“It plays havoc on relationships – because most writers are extreme introverts, who, when in the middle of a work, barely notice the rest of the world exists. When you are successful, you can quickly become vain and narcissistic. When you are not, depressed and despairing.”
Author: ArtsJournal2
Can Ugly Amsterdam Resist Gentrification?
“Deemed most ‘authentic’ and ‘Amsterdam-style’, apartments in historic buildings (anything pre-war) are being sold first, leaving the ‘ugly’ 70s and 80s urban renewal flats largely untouched.”
The Crackdown On Little Free Libraries
“Alas, a subset of Americans are determined to regulate every last aspect of community life. Due to selection bias, they are overrepresented among local politicians and bureaucrats. And so they have power, despite their small-mindedness, inflexibility, and lack of common sense so extreme that they’ve taken to cracking down on Little Free Libraries, of all things.”
Hollywood’s Got All Kinds Of Problems With Diversity
“Minorities are underrepresented compared to their numbers in the overall population by a factor of about 3-1 among lead roles in film and among film directors. That ratio is nearly 5-1 when it comes to screenwriters. On TV, minorities do best on cable, where they’re only underrepresented 2-1 among lead actors in dramas and comedies. Among show creators, the discrepancy is nearly 9-1 in broadcast, nearly 5-1 in cable. All this when ratings and box office tend to rise when casts match the nation’s racial and ethnic diversity.”
Suddenly, Baby Boomers Want To Write Big Checks, And U.S. Museums Are Cashing Them
“‘Coming out of the biggest financial crisis in virtually all of our lives, people are optimistic and are searching for legacy,’ says Dennis Scholl, a vice president at the Knight Foundation.”
Theatre Artists Decamping From London’s Skyrocketing Expenses
“The days when all roads led to London for young artists are over, and there appears to be an exodus of artists looking south to Bristol and Cardiff and north to Manchester, Leeds and further afield to Glasgow, places which all have a creative buzz around them. Why barely survive in London when you can live far better elsewhere, find opportunities, and put down roots?”
How Ballet Dancers Make Pop Music Videos Incomparably Better
“Behold, a brief history of ballet invading pop music.”
Joan Rivers: An Appreciation, And A Reckoning
“From the nineteen-sixties on, Rivers had been the purveyor of a harsh Realpolitik, one based on her experience: looks mattered. If you got cut off from access to men and money — and from men as the route to money — you were dead in the water. Women were one another’s competition, always. For half a century, this dark comedy of scarce resources had been her forte: many hands grasping, but only one golden ring. Rivers herself had fought hard for the token slot allotted to a female comic, yet she seemed thrown by a world in which that might no longer be necessary.”
Can Los Angeles Bring Back Its Own Broadway?
“Nowhere in the world can visitors walk by so many historic theaters and movie palaces. Block after block, stunning Beaux Arts, Art Deco, and revival-style buildings attract the eyes upward, teasing out its many intricate details. Famed acts such as the Marx Brothers, Houdini, and Duke Ellington once walked here, but it seems that time has dimmed the street’s glamour.”
Before Goodreads And Twitter, We Had Marginalia For Insults And Epiphanies, And Cake
“The London Library’s copy of Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, for example, contains such striking remarks — some clearly motivated by the text, some apparently not — as ‘What the devil does this mean?’ and ‘above all there should be cake.’ They were entered by T.S. Eliot.”