Connected technologies put pressure on our normative concepts like privacy, autonomy, and manipulation by changing the world so that our old concepts no longer apply and by pushing us to come up with new or revised concepts, creating conceptual confusion. – 3 Quarks Daily
Tag: 12.30.19
How The Cha-Cha Led A Refugee Couple From Boat People To Oscar Contenders
Chipaul and Mille Cao, who grew up as members of wartime Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese minority, met at a dance party just six months before the Communist takeover of the entire country; they fled separately and were apart for years. They ultimately reunited in Southern California, married, and took up competitive ballroom dancing — and now a 20-minute film about them, Walk Run Cha Cha, has made the shortlist for the Best Documentary Short Oscar. – Los Angeles Times
‘Her Invention Is Ceaseless, Her Influence Is Profound’ — Playwright Lucy Kirkwood Pays Tribute To Caryl Churchill
“In the course of a writing life that spans 60 years, she’s changed the dramatic landscape of two centuries, and evolved more than any other British playwright our conceptions of what a play even is. She’s even changed the way we write them down.” – American Theatre
Which Nights Sell Best For Dance And Classical Music?
In Pittsburgh, at least, it seems not to be nights at all: it’s weekend matinees, across the genres. Sara Bauknecht and Jeremy Reynolds get into the details. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Asia Gets Its First-Ever LGBTQ-Focused Streaming Service
“GagaOOLala brings more than 1,000 feature films, shorts, web series, and documentaries to people across Asia, where censorship and traditional attitudes mean there has been little in the way of gay content in the mainstream media. After launching in 2017 in Taiwan, a beacon for gay rights since becoming the first place in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage, it has expanded to 21 territories including several that still criminalise homosexuality.” – Yahoo! (AFP)
Even With Mega-Franchise Movies In 2019, Box Office Declined. Now What?
“The slide in revenues is still disappointing because it occurred at a time when Walt Disney Studios put nearly all of its major franchises on the field — a show of firepower that enabled the company to pulverize records, racking up more than $11 billion at the global box office. With an arsenal that includes Lucasfilm, Marvel, Pixar, and — thanks to its $71 billion acquisition of much of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — 20th Century Fox, Disney was able to control roughly 40% of the domestic marketplace.” – Variety
Why Do Other Art Forms – Books, Movies, TV – Make Fun Of Theatre?
As if theater weren’t already mocked enough for its hysteria and jazz hands, it now seems to be pop culture’s punching bag. – The New York Times
Jimmy Iovine: The Music Business’s Looming Problem
“Margin. It doesn’t scale. At Netflix, the more subscribers you have, the less your costs are. In streaming music, the costs follow you. And the streaming music services are utilities — they’re all the same. Look at what’s working in video. Disney has nothing but original stuff. Netflix has tons of original stuff. But the music streaming services are all the same, and that’s a problem.” – The New York Times
How The On-Demand Economy Is Changing Our Experience of Cities
“The 2010s were the decade the city became an App Store: an online marketplace where our choices were closely tracked, where that data became part of the products we were using, and where digital clusters of activity displaced real-world transactions. Yes, we still go downtown for drinks, meals, and shopping experiences. But, more and more, we live in cities of the cloud.” – CityLab
Smartphones Changed The Way We Document Our Lives
And that’s a good thing, not something we should be worried about. Having a camera in your pocket all of the time is “an opportunity to capture your own life more honestly—a way to remember what you were really like in one season of life, the mundane food photos alongside shots of scenic vacations or birthday parties. The mundane things you use your phone to document are the details that add up to a full life, what it was like to be alive right then.” – Slate