“Four-hundred years after a nasty occupation of Arab land by the forefathers of these young Turks, the Arab world is embracing Turkey, opening its living rooms and flocking around their television sets to watch over 140 episodes of second-rate Turkish soap operas that don’t even do well in Turkey itself.”
Tag: 04.15.10
Ph.D. Candidates Pretend To Be Elephants In Order To Find Jobs
With the academic job market withering, more and more humanities graduate students must look for work in the outside world. Alas, the demeanor of young scholars is sometimes too … let’s say, cerebral for a successful job interview. So one grad school dean has started an improv program to get her charges more comfortable with things like eye contact.
Movie Critics, Shut Up And Get Back To Work
Andrew O’Hehir: “If film criticism really is dying, it’s doing so with all the dignity of a bunch of clucking old hens, squawking in despair while the fox gnaws his way through the wire. … [The recent round of film critic layoffs] has occasioned more thoughtful thumbsucking than you’d find in a Montessori kindergarten.”
SANAA Restores Luster To Pritzker Prize
Frequently the Pritzker has gone “either to stars with overinflated reputations” or to “lesser-known architects whose reputations could not be inflated by any accolade…. This year’s selection of Sejima and Nishizawa, however, marks a significant departure from past Pritzker practices–including those that adversely affected the prize’s credibility.”
Is One Company Publishing Too Many Books?
“When Bowker’s 2009 book industry stats were released yesterday many in the industry were stunned to see an unfamiliar company name, BiblioBazaar, leading a surging new segment of “non-traditional” publishing stats with a whopping 272,930 titles produced in 2009–almost as many titles the entire “traditional” publishing business cranked out last year. Could it be? Could one little-known company really produce so much volume?”
What Defines The New York Philharmonic?
“Like many top American ensembles, the Philharmonic has fluctuated between worship of the glorious past (pretty damn good, no?) and the altogether messier business of interacting with these living guys (I’ll give it to them, we can be unpleasant!); sometimes the pendulum swings by the decade and sometimes by the week. We see and read about it all.”
How The Arts Exploit Interns
“Should theatres be allowed to employ people without paying them? Given the fact that unpaid internships are virtually endemic across the theatre industry, this might seem a futile question.”
Opera Australia Feels The Recession
“Opera Australia has blamed its first financial loss in six years on the tourist downturn and poor programming choices in 2009 and it expects to report another deficit for 2010.”
No Eli Broad Museum For Beverly Hills
“It now looks as if the museum Eli Broad wants to build to house his 2,000-piece contemporary art collection is going to land in Santa Monica or at Grand Avenue and 2nd Street in downtown Los Angeles, literally a stone’s throw from Walt Disney Concert Hall.”
A New Contemporary Ballet Co. For Australia
“Three of Australia’s principal ballet dancers are … setting up a new breakaway ballet company. Laura Tong, 28, and Robert Curran, 33, from the Australian Ballet … [and] Andrew Killian have formed Jack Productions, a company they will run themselves.” The troupe debuts in Melbourne in July.