“French schoolteacher Frédéric Durand-Baïssas … says the social media giant closed his account in 2011 because he posted L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World, 1866), [the history-making] explicit full-frontal female nude.” The French judge did rule that French users could sue Facebook in France rather than California, but was less than sympathetic to Durand-Baïssas’s claims for damages.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Mayor Of Tehran Forced To Resign After Attending Dance Recital
“The mayor, Mohammad Ali Najafi, attended a celebration last week amounting to an Islamic version of Mother’s Day. There he encountered six [grade-school-aged] girls dancing in traditional costumes and throwing the rose petals in honor of a female saint.” Islamist hardliners were predictably outraged: said one mullah: “One cannot argue that these were children. They were young girls who incited arousal. They made the most atrocious movements. This cannot be justified.”
England’s Arts Funder Creates New Grants Program For Individual Artists
“Arts Council England (ACE) has launched a £14.4m fund for individual artists and creative practitioners in the early- and mid-stages of their creative careers. …Grants of between £2k and £10k will be available to individual creatives, or small groups of collaborators, to support research, the creation of new work or development of future ideas, training, networking or mentoring, or travel.”
The Ballerina Who’s Taught 100,000 Peruvian Slum Children Hip-Hop Dance
“Vania Masías vividly remembers the first time she saw acrobats somersaulting at a traffic light on a visit to her home city in 2004. She was at the peak of an illustrious career as a ballet dancer in Europe – but before long, she would leave it all behind it to nurture the raw talent she found in the streets of [Lima,] the Peruvian capital.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 03.19.18
Court Hearing/Protest Demonstration: Crucial Week in Berkshire/La Salle Deaccession Deliberations
Coming to a boil this week, the heated controversies over the fate of endangered collections at two small, little-known museums pose a huge potential threat to museums around the country. And there’s only one sure … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2018-03-19
The Pleasure of Context
Like many people, when I read a great book, I immediately cast about for other titles by the same author. When I see a film that catches my attention, I look for more by the same creative team. Part of this practice is a desire to get … read more
AJBlog: Infinite Curves Published 2018-03-19
Old friends
I go back a long way with Laura Demanski, my best friend, who blogged with me as “Our Girl in Chicago” for many years. We met some three decades ago. Back then she was … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2018-03-20
Female Directors Are Finally Starting To Get Traction In Sci-Fi
Katherine Bigelow made Strange Days ($42 million budget) more than 20 years ago. Excepting the Wachowski siblings’ Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending (they got their Hollywood cred from the Matrix series, which they made when they were male), it took until Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman and Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time for Hollywood to let a woman helm a big-budget science-fiction feature. (Another one, Claire Denis’s High Life, is on the way.) Anne Billson looks at the trouble female filmmakers have had making headway in high-end science fiction – and at the numerous interesting efforts they’ve made on low budgets.
Is Conspiracy Fiction Dangerous In The Post-Truth Era?
Ned Beauman, who writes conspiracy novels: “When we observe the Alt-Right questioning the established facts and the established world order, the last thing we should do is offer them a monopoly on that attitude. Nonetheless, if I had just written a novel that extolled, say, the spiritual joys of being alone with nature, and meanwhile enormous numbers of ill-prepared people were being found dead in the woods after succumbing to snakebites or dehydration, I might try to introduce some balance into my next paean to the wilderness.”
270 Years After Bach, Fugues Are All Over YouTube
“The use of YouTube is no accident. The internet is a great way for fans to party contrapuntally. Online musicians have turned dozens of songs into fugues, from ‘Uptown Funk‘ to the ‘Star Wars‘ theme and ‘Old MacDonald‘.” (Even the fight songs of the two Super Bowl teams got fuguified.) “Others are making older pieces easier to understand. By adding scrolling videos to the music – each voice marked by different lines of colour – Stephen Malinowski lets fans follow the subject with their eyes as well as their ears.”
Barbara Tuchman’s ‘The March Of Folly’, Even After 34 Years, Is All Too Relevant
“‘Wooden-headedness’ in statecraft, which she defined as ‘assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs,’ has clearly become a prevailing factor in our politics. As Tuchman wrote, wooden-headedness was best captured in a remark about Philip II of Spain: ‘No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.'” Historian Jon Meacham argues why “there is a lesson here not only for the president but for the people.”
Corruption, Basically: John Kander And Ann Reinking Talk About Why ‘Chicago’ Never Feels Dated
Kander: “Because corruption in society never seems to go out of style. Every once in a while, it becomes more obvious than not.”
Reinking: “Every step is basically a word. Especially with musical theatre, because you’re not doing it for dance’s sake, you’re promoting a story – and, more than that, a moral.”