Buckle your seatbelt and fire up your time machine. You are about to blast yourself back nearly fifty years to a simpler time when America was at war, the country was polarized, a crazed and despised president of the United States was in charge, cops were considered racist pigs, cannabis was omnipresent, and young radicals feared that racism was imminent. — Jan Herman
Blog
Problems Of The .01 Percent: Taking Care Of Your Art On Super-Yachts
The crew “just thought it was some painting, they had no idea it was worth many millions,” Mather-Lees told the Observer at a superyacht conference in London last week. “They are expected to know how to serve the owners at sea, not to know about paintings and art. But, now that the rich are increasingly bringing their art collections on board their yachts it’s vital that captains and crew know how to care for these pieces.” – The Guardian
Iran’s Greatest Movie Director Is Becoming A Global Star
Asghar Farhadi on the impact of censorship in Iran: “Each director finds his own way of dealing with it. It’s claimed restriction can lead to even greater creativity. I believe that’s true in the short term, but in the long term it destroys creativity.” – The New York Times
Buzzfeed’s Master Quizmaker Was a 19-Year-Old Who Did It For Free (Then Came Last Week’s Staff Layoffs)
“We were working too hard, making these elaborate things, and all of her stuff was really stripped down. She’d do five quizzes in a day, and I’d maybe do that many in a week. People were, like, ‘If this girl stops, that’s a problem.'” – CBC
Theatre, Bar, Underground Space, Warehouse – London’s Edgiest Theatre?
Everything The Yard does is underpinned by three values, Jay Miller said. The first is that “the stories we tell have to feel like they aren’t being told by mainstream culture. The second is we create a space where audiences and artists feel able to take risks together. The third is we really celebrate the idea of the live moment, and what that means in a society mediated by technology.” – The New York Times
Egypt Discovers 40 Mummies South Of Cairo
Officials told reporters on Saturday at the site that the chambers, which were cut out of rock, belonged to a middle-class family who probably lived during the Ptolemaic, early Roman or Byzantine period. – Times of Israel
Survey: Average Person Stops Seeking Out New Music By Age 28
A survey by streaming service Deezer found that the average person reaches “musical paralysis” — when she or he primarily listens to familiar tracks and does not seek out new genres — at the age of 27 years and 11 months. – Billboard (CTVNews)
We’ve Turned Students Into Tech-Monitored Units. Cue The Yearning For Nostalgia
Students are actively integrated into a system that collects data about their behavior, quantifies it, and packages it for parents and the school itself. In an era of data rooms and standardized testing, when education has become a rigorous science, ClassDojo may seem like nothing new. After all, students have been ruthlessly quantified since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. But ClassDojo seeks to create docile bodies in the classroom, and it does this by monitoring and collecting enormous amounts of data on students. – Los Angeles Review of Books
Hi, Music World: Singers Are Musicians
This isn’t up for debate, so please stop saying or writing, “singers and musicians.” Why does it matter? “This subtle but false dichotomy reinforces many of the assumptions that singers are forced to confront in their careers: that they are not as musically literate, that they came to their career through a path of sub-par training, that they lack the ability to hear and understand the underpinnings of a musical score, that they have to hire a vocal coach to teach them their part.” – NewMusicBox
A Short Look At The History Of Minstrelsy
Wesley Morris, on Ralph Northam’s press conference: “The governor wasn’t arguing that his young self came to see that blackface was wrong because he had learned how minstrelsy wasn’t some cultural niche but was once America’s popular culture and how that popularity helped cement the nation’s perception of black people as hideous and stupid and freakish and dumb and lusty and unworthy of more than torture, exploitation, derision, oppression, neglect and extermination.” – The New York Times