On Monday, Netflix announced that it has reached an agreement to continue leasing the Paris Theater space and keep it open for special events, screenings, and theatrical releases. “After 71 years, the Paris Theatre has an enduring legacy, and remains the destination for a one-of-a kind movie-going experience.” – New York Magazine
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Kanye West Popped-Up An Opera – So How Was It?
Mark Swed: “Typically, a new opera is a multiyear project, so the very notion of this pop-up one, which seems to have been in the works for a couple of weeks at most, is extraordinary. But if you go back to the 18th and 19th centuries, operas were popular entertainment put on with the regularity and immediacy that television shows are today.” – Los Angeles Times
Longtime Theatre Critic John Simon, 94
He was to theatre criticism as pigeons are to statues, William F. Buckley once observed. “In a style that danced with literary allusions and arch rhetoric — and composed with pen and ink (he hated computers) — he produced thousands of critiques and a dozen books, mostly anthologies of his own work.” – The New York Times
Women Writers Still Don’t Get Respect For Their Work
“Ten years ago I went to a speed-dating event in Belfast where I told a succession of potential dates I was a writer and was met with a unanimous sense of disappointment. “I thought you might be a nurse,” one man said, his face falling.” – Irish Times
Jeremy Corbyn Pledges New UK Charter For The Arts And Funding Of £1 Billion
Corbyn said: “The arts are a common inheritance that make our society culturally richer and put a smile on all our faces. We must cherish them and protect them. “Labour’s national strategy for the arts will embrace our rich cultural heritage from William Shakespeare to Ben Okri, Mary Quant to Tim Berners-Lee, delivering a national cultural renaissance.” – The Stage
Research: Extraordinary People Are More Likely To Be Polymaths
Studies have found that Nobel Prize-winning scientists are about 25 times more likely to sing, dance or act than the average scientist. They are also 17 times more likely to create visual art, 12 times more likely to write poetry and four times more likely to be a musician. – BBC
France Pledged Restitution Of African Artifacts. Little Has Happened Since
Two years since Mr. Macron pledged in a speech in Burkina Faso to enable “the temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage to Africa,” little additional progress has been made. – The New York Times
Propwatch: the climbing tackle in ‘Touching the Void’
How do you capture the scale, the struggle, the elemental extremity of mountain climbing? In the theatre? It’s simpler than you think. After all, they both use the same kit. – David Jays
Hollywood’s Blockbusters Are Squeezing Out Everything Else
“These huge franchise pictures are elbowing out midrange and lower-budget movies. It’s harder for midsize movies to get theaters in the first place, much less hold onto them long enough to build an audience.” – The New York Times
In 1988 The Shroud Of Turin Was Declared A Fraud. But…
Oddly the original data was unavailable to researchers. But in 2017, a legal request under the Freedom of Information Act obtained the raw information for the first time. Their results, published recently in Archaeometry, show that the issue of the dating of the Turin Shroud is far from settled. – The Daily Beast