“Should metal stay dangerous and controversial and offensive? Is it censorship to deny bands a platform for their genocidal views? Is it curtailing their free speech to make it harder for a band to get booked or get signed versus at what point does it become critical to keep these dangerous Fascist elements out of our scene? At what point is that record worth so much to you that you would buy it knowing that you were actively contributing to something that is harming other people?” – The New Yorker
Blog
Salvaging Alan Jay Lerner’s Biggest Flop, A Musical ‘Lolita’
Think that’s a ghastly idea for a Broadway show? So did audiences in 1971, when try-out audiences in Philadelphia and Boston hated Lolita, My Love so much that the Broadway run was called off. But the producers of an upcoming staged reading in New York, with a revised book and a new framing device, aim to find out if audiences are finally ready for the show (with the changes, at least). – The New York Times
The Salvador Mundi Has Disappeared. Where Is It?
Where the Salvator Mundi is now, no one is quite sure. Locked away in a store room in the Abu Dhabi Louvre, perhaps? Or being pored over in a laboratory somewhere by scientists and art experts determined to prove it is authentic? Or even hanging on the wall in a grand salon in a Saudi Palace, a reminder of a moment of madness. Many art lovers are left wondering if it will ever be seen again. – The Daily Mail (UK)
W.H. Auden Hated His Anti-Fascist Poems
“‘Spain’ and ‘September 1, 1939’ would be variously revised and amended before Auden finally excised them altogether from his corpus, the first because he saw it as the endorsement of a wicked philosophy, the second because it saw it as sententious nonsense.” – The Daily Beast
Monty Python Snubs V&A Museum For Proposed Show
“It became clear they were doing an exhibition on Surrealism…,” writes Eric Idle in his book. “Pretentious nonsense. We’re nothing to do with Dalí or Duchamp… Python has always been about comedy. That is the art.” – The Art Newspaper
Blackface Minstrelsy, America’s First Cultural Export
While other nations have had traditions of blackening the face to portray a particular character (e.g., Holland’s Zwarte Piet), “a man named Thomas Dartmouth Rice first brought American minstrel shows to Europe in 1836 in which white performers portrayed African American slaves in tattered clothes, dancing and singing songs such as ‘Jump Jim Crow.’ … [Subsequently,] blackface minstrels toured Australia, India, South America, South Africa and other places in the world. They were seen as American and therefore exotic” — and their imagery was absorbed into other cultures.” – Public Radio International
‘Queen Of The Soundies’, Tap Dancer Mable Lee, Dead At 97
“Soundies” were three-minute musical films meant to be played on jukeboxes, and Lee starred in more than 100 of them. In a career that stretched from the age of nine to this past summer, she achieved dance stardom after graduating from the Apollo Theater’s chorus line, was part of the first all-black USO tour, starred in the national tour of Bubbling Brown Sugar, and took part in the tap-dance revival that started in the 1980s, teaching the likes of Michelle Dorrance. – The New York Times
What Comedy Tells Us About Ourselves — And How We’re Changing
Scholar of comedy Matthew McMahan: “Just as Michel Foucault encourages historians to look to moments of rupture and discontinuity when trying to decipher how a culture thinks and acts, I suggest students of comedy look to the moments when a successful joke simply stops landing with its audience. The moment when a loud guffaw quickly shifts to an appalled gasp can tell us a lot about how a culture is changing.” – HowlRound
Why Jessica Lang Decided To Shut Down Her Dance Company
“We didn’t lose our funding. … It was something I did. I approached the board. I told them the last thing I felt I had time to do was create, to make ballets. They agreed. This kind of structure and organization — I know I am not the only one to say it — doesn’t work for me now.” – San Francisco Classical Voice
Met Museum Closes Show And Returns Golden Casket To Egypt
“Less than two years after an acquisition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today that it had handed over a first-century BC gilded coffin to the Manhattan district attorney for return to the Egyptian government after discovering that it had been looted in 2011.” – The Art Newspaper