“[Matt] Cain, the editor of Attitude magazine [a popular gay-male-oriented title in Britain], said the support for his book – which is on course to be the fastest-funded novel on [crowdfunding platform] Unbound – showed there was a market for a commercial novel about a gay man, even though publishers rejected it as ‘too working class, too 80s, too immersed in pop culture, and too gay’.”
Tag: 10.06.17
Seattle Classical Music Station KING-FM Lures USC Radio Group President As Its New Leader
Brenda Barnes succeeds longtime KING FM General Manager Jennifer Ridewood, who was at the helm of the station when it transitioned to a listener-supported public radio station in 2011. KING FM now has more than 15,000 members and last year garnered $4.4 million in revenue, up from $2.1 million in 2010, before the transition occurred, according to the station.
A Growing Tide Of Worry That Our Technology Is Fragmenting Our Brains
There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted. All of the time.”
Bill McKibben: I Quit When Si Newhouse Bought The New Yorker. I Was Wrong
Si Newhouse seems to have decided that the New Yorker was worth protecting, and that the way to protect it was to get out of the way. Remnick has written that he was left alone to manage the magazine. If it has become more business-savvy, sponsoring festivals and so on in a way that would have embarrassed Mr. Shawn, none of that seems to have diminished the quality or the integrity of the words on the page (or, as Mr. Shawn never could have imagined, on the screen).
The Leadership Shakeups In NY’s Downtown Dance
“From July 2016 to February 2017, directors came and went at five major contemporary dance hubs below 23rd Street: New York Live Arts in Chelsea; Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side; Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University in Greenwich Village; Gibney Dance Center, in TriBeCa and near Union Square; and the temporarily nomadic Performance Space 122 (PS122), whose East Village home, under renovation since 2013, is poised to reopen soon.”
How Did The Hogarth Shakespeare Project End Up With A Diversity Problem?
Some things work well – Margaret Atwood’s Hag Seed, Jeannette Winterson’s adaptations to the story of The Winter’s Tale (titled The Gap of Time) – but: “In a 2015 New York Times article detailing the Hogarth Shakespeare project, Alexandra Alter wrote that Winterson’s cover was, ‘a promising start to an ambitious new series from Hogarth, which has assembled an all-star roster of stylistically diverse writers to translate Shakespeare’s timeless plays into prose.’ As the series has gained more traction, it is hard not to notice the word ‘stylistically’ here.”
The Lion’s Jaw Festival Is All About Experimenting With – One Might Even Say Disrupting – Dance
And then there’s the networking of dance groups and individual dancers from across genres. “We want to try and bust open people’s ideas, … to create a container that is peer-based. We want people to say I’m a working artist and you’re a working artist and we’re going to share work.”
Canada Is Not OK With This New Netflix Deal
Netflix paid a lot of money – but it’s not going to meet Canadian content guidelines, and it will not make promises about French-language productions, either. How do Canadians in the TV and movie production industries feel? Hm: “In Canada, we have created regulations and rules by which companies are allowed to access our Canadian people and marketplace. Netflix and the other over-the-top services are not necessarily contributing to that content creation.”
Fantasy That Focuses On Africa, Not Europe, Is Booming Right Now
Writers including N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor – whose 2010 postapocalyptic Who Fears Death is being turned into a series on HBO – and, earlier, Octavia Butler and Ben Okri, have long been turning to traditions well outside of medieval Europe for their speculative fiction books, but now “there’s an enormous appetite for fantasy stories that feature diverse characters and settings and tackle contemporary social issues.”
The Identity Politics Of Modigliani
A new exhibit is centered on the artist’s decision to center his Sephardic Jewish identity-
a choice, because “Modigliani, a half-Italian, half-French Jew growing up in a nation equated with Roman Catholicism (Vatican City wouldn’t become its own state until nine years after Modigliani’s death), was a cultural mixed bag from the get-go.”