Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
There’s always a debate raging in the world of animation, whether it’s the presence of women in the writers room or a cartoon geek’s constitutional right to Szechuan sauce (thanks to the rather rowdy Rick and Morty fandom), but this weekend saw fandom butting heads over a rare topic: college. Instigated by ThunderCats Roar, the…
I could only have seen it there, on the waxed hardwood floor of my elementary-school auditorium, because I was young then, barely 7 years old, and cable had not yet come to the city, and if it had, my father would not have believed in it. Yes, it had to have happened like this, like…
“I’m free! I’m free!” Screenshot: Walt Disney Pictures For the first time in twenty years, as the Atlantic points out, a whole year’s worth of copyrighted works will enter the public domain in the U.S. on January 1, 2019. Under the terms of the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, works first published in 1923 will enter…
Ruling that graffiti — a typically transient form of art — was of sufficient stature to be protected by the law, a federal judge in Brooklyn awarded a judgment of $6.7 million on Monday to 21 graffiti artists whose works were destroyed in 2013 at the 5Pointz complex in Long Island City, Queens. In November,…
In street terms, what the Guggenheim just did — refusing an art request from the White House but offering instead the loan of a golden toilet — is a “sick burn.” According to Washington Post reporter Paul Schwartzman, the White House asked the New York museum if it could borrow a van Gogh painting, which…
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced that beginning March 1, 2018 their pay-as-you-wish policy will undergo a change. From now, you can only pay-as-you-wish with a New York state ID, and if you don’t have one you can pay out your asshole for what’s supposed to be a free museum full of cultural artifacts….
Young Jean Lee/Facebook A play called Straight White Men is about to make history, becoming the first play written by an Asian American woman to appear on Broadway. The show, written by experimental Korean-American playwright (and David Byrne and Kathleen Hanna collaborator) Young Jean Lee, revolves around three brothers (the aforementioned straight white men) visiting…
Detail of proposed grade crossing elimination, Saw Mill River Parkway at Tarrytown Road, 1931. Rendering by Michael Rapuano. Courtesy Thomas J. Campanella. The story: Robert Moses ordered engineers to build the Southern State Parkway’s bridges extra-low, to prevent poor people in buses from using the highway. The truth? It’s a little more complex. This summer,…
Cover Photo A Broadway opening-night picket of “Miss Saigon” in 1991. Credit Corky Lee The Battle of ‘Miss Saigon’: Yellowface, Art and Opportunity The musical — a love story set during the Vietnam War — ignited a fierce debate over the casting of a white actor in a Eurasian role. Now, it’s back on Broadway….
BTW The Trump administration plans to cut funding for the arts and privatize NPR and PBS, according to a new report from the Hill. As part of a plan to cut $10.5 trillion from the federal budget over the next 10 years, the new administration wants to slash spending for the departments of Transportation, Justice,…