“Anyone who spends even a day with a professional dancer or a ballet troupe could likely come away and already have the core of a body horror flick ready just from seeing all the injuries strapped up and ignored, or hearing the stories of cut-throat auditions.” – Far Out

Ingram Library Services and Penguin Random House have announced a print-on-demand program designed to supply libraries with popular backlist titles.  – Publishers Weekly

The indie movie studio was, for a sizable set of Americans under 40 or so, about as cool as a studio could get. (You never saw anyone wearing a Focus Features hoodie, right?) Then A24 announced a $75 million deal with Google’s AI venture, DeepMind. The fan base is furious. – The Hollywood Reporter

Courtenay Finn is currently chief curator and director of programs at the Orange County Museum of Art, which merged with the University of California, Irvine last year. She has previously served as the chief curator at moCa Cleveland in Ohio, senior curator at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, and curator at Art in General in New York.

“I wanted to keep the party going. I wanted to keep the happiness and joy and explosions of laughter going into a dour part of our lives, not our childhood anymore,” Brooks recalled. “ – AP News

I playfully ask them, “Why do you have to see it?” But I know why. They have grown up seeing music as much as hearing it. With iPhones steeping the modern human being in images 24/7, listening to extended forms of music without visual illustration will appeal ever less. – The New York Times

In 1943, Rockwell painted a four-panel portrait of people waiting to see President Roosevelt. The artwork, called So You Want to See the President!, spent 40 years hanging in the West Wing; last year the White House Historical Association purchased the piece, which is now in a nearby museum. – USA Today

The Emmy Award-winning drama has also become an urgently needed Hollywood success story at a time when much of the local film and TV industry has left California for other states and countries. – Los Angeles Times (MSN)

The creative sector is Chicago’s third-largest industry and accounts for nearly 213,000 jobs, according to a new economic impact study released Thursday by Arts Alliance Illinois, a statewide advocacy organization. – WBEZ

I’ve found that some of the most rigid thinkers describe themselves as spectacularly flexible while the most flexible people are often unaware of their own adaptability. This is why, instead of relying on asking people how rigid they think they are, I began studying people’s unconscious thinking styles. – Psyche

After almost a century as a small private business, Sardi’s was officially acquired this week by the company that was already the restaurant’s landlord — the Shubert Organization, owner of 17 Broadway theaters. The legendary eatery has now closed for renovations and is expected to reopen in November. – Eater

Bettina Varwig’s research focuses on how 17th and 18th-century listeners responded to music. “When you read about how music affected listeners in Bach’s time, their testimonies are striking in their bodily intensity. Music contracted their innards and made their hearts leap.” – The Guardian

The new program, called Spark, will include grants, mentorship and marketing support, Suno said, as the company said it’s looking to “help more artists turn ideas into finished projects, connect those projects with fans, and build new opportunities to grow their careers both on and beyond Suno.” – The Hollywood Reporter

For years, there has been too much ballet at Lincoln Center, which I say as someone who loves the form. Modern dance is part of the center’s history, too, and now it is finally being given a stage. – The New York Times

A former child actor who trained as an operatic soprano, Blyth had a busy career in Hollywood through the 1940s and ‘50s and worked in television in the ‘70s. She’s best remembered for her Oscar-nominated performance as the “cheap and horrible” daughter of Joan Crawford’s character in Mildred Pierce. – The Hollywood Reporter

A researcher cataloguing the music collections of the Diocese of Bergamo discovered a four-page setting of the Vespers psalm Dixit Dominus, scored for three male voices a cappella, written by the young Donizetti sometime between 1818 and 1821. – Gramilano (Milan)

“Arkansas TV, formerly Arkansas PBS, is cutting and moving PBS news programming to make room for homegrown shows filmed in Arkansas, once again pulling the old switcheroo on folks who hoped their generous donations would prevent this very thing from happening.“ – Arkansas Times

From the late 1970s, she had a glittering 25-year career as a coloratura, from the Met to La Scala to Santa Fe and beyond. Mills then became an admired teacher and diction coach; from 2016, she was artistic director of the Livermore Valley Opera in the Bay Area. – San Francisco Classical Voice

“The Commonwealth Foundation asked writers to provide drafts, story outlines, manuscripts and other evidence of their creative process when investigating allegations of AI use surrounding this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize, director-general Razmi Farook has (said).” – The Bookseller (UK)

“The reductions amount to roughly five percent of the organization’s current workforce of 1,169 staff. Nine of the cuts will involve compulsory redundancies, with the remainder expected to come from unfilled vacancies, voluntary departures, and natural turnover.” – OperaWire

“The movie mogul still stands convicted of another sexual felony in New York and others in California, and he remains behind bars. But the New York rape charge had remained unresolved after an overturned conviction followed by two hung juries, … (and) his accuser said she could not bear to testify again.” – AP

A run of today’s stories shares a new chore: proving something was actually made by a person. The Commonwealth Short Story Prize spent its week clearing this year’s winners of suspicion that AI wrote them (The Independent). So when fabrication is free, certifying human becomes considerable work. It cuts the other way too. That feel-good clip of an audience member sight-reading at La La Land in Concert turns out to be considerably staged (The Guardian).

Meanwhile Hollywood studios are industrializing microdramas (The New York Times) that have taken over social media. The Wrap worked on making its own to show what AI can crank one out start to finish (Yahoo).

The New Republic nominates the 15 artworks that most shaped the country (The New Republic) — canon-making as a civic act in a year when even the Constitution is up for reinterpretation (Boston Review).

And in Paris, the Marquis de Lafayette has become an unlikely selfie magnet (MSN).

Doug

In France, feelings about him are more mixed than in the U.S. (For one thing, during and after the French Revolution, he favored a constitutional monarchy, not the most popular position then.) But an exhibition at France’s National Archives which tells Lafayette’s full story has become a hit. – The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)