Podcast host Akilah Hughes on Twitter in response the news that the 2011 white savior movie The Help is topping Netflix’s most-watched lists: “If you watched the Help this week you have to donate $500 to black charities.” (Twitter also offered many helpful ideas about what to watch.) – Los Angeles Times
Author: ArtsJournal2
Libraries Are Welcoming The Temporary Easing Of E-Book Prices
One Canadian library director said, “It was very, very good news in a very dark period.” (But the cheaper prices are set to end mid-June, when physical libraries may be partially opening back up.) – CBC
Ute Tribes Have To Reimagine Bear Dances Under Lockdown
Normally, for spring’s Bear Dances, “groups of dancers would sway back and forth, shoulder-to-shoulder, with the lines of men and women closely facing each other before they split off into pairs.” The dances have happened since at least the 1500s – but this year, they’re canceled as lockdowns continue on the Ute reservations. – Colorado Sun
Women Making TV Shouldn’t Be A Surprise, And Yet
Yay women doing TV! Also, having to “yay” this means it’s not going that well with the whole ending of inequality thing. “The good news: The number of women working behind the scenes in television is growing. The bad news: It still ain’t great.” – Los Angeles Times
Building A Sanctuary For Culture Lovers
April Gornik and Eric Fischl want to make the Sag Harbor Methodist Church into a community arts center … whenever people can gather again. Fischl: “We have to stop thinking about art as art. We have to start thinking about how the Church can bring creativity to the community on a larger scale.” – The New York Times
You Might Not Know Much About The Mother Of African Cinema
Sarah Maldoror was “a Euro-Caribbean filmmaker trained in the Soviet Union” – and the director, who died of the coronavirus in April of this year, never stopped; “she kept fighting in a world heading in the opposite direction she and her comrades had fought for.” – Los Angeles Review of Books
The Foundation Trying To Help Indie Bookstores Live Through This, And Everything Else
The Book Industry Charitable Foundation (called “Binc”) is a nonprofit created to help booksellers. “Since the pandemic started, Binc has seen requests for assistance increase by 321%. And [communications coordinator] Weiss says she fully expects that number to grow.” – LitHub
Playing Satie’s ‘Vexations’ To Evoke The Spirit Of Our Times
The pianist Igor Levit played a livestream of Erik Satie’s famous, mysterious work, consisting of four lines repeated 840 times, on Sunday. And, well: “The fascinating livestream occasionally slid into something more disturbingly voyeuristic, like witnessing a private crisis of faith and bracing for it to all go wrong.” (It didn’t.) – The New York Times
Taking Theatre Ed Online
In a sudden shift, Asolo Theatre in Florida had to figure out whether to keep going with its education programs even as students and parents were competing for limited Wi-Fi and screen time, and being assaulted with an awful lot of Zooms. “Among the questions they asked themselves … were, ‘What resources do we have? What videos can we make? Who can we interview? What pictures can we take? What archival footage is there? What can we do to continue this conversation with our community so that we as artists can continue to create?'” – American Theatre
Dancer Hobbies For The Quarantine
There’s DJing with the dance glitterati on Instagram Live, there’s the brewing of kombucha, and, of course, there’s learning how to make pancake tutus. – Dance Magazine