First, we’re not talking about Scots Gaelic, the Celtic language closely related to Irish. Scots is the language of Robert Burns and Irvine Welsh and a few million souls in the Scottish lowlands, closely related to and (sometimes) mutually intelligible with English though it evolved independently. And Twitter has become a rare outlet for written Scots, however informal, to develop naturally. – Quartz
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Pittsburgh Opera: Our Audience Is Growing, But…
“Here there’s a problem where even when the community values this, they think it’ll be supported by wealthy industrialists. But those days are over, and we need to say we’ve got a lot of wealth in this community. How can we get people to support the diversity of arts and communities? We need you to ante up.” – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Robert De Niro’s Company Sues Former Exec For $6 Million
Until April (when she left amid worries about “corporate sabotage”), Chase Robinson was “vice president of production and finance’ at De Niro’s Canal Productions, drawing a $300,000 salary. Canal’s suit accuses Robinson of embezzling cash, using corporate credit cards for lavish spending on hotels and meals, taking personal trips using De Niro’s frequent flyer miles — and, on top of it all, rarely coming to work and spending what time she was in the office binge-watching Netflix. – Variety
Busting Convention: Boomers Had Almost Nothing To Do With The 1960s
Louis Menand: “There are many canards about that generation, but the most persistent is that the boomers were central to the social and cultural events of the nineteen-sixties. Apart from being alive, baby boomers had almost nothing to do with the nineteen-sixties.” – The New Yorker
The Cultural Appropriation Wars Come To Bang On A Can
The controversy at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival (aka Banglewood) in Massachusetts broke out over the use of didgeridoos in the 1990 work Thousand Year Dreaming by 80-year-old New Zealand-American composer Annea Lockwood. Several of the festival’s young Fellows raised concerns about Lockwood’s deployment of the indigenous Australian instrument, including, in this performance, its being played by women (traditionally taboo). But those concerns were not shared by everyone there. – New Sounds (WNYC)
Lynn Nottage On Staying Political
Nottage is the only woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice: for Sweat and Ruined. The former reached Broadway, while the latter – a story about women in war-torn Congo – played a sustained Off-Broadway run. As a result of where they were first staged, the plays have had somewhat different lives after their New York engagements. – The Stage
Meritocracy Is Making Us All — Even The Rich — Miserable
“Meritocracy has created a competition that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win. But what, exactly, have the rich won? Even meritocracy’s beneficiaries now suffer on account of its demands. It ensnares the rich just as surely as it excludes the rest, as those who manage to claw their way to the top must work with crushing intensity, ruthlessly exploiting their expensive education in order to extract a return.” – The Atlantic
Why Is There So Much Weird Stuff In English Cathedrals These Days?
Rochester Cathedral has mini-golf (okay, an “educational adventure golf course’). Norwich Cathedral has a “helter-skelter” (a tarted-up sliding board), ostensibly so that visitors can get a better look at the exquisite medieval ceiling before sliding down. Derby Cathedral got in hot water last year when its free movie series got a bit too racy. What’s going on? Well, last fall the Archbishop of Canterbury said that people should “have fun in cathedrals,” but, in fact, some serious structural and governance issues are in play. – The Economist
What, Exactly, Is A Museum? International Council Of Museums Is Having A Bitter Fight Over That Question
“On 12 August, 24 national branches [of ICOM] — including those of France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Canada and Russia, along with five museums’ international committees — requested the postponement of a vote on a revised definition of museums.” Said one veteran art journalist of the proposed revision, “At first, I thought this was a joke”; the chair of the International Committee of Museology maintains that not even the Louvre would qualify as a museum under the proposed revision. – The Art Newspaper
San Francisco’s Commercial Theatre Titans Settle Years-Long Legal Battle
“By terms of a settlement announced Monday, Aug. 19, [Carole] Shorenstein Hays will give up her half ownership of SHN, operator of the Orpheum and Golden Gate Theatre. [She] will retain her ownership of the Curran as a separate entity. [Hays and former business partner Robert Nederlander] are now free to compete for Broadway productions, a sticking point to their prior arrangement that had led to years of costly lawsuits over noncompete clauses between the theaters.” – San Francisco Chronicle