“Poetry is just prose chopped up into lines. I mean this to be final, categorical, and no slight on poetry.”
Tag: 04.20.15
Have The Words Of Liberal Arts Lost Their Meaning?
“Old words that used to mean something—ideals, meaning, character, self, soul—have come to seem mere floating signifiers, counters in a game played by commencement speakers and college catalogs.”
Lars Von Trier: ‘I’ve Started Drinking Again, So I Can Work’ (Uh-Oh)
The all-too-irrepressible filmmaker, in one of the few interviews he’s given since his unfortunate Nazi joke got him banned from Cannes in 2011, talks about anxiety, AA, rebellion, Dogme, and why he puts so much sex in his movies (He comes from a nudist family).
How The New Whitney Could Be The Next Great Contemporary Art Museum
The museum used to be a storehouse for the art of the past, the display of supposed masterpieces, the insightful exploration of the present in the context of the long or compressed histories that preceded it. Now — especially as embodied by the Tate Modern, Guggenheim Bilbao, and our beloved MoMA — the museum is a revved-up showcase of the new, the now, the next, an always-activated market of events and experiences, many of which lack any reason to exist other than to occupy the museum industry — an industry that critic Matthew Collings has called “bloated and foolish, corporatist, ghastly and death-ridden.”
Confessional Writing: It’s Ubiquitous, It’s Annoying, It’s Uncool – But It’s Powerful, And We Seem To Need It
“No writer wants to own the label ‘confessional’ anymore. It’s an epithet, with the same tenor as ‘hipster’ or ‘artisanal’: something for privileged narcissists who can’t see any of their own silliness. … And yet, the practice has deeply ancient, religious roots. Bruenig notes that it was designed not just to let the person who is confessing spill his or her guts, but also a sort of collective anecdote.”
Scholar Who Rescued 30,000 Volumes Of Chinese Literature From Japan’s WWII Invasion Of Shanghai Has Died At 105
T.H. Tsien, “who was born in China in the twilight of the reign of its last emperor, was a young librarian there during the Japanese occupation, which lasted from 1931 until the end of World War II. Working in secret, he was charged with keeping a trove of precious volumes, some dating to the first millennium B.C., from falling into the occupiers’ hands.”
The First Black Ballerina At The Metropolitan Opera House
“‘It is opening night at the Metropolitan Opera – the gala performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aïda. It is the first time in the history of the venerable opera house that it has a black artist on its roster. Let me tell you, my friend, I am just as surprised as anyone else.’ It was 1951, and Janet Collins, the author of these words, was that black artist.”
Cirque du Soleil Is Such A Singular Enterprise. Can Its Creative Spark Survive A Sale Of The Company?
“Cirque has already played to over 160 million people around the world and I firmly hope it will continue to dazzle us with sights and wonders. But you’ll have to prove to me that a financial group whose major achievement has been the “branding” of J. Crew and Nieman Marcus will understand the impulse that made those crazy buskers from Baie-Saint-Paul become a bright, dazzling comet that streaked so thrillingly across the world entertainment sky.”
LA Stage Actors Strongly Oppose Wage Increase
“The new wage could quadruple what actors earn from a typical production. But opponents say a change could backfire on actors by shutting down the most economically fragile theaters and putting the rest under pressures that would drain much of the flavor and adventure from L.A.’s small-theater menu.”
Two-Thirds Of A Billion Dollars In 50th-Birthday Gifts for LACMA
At a gala last Saturday, Los Angeles’s flagship museum unveiled the artwork donated to it for its golden anniversary, including a Monet, a Memling, an Ingres, and a Giambologna sculpture.