Writing, like anything – from athletics to nuclear physics – depends on a basic degree of talent, which can be cultivated through training. So let’s stop pretending that devoting a year or two to studying writing in the company of others is anything other than a valid step towards a literary career.
Tag: 04.20.18
What’s It Like Photographing Life In The Poorest County In The U.S.?
Jane Rule Burdine: “I could have lived anywhere. I’ve traveled a great bit for work, but I came back to Mississippi because it’s what I know. When I go out hunting for these photographs, it’s not like a stranger coming to town. I can move fluidly. I know what I’m seeing. There’s so much here that I know and can discover within my knowledge. How could I ever exhaust it?”
Can White Playwrights’ Plays About Race Help Combat Racism, Or Are They Just One More Example Of It?
One theatre writer (who’s white) says that it’s disingenuous to have all-white casts, white directors, and white designers for plays that supposedly examine white privilege.
Can Young Cuban Dancers Remain Connected To Their Country Even As They Form A New Company With Carlos Acosta?
Acosta, who had a painful separation from his country and family in order to become a star in Europe and the U.S., says “I want to bring them to the world, but also to bring the world to them.”
What It Feels Like To Get Equal Pay, At Long, Long Last
Thandie Newton, on getting equal pay to the men of HBO’s Westworld for the upcoming Season 3: “It’s unprecedented. It’s — goodness; it shatters so much calcified pain, resentment, frustration. It just shatters it.”
What’s Going To Happen To The American Jazz Museum?
The thing is, “the museum received a blistering report from a City Council-hired consultant earlier this month calling for a ‘complete rebirth; and reorganized leadership. Museum Management Consultants Inc. issued its 62-page report April 9.” Now the Kansas City City Council is putting forth widely divergent plans for what to do about the museum at 18th and Vine.
Richard Oldenburg, Who Expanded MoMA And Drew Massive Crowds, Has Died At 84
He led the museum through competing curatorial arguments, staff strikes, and more, while also getting a massive expansion and a boost to the endowment. But it all began with books, and a close relative: “Mr. Oldenburg — whose older brother is the Pop Art sculptor Claes Oldenburg — was a publishing executive when MoMA hired him to run its publications department in 1969. The job allowed him to work closely with curators and artists on catalogs and books, an experience that proved critical when the board of trustees named him director three years later.”
Fifty Years Ago, These Four Pieces Of Music Blew Up The Modernist Status Quo
Mark Swed: Terry Riley’s ‘In C’ “is simply a collection of 53 melodic motives, all in or around the key of C. Any instrument or vocalist — and any number of them — can play or sing. Each motive is repeated, over a pulse, as long as each performer wants before moving on. … I was told not only that I couldn’t bring that sacrilege into the classroom, but to get it out of the music building and that the only place for it on campus was the trash can. That’s when I knew the revolution had begun.”
One Hot Contemporary Art Trend: Tapestries
Renaissance tapestries are cold, ice cold – no one seems to want to spend substantial amounts of money on them. But new tapestries? Think computer-assisted, bright, and built to last. “Artists are getting really excited by tapestry and are trying to push what can be done with the medium.”
A Photojournalist Killed In Libya Left Behind Tender Portraits Of Soldiers At Play
Tim Hetherington, killed on assignment in 2011, “abhorred violence, but he took it upon himself to explore the subject of war on the front lines, alongside soldiers in Liberia, Afghanistan, and Libya. While embedded in Afghanistan on assignment for Vanity Fair (for which he won the 2007 World Press Photo of the Year), Hetherington came to understand war as a function of male sexuality.”