“According to Nielsen Audio Fall 2017 ratings, the total weekly listeners for all programming on NPR stations is 37.7 million people – a record that has been maintained since the Spring of 2017. NPR’s Newscasts, updated live every hour, can now be heard on 947 broadcast stations by nearly 28.7 million listeners.”
Blog
Is The Next Nobel Prize Winner For Literature Tending Bar Deep In The Australian Outback?
“A strong case could be made for [Gerald] Murnane, who recently turned 79, as the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of. … Yet his work has been praised by J.M. Coetzee and Shirley Hazzard, as well as young American writers like Ben Lerner and Joshua Cohen. Teju Cole has described Murnane as ‘a genius’ and a ‘worthy heir to Beckett.’ Last year, Ladbrokes placed his odds at winning the Nobel Prize for Literature at 50 to 1 – better than Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushdie and Elena Ferrante.” Mark Binelli goes to visit the author in his tiny village five hours from Melbourne, where Murnane promised him “an interview unlike any you’ve done before.” (He was as good as his word.)
How To Diversify Orchestras?
“Diversity isn’t enough. The end game is not just having more black or brown people on stage, though that certainly has an impact. That is meaningful, but on its own it won’t change the direction and priorities of organizations, because musicians are seen as the hands of the organization and others are seen as the brains. We should have a structure that supports a workforce of artists.”
‘We Wanted To See If It Was Possible To Stage A Mind’ – Choreographer Crystal Pite On Her ‘Betroffenheit’
“We wanted … to figure out how to use the whole space of the stage to create an image of an injured mind. After that initial impulse, we tried to take a personal story of loss and trauma and make it universal, to zoom outwards and ask some big questions about what suffering is, what it means and how one survives something like that. … In German, the title means to be stopped or struck by something that leaves you in a kind of shock or speechlessness, an inability to respond or express anything in words. So that word became emblematic for us.”
Concerto For Cheesesteaks And Orchestra: Tod Machover’s New Score Captures The (Literal) Sounds Of Philadelphia
Philadelphia Voices is the eighth in a series of “crowd-sourced symphonies” – symphonic scores incorporating sounds recorded on the streets and submitted by residents – Machover has done for various cities from Detroit to Toronto to Perth. David Patrick Stearns met with the composer, both in Philadelphia and at his high-tech Boston-area studio, to talk about how Machover put together the piece, which will combine the sounds of the Philadelphia Orchestra and several choirs with such found sounds as Mummers at the New Year’s Day parade, birds at the Philadelphia Zoo, and (yes) sizzling cheesesteaks on the grill at Pat’s King of Steaks in South Philly.
Frank Gaylord, Sculptor Of Korean War Memorial, Dead At 93
“Mr. Gaylord, a World War II Army paratrooper who received the Bronze Star Medal for valor during the Battle of the Bulge, said he intended his sculptures to ‘confront visitors with the reality of actual war’ while complying with the design committee’s instructions not to glorify it.”
Houston Gets Its Own Version Of An Anish Kapoor ‘Bean’
Cloud Column, a very shiny, 21,000-pound stainless-steel ellipsis by Anish Kapoor that has just been installed on the campus of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It’s almost impossible to avoid thinking of Cloud Column as the vertical version of Cloud Gate (a/k/a “The Bean”), Kapoor’s popular sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park.
The War Of The Beans: Chicago And Houston Papers Totally Diss Each Other’s Anish Kapoor Sculptures
As Kapoor’s Cloud Column is being installed in Houston (and drawing inevitable comparisons to Kapoor’s Cloud Gate in Chicago), the Chicago Tribune‘s Kim Janssen and the Houston Chronicle‘s Lisa Gray started throwing serious shade at each other’s public sculpture as the rest of the nation watched with amusement. (The Dallas Morning News chimed in with “Sorry Chicago, making fun of Houston’s ‘bean’ sculpture is our job.”)
‘I’m Struggling With The Biggest Element: My Age! I’m Fighting Time’ – Akram Khan Dances His Last Full-Length Solo
To accompany this photo journal, the dancer-choreographer writes about Xenos, about an Indian colonial soldier fighting for Britain in World War I. “In my work, I need a character I can relate to – but also a character who can relate to me. So we decided that this colonial soldier was a dancer who is thrown into the trenches somewhere in Europe. Most of the piece takes place in a trench, at least in an abstract sense.”
Tavis Smiley Sued PBS For Breach Of Contract; Now PBS Countersues Smiley – And Includes Detailed Sexual Harassment Charges
In December, PBS suspended Smiley’s nightly talk show in the wake of allegations that he had behaved improperly with female members of his staff; within weeks, Smiley, furiously denying the charges and alleging that PBS was “racially hostile” to him, filed suit against the network. “[Now, a] 32-page answer and countersuit, filed in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, alleges Smiley violated the network’s morals clause and seeks $1.9 million in returned salary plus unspecified damages.”