“Trauma is all about details. Trauma renders itself in certain songs, in the quality of the air against the sky, in colors of socks, in flavors of alcohol. When the human brain encounters a trauma, it makes quick decisions about what to remember, and it often remembers otherwise mundane details: the timbre of birdsong, or the specific shake of a tree’s shoulders. Sometimes the brain gets kind of obsessive about trauma.”
Author: ArtsJournal2
What British Dramaturgs Do
“While every major theatre in Germany has a whole department devoted to the function and a practitioner assigned to every production, in British theatre the dramaturg has been a comparatively rare beast. Until recently.”
Is The Symphony Over?
“A genre once aimed at vast crowds—Mahler imagined his symphonies being played in stadiums, for tens of thousands of people—now leads a more subdued, solitary existence. Much of its legacy is ignored in concert halls and can be encountered only on recordings.”
Wes Craven, The Mainstream Horror Maestro With A Debt To Ingmar Bergman
“Wes Craven’s career is a startling link between the European arthouse and Hollywood exploitation horror.”
Some Oliver Sacks Reading Lists
“Over the course of his life’s work, Sacks approached his many questions with rigorous intellect and, above all, empathy. The best word for this, maybe, is grace. And it’s everywhere in the elegant body of work he left behind—his many books, but also his shorter essays and interviews.”
(Also, here’s a link to all of Sacks’ work for the New Yorker.)
Apparently, European Cinema Is About To Be Destroyed
First, there’s Netflix (and HBO, Amazon, iTunes, etc.); and now “this sense of threat has been made more urgent by the proposals tabled by the European Union’s executive branch, the European Commission, to sweep away territorial copyright barriers in the movie and TV business in order to create a single European market.”
Target Shooters Are Destroying Ancient Petroglyphs In Utah Parks
“Spattered paint and bullet holes are erasing an archaeological record dating back thousands of years on public lands south of this growing enclave of subdivisions in Utah County.”
One Of China’s Biggest Peking Opera Stars Makes Her U.S. Debut At The Met
“Ms. Zhang, a lithe, delicate woman of 44, is a megastar in Beijing. She has performed for sold-out crowds here and in Shanghai, captivating audiences, including legions of young fans, with her sorrowful eyes, deep vocal intonations and graceful displays of martial arts. In 2007, she was the first star of the Peking Opera genre to perform solo at the Great Hall of the People, the seat of China’s central government.”
Fast-Rising Artist Noah Davis Dies (Far Too Young) The Same Day His MOCA Installation Opens
MOCA chief curator: “Noah is an important artist because he occupies the term ‘artist’ in the largest possible way: an incredibly accomplished painter, he is also a profound visionary — dreaming up the idea of the Underground Museum and then physically enacting that dream against all odds.”
Social Media: To Blame For Literary Mediocrity?
“A middlebrow cult of the popular is holding literature to ransom. Thus, if you judge by the emotional outpourings over their deaths, the greatest writers of recent times were Pratchett and Ray Bradbury. There was far less of an internet splurge when Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014 and Günter Grass this spring. Yet they were true titans of the novel.”