“Bong’s last two films, 2013’s Snowpiercer and 2017’s Okja, were his first to be made in English: they weren’t exactly misfires, either critically or commercially, yet both clearly had designs on being bigger deals than they were. … A globally minded film-maker with big-dreaming genre nous, he spent the last few years making a bid for mainstream Hollywood clout, only to finally make an international phenomenon from his own doorstep.” – The Guardian
Tag: 10.09.19
How Do You Translate The Life Of A Forgotten, Insane Swiss Novelist Into Dance Theater?
Marina Harss: “The material feels both so deeply literary and, at the same time, so utterly deflating. The subject is a solitary man” — Robert Walser — “whose writings tended to track the minutiae of his solitary life, and who died alone in the snow — this hardly sounds like something to dance about. But that is precisely what the choreographer John Heginbotham and the illustrator Maira Kalman have set out to do … [in] Herz Schmerz.” – The New Yorker
Surprise: For The First Time Since 1986, Vinyl Is About To Outsell CDs
Vinyl records earned $224.1 million (on 8.6 million units) in the first half of 2019, closing in on the $247.9 million (on 18.6 million units) generated by CD sales. Vinyl revenue grew by 12.8% in the second half of 2018 and 12.9% in the first six months of 2019, while the revenue from CDs barely budged. If these trends hold, records will soon be generating more money than compact discs. – Rolling Stone
The Met Opera’s New “Porgy”: Restoring An American Masterpiece
Joseph Horowitz: “The modernist view of Gershwin the gifted dilettante is no longer heard. Concomitantly, American music historians, for whom Gershwin once barely existed, have flocked to Porgy and Rhapsody in Blue. A burgeoning interest in the interwar fate of black classical music will surely promote new understandings of Gershwin as a necessary interloper between “classical” and “popular” genres severed by 20th-century aesthetic currents.” – American Scholar
The Time I Played Chess Nude With Marcel Duchamp
Eve Babitz: “I took the smock off, letting it fall beside me, but Julian kicked it far across the slippery floor, out of the way in a corner. I sat down quickly at the chess set and wondered if we could just pose or did we actually have to play, but Marcel — whose obsession with chess made him give up not only art but girls — was waiting for me to make the first move.” – Literary Hub
They’ve Rediscovered The Naughty Bits From Europe’s Most Famous Medieval Romance
Fragments of a manuscript of Le Roman de la Rose — containing a double entendre-filled episode about a pilgrim at a shrine — were found in a centuries-old book binding in the public records office of the English city of Worcester. – Live Science
MoMA’s Expansion Is ‘Smart, Surgical, Sprawling And Slightly Soulless’: Michael Kimmelman
“For all its intelligence and skill and its obvious desire to make the place feel friendlier, the expansion seems to me not to have solved the problem of the Modern’s ambience. … You may feel like you’re entering an Apple store. Everything is crisp and coolly engineered.” – The New York Times
The Real Test Of MoMA’s Expansion Will Be Traffic Flow: Justin Davidson
“MoMA is a machine for viewing art, and the success of this latest incarnation will be gauged by how many visitors the facility can process in any given day. … The 2004 expansion created escalator bottlenecks, Pollock and Picasso choke points, and the slightly desperate atmosphere of a shopping mall on Black Friday morn. This time, the architects … calculated [everything] to smooth the passage of humanity.” – New York Magazine
B-Boy-Turned-Ballet Dancer Teaches His Moves To His Company
Diego Ramalho grew up breakdancing in a small city in Brazil and reluctantly started taking ballet lessons at age 18. Eight years later, he’s a full member of Ballet Edmonton, coaching his colleagues in break-style movement for a new work opening this month. – CBC
The Problem With Museums That Try To Tell The Story Of Classical Music
Classical music institutions have a built-in challenge in trying to arrange exhibits for the public: Their default archival documents tend to be just the kind of dusty memento the stereotype is describing. – Washington Post