Bong Joon-Ho Returns Home From Hollywood And Makes His Masterpiece

“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

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

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