Author: Matthew Westphal

Romance Novels Are A Massive Business. Why Do So Few Get Adapted For TV?

“Even as networks and streaming services slaver over intellectual property with prearranged fan bases, few mass-market romance novels have found their way to screens. Character-driven and story rich, they would seem to have a lot of what television wants. But showrunners have played hard to get.” Alexis Soloski explores why. – The New York Times

Arts Institutions Lost Their Box Office Income This Year. Now They’re Struggling For Contributions, Too.

“Despite an outpouring of contributions when the virus first struck, individual giving to arts organizations fell by 14 percent in North America during the first nine months of the year, [and the] average size of gifts from the most active, loyal patrons fell by 38 percent. … [The arts] are facing competition from pressing causes including hunger, health care and social justice.” – The New York Times

Tony Rice, Virtuoso Guitarist Who Brought Jazz Stylings To Bluegrass, Dead At 69

“[He] collaborated with Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Garcia and Béla Fleck, and, with mandolinist David Grisman, defined the synthesis of bluegrass, jazz and chamber music known as ‘dawg music.'” As one critic put it, “If you play bluegrass guitar, you have to come to terms with Rice the way portrait photographers have to come to terms with [Richard] Avedon.” – The Washington Post

The Riverside Bookstalls Of Paris Have Been There For 400 Years. Can They Survive 2020’s Parade Of Catastrophes?

“Despite frequent bans by assorted French kings, bouquinistes – the first dictionary entry for the term was in 1752 – have been hawking their wares along the Seine since the 16th century, originally from handcarts, voluminous pockets and trestle tables. … 227 franchises were operating at the beginning of the year; 221 are open now – at least, in theory. In practice, except on sunny weekends, as many as 80% of the railway-green boxes are more or less permanently closed, and most bouquinistes‘ incomes have plunged by a similar percentage.” – The Guardian

How Christmas Became Such A Child-Oriented Holiday

Yuletide wasn’t always an occasion for Santa Claus and toys and families opening presents in front of the tree. Historically, particularly in England, Christmas was such a time of rowdy revelry (not to say drunken debauchery) that, in the 17th century, Scottish Presbyterians and Massachusetts Puritans went so far as to ban it entirely. (December 25 wasn’t a public holiday in Scotland until 1958.) Christmas as Americans think of it today is a more-or-less deliberate creation of the 19th-century powers-that-be. – Zócalo Public Square

Capturing The Music Of The Northern Lights

Scientist Karin Lehmkuhl Bodony, who lives in rural Alaska, realized some years ago that, if she could get at least four miles away from human-created electrical sources, she could record the sounds that the aurora borealis makes on a very low frequency receiver. Now she’s worked with composer Matthew Burtner to, in a way, transcribe the aurora’s music: “Rather than a composer writing the notes on the page and the musician playing the horn, the northern lights were playing the horn and writing the notes on the page. So I took myself out and let the lights paint that.” – The Guardian

The Weird New Things Choreographers Had To Learn As They Created Dances Long-Distance

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, who’s made more than a dozen short dance films since the COVID lockdowns began, and Corey Baker, creator of the (in)famous Swan Lake Bath Ballet, tell a reporter about how, as Baker put it, “we knew we had to make it all up” and how they handled the snafus they didn’t yet know to expect. – Dance Magazine