“[His] humorous, freewheeling fiction traced the shocks and jolts of romance, aging and everyday life, in an experimental but plain-
spoken style … [He] published well over 500 short stories in The Paris Review, Playboy, Esquire and legions of small magazines across the country. His first book came out only when he was 40, but he made up for lost time in publishing 35 more novels and story collections.” – The Washington Post
Blog
Inside China’s Sprawling Movie City Sets
Hengdian World Studios, built in the 1990s on farmland in China’s southeastern Zhejiang Province, claims to be the world’s largest outdoor film studio and features full-scale replicas of the Forbidden City and Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, along with dozens of palaces, gardens, and streetscapes. – Wired
No One’s Buying Mark Halperin’s Book. His Publisher Says Its “Cancel Culture”
“In this guilty-until-proven-innocent cancel culture, where everyone is condemned to death or to a lifetime of unemployment based on an accusation that’s 12 years old, is criminal,” Judith Regan says. – Washington Post
Armenian Monuments That Stood Centuries Are Completely Wiped Out
The scope of the destruction is stunning: 89 medieval churches, 5,840 khachkars and 22,000 tombstones, the report said. The annihilation of cultural heritage dwarfs the more widely reported and condemned razing of sites by Islamic State in Syria and the Taliban in Afghanistan. – Los Angeles Times
Ted Gioia: Music As A Cultural Storage Medium
What people don’t understand is that, for most of history, music was a kind of cloud storage for societies. I like to tell people that music is a technology for societies that don’t have semiconductors or spaceships. If you go to any traditional community, and you try to find the historian, generally it’s a singer. Music would preserve culture; it would preserve folklore. Well, nowadays, we rely on cloud storage to be the preserver of these same things. And I think there’s a strange shift. – Medium
The Trance Effects Of Arts
Effervescence is generated when humans come together to make music or perform rituals, an experience that lingers when the ceremonies are over. The suggestion, therefore, is that collective experiences that are religious or religious-like unify groups and create the energy to sustain them. – Aeon
Washington DC Is Getting A Museum Devoted To Language
Planet Word isn’t the first to tackle language and reading in a museum format — there’s Mundolingua in Paris, as well as language museums in Toronto and the Netherlands, among others — and it’s not the first to use high-tech games and displays to engage visitors in its subject. But it’s the rare museum that combines both. – Washington Post
‘Slave Play’ Author Jeremy O. Harris Has Made For Himself A ‘For Colored Girls’-Style ‘Choreopoem’
“The new work, Black Exhibition” — which he developed under the pseudonym @GaryXXXFisher — “is described in the script as an attempt ‘to look at a queer black male psyche through the lens of its literary influences'” — those being, among others, Kathy Acker, Samuel R. Delany and Yukio Mishima. – The New York Times
Why Jeremy O. Harris Had A Special Performance Of His ‘Slave Play’ For A Black Audience
“That was me being able to look certain people in the face and say: ‘You’re wrong.’ So many people have dictated what my intentions were with Slave Play. One of the things they’ve always articulated is that I wrote Slave Play for white people and that it’s not written for a black audience. That’s so bizarre to me. … It was amazing to sit in a 99.9% black audience and see that 99.9% of the play worked. And the parts that exhilarated the audience on other nights still exhilarated the audience that night.” – The Guardian
The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (18)
I’ve never bought a copy of Rolling Stone. but I did buy The Rolling Stone Record Review, a mass-market paperback that came out in 1971, and I read it until the glue dried up and the pages fell out. The first record that one of that book’s reviews made me go right out and buy was this one. – Terry Teachout