“One of the big things that we’re trying to do this season,“ Chief Executive Chad Smith said, “is really advance this idea that Gustavo has been initiating for so long, which is to shift the musical center of gravity for our art form further west and further south. We come from an art form which historically was European and largely male. How do we, over time, change that?“ – Los Angeles Times
Tag: 02.05.20
After 87 Years, A Radical Novel Of The Harlem Renaissance Finds A Publisher
Claude McKay set aside his novel Romance in Marseille in 1933 because his editor thought it too shocking to sell: its protagonist is a West African double amputee with a prostitute lover, and most of the action is “in a sexually liberated working-class milieu, where queer love is accepted as a fact of life, no more subject to judgment than its heterosexual counterpart.” Penguin Classics has just published it for the first time. – The New York Times
How Are They Dating This Set Of Ancient Australian Rock Paintings? With Mud Wasps
Dead mud wasps, in fact. The ancient artists who painted the Gwion figures in Western Australia’s Kimberley region used iron oxide pigments, which have no organic material and can’t be carbon-dated. But the remains of mud wasp nests stuck to the paintings can be carbon-dated, and researcher Damien Finch has used them to determine that the Gwion paintings are roughly 12,000 years old. – BBC
Boris Johnson’s Government Seriously Considers Abolishing License Fee That Funds BBC
“The culture secretary, Nicky Morgan, suggested the television licence” — an annual fee, currently £154.50 ($201.68), charged every household and business with a television — “was an increasingly outdated way of funding the BBC, saying that while she would guarantee its existence in the short term, it was time to look at new ways of subsidising public service broadcasting.” – The Guardian
Slammed For Doing ‘Literary Blackface’, Barnes & Noble Cancels Poorly Thought-Out ‘Diverse Editions’ Campaign
The idea of this Black History Month initiative was to take 12 children’s and young-adult classic titles — among them Frankenstein, Treasure Island, The Three Musketeers, and Romeo and Juliet — and sell them with covers depicting their characters as nonwhite. (This as opposed to promoting titles by nonwhite writers.) – The Guardian
Actor Kirk Douglas, 103
“[His] distinctive cleft chin, raspy voice and highly charged dramatic energy whose starring roles in Spartacus, Lust For Life, Champion, Ace in the Hole and Paths of Glory helped him become one of Hollywood’s foremost leading men and enduring stars.” – The Washington Post
Critic Philosopher George Steiner, 92
He was what many people call a human encyclopedia—not in the American sense, a blank vault of facts, but in the French Enlightenment one: a critical repository of significant knowledge. His long book reviews for this magazine, written over thirty years, from 1966 to 1997, were dotted with allusions of the kind that a naturally horizontal thinker couldn’t help but include. But they were never imposed or forced—his mind truly, on its way to Borges, passed through Sophocles and stopped for a moment to take in the view at Heidegger. Steiner was a lifelong traveller of those routes. – The New Yorker
Barnes & Noble’s Blackface Celebration Of Black History Month
“Seriously. To honor black people, they decided to showcase a selection of white-centered literary tomes. But, instead of acknowledging that the books were written by white people who wrote about white people, these genius marketers simply slapped a diverse selection of black faces on the books’ covers.” – The Root
Beckett: A bit of Rough at the Old Vic
Daniel Radcliffe’s sense of physical theatre is magnificent, but, finally, the evening belongs to Alan Cumming. – Paul Levy