“I am the peer of whoever I’m talking to. If I am talking to a 15-year-old, that’s who I am. If I’m talking to a 50-year-old, that’s who I am. I see too many 75-year-olds who seem much older than I feel. I’m aware I’m an older person, and I wish my back didn’t hurt and my legs didn’t weigh 1,000 pounds. But I go to bed at night and can’t wait for the first taste of coffee in the morning.”
Tag: 04.17.17
The Couple Who Owned A Greenwich Village Building And Rented Only To Creative Artists
When the Frosts moved into their building, the Village was still a thriving creative enclave. The neighborhood became a sort of engine for Western culture after World War II, with Beats, artists, musicians and oddballs flooding the cheap, drafty rooms in rundown brownstones. On Ninth Street alone lived Dawn Powell, Marianne Moore, Astor Piazzolla, Barbra Streisand, Maurice Sendak and Jimi Hendrix.
Is Shen Yun Nothing More Than Falun Gong Propaganda?
“To be sure, the persecuted Falun Gong movement is within its rights to promote its agenda. Through The Epoch Times and other means, it has worked hard to expose human rights abuses at the hands of the Chinese government that has mercilessly suppressed the movement’s spread. Many of the goals of Falun Gong followers are laudable, and its religious tenets – while perhaps striking Westerners as odd – seem to be generally focused on meditation and moral teachings. But none of that excuses its creation of one of the most brazen and deceptive theatrical infomercials ever conceived.”
Vanessa Redgrave Directs Her First Film
“The sight of a Syrian toddler’s lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach was among the horrors that drove Vanessa Redgrave to make her directorial debut with a feature documentary about the refugee crisis, she said.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.17.17
The Met’s new Rosenkavalier: Hello Robert Carsen, goodbye (maybe) to Renée Fleming
So personal is the relationship between Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and its admirers that the arrival of a new production at the Metropolitan Opera is like having your living room redecorated: It has to happen every so often but disrupts your inner and outer world … read more
AJBlog: Condemned to Music Published 2017-04-17
American Watercolors: Excellent Exhibition, But…
American Watercolor In the Age of Homer and Sargent, now on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is an exhausting exhibition, in a good way. It displays more than 170 artworks and covers the … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2017-04-17
Monday Recommendation: Mosaic’s Savoy Bebop Treasury
Classic Savoy BoBop Sessions 1945-49
Just a quick run-through of the names involved in this ten- CD set might be enough to whet the curiosity of the uninitiated and the appetites of … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2017-04-17
Life As A Brand, Or, What Volkswagen Vanagons Mean To Instagram
Social media has made an entirely new job possible: Driving around and taking Instagram-likeable photos of the “ideal” life in a van, preferably a Vanagon. (It helps if you’re a thin, white, yoga-doing naked woman.)
Learning Egyptian Arabic From The Tahrir Square Revolution
Peter Hessler recounts how the language classes he and his wife took in Cairo in 2011 and ’12 changed, in terms of vocabulary and outlook, because of the Arab Spring.
Margaret Atwood And The Artist’s Role In Our Current Circumstances
“Artists are always being lectured on their moral duty, a fate other professionals—dentists, for example—generally avoid,” she observed. “There’s nothing inherently sacred about films and pictures and writers and books. ‘Mein Kampf’ was a book.” In fact, she said, writers and other artists are particularly prone to capitulating to authoritarian pressure; the isolation inherent in the craft makes them psychologically vulnerable. “The pen is mightier than the sword, but only in retrospect,” she wrote. “At the time of combat, those with the swords generally win.”