trailerpilot

Two yes votes to continue, with no one dissenting, on my last Linkage post. Looks like this thing will be a thing, at least for as long as I do the thing.

Select Internet of the Week

It was a good week for dancing mayors. Boston Ballet received props from Thomas M. Menino, whose office of arts, tourism and special events waived theater rental fees for two free performances by both of the company’s ensembles, plus students, on March 23. Hubbard Street Dance Chicago announced that its 35th-anniversary season kickoff will be dedicated to Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, said he hopes that a May 18 kickoff for Big Dance 2012, choreographed by Wayne McGregor and possibly the next Biggest Simultaneous Dance Ever, inspires kids worldwide to participate in the arts long after the Olympic Games are over.

It was a good week for headaches at local universities. More than 125 top faculty members at the University of Illinois signed off on a vote of no confidence in school president Michael Hogan sent to U of I trustees. Hogan “lacks the values, commitments, management style, ethics, and even manners, needed to lead this University,” the letter stated (via @ColonelTribune). Protesting tuition hikes up for a board of trustees vote today, DePaul University students staged a sit-in dubbed #OccupyDePaul that began Thursday. Here’s a Storify from The DePaulia. Developing.

“We are so busy doing things with the work,” wrote C.S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism (1961), “that we give it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves.” It’s an important thought that music critic John Ephland includes at the end of his post for the NEA’s blog from last August, “Why We Still Need Professional Arts Critics,” which I’d missed until Tuesday. Via @magickaleva, who also shared a link to this gem from Charles M. Blow: “Rick Santorum wants to bring sexy back…to the 1950s.”

Related, via @zeekaytee: “What doesn’t make Rick Santorum want to throw up?”

“If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience,” says National Public Radio in its newly revised ethics handbook. “This is a fairly radical departure from NPR’s old model of allowing a right-wing flack and a left-wing flack to lie their butts off and forcing listeners to assume the truth is somewhere in the middle,” noted Matthew Fleischer for mediabistro’s FishbowlLA.

It’s “not a good time to treat the people who aid in the publication of critical information as spies,” wrote David Carr on Sunday. More here from HuffPo by Dan Kennedy, who summarizes: “[L]eak prosecutions often seem to be aimed more at punishing people for embarrassing the government than for genuinely damaging national security.”

Read 11 appreciations of David Lee Roth—including one specifically of his dancing—by John Dugan for The AV Club.

Via @LukeJennings1: Here’s Greskovic on “Kings of the Dance, Opus 3” at City Center for The Wall Street Journal.

Via @theballetbag: Here’s an interview with Gillian Murphy occasioned by her guesting with the Royal New Zealand Ballet, whose new artistic director ICYMI is Murphy’s fiancée, Ethan Stiefel. Here’s my interview with Murphy from April 2010.

Via @livewithart: Here’s a look at how the last Chicago Cultural Plan panned out. Here’s yours truly and fellow editors at Time Out Chicago on the 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan.

Via @tadejny and many more: Here’s that article from Crain’s New York Business about how dirt-poor most dancers are.

…Despite being incredibly dedicated and hardworking, viz. Pacific Northwest Ballet members participating in a snowy Seattle shoot for upcoming book Dancers Among Us. (Via the creator of Dancers Among Us, @jordanmatter. Here’s my interview with Matter about his September shoot in Chicago for the book.)

Via @bellafigural: Here’s the Dutch National Ballet’s video trailer for its 2012–13 season.

Via @pointe_magazine and many more: Here’s that simple, moving We Make Them Wonder video of Moldavian ballerina Georgeta Varvarici’s superhuman saut de chat.

Pointe also pointed out this notable (if hard to confirm) fact: The Bolshoi Ballet’s official channel is among the top 100 most-viewed on YouTube.

It was a big week for tech news thanks to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. One small, interesting item to surface was the announcement of design “stencils” for Android app developers.

Said @clydefitch of Occupy Wall Street’s call to cancel the Whitney Biennial: “Come on. No bigger fish to fry?”

Said @robertloerzel of Cook County judge Stanley Sacks’s ruling that Illinois’s “eavesdropping statute” is unconstitutional: “‘Duh’ was in the judge’s footnotes.”

Said @JudithFlanders of Robert Johnson’s hot-button defense of snarky dance reviews in the Star-Ledger: “False analogy: reviews 4 readers (gd) dont need 2b snarky”

Semi-related: “The boo is back,” writes Michael Simkins for The Telegraph.

In the latest gesture to ratify her 2010 Pulitzer Prize for a “refreshingly imaginative approach to dance criticism, illuminating a range of issues and topics with provocative comments and original insights,” @SarahLKaufman hashtagged this video of bellydance meets Irish step dancing thusly: #ShamrockShake

On Tuesday, I sent @joeltparsons the following: “This camouflaged comic bespeaks not speaking; it carries its closet, qua closet, on parade.” He responded in four hours thusly: “I’ll see your Katz and raise you a Montero. You seem to be pretty proprioceptively inclined.”

“If you sit still, bad things happen. The player’s job is to prevent this collapse.” Read “Change Gamers” by Dylan Walsh for Yale’s environmental-arts and journalism publication, SAGE Magazine.

BP announced Friday a $7.8 billion settlement with businesses and individuals who sued the oil company following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, delaying a trial set to begin Monday in New Orleans. “The deal does nothing to settle charges brought by the biggest player in the trial: the U.S. government,” Reuters reports.

Tweets of the Week

“When Baryshnikov/Ferri did balcony u knew Rom/Juliet wld have hot sex. Cojocaru/Kobborg, u know they’ll die #Sorrow&pity” —@JudithFlanders

“Dumb is like a motorcycle or blue hair: either it makes you hotter or more tragic. There is no in between.” —@ericreda

“History’s best compromises: 1) Nicorette 2) turkey bacon 3) intelligent design 4) secular humanism 5) moving walkways 6) sporks” —@KyDickens

“Wow the turbo tax instant chat help dude doesn’t know shit.” —@hopesicle

“It’s very important to honor and respect a recently-dead man. Just like #andrewbreitbart did with Senator Ted Kennedy.” —@tone_def