“Located on the grounds of the Ayers Rock Resort in the Northern Territory, this remarkable exhibition” – titled Field of Light Uluru in English and Tili Wiru Tjuta Nyakutjaku (“looking at lots of beautiful lights”) in the language of the indigenous Pitjantjatjara people, to whom Uluru is sacred – “from artist Bruce Munro has already drawn some 120,000 visitors since it opened in 2016.”
Tag: 09.12.17
Margaret Atwood: Science Fiction Isn’t Really About The Future At All
“All stories about the future are actually about the now. However, it’s also true that you generally look ahead of you to see where you’re going and that’s what those kinds of books are like. They’re like blueprints of the possible futures that help us to decide whether that is where we want to go. 1984 was actually about 1948 and looking down the road what might happen should England become like the Soviet Union of the now. So the Handmaid’s Tale was about trends that were already there in the now event, and what might happen if those trends continued on in that way. Would we like that? Is that where we want to live?”
The ‘Monkey-Selfie’ Copyright Case Is, At Long Last, Over
Six years after a macaque in Indonesia picked up photographer David Slater’s camera and took photos of herself, three years after the U.S. Copyright Office supposedly settled the matter, and two years after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals claimed standing and filed a lawsuit, PETA and Slater have settled the case. Reporter Sudhin Thanawala explains the terms.
How We Staged ‘Merchant Of Venice’ In The Old Venice Ghetto
Director Karin Coonrod writes about the process, from getting set materials to the site by boat and hand-truck to the dilemma of casting Shylock (and her unconventional solution) to reworking the unsatisfying-to-us-in-2017 ending, all in the places where the story would have happened.
Where The Idea Of “White People” Came From
“Bolstered by a positivist language, the idea of race became so normalised that eventually the claim that anyone would have coined such an obvious phrase as ‘white people’ would begin to sound strange. But invented it was. With the reemergence today of openly racist political rhetoric, often using disingenuously sophisticated terminology, it’s crucial to remember what exactly it means to say that race isn’t real, and why the claims of racists aren’t just immoral, but also inaccurate.”
John Cleese Talks About Political Correctness And The Nature Of Comedy
“The thing about political correctness is that it starts as a good idea and then gets taken ad absurdum. And one of the reasons it gets taken ad absurdum is that a lot of the politically correct people have no sense of humor. … Because they have no sense of proportion, and a sense of humor is actually a sense of proportion. It’s the sense of knowing what’s important.” (He then edges into some rather iffy jokes.)
How Pina Bausch’s Company Keeps Thriving, Eight Years After Her Sudden Death
“Over the course of those years since 2009, the company’s future has become more clear. Crucially, there appears to be an undiminished appetite for Bausch’s emotionally driven style of tanztheater (or dance theater) … (Performances tend to sell out weeks in advance.) Part of that future is a product of continuity. There aren’t many dance troupes whose performers range in age from their 20s to 60s, but that is the situation in the company today. Many veterans are still there to pass on the knowledge embedded in their bodies and memories.” Marina Harss talks with three dancers from various stages Tanztheater Wuppertal’s history.
How Today’s Choreographers Are Inspired By Pina Bausch
Jen Peters talks to Annie-B Parsons, Aszure Barton, Susan Marshall, and others about the influence the late German choreographer had on their work on their outlook.
Documenta Runs €7 Million Deficit, Seeks City/State Bailout
“The local Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine newspaper said [the state of] Hesse and [the city of] Kassel had each agreed to take over loan guarantees of €3.5m. … The local newspaper said the cost overruns for the current edition of Documenta were partly owing to miscalculations by the management team” – particularly concerning the costs of running part of the event in Athens.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Prototypical Broke Freelancer
What most people don’t know is that, for his entire oeuvre—all his fiction, poetry, criticism, lectures—Poe earned only about $6,200 in his lifetime, or approximately $191,087 adjusted for inflation. Maybe $191,087 seems like a lot of money. And sure, as book advances go, that’d be a generous one, the kind that fellow writers would whisper about. But what if $191,087 was all you got for 20 years of work and the stuff you wrote happened to be among the most enduring literature ever produced by anyone anywhere?