While learning an instrument is all of that and more for some people, music lessons can also be the locus of a very particular set of traumas, from the indignity of being forced to practise the piano with teacups on your hands to the paralysing performance anxiety that might surge forth at a dreaded recital. – Aeon
Tag: 02.27.20
How Hollywood Fueled William Faulkner
Hollywood became synonymous with increased income and long absences from home. The manna from Faulkner’s work on screenplays and the movie options on his novels was very welcome indeed, but it did not come without cost to his marriage. When Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered six weeks at $500 a week in May 1932, the couple was significantly overdrawn and without credit. Faulkner literally spent his last few dollars wiring MGM that he would accept their offer. He then asked his uncle for a five-dollar loan. John Falkner instead offered a $500 loan to cover his nephew’s overdraft, but Faulkner declined and held out for a studio advance. – Los Angeles Review of Books
Ethics Issue With Ousted Director Is Least Of Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s Problems
“The turmoil will only further damage an institution that has, for most of its existence, failed to live up to its name while presenting one mediocre exhibition after another.” Aaron Betsky argues that the root of the problems at the Smithsonian’s design museum (and its only branch in New York) isn’t the fault of anyone in particular, but it will require the equivalent of radical surgery. – Dezeen
Artist Pyotr Pavlensky Is In France As A Political Refugee, But He’s Burning Banks And Messing With Elections. What Is He Really Up To?
His various art “actions” (as he calls them), along with his apparently high pain threshold, have earned him international notoriety and a good deal of sympathy. Yet he seems to have squandered quite a bit of that sympathy in France, where his actions haven’t gone down so well. Valeria Costa-Kostritsky talks to associates and observers of Pavlensky in Russia and France and tries to unpack it all. – Apollo
Two Playwrights Embedded In A Newsroom. They Had To Rewrite Their Play When The Paper Started Laying Off Reporters.
“Janielle Kastner and Brigham Mosley thought they had finished writing their play about journalism when The Dallas Morning News announced layoffs in January 2019. They had spent more than a year and hundreds of hours embedded in the newsroom, interviewing and shadowing the paper’s staff to come up with what Mosley calls ‘a really beautiful, clean play.'” – Dallas Morning News
London’s Leicester Square Is Decorated With Statues To Mark A Century Of British Film
Why Leicester Square for the statues commemorating various decades of film (including Mary Poppins, Gene Kelly, and Paddington Bear)? “Leicester Square was first home to a cinema in 1930, with the first premiere taking place there in 1937. It has subsequently cemented its place in British cinema history and regularly plays host to some of the most high-profile events in the country’s film calendar.” – BBC
The Downside Of Learning With YouTube How-To’s
Many of these videos fall into what Carlson calls “infotainment,” where the goal isn’t to teach, but to pass on information, even if it doesn’t lead to understanding. “They’re not saying, ‘Here’s how you would do the problem yourself,’” Stephen agrees. “They’re just handing you a bunch of microwaved facts.” – Fast Company
Trump Gets 45-Minute Briefing On The Play “FBI Lovebirds: Undercovers”
Trump hasn’t seen the play, according to playwright Phelim McAleer, but praised its concept: a script based entirely on congressional testimony and the text messages between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who discussed the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s campaign and Russia while having an affair. The play’s leads—Superman actor Dean Cain and former Buffy the Vampire Slayer actress Kristy Swanson—also attended the White House meeting. – The Daily Beast
Roberto Bedoya On Expressing Oakland Creatively
Bedoya describes the culture of the city as “the embodiment of forms of knowledge and wisdom people have gained through their different lived experiences.” Another way he expresses this idea is that culture is the frame within which the arts provide “the power of shared sensibility and memory… kindling the emotions that make us aware of our shared humanity.” – Reportage From The Aesthetic Edge
Reconsidering The 1980s Soap Opera Boom
“The shifts across the network era, magnified in the early 1980s, help us to see how variable the category of soap opera, and perhaps the ordering concept of genre itself, may be.” What’s more, that boom changed the acting profession. – Literary Hub