“In a new Reddit AMA with Darren Aronofsky, the director was asked by a commenter named chickenmagic (of course) if he considered staging his new movie as a play, to which he responded, ‘johan johansson and i are thinking about turning it into an opera.'” (Jóhannsson composed the score for the film.) This could make sense – indeed (as some have observed), it could make more sense than the movie does.
Tag: 09.22.17
The Rapid Decline Of Americans Who Like To Cook (What’s That About?)
Although many people don’t realize it yet, grocery shopping and cooking are in a long-term decline. They are shifting from a mass category, based on a daily activity, to a niche activity that a few people do only some of the time. Only 10% of consumers now love to cook, while 45% hate it and 45% are lukewarm about it. That means that the percentage of Americans who really love to cook has dropped by about one-third in a fairly short period of time.
America’s Great Dictionary Of Regional Dialects To Shut Down
The six-volume-plus-online-updates Dictionary of American Regional English, the only project of its type based on in-person field research, was supported largely by grants from the likes of the NEH and the National Science Foundation. “The institutional donors pretty much felt that they did their job to get the dictionary to ‘Z.’ The publicity from the completion of the main text led to an influx of enough money to finish Volume VI, which included maps and indices, but that was it. In the last few years, the staff applied for additional grants to update and add new entries; these failed to materialize.” Jesse Sheidlower offers a eulogy.
Joffrey Ballet To Move Into Chicago’s Lyric Opera House
Just as the two companies have opened their first major collaboration, “the Joffrey Ballet and Lyric Opera of Chicago announced Friday that the dance company will move its season residencies from the Auditorium Theatre to the Lyric Opera House, beginning in fall 2020.”
Opera Australia Threatened With Fines For Hiring Too Many Foreign Singers
In the perpetual tug-of-war between hiring the best artists available from anywhere and helping Australian singers make a living in their home country, the balance has swung to the former, with the number of non-Australians in leading roles in the company having tripled over the past seven years. So a government report has recommended docking funding for Opera Australia by up to $200,000 if it doesn’t maintain an “appropriate balance” of Australian and foreign singers.
The Man Who Created ‘Veep’ Explains The Joys Of Opera (Including Regie)
“Opera is the coming together of music, theatre, design, people and coughing in the greatest synthesis of art capable of collapsing at the beep of a watch alarm. … As the sounds soar and mingle perfectly, the evening makes sense, the stupidity is forgotten and the burglars and the rain and the hundred cars outside and the fight 40 yards across the street, and then someone sneezes, which is when, somewhere in the middle of the second act, in a radical switch to the American midwest, we return to a stage full of big people and papier-mâché cacti.”
‘#StopMorganLie’ – Morgan Freeman Has Become Russia’s New Favorite Piñata
Kyle Swenson reports on “the Russian reaction that greeted a two-minute online video [Freeman] recorded recently for a group hoping to keep alive concerns over Kremlin meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Freeman is being portrayed as a tool of the U.S. establishment trying to bring down Trump” – and as everything from a silly, high-strung thespian to a marijuana-addled old man to someone with a “Messianic complex.”
Germany Will Spend €400 Million To Renovate Sanssouci And Charlottenburg Palaces
“The funding through to 2030 is destined for museum sites including the former royal palace at Charlottenburg in Berlin, Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci complex in Potsdam and the Cecilienhof palace … Priorities include renovating dilapidated buildings and parks, increasing fire precautions and security, improving depots and working spaces, and upgrading services for visitors.”
Our Music Might Have Become Post-Genre. But Listeners?
Post-genre thinking seeks to move away from objective methods of characterizing music, instead focusing on a more subjective method within which music is viewed piece by piece with an emphasis on the intention and background of the composer. If a composer has no intent of writing within the “classical” genre label, then attempting to understand the piece through a classical lens is irrelevant. But what about the listener? There is no doubt that all listeners have pre-existing connotations surrounding certain types of sounds. Realistically, because we have discussed music in terms of these genre constructions for so long, a listener’s experience is likely to naturally include elements of: “This moment in this piece of music reminds me of X genre, which makes me think of Y connotation.”
A Botched Book Review Prompts Consternation At (And About) The NY Times
Many journalists and media observers have sympathized with Grigoriadis, who appears to have suffered an authors’ worst nightmare—she spent years writing a book only to sustain an unfair skewering at the hands of a reviewer who didn’t appear to fully comprehend the work. But the review of Blurred Lines has itself set off a drama within the halls of the Times, where the hand-wringing this week has been considerable, sources there told me. “It’s being talked about a whole lot,” said one. Another said, “It’s sloppiness, and also a question of whether or not the public response was adequate. It’s a significant error.”