The now-18-year-old said he did it because “he had to prove a point ‘to every idiot’ who said he had no mental health problems, asking police if it was going to be on the news.” – BBC
Author: ArtsJournal2
Trying To Leap The Three Big Arts Barriers With A Dance Company In San Diego
Peter Kalivas says his PGK Dance Project, begun 25 years ago while he was working as a professional dancer in Munich, “must always be attempting to resolve the three main barriers the professional arts constantly face: affordability, accessibility and relevance.” – San Diego Union-Tribune
Why Hollywood Is Obsessed With De-Aging Its Stars
This isn’t the why, but a result: “Guy Williams and his fellow visual-effects artists have spent so much time staring at Will Smith’s face, they’ve practically memorized his every pore. ‘We joke sometimes that we probably know his face better than his wife does,’ Williams told me in September, laughing. ‘I can tell you exactly how he forms a smile. I can even tell you the 12 different flavors of Will Smith’s smile and the subtleties of each one. It gets pretty obnoxious.'” Indeed. – The Atlantic
Styling ‘Orlando’
Orlando, a new opera based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a time-traveling, gender-bending love letter to her aristocratic lover Vita Sackville-West, “is the first opera commissioned from a female composer by the Vienna Opera in its 150 years of existence.” They wanted to get the costumes right, so they commissioned designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, who is a bit busy. She says, “There were 36 main costumes for the principals, plus 106 others for the choruses and other groups. I accepted to do the costumes on condition that … I could use the theme of “Orlando” for the two Paris collections proceeding it.” – The New York Times
Caroll Spinney, Long The Voice Of Sesame Street’s Big Bird And Oscar The Grouch, Has Died At 85
Spinney created two indelible characters, and, in his long tenure on Sesame Street, assisted in the creation of many more. “His Big Bird had a childlike innocence, sometimes goofy, sometimes subdued, outgoing or shy, like most children a creature of habit and mood. His themes were simple: that it was good to speak up, O.K. to make a mistake, all right to be sad sometimes. At Jim Henson’s memorial service in 1990 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, Big Bird sang a heart-rending farewell, ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green.'” – The New York Times
How Would An Ideal World Look, And Why Were Books Better Before The Nuclear Bomb?
The author of Ducks, Newburyport (yes, the 1,000-page, one-sentence novel) has some ideas. Lucy Ellmann: “I find the annual celebration of contemporary writing, the Xmas lists of 2019 books, quite offensive. It seems so arrogant. These lists suggest that the most relevant books must be the ones most recently published. That’s daft. It’s nice of people to take an interest in new writing of course, especially when one has a book out that year oneself, but let’s face it, it’s a marketing ploy. They want to shift some books, and to do so they glory in the ‘now’ – while everybody knows readers would get more from reading Ulysses or Woolf or Kafka.” – The Guardian (UK)
France Wants To Rein In Big Tech
Digital taxes are only a start, says France’s digital affairs minister. “More important? Targeting the biggest tech companies—most of which are American—with new regulations to prevent them stifling competition and damaging democracy.” (Er, and part of the plan is designed to help French entrepreneurs and their start-ups.) – Wired
Geffen Gaffes
Talking NY Phil: “I’d wish for less attention and money to be squandered on overhauling the hall and more on improving the mix of musicians (guest soloists and visiting conductors) and on reimagining the programing, to make it more innovative and eclectic.” – Lee Rosenbaum
Ron Leibman, Star Of Screen But Especially Stage, Has Died At 82
Leibman won a Tony Award for his portrayal of Roy Cohn in the 1993 Broadway production of Angels in America. At that point, he had Drama Desk Awards and an Emmy, but it was as Cohn that his reputation grew. “So striking was Mr. Leibman’s portrayal that no less an actor than F. Murray Abraham, an Oscar winner, found him a hard act to follow when he took over as Cohn in 1994.” – The New York Times
The Best ‘Cats’ Joke, Among Quite A Few Contenders, Is In ‘Angels In America’
Truly, if you’ve seen the movie trailer, there’s no missing the multitude of jokes just sort of … oh, let’s say it … hanging there to be batted around. However, Angels in America won the competition long ago with Roy Cohn making a joke about the musical: “It’s the rare Cats joke that successfully makes fun of Cats and also punches back at people who think they’re interesting for making fun of Cats. It’s appropriately as chaotic as Cats itself.” – Vulture