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Recent Listening: Reuel Lubag Trio

The Pacific Northwest is home to a dozens of superior jazz musicians. By no means are all of them of them in Seattle and Portland, the attention-getting large cities of western Washington and Oregon. Dozens manage to find work playing in Spokane, Eugene, Bend, Yakima — and increasingly in the region’s burgeoning winery tasting rooms and restaurants.

Pleasures Of The Body Versus Pleasures Of The Mind: A Muddy Debate

The entire debate assumes a clear divide between the intellectual and bodily, the human and the animal, which is no longer tenable. These days, few of us are card-carrying dualists who believe that we are made of immaterial minds and material bodies. We have plenty of scientific evidence for the importance of biochemistry and hormones in all that we do and think. Nonetheless, dualistic assumptions still inform our thinking.

The Joy Of Ugly, Kitschy, Weird-Ass Design

“Since the dawn of the twentieth century, our understanding of good design has had a slightly moralizing tone, even as it shifted from early Bauhaus to boxy midcentury modern and into the sleek … white cubes of twenty-first-century Minimalism. … Ugliness isn’t just a rebellion against the norms of good taste; it’s also a fittingly chaotic aesthetic for a chaotic era of presidential tweets, alternative facts, and government propaganda.”

Artist’s Daughter Sues Corcoran Museum To Get Back Art Works

Public display of Pascal’s work was a condition of the 1994 contract signed by Corcoran director David C. Levy and several Tyler Art trustees, including Petty. The trust gave the museum about 100 pieces of art and $1 million “to cover costs associated with establishing and maintaining the permanent gallery and the collection,” according to court filings. The agreement states that the art and the cash gift must be returned if the Corcoran “has not complied with the conditions.”

Personality Tests: Why Humans Keep Devising Them, And Whether They’re Actually Useful

“In this installment of our ‘Annals of Obsession’ video series, we dive into the history and validity of personality assessments, from the less-known measures used by psychologists to … the ever-popular Myers-Briggs, created by a mother-daughter duo without any experimental training. Do these measures … tell us anything real about ourselves? And what is it about the human mind that leads us to keep seeking them out, in era after era and society after society, endlessly striving to organize the people around us into ‘types’ that may, or so we hope, help explain them all?” (video)

Seattle’s Last Typewriter Repairman Dies At 96

When first profiled in The Seattle Times in 2014, he told about when he was 7 or 8 years old and went to the downtown Seattle shop of his father, also a typewriter repairman. The son helped by changing ribbons and cleaning machines. And so Mr. Montgomery ended up repairing the machines in Bushy Park in London. That was right where Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was stationed as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force…

How’s A Dancer To Handle It When The Company Suddenly Gets A New Artistic Director? Like This

“It’s understandable to experience feelings of shock, fear and even abandonment if your director leaves. It’s not just that you’ll have a new boss — a shift at the top can have a domino effect on casting, programming, rehearsal structure and branding. Here’s how to forge a relationship with your new director and take advantage of the opportunities that come from having fresh eyes on your dancing.”

Why Composers Should Reconsider Whether To Enter Competitions

I have served as Chairperson and panelist for countless composer competitions and residencies over the course of the past twenty years. I have yet to witness any winner be selected because of a resumé stuffed with Important Sounding Awards. Not one. When the panelists and I looked at someone’s attached C.V., it was often just a passing glance. The composers who received these juried opportunities were selected because of one marvelous thing: the excellence and creativity of their music. Imagine that. And keep it in mind.

Viola Davis’s Great Challenge (And Why She Regrets Doing ‘The Help’)

“The responsibility of feeling like I am the great black female hope for women of color has been a real professional challenge. Being that role model and picking up that baton when you’re struggling in your own life has been difficult.” This ties in with what she regrets about The Help (which she found a wonderful experience personally): “I just felt that at the end of the day that it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard. I know Aibileen. I know Minny. They’re my grandma. They’re my mom.”

A Look At Susan Sontag’s FBI File (She Was A ‘Subversive’)

“As a prolific social critic covering topics from AIDS to American interventionism, Susan Sontag seemed almost fated to run afoul of the Bureau. Although her association with the ‘New Left’ of the 1960s first put her on the FBI’s radar, it was her writing in opposition to the Vietnam war that earned her her own investigation and the personal attention of no less than Director J. Edgar Hoover.”