“I’m interested in how we can amplify space and proximity for artists who want to explore an idea bigger than just their next project. For example, there’s the Dancing Laboratory, which will initially center around BODYTRAFFIC, an LA-based company that commissions two or three pieces a year. The commissioning model generally suffers, because the artist must write the grant without knowing what the work will be yet, they raise the funds, and then put all the energy and resources into a few weeks, and expect the commissioned choreographer to make an amazing work. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t; there’s no room for failure or trying new ideas. We decided we want to disrupt that system, as well as offer additional opportunities that would cultivate female choreographic talent.”
Tag: 07.24.17
A Fascinating Tale Of How This Book Might Have Bought Its Way Onto The NYT BestSeller List
“Nowadays, you can make the bestseller list with about 5,000 sales. That’s not the heights of publishing’s heyday but it’s still harder to get than you’d think. Some publishers spend thousands of dollars on advertising and blogger outreach to get that number. Everyone’s looking for the next big thing and that costs a lot of cash. For the past 25 weeks, that big book in the YA world has been The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, a searing politically charged drama about a young black girl who sees a police officer kill her friend, and the fallout it causes in her community.”
The 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women (Since 1964)
“This list, of the greatest albums made by women between 1964 and the present, is an intervention, a remedy, a correction of the historical record and hopefully the start of a new conversation. Compiled by nearly 50 women from across NPR and the public radio system and produced in partnership with Lincoln Center, it rethinks popular music to put women at the center.”
Revising The Canon Of Pop Music To Put Women At Its Center (Why We Made A List Of The 150 Greatest Albums By Women)
Ann Powers: “I’m officially tired of writing about music that recognizes women when gender is the topic, but when music itself is the topic, almost always returns its focus to men. Talking about this problem with Jill [Sternheimer of Lincoln Center] and then with several of my colleagues at NPR, I began to wonder if focusing on what women have done in music, instead of constantly remarking that wow, they exist, might be a way to begin correcting this pattern.”
Publisher Withdraws Doctor’s Book ‘Mandela’s Last Years’ After Protests From Widow And Others
“[The memoir,] written by his long-time physician Vejay Ramlakan, discloses intimate details about Mandela’s health and family infighting prior to his death in 2013. … Members of the Mandela family have strongly objected to the book’s publication, slamming it as a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality.”
Sven Birkerts Found It More And More Difficult To Write. Then The Impulse Returned
“The change did not come overnight, but I did start to notice a while back that I was having fewer of these word surges interrupting whatever I was doing. Less and less often was I waking up wanting to strategize — plotting out paragraph transitions like a traveler marking a route on a map, except that both map and route were both in the head.”
The Strange Tastes Of Bookstore Shoplifters (Kierkegaard And Wittgenstein?)
Sure, thieves make off with expensive coffee-table books and textbooks, but, says the manager of the London Review Bookshop, “Our most-stolen authors, in order, are Baudrillard, Freud, Nietzsche, Graham Greene, Lacan, Camus, and whoever puts together the Wisden [Cricketers’] Almanack.” One booklifter who got caught said as he was escorted from the store, “I hope you’ll consider this in the Žižekian spirit, as a radical reappropriation of knowledge.”
Paul Jacobs: Classical Musicians Are Not So Much Advocates For Their Art But Apologists
“So much of our understanding of the arts in this country is bound up with the individual tastes of the listener or consumer. The primacy of classical music as an artful or superior genre has gradually diminished. Increasingly, classical musicians are not so much advocates for their art as apologists. This is not a trend I observe, however, in great art museums.”
Economists Predicted Progress Would Lead To Lives Of Leisure. But Indigenous Tribes Had Figured That Out Long Ago
“Convinced that mankind had been on a journey of unrelenting progress since we emerged from the swamp, he believed the 15-hour week to be the culmination of hundreds of generations’ collective ingenuity and effort. Perhaps Keynes would have had a different view had he known that the 15-hour week was a reality for some of the handful of remaining tribes of autonomous hunter-gatherers, and that, in all probability, it was the norm for much of the history of modern Homo sapiens.”
We’re Approaching A Major Turning Point In Trump-Era Pop Culture
Mark Harris writes about how audiences are finding current-day resonance in properties like The Handmaid’s Tale, The Americans, The Big Sick, and Dunkirk that were planned and written well before the 2016 election. However, “this moment is coming into focus just as it’s about to end. … With the advent of autumn we’ll move into a period in which most of the resonance will be planned. … My guess – speaking of questionable forecasting – is that our relationship to Trumpian pop-culture material will start to change in the next few months. Critics and audiences alike can be suspicious of art that looks like it wants to have an effect.”