Tag: 08.01.17

How Jack Benny And Harry Conn Figured Out The Formula For Situation Comedy

“In vaudeville you had one show and that was it. You changed it whenever you felt like it,” Benny said, years later. But, in radio, “when you realized that every week you needed a new show, this got a little bit frightening.” In another interview, he recalled, “The first show was a cinch—I used about half of all the gags I knew. The second show consumed all the rest, and I faced the third absolutely dry.”

The Instagram Dancer Who Stands Out

While Instagram has become a go-to forum for dancers recording themselves in class and rehearsal, Marlee Grace has managed to stand out, though it’s hard to pinpoint why. Maybe it’s her musical selections, which range from Justin Bieber to wind and waves; her playful, impulsive choices as a mover and iPhone videographer; or the sense that she’s not working toward anything in particular, just dancing for herself and anyone who happens to cross her virtual path.

Why Do Dystopian Science Fiction Cities Look So Much Like The Cities We Already Have?

Justin Davidson: “Most of us can imagine only what we already know, and even the fantasies of visionary filmmakers can be astonishingly earthbound. The inventors of nonexistent cities don’t have to worry about building codes, zoning, financing regulations, or even the need to make their structures stand up. Rather than use that freedom to unleash radical design or dream up darkly beautiful architecture, they simply recycle the present and make it bigger, and worse.”

Getty’s Multicultural Internship Program Has Had A Profound Impact On LA’s Arts Leadership

“The idea: Provide students with real-world professional experience at cultural nonprofits small and large, be it the Center for the Study of Political Graphics or the Museum of Contemporary Art. The first crop of 89 interns completed sessions at 80 arts organizations around Los Angeles in summer 1993. Twenty-five years later, the Multicultural Internship Program is still going strong. Over that period, the Getty Foundation has funded more than 3,200 internships at an estimated 160 Los Angeles arts organizations — including 120 internships this summer. That amounts to an investment of more than $12 million over a quarter century.”

Another Civil War Alternative-History Series Is Coming: This Time, Freed Slaves Get Three States As Reparations

A couple of weeks ago, HBO announced a series called Confederate, depicting an independent 21st-century Confederacy (the South won) where slavery is still legal. (There’s been a lot of queasiness and worse about this project on social media, not least because the producers, the Game of Throines guys, are white, although the head writers are black.) Meanwhile, Amazon has been developing a series titled Black America, in which ex-slaves were given Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama and created the nation of New Colonia, which has been the United States’ neighbor and frenemy for 150 years.

Met Museum Turns Over A Second Ancient Artwork To Police

“Manhattan prosecutors have taken custody of an ancient bull’s head that was on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art because of concerns that the antiquity was looted from a Lebanese storage area in the 1980s during Lebanon’s civil war. … Last week, the Met surrendered an ancient vase that it bought at auction in 1989 because of concerns that it might have been looted from Italy.”