‘You live on one continent and work on two others.’ You have ‘a firsthand knowledge of the sunrise over the Po, the sunset over Shenzhen, the crackle of the midday sun as the Acqua Alta wets your calves’. You might be a poor culture-ronin, but you have accidentally attained an enviable ‘air of weary cosmopolitan glamour’, which follows you back to your shabby, expensive flat. But with climate change… – Frieze
Tag: 12.26.19
On The Edges Of A Huge South American Landfill, An Orchestra With Instruments Made Out Of Garbage
Most people who live near the Cateura dump outside Asunción, the Paraguayan capital, scratch out a living by digging out anything that can be resold, and buying a musical instrument would be an impossible dream. But local carpenter Nicolás Gómez and music teacher Favio Chávez decided that they could build musical instruments and give children there free music lessons — and so the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura was born. – Al Jazeera
UNESCO And The Fight Over “World” Literature
UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary shows how, when confronted with people across the globe who perceived their own lives “in ways radically antagonistic to the requirements of capitalist production,” UNESCO’s cultural programming was developed to “acknowledge, integrate, manage, and assuage” that antagonism. – Los Angeles Review of Books
At The Beginning Of The Decade, Celebrities Were Worried About Paparazzi
In 2011, “the industry itself was broken, transformed from a system of honor and veneration into one of shame and denigration, which treated its products as little more than commodities to be bought and traded.” Then Instagram happened. “In the end, the solution was so straightforward. Celebrities simply became their own paparazzi.” – BuzzFeed
French Theatre’s Conflicts Are Starting To Fray The Humans On All Sides
This is bad. “From Bethune to Dijon, noted directors landed in the National Drama Centers – devoted to theatrical creation – thinking they were touching the Grail: a place and means to make their work exist on a large scale in the service of the greatest number. They discovered companies that were cumbersome to maneuver, using tools that were often obsolete or to renovate, and subsidies at half mast.” Now it’s all lawyers and consultants. – Le Monde
Is The Internet Our Salvation Or Our Damnation? The 2010s Exploded Myths
“The second decade of the 20th century began at the apex of naivete about the potential for the internet to enhance democracy and improve the quality of life on Earth. By the end of 2019, very few people could still hold such a position with honesty.” – Wired
Why Some Pop Bands Are Giving Up Encores
The banality of encores has long been a frustration for some musicians, but, in recent years, a growing number of notable acts have taken a stand against performing them at all. – Toronto Star
The Man Who Made “Cats” And What He Was Thinking
“Like all stories, it’s just about cats, but none of these stories work without the big issues underneath. Eliot was writing as much about humans as cats; he was writing about humans through a feline prism. Ultimately, why I wanted human cats, not actual cats, [in the film] was that, if they’d been actual cats, it would have totally missed the point of the duality of the poetry.” – The Atlantic
Producing A Movie Is An Arduous Slog. It Just Is
“Writing is lonely; directing and acting, if you’re overlapping them, is challenging but fun. But producing is just pushing a rock up a hill. And sometimes it rolls over you on the way back down.” – Los Angeles Times
I Knew These Things I Bought Would Transform My Life! (A List)
“Every morning, I wake up before dawn to take a walk with my dog around the countryside, before I return to my home (still before dawn) to bake a loaf of bread and write for four hours in my notebook.” – The New Yorker