Jeremy Gerard: “I’m all for producers and the sometimes preposterous lengths they will go to in order to promote and protect their shows. That’s their job. But I’ve often wondered why we, the critics, so willingly go along with their manipulations. Especially when they interfere with the, well let’s call it the journalism part of our job — reporting to our readers and giving context to the cultural news of the day.” – Broadway News
Tag: 03.02.20
‘Weimar On The Pacific’: When L.A. Was The Capital Of German Literature
Alex Ross revisits that odd period when the Nazi regime had driven the cream of pre-war German arts and letters — Werfel, Döblin, Viertel, Brecht, Adorno, three different Manns, along with composers, actors, and stage and film directors — into a disorienting exile under the palms. – The New Yorker
All About Tights And Tutus
Where they came from in the first place, how they’re made (and laundered), and why they got Nijinsky fired. – The Stage
Chicago’s Public Schools Have A Major Collection Of WPA Murals. Why Are People Calling For Them To Be Covered Up?
For essentially the same reasons that some people wanted the murals at George Washington High School in San Francisco to be covered over or removed. – Artnet
Poland’s Formidable Filmmakers Versus The Right-Wing Nationalist Government
The country’s cinema has a redoubtable history (think of Kieślowski and Wajda), famous auteurs at their peak (Paweł Pawlikowski, Agnieszka Holland), and an impressive younger generation. And they’re all facing the culture war being waged by the Law & Justice Party that heads the government. As Pawlikowski puts it, “we have a common enemy, so there’s a sense of common purpose.” – The Guardian
Computers Are Amazing. They’re Not Intelligent
The amazing feats achieved by computers demonstrate our progress in coming up with algorithms that make the computer do valuable things for us. The computer itself, though, does nothing more than it ever did, which is to do whatever we know how to order it to do—and we order it to do things by issuing instructions in the form of elementary operations on bits, the 1s and 0s that make up computer code. – American Scholar
A Backlash To Oversharing Our Lives?
Oversharing just doesn’t look like it did before. Like most things on the internet, it too has become commodified. Where we once divulged, without much thought or artifice, the hardships in our marriages or the frustration of a bad-hair day, now this seems a little cheap and amateurish. Professional influencers make a living from their oversharing. Ours doesn’t look as neat, as well thought-out, as supported. Even our connection to oversharing is controlled, manipulated, and artificial. – Wired
Two Veteran Chicago Tribune Reporters Search For Someone To Buy The Paper
Late last year, a one-third share of the Tribune was purchased by Alden Global Capital, an equity firm notorious for buying newspapers and stripping them bare. Contractual issues prevent Alden from acquiring a controlling share until June — so a pair of Tribune investigative reporters is using every tool they have to find some other, more sympathetic buyer. Are they having any success? – The New Yorker
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s ‘The Gates’, 15 Years Later
Kriston Capps reviews the 26-year-long process of convincing the City of New York to allow the project to happen in Central Park — and allows as how, when it was over, the biggest question was why anyone had ever objected. – CityLab
Yes, Hitler Wrote An Opera (A Bad One)
Long speculated about, but never before seen in public, the manuscript was apparently written after Hitler had had only a few months of piano lessons. And it clearly demonstrated the future dictator’s “inflated sense of his own abilities. The single sheet is believed to be the only surviving page of an ambitious project based on Germanic mythology that closely apes an unfinished work of the same name by Wagner himself. – The Local AT