Like many of us, conductor/composer Craig Hella Johnson was shaken by the story of Shepard, the young man who was gay-bashed to death in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998. For years, Johnson had an inchoate desire to create a response – an urge that ultimately led to a full-length work for Johnson’s professional choir, Conspirare.
Tag: 01.25.17
Now Even GQ Wants You To Follow Jerry Saltz
And not only for the oversexed Instagram feed. “Jerry Saltz is the anti-critic critic, making critic-art out of the whole cloth of himself. Saltz is human Xanax; always ‘on’, he’s forever cheerful, an antidote to life’s chores and routines, maybe shying from his family history of despondency. I can’t remember ever seeing him grumpy or imagine him out of character.”
‘Graphic Novel’ Is Not An Accurate Name For The Genre, So Maybe We Should Go Back To ‘Comics’
“It used to be ‘comic books,’ or ‘cartoons,’ or ‘the funnies’ – silly names for childish entertainments. Now, we say ‘graphic novels,’ with some rolling their eyes at the puffed-up earnestness of the name.” Joel Priddy looks at where the descriptor came from, why there’s a backlash against it, and why “comics” may be the least-bad option.
India’s Biggest Book Festival Warily Makes Room For The Hindu Radicals It Used To Conider Pariahs
The RSS (for Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) is a Hindu nationalist group compared by some to the Tea Party and by others to the Ku Klux Klan. The Jaipur Literature Festival is a swanky, high-minded gathering that would consider the RSS both morally repugnant and vulgar. Until this year, that is.
Jaipur Literature Festival’s Normalizing Of Hindu Radicals Just Shows That The Mask Is Off
Novelist Siddhartha Deb calls out the event and (especially) its sponsors: “One of India’s largest entertainment companies, Zee is best known for a news channel that serves as the media bludgeon of the Hindu right, its favorite term of abuse, usually flashing in extremely large font, being ‘Deshdrohi,’ or ‘Nation-hater.'”
Why Are Poets So Bad At Writing About Their Relationships To Money?
Few poets write honestly about their economic situation. Indeed, it’s a challenge to find any poet willing to come clean about money: wanting it, enjoying it, needing it, or lacking it—even though this must necessarily be our condition.
John Adams At 70
“The Pacific Coast, and California in particular, has worked its magic on a host of American composers over the years, from figures like Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, who started out here, to such postwar emigres as Stravinsky and Schoenberg who arrived here with centuries of European musical history packed inside their valises. But no one has fused those strains — the freedom and sunny openness of the California milieu with the expressive depth and constructive rigor of late Romanticism — with the facility and grace that Adams has shown over a long career.”
What The Milo Yiannopolous Book Deal Reveals About The State Of Book Publishing
The idea of “editorial independence,” like the idea of free speech, is not faulty per se, nor is it necessarily misapplied. But Milo’s’ case reveals the contradictions of any endeavor that speaks in noble tones about the profit motive.
Is Virtual Reality The Future Of Live Music?
“Getting people through the doors into local venues is getting tougher so VR is being seen as a new form of potential income.”
Shouldn’t Paying Living Wages Be Part Of A Theatre’s Mission?
“Part of the promise of America is the ability to provide for your family while doing work you love, instead of just taking on a job to pay the bills. But for many theatre practitioners and arts administrators, even finding a job just to pay the bills is not in the cards; real living wages are still a rarity in the theatre, especially for freelance theatre workers. With government and private funding for the arts anemic and showing few signs of growth, many theatres are juggling payroll with the overhead needed just to keep the doors open.”