Author: Matthew Westphal

Male Film Critics Still Get Published Twice As Much As Female Ones: Study

“Female film critics contributed 35% of the film reviews across print, broadcast and online outlets, up 1% from 2019, according to the report, titled Thumbs Down 2020: Film Critics and Gender, and Why It Matters. Though the increase in numbers of female film critics seems marginal, the numbers show a marked improvement from the 73% male to 27% female breakdown in 2016.” – Variety

Why Are There So Few Black Directors In The Criterion Collection?

“In such an expansive catalog, encompassing films from more than 40 countries, the relative absence of African-American filmmakers stands out. There are, for example, more directors in the Criterion Collection with the last name Anderson than there are African-Americans.” Criterion president Peter Becker acknowledges the problem: “There’s nothing I can say about it that will make it OK. The fact that things are missing, and specifically that Black voices are missing, is harmful, and that’s clear. We have to fix that.” – The New York Times

White Leaders At Some U.S. Theaters Are Ceding Their Jobs To People Of Color

“The theaters are mostly small, and it remains unclear how calls for change in the industry will (or won’t) affect life at larger institutions, many of which have been programmatically and financially hobbled by the coronavirus pandemic.” But this year’s calls for equity are starting to have an effect. Says William Carden, outgoing artistic director of New York’s Ensemble Studio Theater, “The key to antiracism is sharing power. It takes a lot of work and a lot of humility, and it requires that white people step aside.” – The New York Times

Berlin Medical Institute Study Says Concerts And Operas Could Safely Have Full Houses — Then Institute’s Board Disavows Study

“Earlier this week, leading German epidemiologists from the prestigious Clinic Charité published a revised study suggesting that the opera houses and concert halls should allow every seat in the audiences to be occupied. …
However, in a major twist, the Charité’s Board of Directors … stat[ed] that ‘the paper on the resumption of opera and concert operations under the COVID-19 conditions had not been coordinated and did not reflect the position of the board.'” – OperaWire

14,000-Year-Old Engravings Are Oldest Art Ever Found In British Isles

Well, as long as Jersey, 14 miles off the coast of France but 85 miles from England, counts as the British Isles. “The designs were scratched into small ornamental tablets known as plaquettes … [which] were made by the Magdalenians, a hunter-gatherer culture thought to have expanded out of Iberia (modern Spain and Portugal) and southern France after the peak of the last Ice Age.” – BBC

Italy To Tourists: Please Come Back — Just Don’t Climb All Over The Old Stuff, Okay?

A German couple going swimming in the Grand Canal. An Austrian breaking the toe off a statue when he climbed on it for a selfie. A French woman writing her name in felt-tip pen on the Ponte Vecchio. A woman posing for a selfie on top of 2,000-year-old thermal baths in Pompeii. Italians badly want to revive the all-important tourism industry in the wake of COVID, yes, but not if tourists vandalize. But which will be more effective, education or harsher punishment? – The New York Times

U.S. Court Of Appeals Rules Madrid Museum May Keep Nazi-Looted Pissarro

“The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California has ruled that the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation in Madrid is the owner of Camille Pissarro’s 1897 painting Rue Saint-Honoré, Après-midi, Effet de Pluie, which it purchased in 1993 from the collector Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. In 2005, the heirs to the work’s original owner, Lily Cassirer Neubauer, alleged in a complaint that the foundation knew upon acquiring it that the painting had been stolen by the Nazi regime in 1939.” – ARTnews

The Evolution Of The Quizbowl, From Radio To Screen To Zoom

“Technology and trivia may not be obvious bedfellows. But trivia enthusiasts in the postwar-trivia boom of the 1950s would surely look in envy at technologies we take for granted today: word processors, search engines, wikis, videoconferencing services. In today’s Tedium, I take you through the technological evolution of a trivia format called quizbowl.” – Tedium

Lorenzo Wilson Milam, The Johnny Appleseed Of Independent Community Radio, Dead At 86

He didn’t start the community radio movement (that was Lew Hill of Pacifica), but, as one radio historian wrote, “if Lew Hill fathered the movement, Lorenzo Milam reared it.” He founded independent, community-supported stations in Seattle (KRAB-FM), St. Louis, San Francisco, Portland, Dallas, and other cities, and he even wrote a guide to starting up a station, titling it Sex and Broadcasting. A polio survivor, he spent later life as a writer (The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues; Cripzen: A Manual for Survival) and published two literary journals. – The New York Times