Tag: 10.25.19

Soprano Julia Bullock Is Forging A Major Career Entirely Away From Standard Opera Repertory

“Instead of singing Mozart or Verdi, she has made a precocious impact on the concert stage and as a curator, serving as artist in residence last season at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — where she delved deeply into the African-American experience, past and present — and this season in the same role with the San Francisco Symphony.” Says director Peter Sellars, “This is who we’ve been waiting for. You see someone who’s not just a vehicle, but an agent of change. She’s actually moving the whole art form into a new relevance.” – The New York Times

Can This Website Become An Amazon For Independent Bookstores?

This January, the American Booksellers Association Bookshop will launch Bookshop, “a mobile-friendly website with one-click ordering à la Amazon that … will sell physical books and digital audio but not e-books. It will also discount, but not nearly as deeply as Amazon … [and] experiment with various thresholds for free shipping.” – Publishers Weekly

Rowan Williams: How Poetry Clarifies Our Language

As Auden says, poetry is “a way of happening”. It takes the passage of time, the reality of loss, the absorption in a sharpened kind of seeing or hearing, and makes all these into speech that can survive (as Auden also insists) and help others survive. Its task of “turning noise into music” is thus irreducibly political, a sustained resistance to commodified, generalised language and the appalling reductions of human possibility that this brings with it. Far from being a decorative adjunct to social or public life, it represents the possibilities to which all intelligent and humane social life should point. “Poetry saves the world every day.” – New Statesman

NY Is Trying To Diversify Its Monuments. Not So Easy, It Turns Out

Under Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, the city is aiming to build monuments at an unusually rapid rate to honor women, people of color and others previously overlooked. But the effort has become far more contentious than expected, as a diverse, vocal and highly opinionated city fights over the legacy it should leave in bronze and stone. – The New York Times

What Your Brain Looks Like When You’re Improvising

“What do the brains of jazz musicians look like as they create their art on the fly? Using an fMRI machine, Dr. Charles Limb found that activity in the medial prefrontal cortex shot up, while activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex plummeted. In short, the area of the brain responsible for self-monitoring shut off, and the source of self-expression lit up.” – Fast Company

Jerry Saltz And Justin Davidson Debate The New MoMA

“The great news is that along with the rest of us, Diller Scofidio + Renfro were finally beaten down by the reality of just how messed-up and cramped the billion-dollar Taniguchi building was. They fixed some of the problems and tacked on a few fun extras, and added about five Gagosians’ worth of space. But it still amazes me that the suits who make the museum’s real-estate deals sold MoMA short again.” – New York Magazine

It’s Theatre! No, It’s Film! (Actually, It’s Both)

“Fascinated by the relationship between theater and cinema, Christiane Jatahy has made a show that’s both. “One is the utopia of the other,” she tells us, though anyone who has ever despaired at badly shot video in the theater might wonder if screen and stage are actually enemies. But Jatahy has managed a strange and difficult trick. By precisely setting live film and live performance against each other, she makes them into a mise en abyme— a mirror that reflects another mirror, leading the eye into infinity.” – New York Magazine