“Actors of color who already have visibility in the mainstream want to maintain their platform. For Hollywood, these select few become representatives for diversity; they are able to play lead roles outside the usual tropes for people of color, while the rest as Viola Davis pointed out on Oprah’s Next Chapter, are on “crisis mode” competing over a “piece of cheese.” Competition is the implicit consequence of the narrow and reductive roles available. What choice do actors of color have except to play the game and start running for a seat?”
Tag: 11.13.15
How To Keep Yourself Humble When You’re One Of The Greats Of Jazz
“Take off all your awards. Go on the stage naked. Or your pajamas. And go out there and do what you can do to inspire something greater than yourself.”
English As A Language Is Super Weird, And We Just Need To Accept That
“Even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels ‘normal’ only until you get a sense of what normal really is.”
Can Architecture Help Heal The Rift Between Police And African American Communities?
“The police station Gang envisions would be more like a town center than a fortress. A gym, open to the public as well as the police, would rise across the street. Cops, teachers and firefighters would live in nearby housing. Some of the parking lots around the station would be transformed into parks. The idea is to have police rub shoulders with residents, building bonds of trust.”
How The Artistic Director Of The Toronto International Film Festival Moved Toward Art
“The art world at that time, for better or worse, was full of these people who had these long treatises on their work. I think the art world has changed a little bit since then – there’s been a return to more direct practice and less thinking through the art before you make the art. But when I was coming up, it was all about the ideas, and the ideas I was familiar with were from literature and film.”
Stand Aside, ‘Jane Eyre’ – New, Unpublished Charlotte Brontë Works Discovered
“Both the poem and the prose piece deal with characters from Angria, a fictional kingdom that Charlotte created with her brother Branwell, and wrote about in several stories, some of which were originally scrawled in small handmade books.”
What’s Under Malevich’s Black Square?
Examinations with a microscope reveal a racist joke.
Sotheby’s Offers Staff Buyouts
The auction house’s stock price has been steadily declining over the last six months. On Monday the company released its third-quarter results, showing that commissions from Sotheby’s auction sales during the period were $56 million, a decrease of 12 percent from the same period in 2014.
The World’s Most Musical Languages
“Tone languages are spoken all over the world, but they tend to cluster in three places: East and Southeast Asia; sub-Saharan Africa; and among the indigenous communities of Mexico. Why there and not elsewhere?”
Micro-complaining My Way Into Unhappiness
It was once considered unbecoming, or annoying itself, to moan publicly about trifling personal ordeals. Now, in a seismic shift for the moral culture, abetted by technology, we tolerate and even encourage the “microcomplaint”: the petty, petulant kvetch about the quotidian.