Producers Turn To Indiegogo To Finance Completion Of Orson Welles’s Last Film

“Add a few more twists to the decades-long quest to release The Other Side of the Wind, the unfinished final film of Orson Welles.” Says Peter Bogdanovich, one of the film’s stars, “I think it would amuse Orson to have the fans able to contribute to the completion of the film. As you know, he didn’t like Hollywood very much.”

At Venice Biennale, A Historic Church Becomes A Real Working Mosque

On Friday, the old Santa Maria della Misericordia “will open its doors as a functioning mosque, its Baroque walls adorned with Arabic script, its floor covered with a prayer rug angled toward Mecca and its crucifix mosaics hidden behind a towering mihrab, or prayer niche.” The project constitutes all of Iceland’s pavilion, and it has evoked more than a little ambivalence, despite a centuries-long Muslim presence in the city.

Why It’s No Good Blacklisting Theater Critics From Shows (According To A Theater Critic)

Lyn Gardner: “While the producers of any show may argue that as it’s their party, they can invite whoever they want, the principle of extending invitations across the board to established newspapers and reviewing outlets is a sound one. Trying to exclude particular reviewers is not – if for no other reason that it makes that individual critic seem more important than they are and hints at, if not outright censorship, than at least an over-developed desire to manipulate coverage and ensure good reviews all round.”

The Arts Patron Of Teheran

“Almost overnight nearly all of Tehran’s billboards, which are owned by the city and are a prime source of income, stopped showcasing South Korean dishwashers and the latest bank interest rates (now 22 percent) and sported still lifes by Rembrandt and images by the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.”

Viewers Are Increasingly Turning Away From Paying For Cable TV

“Some homes are turning to over-the-air signals because they can’t afford cable. But a growing number of them are millennials who use over-the-air TV for live sports and broadcast network shows on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox while getting a wide array of programs from streaming video services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. They are happy to pay for broadband Internet, but not TV.”

New York City Ballet Usher Gets To Design New Production of “Sylphides”

“For Ms. Tammany, an artist by day who moonlights as an usher, the job was a reunion of sorts. She designed La Sylphide when Mr. Martins first staged it 30 years ago for the Pennsylvania Ballet, in a production that was later broadcast on public television. But she said she was stunned when Mr. Martins approached her about doing it again at City Ballet.”

Why Sappho Is One Of The Most Important Figures In All Of Literary History

“With a single poem, which says that her beloved Anactoria is more valuable than the splendor of any cavalry, infantry, or fleet, she created a tradition of ‘love-not-war’ lyrics whose future stretches from Propertius to Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Bruce Springsteen. As the definitive ur-voice of lyric ecstasy, she is so consequential that poets of every generation, from Catullus to Sylvia Plath and Anne Carson, have used her to define their aesthetic manifestos: among the ancients, only Homer can claim an instrumental role in literary history equivalent to Sappho’s.”