What the lens of the Piazza di Spagna webcam reveals, in its own intimate way, is that so-called bucket-list destinations are, and always have been, real places where real people live. With most of the world locked down, these public live streams offer a new perspective; with the tourists gone, places appear all the realer. – The Walrus
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Poets, Playwrights, Novelists, And A Swashbuckling Conquistador Nun: The Women Writers Of The Siglo De Oro
The polymath Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz was only one of numerous women in Spain and its New World colonies who became accomplished authors during the 16th and 17th centuries (and who should be better known today). Many of them were, in fact, nuns, and one of them really did run away from the convent, dress and pass as a man, and had some hair-raising adventures in New Spain. – Public Radio International
CEO Of Hal Leonard On The Future Of Music Publishing
Larry Morton: “I thought that digital would completely replace things like physical phone books and all that. Certainly digital is a huge part of the business, and it’s growing quickly. But there’s something unique about that physical touch between musicians and their music books. There’s something about that relationship. if you’re learning a difficult piece and you’re really scrutinizing that score… you know we have nearly all of it available digitally. People still want to touch that page.” – MakingMusic
How The Virus Turned This Ballet Master Into A Real-Life Phantom Of The Opera
Curtis Foley, who danced with the Royal Winnipeg ballet and Les Ballets Grandiva, was, until this year, a ballet master at the Polish National Ballet He had just arrived to coach the ballet company at the opera house in the Czech city of Ostrava when the COVID lockdown struck — and he’s ended up spending four months, much of that time alone, living inside the theater. – Dance Magazine
What It’s Like To Be The Only Black Dancer In A Company
Former Atlanta Ballet dancer Kiara Felder: “The ballet’s audience, typically, are overwhelmingly white. “It’s important to engage with the community, and it’s tough when the community looks one way and your company looks another,” Felder said. “That may be one reason the audience was what it was. It would be amazing to see the demographics of the company reflect the demographics of the city. I wish those correlated more in the arts. It’s not that way in most companies.” – ArtsATL
Photographer Li Zhengsheng, Who Captured The Cultural Revolution On Film, Dead At 79
“At great personal risk [he] documented the dark side of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, producing powerful black-and-white images that remain a rare visual testament to the brutality of that tumultuous period, many of them not developed or seen for years.” – The New York Times
Why You Don’t Need To See The New Film Version Of “Hamilton”
This is in part because Hamilton is a sung-through musical, meaning there aren’t any scenes of spoken dialogue in between the songs. Everything in the show is right there on the album—with the exception of one very brief scene in which Hamilton learns of the death of his friend (and in countless fan fictions, his lover) John Laurens. – Slate
Fully Half Of The Dramas On US Broadcast TV Are About Cops
“Perhaps one reason why America’s national reckoning on police brutality took so long to arrive is because TV is conditioning its citizens to view cops as reliable heroes. Of the 69 scripted television dramas that aired on the big four US broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, Fox, and ABC) in the last year-and-a-half, 35 were about law enforcement.” (And that’s not counting comedies like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, reality shows like Cops, or syndicated reruns.) “Numerous academic studies over many years have showed that viewing cop shows can leaded to warped views of the criminal justice system and policing.” – Quartz
A Plan To Diversify American Orchestras
The Catalyst Fund, a three-year, $2.1 million program launched in 2019 by the national support organization, is designed to help its members identify, confront and ultimately correct what Jesse Rosen, the League’s president and chief executive officer, called built-in “systems of inequity.” – Chicago Sun-Times
Uffizi Gallery Becomes High Art’s Top TikTok Jester
Until just a few years ago, the august Florence museum “acted like the internet didn’t exist”: it didn’t even launch a website until 2015 and only got itself a Facebook page after the COVID lockdown started this past spring. At the end of April, in an effort to reach young people, the Uffizi opened a TikTok account and started posting inventively humorous videos incorporating art in its collection — for instance, Botticelli’s Medusa turning a coronavirus to stone. – The New York Times