Tag: 06.30.17

Is The Structure Of Today’s Arts Institutions The Problem With Today’s Arts?

“What is the real vision that we’re looking for in the performing arts? Maybe it needs to go beyond simply what goes on the stage. Maybe someone needs to bring vision to the fallacy, almost universally accepted, that the only way to sustain the arts we love is to shore up a system of oversized institutions that no longer seem to work well in today’s culture. Might there be a better way to reconceive orchestras and opera houses, and to allocate the considerable resources that go into the performing arts every year, while fostering creativity — rather than convincing everyone that art needs to be packaged in layers of institutional bubble wrap so it doesn’t get broken?”

Catching Up With The Beat Poets (They’re Still Alive?)

“Late last spring, I drove up the coast from Los Angeles in search of surviving members of the Beat Generation. Interview times had been procured with the poets Ferlinghetti (now 98), McClure (84), Snyder (87), and Diane di Prima (82), as well as Beat-adjacent novelist Herbert Gold (93). When I told people about my plan, the most common response was, “They’re still alive?” After all, the loose collective’s three most famous avatars are long gone. William S. Burroughs and Ginsberg died within four months of each other in 1997. After chronic alcoholism, Kerouac’s organs finally burst in 1969.”

One London Library Not Suffering From Cuts During The Long Retrenchment Of British Public Life

In a neighborhood where the town council announced there would be no austerity measures at its libraries, “Books are only a small part of the library’s mandate. When the council elected to spare its libraries from cuts, it announced that they would be redeveloped as ‘community hubs.’ Among the groups using the library’s facilities for regular open meetings are stroke survivors, cancer survivors, seniors, dads, knitters, aspiring songwriters, Pilates enthusiasts, and philosophy buffs.”

Olivia De Haviland Is 101, And She Is *Not* Having That ‘Feud’ Miniseries

Indeed, she’s suing FX and Ryan Murphy Productions. “In a complaint filed Friday in L.A. County Superior Court, de Havilland claims she has built a reputation for integrity and dignity by refraining from gossip and other unkind, ill-mannered behavior — but the series opens with Zeta-Jones doing an interview as de Havilland and creates the impression that she was a hypocrite who sold gossip to promote herself.”

Is This The Year The World Will Get Re-Excited About Canadian Literature?

Maybe? “Few writers have seen, first-hand, the way Canadian literature is embraced internationally more than Madeleine Thien. She has been travelling, seemingly non-stop, since her Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning Do Not Say We Have Nothing, a novel both global in scope and profoundly Canadian, was published last year. What she’s discovered, she says on the phone from Umbria, Italy, which she was visiting for a music festival organized by the Canadian classical pianist Angela Hewitt – this immediately on the heels of a two-week prepublication tour of Japan – is that Canadian literature is not viewed the same way, but changes from country to country, region to region.”