In Norway, the show “Skam” has become a hot button for national conversations about consent, dating, pressure and much more. So let’s rephrase the question: Will the English-language versions of “Skam” be as careful to get everything about teenagers’ lives right?
Tag: 12.09.16
A Writer Says That Art Can – And Must – Turn Hatred Around
“Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Art can take something as dark as the Hay Institution for Girls, as hateful as that graffiti, and in applying the transfiguring power of ‘something else,’ it can give us the strength not to turn away and normalize, but to keep looking—and in doing so to question, provoke, understand, reject, change.”
The Tragic Fire In Oakland Is Going To Make Informal Artists’ Colonies Much More Rare
Artists band together in unsafe living conditions all over expensive urban areas like New York, the Bay Area, Los Angeles and more. Now property owners, freaked out by the Ghost Ship fire, are handing out evictions – and the artists have no place to go. (Meanwhile, the warehouses are becoming condos for tech workers.)
At Long Last, Daniel Barenboim Achieves One Of His Major Dreams
The Barenboim-Said Academy opened Thursday in the heart of downtown Berlin. “‘I’m sure you will believe me if I tell you that I once felt this day would never happen,’ he said. … The building contains a brand new concert hall, designed pro bono by Frank Gehry and named after Pierre Boulez, an avid supporter of the idea and a good friend of Mr. Barenboim.”
So, How Much Did You Know About Hitler Doing Speedballs?
Who knew that after somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 million books, movies, TV shows and documentaries about the Nazis, there was something left to learn? “Though elements of this tale have been told, the extent of narcotic consumption by Nazi soldiers and Hitler has surprised even those who have spent decades researching this era.”
Mika Kurosawa, The Godmother Of Contemporary Japanese Dance, Has Died At 59
Kurosawa lived in New York in the early 1980s and was deeply influenced by that city’s experimental dance scene. “She was rebelliously devoted to dance; the trappings of fame or popularity were antithetical to her approach.”
The Panel Mediating On Objects Stolen By The Nazis Says That Yes, A Rare Violin Is In That Group
The violin disappeared after its owner, a Jewish man who ran a music business in Speyer, couldn’t escape Nazi Germany and committed suicide; it reappeared in 1974.
Today’s AJBlog Highlights
- Amateur work On Facebook and Twitter I’ve been talking about bad graphic design in classical music. Why does bad design matter? Because we need a new audience. Our new audience comes — will come — from the … read more
- Looking for love in Bodunk In the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, I review a new off-Broadway musical, the stage version of The Band’s Visit. Here’s an excerpt. * * * As delightful as well-done big-budget musicals can … read more
Where Risk Lives – Increasingly Not In Big Institutions But In The Small Nimble Startups
Just as Hollywood studios have abandoned making movies that don’t promise blockbuster potential, so have major publishers narrowed their interests to “big” books. Increasingly, risks in new authors are taken by small, nimble presses with small staffs. They invest in these writers, and, when they become successful, bigger publishers snap them up.
Increasingly, “risky” authors, those who’ve been rejected over and over again by traditional publishers or dozens of agents, are being picked up by small presses whose modus operandi is to take risks on literature that is exciting, innovative, or that they deem important either stylistically or politically. Then the big publishers swoop in and profit from the hard work and risk-taking of the small presses.
That is a good thing, in a way, because it means everyone makes more money from the art and a wider audience is reached. But it does seem like big publishers are hedging their bets more and more often, operating as if they are not too big to fail. It is a shame that the heavy lifting is being left to those who are only big in ambition.
As our creative industries are being de-institutionalized, large institutions are less and less able to be nimble and experiment than are smaller startups without legacy costs.
Remembering Pauline Oliveros And Her Radical Vision Of Listening
Considered as a healing practice—or a “tuning of mind and body”—Oliveros’s “Sonic Meditations” are, to an extent, unique in the history of musical experimentalism. In these works, experiments were not conducted on the music; the music was an experiment on the self. Anyone searching today for the complete box set of “Sonic Meditations” won’t find it, because, as the composer wrote, “music is a welcome by-product” of this composition. The experiments remain in each listener. Oliveros’s aims were clear: these works were intended to be transformational, even therapeutic, enacting lasting changes on the body and mind.