In a blog post on Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” and the nature of the poet’s feelings toward the man for whom he grieves, Ta-Nehisi Coates wonders “how identity changes what we see. In that vein, I’d like to ask some of our gay commenters to weigh in here. On Tennyson particularly, and more broadly on the realm of artists beautifully expressing affection for humans of the same gender.” (And weigh in they do.)
Tag: 03.30.11
How British And American Theatre Audiences Are Different
Playwright Christopher Shinn: “After premiering plays on both sides of the Atlantic, I’ve realised that from ticket prices to timing, London and New York audiences demand very different things from theatre.”
Top Rare Violin Dealer Arrested For Fraud
“Violin dealer Dietmar Machold has been arrested in Switzerland. Swiss police acted on behalf of Austrian investigators, who want to extradite the German-born owner of Machold Rare Violins to Austria to face charges of fraud and misappropriation.”
Have Computers Made Architects Less Disciplined?
Think back to the time “before faxes, cell phones, color Xeroxes, personal computers, and Power Point. The cumbersome and slow production of drawings and reports required extensive preparation – hurried changes were difficult if not impossible. Such working methods required … ‘tremendous discipline and rigor of thought’.”
You Know What Feminism Needs? More Tina Fey!
“Fey’s strategy for dealing with everything from entrenched discrimination to garden-variety chauvinism is to write a joke, a better joke than the other people in the room. You see, some of us have forgotten this basic point: Responding to a situation with humor, as opposed to, say, dead-serious self-righteousness, is a rhetorically effective way to get a political point across.”
North American Movie Box Office Down 20 Percent
“Movie theater attendance in the U.S. and Canada is down a staggering 20 percent so far this year from 2010′s numbers — and 2010′s numbers were down 5 percent from the year before. How to account for the ongoing slump?”
Is LA Theatre Coming Of Age?
“In 1984, Time proclaimed that with the Olympic Arts Festival, in which the best of the best of world theater strutted on our stages, Los Angeles theater had finally come of age. It hadn’t. The energy and the money slowly dissipated, revealing, at best, the subtlest of changes. Jaded local observers are quick to point out our cyclical tendency toward overenthused hyperbole. Will the summer of ’11 reiterate or end that cycle?”
Why Do Architecture Prizes Go To One Person Rather Than Their Teams?
“The Pritzker Prize promotes the fiction that buildings spring from the imagination of an individual architect–the master builder. This wasn’t true in the Middle Ages, when there were real master builders, and it isn’t true today.”
In An Age Of Home Entertainment Systems, Why Movie Theatres Matter
“Movie theaters represent a social art form you can’t get on an iPhone and you can’t get on the TV…. Man is a social animal — we want to enjoy things together. And that’s what a theater is.”
How The Smithsonian Chief Got Caught In The Middle
“The story of how Mr. Clough was caught in a collision of art and politics is in some ways a classic Washington tale: Outsider comes to the capital, crosses power brokers, shifts into damage control. It reflects the difficult landscape for the arts in Washington, where Republicans are ascendant, and arts leaders, nervous about budget cuts, are treading carefully.”