“Q: Why did you decide to step down?
A: I think I’ve moved the museum forward in many respects. We’ve really modernised and come into the 21st century. …
Q: Was the speculation about your relationships with staff … the worse [sic] thing you’ve had to deal with as a director?
A: It goes with the territory. … There are charges of favouritism but quite frankly that is what leadership is all about. It’s about making decisions.”
Tag: 07.01.17
Richard Florida’s “New” Urban Crisis
Florida’s new “crisis” is one of growing income inequality everywhere, segregation (by neighborhood, income, and race), and a disappearing middle class. It’s a crisis of suburbs, where poverty, income insecurity, and crime grow. It’s a crisis of the developing world, where urban hypergrowth and rapid industrialization fail to move people up the income scale.
The Horror Film Guy Who Produced ‘Get Out’ And Many More Low-Budget, High-Gross Films Is Turning To Publishing
Jason Blum “sees it as another way for the writers and directors he works with to tell a story. ‘We’re trying to be a home for our artists, and be an outlet for them no matter what they want to do: write a book, do a live event, do a television series, make a movie … Having a book division helps me keep books front of mind when we’re talking to people about how to get their stories out into the world.'”
Children’s Art May Seem Like ‘Scribbles,’ But It Is Actually Complex And Powerful
Artist Brian Belott, who has curated a show with a combo of children’s art and his own art: “A child wakes up in the morning with so much energy, and I try, in my own practice, no matter what I do, to tap into that hyper-spazzy energy that slowly gets shut down as you enter the adult world. As an artist, I’m into celebratory stuff. I’d much rather create a dance party than a pity party.”
Film Critic Barry Norman, Who Was The BBC’s Film Reviewer For 26 Years, Has Died At 83
“It was at the BBC where he became a household name, presenting from a comfortable armchair and often dressed in a familiar jumper. A catchphrase, ‘And why not?,’ was used on occasion by Norman and became the title of his autobiography, but took on a life of its own in the mouth of the puppet version of him in the satirical show Spitting Image on ITV.” Then there was the time Robert DeNiro almost hit him.
How We Can, Or Rather Could, Save Free Speech From ‘Free Speech’ Trolls
This certain-type-of-person freakout is costing anyone who’s not an aggrieved white man quite a lot. “Casting the dissent of marginalized groups as a First Amendment violation is the kind of pseudo-intellectual argument that seems reasonable to people who don’t have enough skin in the game to bother paying attention. ‘Discourse’ is good! Sunlight is the best disinfectant! The more airtime we give to irrational bigots on high-profile platforms — the more assiduously we hear both sides, stay ‘fair and balanced’ — the sooner they’ll be rejected by the public at large!”
The History Of Female Monsters, And How One Author Started Giving Them A Voice
Theodora Goss noticed something about European horror, or at least Euro-monsters who were women: They didn’t speak. So she wrote her own short story, “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter,” “which explores the lives of female monsters such as Justine Frankenstein, Diana Hyde, and Catherine Moreau. ‘All these girl monsters have found each other and they’ve formed a club, and they live together in London,’ Goss says. ‘That’s the premise'” – and now the story is a book.
Heathcote Williams, Polemical Poet, Playwright, And Actor, Has Died At 75
Williams was also a painter and generally a polymath, and always committed to being a revolutionary. He “was the author of many polemical poems, written over four decades in a unique documentary style. They included works about the devastation being wrought on the natural environment – Sacred Elephant, Whale Nation and Falling For a Dolphin – and Autogeddon, a grim and majestic attack on the car.”
How Illusion Entertainment Took On Pixar – And Is Perhaps Winning
Illumination has certainly beaten up Dreamworks Animation, and it’s surpassing Pixar as well, partly by making mid-budget films that then gross wild numbers worldwide. Illusion hires big-name actors, which helps appeal to parents. And “the hooks of its films are almost maddeningly direct. The elevator pitch for each of its films is simple.”
Paul Robeson Found His Radical Voice During A Chance Meeting With Miners
“He stopped, startled by the perfect harmonisation and then by the realisation that the singers, when they came into view, were working men, carrying protest banners as they sang. By accident, he’d encountered a party of Welsh miners from the Rhondda valley. They were stragglers from the great working-class army routed during what the poet Idris Davies called the ‘summer of soups and speeches’ – the general strike of 1926.”