Why Do We Keep Making And Consuming Movies And Books About Steve Jobs?

Laura Miller: “When people feel compelled to tell each other the same story over and over again, there’s usually something about it they can’t quite work out. Each iteration promises, yet fails, to finally make sense of it. The life and work of Steve Jobs is that kind of story, and our preoccupation with telling and retelling it points to some sizable cracks in the American psyche.”

Aaron Sorkin’s Movies Make Waves, But Do They Make Money?

“Very few writers are Aaron Sorkin. Very few writers have worked as both TV showrunners and Oscar-nominated screenwriters while consistently maintaining a lively presence in the press. … One might’ve expected Sorkin to have reached peak cultural relevance in 2010 [the year of The Social Network]. But no: Aaron Sorkin does not peak, he just has increasingly brief plateaus.”

The Openly Gay Black Avant-Garde Composer Who Taught With Morton Feldman And Enraged John Cage

Julius Eastman studied piano with the great Mieczyslaw Horszowski at Curtis, got denied tenure at Buffalo, improvised an aria during Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, frequented S&M clubs, drove away his friends – and wrote extraordinary music with unorthodox notation and titles so provocative that they couldn’t be printed in programs.

Top Posts From AJBlogs 10.13.15

The Communal High of Twyla Tharp in Los Angeles
In advance of Twyla Tharp’s 4-day run at the Wallis Theater in Beverly Hills … a call went out for public volunteers to participate in a staging … read more
AJBlog: Fresh Pencil Published 2015-10-13

Ethan Hawke As “Chet Baker”
This seems to be the season for a new round of films based, more or less, on the lives of jazz trumpet players.  … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-10-13

Little Miss Wolfsbane
Dawn Powell and I go back a long way. I wrote about her in the New York Times Book Review in 1995, asking the same question that everybody asks: why isn’t so deliciously witty a writer more popular? … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-10-13

“Overwhelmed by Art”: My WSJ Article on Wadsworth Atheneum’s Dazzling Transformation
Can the Wadsworth Atheneum regain its former reputation as a midsized museum with outsized importance? … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-10-13

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