Talk about your unprecedented times. Buckingham Palace needs a plumbing update, so the paintings, including Vermeer’s The Music Lesson and two Rembrandts, have to find a temporary home, and the Queen’s surveyor sounds thrilled about it: “In a way, we’re obliged to do it. … We’ve got to get them out of the picture gallery for the building work.” – The Guardian (UK)
Author: ArtsJournal2
In The 2016 ‘Much Ado’ On PBS, Shakespeare Conveys How Much Black Lives Matter
This is a good time for some required quarantine viewing, no? And it’s always a good time to check out how good directors, dramaturgs, and designers (not to mention actors) can turn Shakespeare’s plays into a living, breathing commentary on contemporary life. – LitHub
As Boston’s Art Museums Reopen, There’s A Sense Of Hope
During the height of the first wave of the coronavirus, it seemed this day would never come. Now, “it’s odd how the surreal can become de rigueur. At the Gardner I barely noticed the masks, the arrows on the floor, the laminated signs tacked virtually everywhere.” – The Boston Globe
Linda Manz, Who Starred In Terence Malick’s ‘Days Of Heaven’ At Only 15, Has Died At 58
Manz also featured in Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue. – Variety
To Find A Book That Charts Our Own Distressed Times, Try Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook, published almost 60 years ago now, gets to the heart of almost everything (depressingly, still) going on right now. “Lessing — like Anna — is unafraid to dirty her hands in the quest for truth. She might write with an acid touch but she doesn’t keep an Olympian distance from new causes or passionate affairs.” – The New York Times
Will Britain’s First Live Show To Return Actually Make It Back To The Stage?
Actors rehearsing for the musical Sleepless get test results within 45 minutes on an app. One of the actors says, “It does actually feel amazing to just be hearing people sing again. It’s made me realize the escapism of theatre and how much people will love to see it again.” (Especially if the audience can also get those speedy tests?) – BBC
Billy Goldenberg, Composer For Stage, Screen, And TV, 84
You may not know you know his work, but you definitely do. A partial description: “Emmy-winning composer who worked with Barbra Streisand and Elvis Presley, scored Steven Spielberg’s early work and wrote the theme music for more than a dozen television series.” – The New York Times
The Pain And Dedication Of Being A Reality Show Camera Operator
The camera operators’ job applications asked them to list their skills at things like mountain biking, river rafting, and hiking. Those aren’t on the skillsheets for a lot of camera operators, but “‘I wish every job application was like that, because that’s all the stuff I love to do,’ said camera operator Kathryn Barrows, 43. ‘I felt like this is the show I’ve been waiting my whole life to shoot.'” – Los Angeles Times
The Many Hatreds Of Horror Master H.P. Lovecraft
Lovecraft was clearly racist and clearly an anti-Semite – and guess what? He also thought the Irish were inferior. “Such prejudices weren’t simply background colour. They are front and centre of many of his most iconic tales.” (Which is why a new series would make him so mad.) – Irish Times
As We All Know Now, Time Both Is And Isn’t Real
OK, let’s get metaphysical: “‘The true present is a dimensionless speck,’ Alan Burdick writes in his book Why Time Flies. ‘The specious present, in contrast, is ‘the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible’ ’—he quotes James. The specious present, Burdick adds, ‘is a proxy measure of consciousness.’ It is what we think of as now. Not the general now, as in “the way we live now,” but right now. And how long is now?” – The Paris Review