“New novels from Don DeLillo and Martin Amis, two of the remaining dons of the literary scene of the 1980s, are out within a week of each other, like some last blast of “Remember when?” just before the 2020 election further propels us into a new realm of reality. Amis has written a novel so interested in Amis that its cover — a black-and-white portrait of, you guessed it, Amis — feels less like a postmodern joke and more like a warning sign. DeLillo, whose work is usually our national harbinger of future calamities, has written a disaster thriller that forgets to thrill.” – New York Magazine
Tag: 10.16.20
How “The Lion King” Became A $9 Billion Blockbuster On Stage
“The musical, estimated at $20 million—at the time, likely the most expensive in Broadway history—opened at the Palace Theatre. The critics dismissed it as a theme park show. The Broadway crowd snubbed it too, giving the 1994 Tony for best musical to Stephen Sondheim’s short-lived Passion. But the family audience flocked to it. It became a blockbuster.” – Vanity Fair
Ed Benguiat, Titan of Typefaces, Dead at 92
“He became one of the go-to designers of the second half of the last century, especially in matters of typography. His hand was behind more than 600 typefaces, several of which bear his name.” – The New York Times
August Book Sales Down 30 Percent
Sales fell to $754 million compared to $1.09 billion in August 2019. The steep August drop put an end to a brief rally during which the rate of decline in bookstore sales had been slowing. – Publishers Weekly
Google Now Lets You Search For A Song By Singing It
The update, a new feature called ‘Hum to Search’, was announced at Google’s Search On event and is available from today. It allows you to search for a piece of music which either has no lyrics, or whose lyrics you can’t remember. – Classic FM
When Even Socially-Distanced Dance Is Shut Down
KDH, an Austin, TX dance group “planned to present ‘At a Distance’ for free over the course of couple of weekends. The show would be pop-up style — informal, free and no seating would be offered. In fact, the dancers would move slowly down the lake to discourage any crowding along the lakeside. Kathy Dunn Hamrick didn’t publicize the plans widely, just a few social media posts. However, somehow, just days before the first the city’s Office of Special Events got wind of the performance plans. Stephen Pruitt and Hamrick were told they could not stage their show.” – Sight Lines
The Photographer Who Took Original ‘Fatima’ Photo Says She’s Hurt By British Government’s Campaign
Photographer Krys Alex, on the subject, young dancer Desire’e Kelley: ““I immediately thought about Desire’e and how her face was just plastered all over social media and the internet, different news articles, and memes were created, and she had no clue. All of that really hurt me.” – Classic FM
How The Church Of England Bought Into Beyonce’s All The Single Ladies And Justin Timberlake’s Sexyback
Wait a second, those royalties are going to whom? Well: “The church is one of hundreds of investors in a company called Hipgnosis, which, for the past three years, has been hungrily snapping up the rights to thousands of hit songs.” – BBC
Ruth Kluger, Author Of A Haunting Holocaust Memoir, 88
Kluger’s Still Alive redefined the genre. Her work “spared no one with its blunt and haunting narrative — not her cultured neighbors who stopped suppressing their latent anti-Semitism when Germany annexed Austria; not her adult relatives who she believed should have foreseen the ‘final solution’ for European Jews and fled the continent with their families; not her liberators who swiftly wearied of hearing about the Holocaust; not even her tormented self.” – The New York Times
The Real-Life, Self-Educated British Fossil Hunter Behind A New Movie
Mary Anning risked her life in fossil hunts, never gaining the recognition nor certainly the rewards that rich men in Britain won. She “was three things you didn’t want to be in 19th-century Britain – she was female, working class and poor.” – BBC