There’s no longer an arts council to assess grant requests; that was eliminated in 1993. Now cultural groups compete – often in person, during two-day-long pitch sessions – with libraries, health-care organizations, wildlife conservancies, and other non-profits for pieces of each county council member’s discretionary funds.
Tag: 08.06.14
Watch The Mariinsky Ballet Take Class
“It is interesting to see any company in class, to glimpse behind the greasepaint and the glamour to see the sheer hard work and repetitive grind which makes onstage greatness possible. But it is particularly fascinating to watch the Mariinsky in action, partly because their dancers are so famous – but mainly because their style is so pure.” (includes video)
A Big Red Barn Or A Red Big Barn? The Secret Rules Of Adjective Order
“An intuitive code governs the way English speakers order adjectives. The rules come so naturally to us that we rarely learn about them in school, but over the past few decades language nerds have been monitoring modifiers, grouping them into categories, and straining to find logic in how people instinctively rank those categories.”
Contemporary Choreography Is Hard, Says Natalia Osipova
“In ballet, the muscles on the inside part of your legs work, but here you use the muscles on the outside of your legs. There’s a lot of pressure on the knees, which you don’t get in classical ballet, and you dance practically barefoot, which is also unusual. Lots of falling movements – when we were rehearsing we were covered in bruises, all beaten and battered!”
How Big Data Becomes Big Data (It’s More Than Just Gathering More)
“While computers have made large-scale number crunching far easier and faster than it was 20 or 30 years ago, that doesn’t mean that weather reports or graphs of seismic activity suddenly qualify as big data.”
How Records Messed Up Classical Music (And The Digital Era Could Fix It)
Tom Service: “The recording industry tried to fix in the collective imagination what individual musical works should be, like the totemic masterpieces of the Western canon (or rather, like those pieces of music that were turned into canonised totems, in part by the recording industry): a series of desirable, aspirational cultural and commercial objects, a collection of black-lacquer-magicked things that could be literally possessed.” Not any more …
“Fighting” Illness: The Trouble With Metaphors In Medicine
“Metaphors are a fundamental mechanism through which our minds conceptualize the world around us, especially in the face of complexity. But evidence suggests they do more than explain similarities – they can invent them where they don’t exist, and blur the lines between the literal and the figurative.”
The Weird Prescience of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”
“Of course, no parent walked out of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with their wound-up eight-year-old and thought, ‘That really captured our collective fear of being mugged by teenagers. Radical!’ But viewed today, it’s striking how much the [1990 film] encapsulated contemporary attitudes about delinquency and violence, and showed weird prescience about the decade to come.”
The Case For Peter Gelb: The Met Opera’s Maligned Manager Isn’t As Bad As You Think
James Jorden: “It’s not hard to understand how the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager Peter Gelb got a bad rap … but the dark clouds hovering over Mr. Gelb should not obscure his very real achievements.” And those achievements go well beyond the HD simulcasts.
Board Of North Miami’s Museum Of Contemporary Art Votes To Leave The City
The museum’s board was in talks to move the collection to the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. City officials called the move a “modern-day art heist,” and vowed to do whatever was necessary to keep the museum in North Miami.”