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Venice Will Begin Charging Admission For Tourists Next July

The tax will apply to tourists who arrive by coach, cruise ship, water taxi, plane or train. They will be able to pay the charge online with a credit card or from machines “installed in strategic points” around Venice, officials said. The council did not say what penalties would apply to tourists who fail to pay the charge, although in February authorities suggested they would be hit with a fine of up to €450. – The Telegraph (UK)

Bong Joon-Ho Returns Home From Hollywood And Makes His Masterpiece

“Bong’s last two films, 2013’s Snowpiercer and 2017’s Okja, were his first to be made in English: they weren’t exactly misfires, either critically or commercially, yet both clearly had designs on being bigger deals than they were. … A globally minded film-maker with big-dreaming genre nous, he spent the last few years making a bid for mainstream Hollywood clout, only to finally make an international phenomenon from his own doorstep.” – The Guardian

How Do You Translate The Life Of A Forgotten, Insane Swiss Novelist Into Dance Theater?

Marina Harss: “The material feels both so deeply literary and, at the same time, so utterly deflating. The subject is a solitary man” — Robert Walser — “whose writings tended to track the minutiae of his solitary life, and who died alone in the snow — this hardly sounds like something to dance about. But that is precisely what the choreographer John Heginbotham and the illustrator Maira Kalman have set out to do … [in] Herz Schmerz.” – The New Yorker

Surprise: For The First Time Since 1986, Vinyl Is About To Outsell CDs

Vinyl records earned $224.1 million (on 8.6 million units) in the first half of 2019, closing in on the $247.9 million (on 18.6 million units) generated by CD sales. Vinyl revenue grew by 12.8% in the second half of 2018 and 12.9% in the first six months of 2019, while the revenue from CDs barely budged. If these trends hold, records will soon be generating more money than compact discs. – Rolling Stone

The Met Opera’s New “Porgy”: Restoring An American Masterpiece

Joseph Horowitz: “The modernist view of Gershwin the gifted dilettante is no longer heard. Concomitantly, American music historians, for whom Gershwin once barely existed, have flocked to Porgy and Rhapsody in Blue. A burgeoning interest in the interwar fate of black classical music will surely promote new understandings of Gershwin as a necessary interloper between “classical” and “popular” genres severed by 20th-century aesthetic currents.” – American Scholar

The Time I Played Chess Nude With Marcel Duchamp

Eve Babitz: “I took the smock off, letting it fall beside me, but Julian kicked it far across the slippery floor, out of the way in a corner. I sat down quickly at the chess set and wondered if we could just pose or did we actually have to play, but Marcel — whose obsession with chess made him give up not only art but girls — was waiting for me to make the first move.” – Literary Hub