Author: Matthew Westphal

What I Learned From Spending 2020 Working, Learning, And Entertaining On The Same Screen

Alissa Wilkinson: “In a strange, unexpected way, this year made me appreciate the richness of experience we’ve normally enjoyed both offscreen and on and, along with it, the importance of context in those experiences. Reality seemed to collapse because the context for everything was the same: a brightly lit rectangle in my house.” – Vox

How Hollywood Negotiated The Pandemic, Studio By Studio

“One studio’s delayed theatrical title became another studio’s new original streaming film. While some focused on remounting pipeline productions, others fast-tracked new productions that allowed for contained stories with minimal casts. Big-ticket packages were purchased with the hope of a future return to theaters and franchise films rejiggered to allow for back-to-back production of installments. Ahead of 2021, The Hollywood Reporter takes a closer look at how each studio’s film division is traversing the new landscape.” – The Hollywood Reporter

This New Company Of Men Dancing On Pointe Is Not Like The Trocks

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, as skillful as its members are, basically performs affectionate parodies of classical ballet, and the dancers all have drag names (including the ones taking male roles). The men in the new San Francisco troupe Ballet22 may sometimes wear tutus, but they dance as themselves and the choreography is serious. – San Francisco Chronicle

Christian Lawyers’ Group Sues Director Of Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum For Blasphemy

Last week the institution opened a major retrospective of the iconoclastic Argentine artist León Ferrari, whose work often riffs subversively on Christian imagery. Within a few days, the Asociación Española de Abogados Cristianos filed a legal action against Manuel Borja-Villel, the museum’s director, arguing that the show “insult[s] Jesus” and “mocks the Gospel.” – ARTnews

Gender-Neutral -e Ending In Spanish Is Starting To Catch On (Except At The Royal Spanish Academy)

‘Latinx” may seem ungainly in English, but it’s very awkward in Spanish. But use of latine as an alternative to latino/a, a formulation which started in Argentina (where even some universities, politicians and judges have started using it), is spreading among young people in Latin America and Spain, as is the -e ending more generally. Yet the Real Academia Española, the official arbiter of the language of Cervantes, will have nothing to do with it. That may not matter so much: as one Ecuadorian copy editor tells a reporter, the RAE is, quite literally, “a colonialist institution.” – The World (PRX)

Since They Cancelled This Year’s Bad Sex In Fiction Award, Here’s Some Brand New Bad Sex In Fiction

“The judges offered the justification that ‘the public had been subjected to too many bad things this year to justify exposing it to bad sex as well,’ but come on — the bad things we’ve weathered in 2020 are exactly the reason we need to laugh and cringe at [execrable sex writing]. … The Literary Review judges admonished writers not to take the cancellation as ‘a license to write bad sex’ — but they abandoned us in our time of need so we don’t have to listen to them.” – Electric Literature

The Erasure of the Arts

To me the most salient feature of The Upswing, the important new book co-authored by the sociologist Robert Putnam (who also wrote Bowling Alone) on the disappearance of “social capital,” is incidental: the authors completely fail to consider the arts. In fact, I have the uncomfortable feeling that The Upswing may partly be a symptom of the shortcomings it observes. And it is not alone. – Joseph Horowitz