Says the citation for Christopher Bollen’s The Destroyers, “The judges felt that there are parts in the book where Bollen goes overboard in his attempts to describe the familiar in new terms, leading occasionally to confusion. In the line quoted … they were left unsure as to how many testicles the character in question has.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Sydney Morning Herald Theatre Critic Fired After Launching New Arts Website
Jason Blake, chief theatre critic for the Herald since 2010, and his wife Elissa, a freelance arts journalist for that paper and its Sunday tabloid, The Sun-Herald, opened the Sydney-focused website Audrey Journal in November to help make up for reduced arts coverage in the print newspapers. Now the SMH has told the Blakes that their new venture, which is supported financially by several Sydney arts institutions, is a conflict of interest.
Brazil’s Famous Hotbed Of Countercultural Theatre Now Under Threat By Real Estate Development
Teatro Oficina, part of the tropicalismo movement of the 1960s and ’70s and notorious for performances filled with nudity and onstage drug consumption, is headquartered in a unique, landmarked São Paulo building by architect Lina Bo Bardi with a huge window and retractable ceiling. Mogul and TV personality Silvio Santos owns the land around Teatro Oficina and wants to build three skyscrapers which would block the theatre’s light, and the country’s artistic community is rallying to fight Santos’s plan.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 11.30.17
Recent Listening: Urban Fado
Mary Ann McSweeney, Urban Fado (McSweeney)
In Lisbon, New York, Montreal, Paris, and Tokyo – among other places around the world – musicians are melding jazz and Fado. Fado’s origins in Portugal extend to at least … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2017-11-30
Why Some Bad Movies Become Cult Classics (And Others Just Don’t)
“Not all bad movies are entertaining. To be worthwhile, they require a sense that someone was actually trying. … Making a purposefully lousy movie is like wearing a Female Body Inspector T-shirt: You might get a cheap laugh, but ultimately, you’re just a guy with questionable taste.”
The Long, Surprising History Of Dinosaur Art
“Works of paleoart – a genre that uses fossil evidence to reconstruct vanished worlds – directly shape the way humans imagine the distant past. It’s an easy form to define but a tricky one to work in. Paleontological accuracy is a moving target, with the posture and life appearance of fossil species constantly reshuffled by new discoveries and scientific arguments. Old ideas can linger long after researchers have moved on, while some artists’ wild speculations are proved correct decades after the fact.”
How Dana Gioia Composes His Poems (Very Physically)
BBC World Service’s In the Studio visits the California poet laureate and former NEA chairman at his hilltop retreat, where he talks about how he feels a poem coming on physically and has to walk around as he’s composing it – as well as the origin of the ballad he wrote about the death of his Mexican-American cowboy grandfather in Wyoming. (audio)
The Dining Car Could Heal America: Composer Gabriel Kahane’s Amtrak Odyssey
“On Nov. 9, 2016, I boarded the Lake Shore Limited, Amtrak’s overnight service from New York to Chicago. … Over the next 13 days, I would log 8,980 miles aboard six trains, traversing 31 states, subsisting mainly on Three Cheese Tortellini with Creamy Pesto Sauce and Vegetable Medley. During this time, I had conversations with upward of 80 strangers, almost all of whom I met over meals in the dining car.”
‘The Music Of The Plants’ Is A Real Thing (Meaning Plants Are Really Playing Music)
“During a small lecture at a private residence in Delray Beach earlier this month, I watched a houseplant play music, unabashedly and beautifully. Potted and still, it was hooked up to a MIDI machine via electrodes, its bio-emissions creating twinkling melodies. Attached to the same machine, an orchid and rosemary plant played nothing, but this one was active and virtuosic, as though it enjoyed playing.” A reporter talks to a leader of the Music of the Plants project about how all this works.
A Whole New Variety Of English Has Developed In The Lesvos Refugee Camp
“It is unsurprising that simplified English is the lingua franca of Moria prison camp and its environs, spoken between asylum-seekers from formerly-colonised states as disparate as Iraq, Uganda, Pakistan and Burma. But in the crucible of the overcrowded detention centre … English is undergoing an accelerated evolution, tentatively beginning to develop its own unique grammar and idiom.”