CMU School of Drama


Sunday, March 29, 2015

NFTRW Weekly Top Five

Here are the top five comment generating posts of the last week:

Multitool in a hair-clip

Boing Boing: The $10 Monkey Business Clippa Mini Tools Clip is a hair-clip with a sawblade, trolley coin, wrench, phillips screwdriver, ruler, and eyeglass screwdriver.

 

The Myth of the Starving Artist

ArtistThink" “How nice for you to have an interest like art, but really, how are you going to make money from it?”

So many people I have met have shared a similar story with me. One where well meaning parents, teachers, or other authority figures tell them that their interest in the arts is “cute” or “great for a hobby,” but “what about a real job?”

Are Virtual Reality Headsets Too Immersive For Their Own Good?

Forbes: In the burgeoning world of virtual reality, to use is to believe. With few exceptions, I’ve found it takes but a quick demo on an Oculus Rift (or one of its growing number of competitors) for skeptics to realize how awesome—and awesomely immersive—the tech can be. Five minutes, and all your held-over-from-the-nineties notions of VR (and, as the show Community recently pointed out, its disastrous effect on nineties cinema) are likely to dissolve into wide-jawed yelps of “Awesome”.

A Hanging Garden That Floats Through Space to Meet Your Nose

gizmodo.com: Gardens are beautiful and all but they're almost always inconveniently located on the ground. Instead of stooping to smell the roses, this garden comes to you: A suspended, living arrangement of 2,300 flowers which rises and fall around viewers as they move through the space.
 

We Need More Crappy Plays

The Clyde Fitch Report: My first dog was a beagle named Bootsie, who used to do a hilarious and fascinating thing. When she was given a bone to chew, she would gnaw on it until she was tired, and then she would take it to some part of the room and “bury” it. By which I mean, she would “cover” it with imaginary dirt moved from all parts of the room with her nose. When it was buried to her satisfaction, she would settle down. But if anyone in the family looked at the bone, she would jump up, grab it and with great annoyance bury it again somewhere else in the room. Everyone was supposed to pretend that we couldn’t see it.

2 comments:

Alex Wanebo said...

I wanted to talk about the "Myth of the Starving Artist" article. I thought it made some very valuable points and I do think it is important for our culture to acknowledge the arts as a serious endeavor and be more supportive of it in general. It is, after all, primarily through the arts that culture is maintained and passed down. However, I found that this article came off a little condescendingly. At the end, the suggestion about getting a coloring book for those who question the validity of the arts seems fairly patronizing. I really appreciate the idea of showing people who have doubts about the arts in general what exactly it is that makes individual artists so passionate about what we do but I think that approaching this issue as though we have some great secret that we're choosing to share because 'they just don't understand' may ultimately distance more people than draw them in.

Eric Wiegand said...

Re: "We Need More Crappy Plays" article... The title of this article was a bit misleading, the point the author makes is more substantive than that. The author points out that the current climate in the theatre world is barely hospitable for new playwrights, these folks cannot make a reasonable living on their art. Theatre companies are spending their seasons on ubiquitous shows (i.e. Oklahoma, Rome and Juliet, etc.), creating a hegemony of classics. Theatre companies today leave very little room for new voices. I definitely cannot argue with the author's point, I just had never thought of it before. This article absolutely makes me want to support (with my time and focus) works by new playwrights, to actively seek the voice of modern theatre rather than settling for what we already know to be good. <54-102> 54-102 54102 Eric Wiegand