Will this start some dominos falling or reinforce the agencies’ intransigence? “Verve, a young Los Angeles agency focusing primarily on writers, is the biggest agency so far to make peace with the opposition, though it is far smaller than the four major Hollywood agencies that are at the center of the fight.” – Los Angeles Times
Blog
Fighting Visual Clichés About Africa
Aïda Muluneh once worked as a photojournalist for The Washington Post. That didn’t go perfectly. “‘Are you an artist, or are you a journalist?’ her boss asked.” By now, the answer is clear: “Muluneh’s art isn’t coy. It deals in high-stakes disparities: Africa as aspiration and Africa as abyss. Reconsider the continent, her images command, and they proceed to connect it to a genre-blending aesthetic that reconceives notions of place and otherness.” – The Atlantic
For Decades, Cuba Exported Radio Soap Operas – And Now Their Post-Revolution Successors Are Going Digital
Plot twists, bingeing, and deep curiosity about characters are nothing new. Cuba exported tons of radionovelas, as they were called, from the 1930s through the 1950s. After the Revolution, “Cuban emigrés in Miami began making original Spanish-language radio soap operas … that reportedly ran on more than 200 stations worldwide. The Latin American Library at Tulane University is now digitizing a whopping collection of those 1960s-era programs and encouraging academic study of Cold War soaps.” You know, just like we “academic study” Game of Thrones. – NPR
Thomas Nozkowski, Who Changed The Course Of Abstract Art, Has Died At 75
Nozkowski’s “small, insistent, richly hued abstractions upended the heroic scale of postwar New York art and helped push painting in a more accessible, personal and wryly self-aware direction.” – The New York Times
As More Commercial Movies Flood Cannes, Deals Follow
There is, however, downward pressure on the market – which may eventually hit actors, directors, and everyone else working on films in the pocketbook. And – let’s face it – Disney is a challenge. “U.S. distribution is still a big issue. There are fewer studios now that Disney has purchased Fox, and most of the major companies are more interested in remaking past hits or backing sequels to long-running franchises than they are with buying an unknown property in the script stage out of Cannes.” – Variety
Reaching out with love
It’s time to stop being angry about classical music’s place in the world, and move toward acceptance. – Greg Sandow
There’s A Moon Rush On, And Science Fiction Is Partly To Blame
Or, if not to blame, then to illuminate how we understand our moon. “If technologies once found only in SF do sometimes become real they do not, in so doing, always cease to be science fictional. SF is not, after all, simply a literature about the future; it is a literature about the shock of new capacities and new perspectives, about transcendence, estrangement and resistance in the face of the inhuman. Its ideas shape and constrain the ways in which technological possibilities are seen, understood and experienced long after those possibilities are first tentatively realised.” – The Guardian (UK)
LA MOCA Gets A $10 Million Gift To Make Entrance Free
A board member made the announcement of her gift at a quasi-40th birthday party for the museum on Saturday night. That fits with new director Klaus Biesenbach’s vision. “‘We are not aiming at having more visitors or larger attendance, but we’re aiming at being more accessible, at having open doors,’ Biesenbach said in an interview. ‘As a civic institution, we should be like a library, where you can just walk in.'” – Los Angeles Times
As U.S. States Strive To Make Abortion Illegal, Romance Novelists Pledge To Write About It
Why? Because of some not so great romance novel tropes. Novelist Liz Lincoln: “We need to start putting abortion in our books. … As an alternative to marrying virtual strangers after a surprise pregnancy. As a part of character backstory. As a thing lots of people experience. … It needs to be as regular in books as characters with dead parents or green eyes. As a normal part of life, not as a moral lesson where women are then punished for their choice.” – The Guardian (UK)
The Suburbification Of The Urban Landscape
Are cities urban anymore? Or are the suburbs moving in? New buildings across the country are offering parking, private entrances, “parks,” and other perks of suburban life – downtown. Yes, “these new buildings are designed for a very narrow slice of the population — those who can afford to spend multiple millions of dollars on a home — but it’s a slice of the population whose purchasing decisions affect all city dwellers.” – The New York Times