“French authors, booksellers and publishers are imploring the French government to allow bookshops to stay open because reading is ‘essential’, as the country enters a national four-week lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus.” – The Guardian
Blog
Investing In Artists Rather Than Just Buying From Them
One huge bright spot, for example, is Soho Rep’s Project Number One, which puts artists on salary through June 2021. The artists in this program have been moved from a project-based, transactional relationship with the theatre to a more holistic, sustainable one. I believe this is an incredibly important, perhaps transformative, shift for our field to make. – HowlRound
Paris’ Legendary Shakespeare & Co. Sends Out An SOS
“We’re not closing our doors, but we’ve gone through all of our savings. We are 80% down since the beginning of the first wave. We’ve now gone through all of the bookshop savings, which we were lucky to build up, and we have also been making use of the support from the government, and especially the furlough scheme. But it doesn’t cover everything, and we’ve delayed quite a lot of rent that we have.” – The Guardian
Why Being An Optimist Might Be A Liability During COVID
Most people have a tendency to overestimate the chances of experiencing a positive (like getting a promotion), and underestimate the likelihood of experiencing a negative event (like getting robbed or sick). Typically a benign — even beneficial — human quirk, the “optimism bias” could be contributing to the spread of coronavirus according to behavioral psychologists. – Big Think
The Cultural Cost Of Four Years Of Trump
Michelle Goldberg: “When I think back, from my obviously privileged position, on the texture of daily life during the past four years, all the attention sucked up by this black hole of a president has been its own sort of loss. Every moment spent thinking about Trump is a moment that could have been spent contemplating, creating or appreciating something else. Trump is a narcissistic philistine, and he bent American culture toward him.” – The New York Times
Lockdown Has Jumbled The Place Of Artists In Our Culture
“It would be easy to dismiss a surfeit of depressed artists as the most minor of national considerations, given the loss of jobs across the spectrum, but it is important to examine how we got to this point, and why there should be an onus on our politicians to take more care in their consideration of our collective fate.” – MAX
COVID Lockdown 2.0: Will Screens Still Prevail?
Futurists are predicting that the pandemic has accelerated the permanent decline of everything from watching movies in traditional theaters to standing in line at theme parks. But as we approach what is looking more and more like a second lockdown, this one timed alongside a cold, dark winter here in the upper Midwest, are those in-home screens going to dominate everything again? Is Big Tech going to once again take home all the spoils? Are we all going to let that happen? – Chicago Tribune
How To Rebuild A Healthier, Fairer Theater Ecosystem? Bring Back Repertory Companies
Jim Warren, founding artistic director of the American Shakespeare Center, writes that the “revolutionary changes” he recommends — companies of 15 to 20 resident actors, performing shows in rotating repertory and handling administrative jobs as well as performing, and working 40-hour weeks with full benefits — “are a jumping-off point for righting a history of wrongs.” – American Theatre
Why composers shouldn’t attack each other in public
In the end, everyone comes out looking bad. And so it was when composer Matthew Aucoin, age 30, took on Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) in the Nov. 5 New York Review of Books. – David Patrick Stearns
Diane di Prima, R.I.P.
What I like is her poetry’s simplicity. I like its rich feeling, which is straightforward and strong and not at all sentimental. Her poems age well. I’d be surprised if her poetry didn’t last longer than the poetry of many of the Beats. – Jan Herman