Tag: 06.24.20

Our Literary Magazines Are Root-Bound

Behind the scenes, the media faced a genuine crisis over and above its ordinary instability. Publications folded, mass layoffs ensued, and with months of pre-written content suddenly obsolete, the remaining magazines were left scrambling for new material. A week into the pandemic, editors at every vaguely literary or intellectual outlet seemed to decide it had fallen to them to solicit first-person accounts of quarantine for the benighted historical record. – Drift Magazine

Who Would Go To A “Herd Immunity” Music Festival This Summer?

A three-day “herd immunity” music festival scheduled to take place in Ringle, Wisconsin, in mid-July is taking this energy to the, uh, extreme. With the exception of drive-in concerts and performances streamed online, live music events have largely been cancelled for the foreseeable future. Health experts have warned concerts could be “superspreaders” of COVID-19 and predicted they wouldn’t be feasible till 2021. – Mic

One Of Britain’s Most Beloved Children’s Authors Emerged From 47 Days In Intensive Care For Covid-19

“I’ve survived,” tweeted Michael Rosen. “The 74-year-old author, performer and broadcaster is one of Britain’s most beloved writers, the author of more than 140 books including We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and Little Rabbit Foo Foo, and children’s poetry including Chocolate Cake and Don’t.” – The Guardian (UK)

How To Fix New York’s Theatre Awards

Jose Solís: “As an insider who still holds a little bit of hope about the possibility of change happening within these overly white spaces, I would like to propose some things the Drama Desk and the Outer Critics Circle can do to secure a more diverse membership, who in return will honor shows that defy conventions of what good theatre is, and who gets to make and star in it.” – Token Theatre Friends

Fully Half Of The Dramas On US Broadcast TV Are About Cops

“Perhaps one reason why America’s national reckoning on police brutality took so long to arrive is because TV is conditioning its citizens to view cops as reliable heroes. Of the 69 scripted television dramas that aired on the big four US broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, Fox, and ABC) in the last year-and-a-half, 35 were about law enforcement.” (And that’s not counting comedies like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, reality shows like Cops, or syndicated reruns.) “Numerous academic studies over many years have showed that viewing cop shows can leaded to warped views of the criminal justice system and policing.” – Quartz

Uffizi Gallery Becomes High Art’s Top TikTok Jester

Until just a few years ago, the august Florence museum “acted like the internet didn’t exist”: it didn’t even launch a website until 2015 and only got itself a Facebook page after the COVID lockdown started this past spring. At the end of April, in an effort to reach young people, the Uffizi opened a TikTok account and started posting inventively humorous videos incorporating art in its collection — for instance, Botticelli’s Medusa turning a coronavirus to stone. – The New York Times

After Years Of Criticism, An Off-Broadway Institution All At Once Agrees To Pay Its Actors

When the Flea Theater was founded by Sigourney Weaver, playwright Mac Wellman and two others in 1996, it was intended to have no stable location and to shut down after five years. Twenty-six years later, the Flea is still here, and in its own $21 million, three-theater building. Yet it continued to operate like a shoestring enterprise, requiring its actors to work for free both on- and offstage. Helen Shaw reports on how the current moment of racial reckoning shocked the Flea into addressing its problems with both pay and inclusion. – Vulture

We’re Witnessing The Death Of Shopping Malls

By mid-May, 28 percent of the surveyed members of Restaurants Canada, which represents 30,000 restaurants and food-service operations across the country, either said they were never reopening or predicted they would close unless conditions quickly improved. After rent came due on June 1, nearly half of the members of the Retail Council of Canada reported they had not been able to pay their rent at all; over a quarter of them said that landlords had threatened to either change their locks or formally evict them as tenants. – The Walrus

Performance Reviews For Statues?

While some have suggested placing these statues in a museum or leaving them to deteriorate naturally, I propose another way: a statue of limitations, where towns and cities would hold a mass review of their monuments, say every 50 years. At that point, citizens would be tasked with deciding whether to maintain the memorials as they are, reimagine them, or remove them from the public square for good. – The Atlantic