The awfulness of Rotten Tomatoes and Cinemascore. (But he does give a defense of mother!, so there’s that.)
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Have Our Senses Been Polluted?
“I don’t mean to depict our sensorium — the entire range and capacity of our sensory experience — as a pure state that has been defiled by light, noise, flavor and scent pollution; that would just be another version of the original-sin-and-fall narrative. I would argue rather that we have managed to turn the senses against themselves by pitting overwhelming light against lights, overpowering sound against sounds, intense flavor against flavors, penetrating aroma against aromas. In each case, the result is a marked simplification in the field of possible experiences — one or two stimuli will outshine, outsmell or outshout the rest.”
If We Can’t Even Gather Together For A Performance Without Worrying About Getting Shot, We’re Doomed
LA Times theater critic Charles McNulty: “We feed our minds and spirits as well our bodies. My way is theater. Yours might be movies, sports or church. It makes no difference. With gun regulation as irresponsibly lax as it is, we are all just a maniac away from being on the next casualty list.”
Michael Friedman Was A Brilliant Talent. So Why Did He Die?
Mr. Friedman’s death from complications of H.I.V./AIDS has rattled the theater world, both because he was seen as among the brightest lights of his generation and because it shocked those who had come to see H.I.V. infection as a chronic but manageable condition, at least for those with health care.
Margaret Atwood, Azar Nafisi, And Naked Ladies, All Side By Side: A Playboy Literary Editor Reveals All
Amy Grace Loyd, who was Playboy‘s literary editor from 2005 to 2011, writes about how, and why, she convinced some of the English language’s top female authors (along with the likes of Junot Díaz, Walter Mosley, and Sherman Alexie) to write for the magazine.
Letting All-Male Pas De Deux In Ballet Become Genuinely Romantic
“Ballet is slower to change than most art forms, but in the span of just two weeks, New York City Ballet, one of the world’s premier companies, will have shown two ballets featuring significant same-sex duets.” Gia Kourlas talks with the choreographers of those ballets, Lauren Lovette and Justin Peck, and the men who’ll be dancing those duets.
How A Dancer ‘Unwinds’ Bharatanatyam, South India’s Classical Dance
Says Pranita Nayar, who has studied the form for decades, “My audience is not from a thousand years ago, so what are we preserving? For whom am I preserving it? … [What’s more,] the bharatanatyam of today is only about 100 years old.”
Arts Center Damaged In California Wildfires
The Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa (Sonoma County), which hosts hundreds of performances and workshops a year reports that its main building has suffered “minimal damage,” but its eastern end and several classrooms are “destroyed.”
As Fires Rage, How Are Northern California Art Museums Doing?
Museums in Napa and Sonoma Counties, including the Di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, the Hess Collection, Stonescape, and the Oliver Ranch report no damage so far, though most of them are closed for the present.
Last Leonardo Painting In Private Hands Is Up For Auction (And Should Fetch $100M)
Salvator Mundi, long taken to be a copy, was only authenticated as a Leonardo original a few years ago, and already it has a tangled legal and ownership history.