“Today, you couldn’t tear down a McKim, Mead & White building. The preservationists wouldn’t let you.” But the firm’s long tenure at the top of the architecture field wasn’t always guaranteed. “They were the Ralph Lauren, the Rolls-Royce of architecture. Then the modern movement started, and boy did they crash. From 1925, when white walls and European modernism began its takeover of architecture, McKim, Mead & White were poison to the profession.”
Tag: 11.14.18
Gotta Dance (Why?)
This Aeon Original video explores that unifying feeling of group ‘electricity’ that lifts us up when we’re enthralled by our favourite sports teams, participating in religious rituals, entranced by music – and, yes, dancing the night away.
‘The African Mahler’: British Comedian Pays Tribute To Britain’s First Black Composer
Lenny Henry: “Over the past few months I have been enthralled and captivated by the story of a man from Croydon in south London who died more than 100 years ago and who wrote one of the biggest musical hits of the [early] 20th century. He was a total genius – a bit like Prince, but for late 19th-century London rather than 1980s California – and his name was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.”
Netflix Is Releasing Its New Movies In Theaters Before Streaming Them — Not That You Could Tell
“For The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the new film from the Coen brothers and the first title Netflix is distributing this way, the exclusive theatrical release was something of a mirage” — one screen in each of three cities for four barely publicized days. The same thing is going to happen next week for Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. Film fans are not happy.
Identical Triplet Ballet Dancers From Cuba Ready To Take On The World
Angel, César, and Marcos Ramírez, now 18, had secure jobs dancing with the National Ballet of Cuba. But they gave them up to study at the Rock School in Philadelphia. Ellen Dunkel meets them. (includes video)
What Memorials Of World War I Should Really Focus On
Duty and honor? Patriotism? Rebecca Onion reminds us of the truth about “the war to end all wars”: it was bloody, cruel, and basically pointless. “How, then, to commemorate a useless war that shouldn’t have happened — a black hole in history?” Slate‘s resident history maven suggests that we have a look at some of the antiwar literature and advertising campaigns of the time.
Cellphone Addicts In The Theater? Here’s One Broadway Star Who Calls Them Out Right From The Stage
Fortunately, Mike Birbiglia doesn’t do it quite the way Patti LuPone does. And he’s playing himself in his one-man Broadway show, The New One, so he can talk to offending audience members directly without breaking character. Here, with audio of recent examples, he explains how and why he does it.
Wolfgang Zuckermann, 96, Helped Midwife Off-Off-Broadway Movement And Invented Build-Your-Own-Harpsichord Kit
Late in life, he opened an English bookstore in Avignon; before that, in London, he wrote anti-consumerism and anti-automobile books. But he made his biggest mark in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s and ’60s: he briefly ran the Off-Off-Broadway birthplace Caffe Cino, and he devised a kit that lets customers assemble their own harpsichords, enabling the modern revival and spread of the instrument.
National Book Awards 2018 To Sigrid Nunez’s ‘The Friend’, Jeffrey C. Stewart’s ‘The New Negro’
Alongside the fiction prize to Nunez’s novel about a bereaved writer and his Great Dane and the nonfiction prize to Stewart’s biography of philosopher Alain Locke, honors went to Justin Phillip Reed’s Indecency (poetry), Yoko Tawada and Margaret Mitsutani for The Emissary (translated literature), and Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X (young people’s literature). Isabel Allende became the first Spanish-language author to receive the lifetime achievement award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
OED’s 2018 Word Of The Year: ‘Toxic’
“The word was chosen less for statistical reasons, [the U.S. head of Oxford Dictionaries] said, than for the sheer variety of contexts in which it has proliferated, from conversations about environmental poisons to laments about today’s poisonous political discourse to the #MeToo movement, with its calling out of ‘toxic masculinity.'” The runners-up were “gaslighting” and “incel.” (Last week, rival dictionary Collins declared its word of the year to be “single-use.”)