“Within the Broadway spectrum, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop historical musical has less in common with recent smashes than with shows that radically expanded audiences’ perceptions of the kind of stories musicals could tell, and the language and form they could use to tell them.”
Tag: 08.31.15
A New Ballet Explores The Real, Complex, Dark Relationships Behind Picasso’s ‘Three Dancers’
“Working for the ballet had been a good career move for Picasso, augmenting his income and introducing him to an audience of rich, cultured patrons. It had also pleased Olga who, while retiring from the stage, remained deeply attached to her old profession.”
How Art Helps New Orleans Students Deal With Their Post-Katrina PTSD
“Trauma is all about details. Trauma renders itself in certain songs, in the quality of the air against the sky, in colors of socks, in flavors of alcohol. When the human brain encounters a trauma, it makes quick decisions about what to remember, and it often remembers otherwise mundane details: the timbre of birdsong, or the specific shake of a tree’s shoulders. Sometimes the brain gets kind of obsessive about trauma.”
Is The Symphony Over?
“A genre once aimed at vast crowds—Mahler imagined his symphonies being played in stadiums, for tens of thousands of people—now leads a more subdued, solitary existence. Much of its legacy is ignored in concert halls and can be encountered only on recordings.”
Wes Craven, The Mainstream Horror Maestro With A Debt To Ingmar Bergman
“Wes Craven’s career is a startling link between the European arthouse and Hollywood exploitation horror.”
Fast-Rising Artist Noah Davis Dies (Far Too Young) The Same Day His MOCA Installation Opens
MOCA chief curator: “Noah is an important artist because he occupies the term ‘artist’ in the largest possible way: an incredibly accomplished painter, he is also a profound visionary — dreaming up the idea of the Underground Museum and then physically enacting that dream against all odds.”
Social Media: To Blame For Literary Mediocrity?
“A middlebrow cult of the popular is holding literature to ransom. Thus, if you judge by the emotional outpourings over their deaths, the greatest writers of recent times were Pratchett and Ray Bradbury. There was far less of an internet splurge when Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014 and Günter Grass this spring. Yet they were true titans of the novel.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs For 08.30.15
What I Learned This Summer: Philadelphia
AJBlog: Real Clear ArtsPublished 2015-08-30
Dr. Oliver Sacks, Author Of ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat’ And So Much More, Dies At 82
“Describing his patients’ struggles and sometimes uncanny gifts, Dr. Sacks helped introduce syndromes like Tourette’s or Asperger’s to a general audience. But he illuminated their characters as much as their conditions; he humanized and demystified them. In his emphasis on case histories, Dr. Sacks modeled himself after a questing breed of 19th-century physicians.”
‘Happily Manipulated’: Peter Schjeldahl On Whistler’s Mother, And His Own
The iconic status of Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 isn’t just because it marks “the peak of Whistler’s radical method of modulating tones of single colors.” It’s because, like Mona Lisa, The Scream, and American Gothic, “Whistler’s Mother” is “the distillation of a meaning instantly recognized and forever inexhaustible. In this case, it’s the mysteries of motherhood. Everybody has a mother, and something close to half of everybody becomes one.”