress’ awards an insidious example of gender apartheid, or is it just a convenient excuse to give out more awards? You can decide after reading our latest Point-Counterpoint.” TheaterMania critics Zachary Stewart and Hayley Levitt debate.
The Challenges Arts Professionals Face Everywhere In The World
“How to respond to budget cuts in an unstable economic environment is perhaps the number one struggle. Managing cultural organisations in a sustainable way is not straightforward these days and perhaps it never has been. What has changed is that we are facing the vulnerability of public investment, in parallel with a significant shrinking of private investment. Add to that the extent to which digitisation has affected the creative value chain, from conception to creation, the arts sector is faced with quite a new panorama. And this requires new approaches to the way we work.”
How Koranic Chanting Morphed Into Sizzling Afropop
“Across working-class Muslim neighborhoods in Yorubaland, for nearly 50 years, a high-energy sound has been heard on busy street corners and at parties. Fuji, a raw and percussive musical style, was born out of these communities; a cultural cornerstone adapted by a number of players to a backdrop of a continually shifting Nigeria.”
Read Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s Lecture, ‘Staying Human: Poetry In The Age Of Technology’
“In April, to mark the beginning of her second term as poet laureate, Smith delivered a lecture at the Library of Congress about what she experienced during that tour and how poetry can defend us from the distractions and degradations of our technological culture. Her remarks are presented here in full with permission from the author and the Library of Congress.”
The 25 Best American Plays Since ‘Angels In America’ (As Chosen By The New York Times’ Five Theater Critics)
“Of the plays we’ve singled out as the best 25 of the last 25 years — dated by their first reviews in [the newspaper] — only nine have ever appeared on Broadway, and none originated there. No matter their size, most began on, and many never left, the smaller stages of Off and Off Off Broadway, or were developed at regional theaters. If they have reached fewer people as a consequence, they have told more stories: the kind often ignored during the decades when theater was still a dominant but homogeneous cultural force.”
How The New York Times’ Critics Chose The 25 Best American Plays Of The Past 25 Years (Plus Nods To The Ones They Left Behind)
“We started with 75. … This was encouraging; it meant we found much to love. And many of the same plays were on more than one list. That was good to recognize, too. To get to 25, we eventually realized that we could only include one play by any given playwright, or risk being overrun by a medley of Annie Bakers or Suzan-Lori Parkses. Conversely, we decided that we could not include veteran playwrights just because they wrote great plays before 1993.”