Not only has her former label not let the singer buy back her own masters, but Scooter Braun, a powerful music mogul whom Swift calls a manipulative bully, has bought the entire label (likely sold to him specifically because Swift wouldn’t re-sign with her former label). It’s a nightmare scenario for many singers and singer-songwriters. “‘This is what happens when you sign a deal at fifteen to someone for whom the term ‘loyalty’ is clearly just a contractual concept,’ Swift wrote on Sunday.” – The New York Times
Author: ArtsJournal2
What Happens When You Put Two National Poet Laureates In The Same Room
When the poet laureate of Scotland meets the poet laureate of the United States … no, not the start of a joke. “Both strongly believe in poetry as a means of fostering empathy by inhabiting different characters and different selves. ‘In a way I think of your work as a great opera of voices,’ [Jackie] Kay tells [Tracy K.] Smith. ‘It’s almost like you’re saying that all of these human beings come through us, that we’re not one person, we’re many.'” – The Observer (UK)
Creating A Visual History Of LGBTQ Life Before Stonewall
Of course, LGBTQ life didn’t start in 1969 – but there’s not a lot of visual record out there, at least not in public. The director of 1982’s Before Stonewall reflects on her archival research and the difficulties along the way as the film gets a re-release for the 50th anniversary of the protests/riots/major point in the fight for civil rights. – The Atlantic
Riz Ahmed Was On His Way To A Star Wars Event, Until Homeland Security Stopped Him
Even Star Wars – heck, even Disney – can’t protect against Homeland Security. Ahmed made a slight joke about it before explaining that, well, it’s simply scary for him to be traveling in the U.S. right now. – Los Angeles Times
The Overlooked Work Of Ernie Barnes, The Athlete Turned Celebrity Artist
Barnes, a U.S. football player turned artist who did such things as “creating album covers for Marvin Gaye, receiving a commissioned by Kanye West and being named the official artist of the 1984 Olympics,” still isn’t really part of art history, curators of a new retrospective claim – and that’s what they’re trying to correct, of course. (But it’s not every day that the artist’s professional American football helmet is included in the artist’s show.)- The Guardian (UK)
Why Do So Many Ignore The Suffering In The Poems Of Mary Oliver And Elizabeth Bishop?
Maybe because it’s easier on certain types of reviewers and critics to ignore clear evidence of suffering and pain? “Oliver and Bishop share a clear appetite for animal flail and gore and death. But many readers don’t seem to make very much of this. Critics praise the work, but tend to smile gently, indulgently, upon Bishop’s rhymes, her received forms and elegant impersonality, Oliver’s ‘old-fashioned’ subjects.” – LitHub
The Former Soap Opera Youth Star Whose Parents Made Him Keep A Paper Route
Himesh Patel may be the star of the new Beatles (if they’d never existed) movie Yesterday, but he knows what happens if you don’t keep both feet on the ground in a media career: The New York Times Your parents make you haul out the bike and get on top of that paper route. – The New York Times
When You Want To Feel Inspired By Language, What Should You Read?
Language can be curved, bent, cajoled, broken, reconstituted, made to fit a creators passion. When that’s what you want to read, here are some ideas to put up higher on the TBR pile. – The Rumpus
How Is It That Musicals Both Ultra-Gay And Not Gay At All?
Musicals can help young men, especially (but not only!), come out, and lord knows they’re often campy enough … but where are the happy gay musicals? Other than Bill Rauch’s happy and gay Oklahoma! at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2018, really, where exactly are they? – The Stage (UK)
The Author Who Just Won The Dylan Thomas Prize On Code-Switching And Superpowers In London
Guy Gunaratne, whose novel is written in ”a pungent first-person patois,” explains that of course he speaks differently to an interviewer. “publishing is pretty middle class and I’ve had to accommodate. In London, you learn to code-switch quite well and I’ve always thought of that as a superpower in a way. You’re able to express yourself with different vocabulary in different situations, not through any pretence but because the way you express yourself matters, and your social condition is inherited through your inheritance of dialect.” – The Guardian (UK)