“Within five years, television has changed from the prescribed, September-to-May schedule that has existed since the birth of the medium to a never-ending blitz of new shows that networks struggle to keep up with. And even though Netflix hasn’t toppled the similarly staid film calendar as quickly, it could mark the beginning of the end for movie theaters, if the company’s success so far with TV is anything to go by.”
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Deaf Music Fans (Yes, They Exist) Are Finally Getting Concerts Made Accessible To Them
If Evelyn Glennie can play music, other deaf people should be able to enjoy it, right? Like Glennie, most deaf music fans perceive the music kinesthetically – they feel the vibrations. And concerts, especially rock concerts, are now providing deaf audience members what they need to take part.
Daniil Simkin Creates A High-Tech Dance For The Guggenheim’s Rotunda
“Imagine a nearly ceaseless stream of digital imagery, beginning with unusual shadows. Computer-generated projections envelop the performers with auras as elastic as bubbles, shimmering and rippling at the edges like the hot air of a mirage. Sometimes the shadows linger after bodies exit, like the quick-fading imprint of fingers pressed on pale skin, or maybe like the soul after death.”
The Personal Essay – Inelegant Language As A Badge Of… Well, Something
“For a certain breed of personal essayist at work today, there exists a necessary and desirable trade-off between aesthetic clarity and moral complexity; a bargain premised on the depressing notion that words are always insufficient to the task at hand and so we may as well stop trying to choose the clearest or most precise ones. The adjective that best captures the conditions of this bargain is messy.”
Odd Music Jobs, No. 347: Calling The Cues For The Subtitles At The Opera
“[Lily Arbisser] hopes to someday sing center stage at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, but for now, she works there behind the scenes as a cue-caller: the person responsible for making sure an opera’s subtitles appear at exactly the moment when the performers onstage sing their lines. Each night’s performance is slightly different, and if the timing isn’t just right, it can ruin the punch line to a joke or give away major spoilers.” (audio)
The Uses Of Professional Theatre Critics (Now That They’re Disappearing)
Mark Shenton considers both an Edinburgh Fringe show “in which three comedians use a device of talking out of their arses (literally) to quote from some of the negative reviews they’ve received” and the directors of L.A. theatres who publicly protested when critics in the city were laid off.
Two Book Critics Consider The Lines Between Praise, Fairness, And Meanness
Thomas Mallon: “Today’s literary reviews too often turn into participation trophies, quiet tour-guide appreciations. Few things, of course, are duller than self-indulgent put-downs; but informed and spirited dismissals are another matter, and they remain in too-short supply.”
Liesl Schillinger: “There’s a distinct line between eulogy and fairness, but every critic knows you make more of a splash when you wield a bludgeon than when you bestow a bouquet. Yet Trollope also recognized that brickbats too readily brandished lose their power to stun.”
Are Civil War Re-Enactments In Their Last Days?
“In every part of the country almost every weekend of the year, participants [learn first-hand] … how a soldier felt charging across grass into battle, down to what he ate at the campfire before forcing sleep to come while lying on a hard earthen floor.” Americans have been staging mock Civil War battles since (believe it or not) 1861. But in these politically and socially contentious times, the practice has become – well, somewhat fraught.
Charlottesville Showed Us The Trouble With That HBO If-The-Confederacy-Won Series
Jelani Cobb: “Last month, HBO inspired an avalanche of criticism when it announced that it would produce a series called Confederate, which would explore a hypothetical world in which the South had won the Civil War. The events in Charlottesville illustrated a problem with that idea: only by the most specific, immediate definition can we consider the Confederacy to have lost the Civil War, and its legacy has defined a great deal of our history since then.”
‘The Lost Cause Of The Confederacy Meets Cirque Du Soleil’: Dolly Parton’s Civil War-Themed Dinner Theater Extravaganza
Aisha Harris travels to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee to watch Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede – twice. (Audience members choose whether to sit with the North or the South; she wanted to see the show from, as it were, both sides.)