“Blackface minstrelsy was the pre-eminent form of entertainment in the United States for most of the 19th-century … Yes, blackface comedy was racist and appalling … It is also a key to cracking the code of American culture.”
Tag: 08.31.09
Peter Grippe Collection (Including De Koonings And Calders) To Allentown, Pa.
“The Allentown Art Museum has received one of its largest gifts ever – about 500 works and the Long Island home and studio and New York City apartment of the modernist artist Peter Grippe.”
Joanna Lumley Is A Goddess (Yes, An Actual Goddess)
In response to her recent campaign on behalf of Gurkha soldiers in the UK, Nepalis declared Lumley – one of British television’s most familiar faces (Americans know her as AbFab‘s Patsy) – a minor Hindu goddess and named a mountain for her. Says she: “I don’t think I’m much of a god, because I don’t have the good snappy nature that would throw a thunderbolt.”
If Only Anna Pavlova Had Lived To See The Hula Hoop
Australian Judith Lanigan, “a street and international freelance circus artist, is best known for her interpretation of the ballet piece The Dying Swan [originally choreographed for Pavlova], which she performs with 30 hula hoops.”
Oscar Ballot Change: #1 Choice Might Not Win Best Picture
“Instead of just voting for one nominee, the way Academy members have almost always done on the final ballot, voters will be asked to rank all 10 nominees in order of preference — and the results will be tallied using the complicated preferential system, which has been used for decades during the nominating process but almost never on the final ballot.”
Ikea Vows Its Catalogue Won’t Go Back To The Futura
“After 50 years of using a typeface called Futura, the Swedish home furnishing chain Ikea decided to switch to a new font called Verdana. The typeface-sensitive Ikea fans around the world are not amused.”
District 9, Through South African Eyes
Sci-fi blockbuster District 9 “explores the plight of huge, chitinous aliens who’ve been trapped and maltreated for decades after their unexpected appearance in the skies above Johannesburg — touching on themes of apartheid, xenophobia and redemption along the way. Now District 9 is playing in South Africa … and many of those emerging from theaters over the weekend responded to subtleties in the film that may have been lost on many American audiences.”
Berlin Celebrates Bauhaus At 90
As Bauhaus turns 90, Germany’s main Bauhaus institutes are marking the occasion with a joint exhibition. “With nearly 1,000 objects–including models, studies, paintings, photographs and furniture–spread over the ground-floor galleries of this stately neoclassical building, the exhibit is the largest Bauhaus retrospective ever mounted and the first time that the three Bauhaus institutes, once separated by the Iron Curtain, have collaborated.”
Between Notes, A Pause Can Change Everything
“Vermeer understood the power of withheld information. Composers have a similar understanding that in shaping sound, a nothing can be just as expressive as a something. It depends on the frame, what it is that echoes in the silence.”
Painter Hyman Bloom Dies At 96
“His images often fell on the hallucinatory side of visionary and could be confrontational, even repellent: synagogue lamps scintillating with light, translucent spirits evoked in séances, disemboweled bodies on autopsy tables. His paintings were hard to love, but they are not easily forgotten.”