Bell was on stage when someone who looked like him and claimed to be him got into his hotel room in Zaragoza, Spain. How did he get the hotel staff to open the room safe? That took some ingenuity, and a towel.
Author: ArtsJournal2
Edward Albee’s Second Chance (With Dubuque)
Albee: “If you write plays because you just want them to be liked, you have to lie too much. … People like theater that is safe, generally speaking — things that are easy, that are not too deeply troubling. In other words, people want to go to the theater and waste their time.”
Being Alive Means Being In Pain (Look! A Puppy!)
Humans deal with a lot of different kinds of pain, and our brains can learn to distract us from it, through stress – or something a little more pleasant.
Need A Recipe? Google It (Even If You Have It On An Index Card Somewhere)
“Social media is becoming deeply embedded in our food habits: Half of consumers use sites like Twitter and Facebook to learn about food. Another 40 percent of consumers say they learn about food via websites, apps, or blogs.”
Radio’s Going Everywhere (That’s Why NPR Isn’t ‘National Public Radio’ Anymore)
New NPR CEO Gary Knell: “Now you have voice-activation systems in Fords and other car manufacturers, which are just going to get faster, smaller, and cheaper every year, and NPR’s gotta be on there. Public radio’s gotta be a player. If we’re not on these platforms, we’re dead. This isn’t a choice of whether — it’s really a choice of how.”
A Masterful Collaboration Comes To A Probable, If Satisfactory, Close
“The long and faithful collaboration between director Bela Tarr and novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai stands apart. Spanning five features over a quarter of a century, two of them indebted to the writer’s novels, their alliance is among the most triumphant of enduring novelist-director pairings, alongside Graham Greene and Carol Reed. And the shared vision pursued in their works — of human longing, struggle and folly in a disintegrating, predatory world, where all paths only circle back unto themselves — has been, above all, uncompromising.”
The Real War Horses (It Wasn’t As Pretty As The Spielberg Film)
In WWI Britain, “a million horses were taken overseas, pulled out of farms, breweries and every industry you can think of, most of them had no experience of being near anything that went bang and they went through a hell of a time.”
Seriously: Trust Your Feelings (They’re Smarter Than Your Reason)
“Every feeling is like a summary of data, a quick encapsulation of all the information processing that we don’t have access to. (As Pham puts it, emotions are like a ‘privileged window’ into the subterranean mind.) When it comes to making predictions about complex events, this extra information is often essential. It represents the difference between an informed guess and random chance.”
Sometimes, Revolution Takes You Backward (As French Painters Could Tell You)
“During much of the 18th century in France, female painters defied the usual constraints on their gender and thrived among the kings, queens and nobles soon to lose their heads.” Then came the French Revolution – destroyer of (bourgeois) women’s careers.
You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Immediately – It Might Take Seven Years)
Rereading Marion Milner means thinking hard about desire. “We think of our desires as being pure and instinctual, never really understanding the influence cultural norms, or what we see on television or in pornography. We feel pulled toward something we consider magical and totally individual, and then we get our hands on it and realize it’s not having much of an effect on us after all. Why were we craving this again?”