“Dancer Carmen de Lavallade said on Thursday that she would be honored to attend the Dec. 3 ceremony at the Kennedy Center, buuuut … ‘In light of the socially divisive and morally caustic narrative that our current leadership is choosing to engage in, and in keeping with the principles that I and so many others have fought for, I will be declining the invitation to attend the reception at the White House.'” Norman Lear is sitting out the party as well, and Lionel Richie is, for now, on the fence.
Tag: 08.17.17
Top Posts From AJBlogs 08.17.17
Resistance Insistence: Museums (& CultureGrrl) Grapple with Political Turmoil
Even before Saturday’s horrific game-changer, some art museums — including major “establishment” institutions — had begun dropping their guard, casting aside their habitual reluctance to risk offending the more conservative members of their culture-loving base and taking political stands. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-08-17
Writer Who Wrote About A Writer Murdering People Is Arrested For Murdering People
“I came up with the idea after reading some detective novels and watching crime shows and movies,” Mr. Liu wrote at the time. “The working title is: ‘The Beautiful Writer Who Killed.’” But what was assumed to be a fictional crime story took a turn into reality last week when Mr. Liu, 53, was arrested on accusations of bludgeoning four people to death 22 years ago.
To Hear How Jazz Got Pushed To The Side Of American Culture, Listen To This One Night In 1967
Alan Iverson: “Ellington could connect all the dots—the social, the modernist, the intellectual, the populist, the personally poetic—for a vision of American music truly epic in scope. As great as Evans was, he didn’t have that kind of command. Fifty years ago, the basic connection to a larger audience was slipping away. The integrity of the song was getting diluted by the scale. A kind of darker and mysterious undercurrent was giving way to something lighter in affect.”
In Hot Demand At Tech Companies? Workers With Liberal Arts Degrees
“Throughout the major U.S. tech hubs, whether Silicon Valley or Seattle, Boston or Austin, Tex., software companies are discovering that liberal arts thinking makes them stronger. Engineers may still command the biggest salaries, but at disruptive juggernauts such as Facebook and Uber, the war for talent has moved to nontechnical jobs, particularly sales and marketing. The more that audacious coders dream of changing the world, the more they need to fill their companies with social alchemists who can connect with customers–and make progress seem pleasant.”
The Frank Lloyd Wright Problem
Academicians warned decades ago that “the restrictive control of the master’s archives for a quarter-century after his death in 1959 by his widow, Olgivanna (who died in 1985), would set back Wright studies for a full generation, if not longer. Dissertation advisers prudently steered doctoral candidates away from Wright topics because of the extortionate research and reproduction fees demanded by his foundation, as well as the editorial approval it demanded for publications that used material from the Taliesin archive. The rise of poststructuralist criticism further eroded younger scholars’ interest in an architect whose uniquely personal approach to architecture had little to do with the period’s fascination with literary theory.”