Anna Elise Johnson, Camp David, November 15, 1986, Reagan / Thatcher, 2011. Oil on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.

Gerhard Richter, more than Lichtenstein, was on Johnson’s mind while she painted deinterlaced, close crops of political speeches and summits between 1981 and 2011. But “a lot of people brought up Lichtenstein in my critiques,” Johnson tells me by phone, and there’s no doubt that her rendering of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s legs at Camp David, for example, has much in common with Lichtenstein’s black-and-white portrait of a car tire. “One can almost smell the rubber in this picture,” says exhibition cocurator James Rondeau of Tire (1962) during the audio guide for “Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective.” Likewise, one can almost hear Thatcher and Reagan’s shoes hitting the pavement in Johnson’s Camp David, November 15, 1986, Reagan / Thatcher (2011).

Faced with either painting, however, one is also confronted with a multitude of questions about representation, contemporary culture and painting itself. Lichtenstein’s Tire is about tires and yet, at the same time, isn’t at all. Johnson’s bifocal close-ups — she takes two slightly different points of view on the same scene, cuts them into narrow strips, then shuffles them together like playing cards — are and aren’t about political leaders or, in the case of Moscow, March 15, 2011, Blankfein / Medvedev (2011), titans of finance.

The Art Institute currently holds more than 160 Lichtenstein works, which museum Ditmer chair and contemporary curator Rondeau, with Sheena Wagstaff of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, culled over five years spent looking at thousands of drawings, completed paintings, sculptures and reproductions. Their show’s hall of mirrors is, for me, the chief reason to see it.

Roy Lichtenstein, Mirror in Six Panels, 1971. Oil and Magna on canvas. Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Seven “mirrors” hang in their own room, at eye level for most adults. From a series of nearly 50 mirror-related paintings Lichtenstein created between ’69 and ’72, this subset, given their own space and the fact that some of them face one another, is a kind of installation within the exhibition. The dramatically enlarged, isolated panels from comic strips are out of sight from most angles. Ditto workaday objects as portrayed in ’60s advertisements, and the painter’s late-career nudes and “Chinese” landscapes.

At first glance, this room doesn’t even appear to contain any paintings at all. The works are momentarily confusable with their non-art twins and, unless crowded by people, also aren’t suspiciously absent any reflections of their surroundings. (Try to be alone among them, even for just a second.)

“He’s not so much interested here in mirror-as-object,” says Rondeau for the guide, “although that certainly is a part of the fascination.” The mirror paintings are, he continues, “vehicles [for Lichtenstein] to examine, and to understand, what the graphic codes that signify reflection are.” Paintings themselves are, of course, reflections of their creator’s views onto the world. And Lichtenstein’s looking-glasses continue a tradition of mirrors in painting that includes, to name one example, Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez.

Painting convincing reflections has long been “a sign of technical virtuosity,” the AIC’s wall text reminds us. In witty response, Lichtenstein’s mirrors, though made by hand and unique, employ techniques used for mass reproduction, such as Ben-Day dots and halftone gradients. The retrospective’s mirrors also include their frames and, as paintings, are unframed. Said the artist, according again to museum text, “Making a painting that is also an object bridges, somewhat, the gap between painting and sculpture.”

Representations of usually reflective objects, on the cusp of painting and sculpture, facing each other in an otherwise empty room, reflecting nothing except concepts grappled with throughout centuries of art history: This is the genius of the hall of mirrors in “Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective.” It’s a room of ideas in line with what Rondeau and Wagstaff told press on May 11 were their goals for the exhibition: to begin a new trajectory rather than present closure, and to offer viewers questions, not answers.

“Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective” is on display through September 3 at the Art Institute of Chicago.

zoe | juniper, A Crack In Everything. Photo: Gia Goodrich

Diversities of all kinds are in the South Loop between September 13, 2012 and April 6, 2013. The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago’s next season lineup, which includes per usual a variety of related discussions, master classes and family matinees, features for example an intersection between Butoh, African dance and architecture; and the beginnings of a Grotowski-influenced physical theater cycle inspired by Marc Chagall. Single tickets and subscriptions are available starting July 9.

The work of five independent female choreographers from Africa comprises a kind of mini festival September 13–15, “Voices of Strength.” See Correspondances by Haitian-Malian artist Kettly Noel and South African dancemaker Nelisiwe Xaba, Sombra by Maria Helena Pinto of Mozambique, Quartiers Libres by Nadia Beugre of Cote d’Ivoire, and Madame Plaza by Morocco’s Bouchra Ouizguen. That’s followed by (glowing) September 27–29, the aforementioned Butafritectural bonanza, presented by New York’s Kota Yamazaki/Fluid hug-hug. The work’s six dancers are American, Ethiopian, Japanese-American and Senegalese and its score is by Koji Setoh.

Gallim Dance comes to town October 11–13. The NYC ensemble performs choreography by Andrea Miller, seen recently at the Dance Center performed by Ballet Hispanico and in repertory at Hedwig Dances. Gallim’s Chicago show will be one of two full-lengths, Blush (2009) or Wonderland (2010), to be decided.

The Seldoms, from Chicago and on a roll, follow October 25–27. An evening-length work, title TK, by Carrie Hanson continues her choreographic interest in current events, exemplified by last year’s Stupormarket and February’s This Is Not A Dance Concert. It’s the Seldoms’ 10th year and fellow local group the Chicago Moving Company’s 40th; the latter presents a new work by Nana Shineflug plus four revivals, from 1984–2001, March 21–23.

Between the two come three programs from both coasts. Columbia’s theater department cocommissioned The Grand Parade from Massachusetts project Double Edge Theatre, showing January 18 and 19. The first episode of that prenominate, Chagall-inspired cycle will include as many as five students as well as possibly puppetry, object work and circus arts. (Coincidentally, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s season opener is also inspired by Chagall.)

zoe | juniper is the collaboration between Seattle choreographer Zoe Scofield and visual artist Juniper Shuey (they’re also married). A Crack in Everything, the pair’s latest, runs February 14–16 and “uses dance, performance, video projection, lighting and text to examine liminal states of mind.”

It’s been more than a decade since Stephen Petronio Company last played Chicago; the New York group ends its absence March 7–9 with Underland, created in 2003 to music by Nick Cave. Closing the season April 4–6 is the return of Mexico’s Delfos Danza Contemporánea, memorable in its local debut (in the same space) in April 2009.

For further details, visit the Dance Center site or call 312-369-8330.

FootworKINGz, from left: Trevell Johnson, Charles “King Charles” Parks and Ukemosay Sanders. Photo: Brazilionaire

Two concerts in the past week brought ten dance ensembles together. Chicago Human Rhythm Project’s “Windy City Rhythms” gave the city a head-start on National Tap Dance Day (May 25); and DanceWorks Chicago and Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago shared a stage at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie.

The scale of the two programs and their collaborative natures introduced some pacing issues and minor hiccups. But overall, these were strong examples of arts partnership and cultural exchange. “Windy City Rhythms,” which I attended May 11 at the DuSable Museum of African American History, gave an enthusiastic crowd including many kids a whirlwind tour of percussive dance and hip-hop, genially emceed by CHRP artistic director Lane Alexander. FootworKINGz, M.A.D.D. Rhythms and CHRP group BAM! all performed twice during two acts. Ayrie “Mr. Taps” King, Boom Crack! Dance Company, Martin “Tre” Dumas III and the Bronzeville Lighthouse Charter School Tap Ensemble presented one piece each. While the last and Boom Crack!, plus the “BBF Crew” from M.A.D.D. Rhythms West were all recitalish to some degree — one girl shuffled onstage late — I enjoyed seeing young dancers perform alongside seasoned professionals. No doubt the kids learned a thing or two from the experience to boot.

FootworKINGz, featured in the otherwise horrid, seizure-triggering video for Nicki Minaj and Willow Smith’s “Fireball,” had the audience roaring after both of its brief numbers. The first, set to a juked-up mix of classic tracks including Cajmere’s “Coffee Pot (It’s Time for the Percolator),” was preferable to the second, whose soundtrack simply cut and pasted together familiar slices of mediocre pop from from the likes of Ke$ha and the Black Eyed Peas, and which suffered from a janky ending. You can’t argue, however, with the speed and showmanship of these dancers: Stephan Gregory, Donnetta Jackson, Trevell Johnson, Kenneth Livingston, Brandon Love, and Eddie Martin, Jr. Great footworkin’ is pure energy and FootworKINGz are a power plant.

Props to Alexander for programming a lineup that took us from the Percolator to his own Reflections, a premiere tap quartet set to three keyboard works by Bach, tenderly played by Joffrey Ballet accompanist Mungunchimeg Buriad. It’s a lovely work, which comes casually into being and then dissolves. I hope to see it again soon.

Soloists Dumas and King couldn’t have less in common. The “Mr. Taps” routine is a wild, sequined ride, King’s seemingly stream-of-consciousness, tenor tap riffs alternating with runs of seemingly stream-of-consciousness half-jokes. Dumas’s taps have a bassy weight to them, real heft and seriousness, and long phrasing. Both are fine artists and their differences only contributed to a show whose chief reward was its variety.

I saw six of the eight programs supported by the New Stages for Dance Initiative, which I detail here. My questions about the program when it was announced two years ago centered on whether it was a handout for venues in the guise of company support. When I asked Dance/USA executive director Amy Fitterer about New Stages last summer, she allowed that in a pilot year, “conversations like these are exactly the ones we need to be having. You’re absolutely right: There are going to be certain works of dance that might not fit in these particular [first-round] venues. There really is no one-size-fits-all.” There’s no word yet on whether New Stages will go another round in Chicago and, if so, what changes might be made to the initiative. If it does continue, I hope it fosters the kind of collaboration and exchange seen May 12 between DanceWorks and Muntu.

They’re very different dance companies, both stylistically and in their objectives. Muntu is in its 40th year of presenting and maintaining dances from Africa and the African diaspora. (It’s also commissioned choreographers such as Reggie Wilson and Ronald K. Brown, who’ve built fine contemporary work on this foundation.) DanceWorks is a grad school, if you will, that stewards early-career artists.

While their joint show began a simple tag-team affair, with the two companies alternating short works, it proved much deeper as it progressed. Three of 12 dances on the bill involved artists from both troupes, working together in three quite different ways. See(in) Me, by River North Dance Chicago alumna Monique Haley, featured a male-female couple from each group in choreography that employed multiple techniques. DanceWorks’ six members performed If Ever (an Ocean) Relinquished by Bay Area choreographer Alex Ketley, to live music by Muntu’s phenomenal percussionists. (The work has had multiple scores.) And a finale choreographed by Muntu artistic director Amaniyea Payne brought the artists together in celebration.

Here are the internets I found interesting during the past week, sorted by source and teased by pullquote:

From twitpic: “It was the first movie I acted in, if you don’t count being killed in the Kung-Fu movie ‘Ninja Turf.’ Love is more important than material possessions.” | From imgur via Reddit: “Man drills magnets into arm to mount ipod” | From Matt Richardson dot com: “Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera’s settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don’t output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.” | From The Atlantic Wire: “According to Germany’s Der Spiegel, German police shot only 85 bullets in all of 2011.” | From hashtag battle dot com: #love vs. #hate | From Guerrilla Semiotics: “The main difference between this Berlin audience and, say, the Melbourne audience which might never walk out of a boring performance, but will check phones like nobody’s business, is not that one is rude and the other not…but that one engages, and the other disengages from the social, communal nature of the encounter.” | From WJXT-TV via MSNBC: “They feature a hoodie with crosshairs aimed at the chest. A bag of Skittles is tucked in the pocket and a hand is holding a can resembling iced tea.”

From The Guardian:

“Gay rights in the US, state by state” | “We, as a city, are in the throes of a full on civil rights crisis.” | “One participant in the program said police got him ‘high as fuck.’ ”

From Metro Weekly’s poliglot blog: “But, that is not [sic] the circumstances in which he makes these comments.” | From Mark Twain, via the hairpin: “I suppose there is nothing like it in heaven; and not likely to be, until we get there and show off.” | From the Kuwait Times: “Different professions have different tastes.” | From the Idaho Statesman: “Two days of record high temperatures and two days of record rainfall the same week in late April sent 26,000 cubic feet per second surging into the Boise River dam system.”

From YouTube:

“She appeared in Higglety Pigglety Pop! What am I saying? She appeared in every book I did.” | “Rare footage of Steven Spielberg directing his cast and crew on the set of Jurassic Park in 1992.” | “Alinea chefs prepare a new course comprised of 86 individual components.” | “Double Oh Double Oh” | “When you look down…and you look up, that is, for me anyway, the most important in dance.” | “Johan Kobborg on pointe!”

From Kickstarter: “He Said She Said That’s What She Said” | From The Daily Beast: “Are the banks too big to jail—or is Washington’s revolving door at [sic] to blame?” | From Bits of Freedom: “Digital rights movement Bits of Freedom calls upon other countries to follow the Dutch example.” | From Dance Spirit: “Those legs! That panache!” | From Gawker: “AJ and Nick are just play-fighting to get pageviews.” | From ArtsJournal blog Artopia: “Art critics never appear anywhere before noon.” | From The Week: “The classiest flash mob ever?”

From The New York Times:

“Houses that sold for $1 million before the crisis have been turned into grow houses, equipped with the high-intensity lights, water and air-filtering systems necessary to produce potent, high-quality marijuana.” | “It may just involve just a couple of mouse clicks, or maybe just one mouse click, but the point of that mouse click, a major point of that mouse click, is to inform others that you like whatever that means.” | “A chandelier hangs over the table, but it’s not turned on; his computer provides the only light.” | “The dual explosions forged a hellish landscape of incinerated corpses, burning vehicles and a billowing plume of smoke visible throughout Damascus.” | “What’s missing? The outrage.” | “For years, Anne and Miguel have struggled to understand their eldest son.” | “Dancers wore costumes designed by Rodarte’s Kate and Laura Mulleavy and Gilles Mendel of J. Mendel, with Swarovski earrings designed by Jamie Wolf.” | “He never screams at us. He never raises his voice. He makes you feel like you’re capable, and it’s like: Just do it. It’s not a big deal.” | “ ‘Amtrak tells me they have more delays here than anywhere else in the system.’ More delays than anywhere else in the Chicago area? No, he explained. ‘In the entire United States.’ ” | “ ‘I am tir-ed, I am tir-ed,’ she chants in a sing-song, childlike rhythm.” | “If you live in the suburbs of Chicago, where I’m from, vampires go crazy and start feeding on squirrels.”

From Interchange Project: “How do you do great work if you’re always being interrupted?” | From GigaOM: “The format of a single device does not change the fundamental ecosystem underneath it, and this shiny tablet has taken media companies’ eyes off of the ball.” | From the Chicago Reader: “If only it were so simple.” | From A Good Day’s Work: “I started this project because while it is not considered to be among the most ‘beautiful’ of Chicago’s streets, Western Avenue is a perfect place to document the humanness of Chicago, the positive and the negative.” | From McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Respectful Yo Mama Jokes.

Inbox zero.

This blog is 400 posts old as of this you’re reading right here. (It’s been 175 weeks since my first post, for the record.)

Now, I ain’t tryna be precious about it, I’m just sayin’. Let’s round up ten posts you dear readers have particularly liked, or hated, or whatever — clicked on a lot — and then it’s back to work for the both of us.

“make money but don’t work too hard — make somebody else pay to make it — and don’t smoke too much but drink enough to relax, and stay off the streets”
February 8, 2009

“It’s all very funny and easy and the characters are beautifully drawn, pinned-together muslin mockups of odd interests, irrational anxieties, raging hormones and idle minds.”
February 21, 2009

On Two Experiences Yesterday Evening, Specifically Dean Wareham’s and Britta Phillips’ Concert at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Being in a Car Accident Placing Around 6 Or 7 On A 1–10 Scale of Car-Accident-Seriousness.
March 9, 2009

My review of Orpheus and Eurydice by Compagnie Marie Chouinard remains popular. Could the photos of scantily clad performers have anything to do with that popularity? Ha! What do you think this is, the internet?
April 18, 2009

Here’s a review of Cupola Bobber’s Way Out West, the Sea Whispered Me. Damn that was a good show.
April 19, 2009

To this day, I’ve reviewed Nederlands Dans Theater only once.
June 17, 2009

This is my first in-depth look at the choreography of Julie Mayo. Keep an eye on this blog for a follow-up with Mayo about her recent programming venture, and with Jessie Young, a performer-collaborator on the project.
August 30, 2009

This interview with Edward Villella was published on the eve of Miami City Ballet’s first performances in Chicago proper.
September 25, 2009

This interview with Hema Rajagopalan was published on the eve of Natya Dance Theatre’s 35th anniversary.
September 26, 2009

This is a review of EMPIRE (Art & Politics) by Superamas.
October 6, 2010 

Whether this is your first or your 400th visit to trailerpilot, thanks so much for reading. And thanks to Sauce for the source image above and for her thoughts upon her 400th blog post, not unlike my own today. Cheers.

It’s been nearly a month since the last Linkage post, so this is a big one. Without further ado, here are the more interesting links I emailed to myself between April 9 and May 6, 2012:

“Why limit standard crediting practice to the visibility of a face,” asks Sarah Maxfield in her post “Worth Noting” for The Performance Club, “when dance as a medium is about the body as a whole?” Maxfield asserts that “the [photo] caption is just a small symptom of a much larger cultural dismissal of the body and those who have expertise in body-related work,” which is absolutely correct.

There will be “a bloodbath of nonprofit failures,” warns Brooklyn Philharmonic CEO Richard Dare, “unless we undertake fundamental structural reform of the nonprofit business model itself.”

“No one was more influential in shaping the arts and humanities in the ’50s and ’60s” than W. McNeil Lowry of the Ford Foundation, according to Rockefeller Archive Center vice president and director of research and education James Allen Smith. The Center recently opened Lowry’s correspondence and other Ford Foundation archive materials to researchers.

There are many beautiful moments worth seeing in this video of a rehearsal for Epode (1979) by Gerald Arpino, featuring Joffrey Ballet dancer Patricia Miller. At 2:50, there is also an absolutely classic ballet-rehearsal moment.

Vanessa Quirk, writing for arch daily, muses about what architecture critic Paul Goldberger’s move from The New Yorker to Vanity Fair might really mean. “The ‘critic’ may be dead,” Quirk concludes, “but the conversation is only just beginning.”

Alok Jha, writing for The Guardian, traces the beginnings of a revolt against high fees for access to the contents of academic journals.

Jim Muir, writing for BBC News, notes that in Syria, “the observers are being expected to help create the peace they are supposed to be monitoring.”

Filling in for Glenn Greenwald at Salon, Jesselyn Radack looks at whistleblowing in the Obama Era.

“Procedures are procedures,” writes Larry Rohter in his report for The New York Times on difficulties foreign artists encounter when booking engagements in the States.

Trajal Harrell “wondered why Judson was an accepted part of dance history and voguing wasn’t,” Andrew Boynton explains in a blog post for The New Yorker.

“One can only live on a diet of ramen and unrealized potential for so long,” Nina Metz acknowledges in her Tribune story about Chicago actors assessing the relative verdancy of coastal lawns.

“How Drinking Makes You More Creative” is the the immensely clickable headline for Whet Moser’s April 12 blog post for Chicago magazine’s The 312. Semi-related, “most gay men are alcoholics,” states Stephin Merritt in this CBS News profile. That’s a blanket statement, of course, but like most songs by Merritt’s band The Magnetic Fields, it makes for a good story. Tangentially related: Adam Rathe recently assembled for Out magazine an oral history of queer punk.

Charles Isherwood’s review of Calixto Bieito’s Camino Real for the Goodman Theatre “is a good example of a negative review that explains what failed thoroughly,” tweets Monica Reida. She’s right.

“SO COOL!” tweets Nina Garcia about photos Stanley Kubrick took on the New York City subway in 1946, for LOOK magazine. She’s also right.

Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki recently left the board of his own foundation “to avoid being a lightning rod for criticism and government attacks that would undermine its work,” report Shawn McCarthy and Oliver Moore for The Globe and Mail.

There’s a “shortage of properly cultured people in rich circles” in the United Kingdom, according to Princess Donatella Missikoff of Ossetia, better known as Donatella Flick. That’s according to Ismene Brown’s interview with the cultural patron.

“If you’re going to use the language of curating as greasepaint for staging music gigs in art museums,” writes Dan Fox on the Frieze blog, “at least follow through on all the conventions of exhibition making and allow the opportunity for as many people as possible to see the entirety of whatever complex-layered-performative-retrospective-exhibition-video-installation-event-conference-bar-mitzvah-Renaissance-Fayre-knees-up it is you’re putting on.”

“We met at the Super Shop,” begins Tony Oursler’s remembrance of Mike Kelley in Artforum.

“Sci-fi has always been a kind of funhouse mirror for our dreams and anxieties,” observes Zac Thompson in his Reader review of Bailiwick/New Colony musical Rise of the Numberless.

In an editorial for The Washington Post, Erik Wemple argues that “anyone who might feel ‘constraints’ about disclosure of their opinions shouldn’t be mucking around with the highest honors in the [journalism] industry.”

In an article for The American Scholar, Pamela Haag observes how “the proliferation of a cloying, saccharine culture” might be responsible for “less forgiving, meaner attitude[s] in public life.”

Want maps of jazz clubs on the South Side of Chicago between about 1915 and 1940? Here you go. Want a massive overview of various consumer-technology ecosystems? Here you go. Want a bunch of photos of Chicago at the turn of the last century? Voilà. Want some photos of megacities today? Check ’em out, yo.

On April 16, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America published the study “Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal.”

On April 18, The Guardian published Judith Mackrell’s interview with choreographer Angelin Preljocaj.

On April 20, design blog Colossal brought to my attention the awesome fact that some German garbage men are using Dumpsters as giant pinhole cameras.

On April 22, New York magazine published its feature package “How to Make It in the Art World.” Start with this essay by Jerry Saltz, “Reject the Market. Embrace the Market.”

On April 27, Apollinaire Scherr reviewed Gideon Obarzanek’s Faker for the Financial Times, and John Rockwell shared his observations from a “three-week cultural odyssey through Western Europe” in The New York Times.

On April 29, Steve Sucato reviewed BJM Danse for Dance Tabs.

Thankfully, Flaunt preserves for online the print layout of Marina Harss’s profile of David Hallberg, with striking photos by Tetsuharu Kubota.

Thankfully, there is a successful new example of narrative ballet, according to Luke Jennings of The Observer. Clement Crisp dissents in the Financial Times about the work, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s A Streetcar Named Desire, for Scottish Ballet.

Something I’ll always regret not seeing in person: William Forsythe’s Artifact performed by the Royal Ballet of Flanders. While beautiful, these photographs of the production by Jane Hobson are so much salt in the wound.

Someone I never saw conduct in person, but who waved the baton at recorded performances I watched countless times growing up: Hugo Fiorato. The New York City Ballet conductor died on April 23; here’s the Times obituary by Paul Vitello.

Something that exists: a 2½-ton, marble Manhattan.

Some endings here: of artists’ ouevres, and of films.

Recently Found Among Digital Notes to Self

David Lynch’s “Crazy Clown Time”

The Stage’s survey of fallout triggered by Arts Council England cuts

Education Week’s rundown of the effects of a newly implemented federal requirement for calculating high-school graduation rates

Roberta Smith’s exasperated response to Morley Safer’s exasperated response to Art Basel Miami Beach

Phil Rosenthal’s look at the state of Groupon

Jeff Ruby’s Nutraloaf taste test

Zac Thompson’s thoughts on church

Brent DiCrescenzo’s appreciation of early-’90s hip-hop

A roundtable chit-chat among regular dance critics for The New York Times and commenters

A one-on-one between a singer and a president

Maybe the best example yet of James Cameron’s perfectionism

What might’ve been a weightless reading by Evgenia Obraztsova and Matthew Golding of the adagio from Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux, were it not for molasses poured into the orchestra pit

A Balanchine reading closer to the source

Vowels and avant-books

Misha and Liza with a Z and Norwegian subtitles

Justin Vivian Bond’s “Patriot’s Heart” and Jason A. Heidemann’s Time Out Chicago story on Bond

“Changes that appear to give [Ariana] Huffington more authority within the closely watched media company” that bears her name

The end of Ai Weiwei’s brief experiment in self-surveillance-as-political-statement

The call for entries for an art exhibition in Times Square

Andrew Beaujon’s observation about the gender breakdown among National Magazine Awards nominees and his follow-up after speaking with ASME chief executive Sid Holt

Sarah Leonard’s essay on transparency at The New Inquiry

Marcus Gilmer’s investigation of his feelings about the Occupy movement

Barbara Brotman’s investigation of how weed has evolved and another bit of old news

Rick Perlstein’s thing about Rahm Emanuel and Whet Moser’s response to that thing

Tim Weiner’s obituary for Mike Wallace and Brian Stelter’s roundup of reactions to Wallace’s death and another roundup of reactions on Mashable plus clips from some notable interviews

David Carr’s catalogue of a baronial trend in newspaper ownership

A catalogue of a different sort

Lourdes Lopez’s new job

Tamara Rojo’s new interest

Middle America’s new moves

Debbie Harry’s once-high-tech portrait

What Chloe Angyal jokingly labeled OWS with better choreography

What Pointe magazine termed a strange, confusing, fascinating story

No, you didn’t miss anything—there was no Linkage post last weekend. And although this one represents a full two weeks’ worth of internetting, much of what I sent myself within that span is now stale. Still fresh enough, in my opinion, for consumption today are the following items, listed by date of birth.

March 18: The New York Police Department issued a press release in response to “the critics” and an unspecified editorial in The New York Times.

March 19: Constance Hale discussed “the sentence as a miniature narrative” at The Opinionator.

March 20: Claudia La Rocco tweeted her review of a very interesting-sounding performance by the Martha Graham Dance Company at the Joyce.

March 21: Laura Barnett talked with Wayne McGregor for The Guardian about dance and the internet.

March 22: Warrick Carter, president of Columbia College Chicago, probably had a long day.

March 23: My colleague at Time Out Chicago Jake Malooley compiled evidence of a “world-class city complex” among Mayor Rahm Emanuel and some of his associates. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, probably, dropped a new single.

March 24: Apollinaire Scherr profiled choreographer Alexei Ratmansky for the Financial Times. Luke Jennings of The Observer wrote about the Royal Ballet’s boarding school, White Lodge, triggering a volume of comment far exceeding what usually follows articles about dance (nothing).

March 25: Frank Rich argued that the Republican Party has “a serious problem with women.” A performance event called “Bond on Blonde” was held at MoMA’s PS1 outpost in Queens. Big Art Group later posted a wrap-up and photos; Time Out New York later published a slideshow.

March 26: Sindya N. Banhoo pointed out new research on kinesthetic response in dance viewers. Adam Parker provided an update on turmoil at Charleston Ballet Theatre for The Post and Courier. Downton Arby’s happened and Outlook India published Arundhati Roy’s feature titled “Capitalism: A Ghost Story.”

March 27: Ramsin Canon blogged about “the domestic infection of empire.” It would’ve been Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 126th birthday; The Guardian published Steve Rose’s summary of pendulum swings of opinion about the architect.

March 28: Claudia La Rocco hashed out Coda with its creator, Yve Laris Cohen. Ethan Zuckerman got me to link to one last thing about Mike Daisey. Deadline reported that Charlie Kaufman, whose skull protects one of my favorite minds, will publish a novel.

March 29: Sheri Candler asked the question, “Is trendy a dirty word in ballet?” Diablo Cody interviewed Sarah Silverman in the Red Band Trailer.

March 30: Roslyn Sulcas profiled Sylvie Guillem for The New York Times. Whet Moser blogged for Chicago magazine about dissing your boss on Facebook. Julie Klausner posted her How Was Your Week? interview with Sharon Needles.

March 31: Joffrey Ballet dancer Fabrice Calmels posted on Twitter a photo of rehearsal. I published at Time Out Chicago’s Unscripted blog my review of Mystical Bootcamp and Under the Roses.

March 16, 2012: Daiseyaster Strikes

Shit met fan on Friday, when a tense episode of This American Life and advance press release revealed that key details about The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs were fabricated by its author-performer, Mike Daisey. Amongst the wreckage is a canceled April 7 performance of the consumer-electronics industry exposé / embellished monologue in Chicago.

Predictably, this most SEO scandal of all time—which erupted almost simultaneously with sales of Apple’s new iPad—triggered a frenzy that functioned as a kind of straw poll on ethics, standards and best practices in journalism.

Tweeted Anne Elizabeth Moore, no stranger to performance created to comment on overseas mass-manufacturing methods: “And now I’m unfollowing journalists who claim that there’s a natural, just divide between journalism and entertainment #knowyourhistory”. She added later, “Daisey just made it harder for those of us who do creative journalism.”

Tweeted Claudia La Rocco: “Using a source to fact-check that source is like using a word to define that word.”

Tweeted Patrick Thornton: “If you ever say to yourself, ‘maybe we shouldn’t run this story,’ you shouldn’t run it. Not when it involves sourcing.”

Chicago Tribune theater critic Chris Jones’s response states that artists “make things up in service of their broader point. Their subjective broader point. That’s why ‘This American Life’ made a mistake in airing Daisey’s monologue as fact. And it’s why Daisey made a mistake in accepting the offer.”

Tweeted @nickkeenan, in two parts: “What Daisey did one day to get us to remember people that suffer for our wealth, Murdoch & others do all year for political control. Outrage should always be tempered with perspective and the search for truth.”

In an unsparing post for Reuters, Jack Shafer wrote that “everybody who cares about real journalism owes a debt of gratitude to [Rob] Schmitz,” the Marketplace reporter in China who lifted the rock covering the squirming, creepy-crawly questions obscured by Daisey’s opacity about the piece’s accuracy. Expressing his doubt that Daisey would acquit himself during the TAL episode “Retraction,” which had not yet aired, Shafer added, “Liars come up with all sorts of justifications when caught.”

Tweeted @dansinker of @MayorEmanuel fame: “Is the difference between Sedaris’s ‘truth’ and Daisey’s ‘truth’ just the stakes?” Good answers followed.

Tweeted Alison Cuddy: “mike daisey’s story is all-american: believe strongly enough that your end is good + you can ignore the means by which you’re getting there”

“We have different notions of integrity, [Daisey] and I,” wrote Bob Garfield for The Guardian.

On TechCrunch, John Biggs called Daisey “a droning Woody Guthrie whose intentions were good but whose rigor was lacking,” then goes on to add that “We can learn from [Daisey’s] example, at least in terms of consuming less and reducing our endless neophilia.”

Tweeted Tony Adams, artistic director of Chicago’s Halcyon Theatre, with characteristic wit: “So wait, NPR lied about George Clooney being arrested for masturbating while vandalizing an Apple store with a Daisey?”

By 7:24pm, like many, theater actor Arian Moayed was worn out: “Clooney arrested, Kony guy masturbates, Daisey lied & Olive Joon licked Lazarus at school after trying to kiss him. Enough, Mar 16, enough.”

Pre- and Non-Daiseyaster Internet and Choice Tweets of the Week

Two articles to read about the 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan: Lauren Weinberg’s in Time Out Chicago and Christopher Bentley’s in The Architect’s Newspaper.

On Friday, @noz posted this photo of a quote from painter Lisa Yuskavage.

On Sunday, Anita McNaught filed her first report from inside Syria and David Carr published an article about this thing I’m doing right here. The next day, the Providence Journal published 4,400 words of semi-related steam blown off by Harper’s publisher John R. MacArthur in a Delacorte Lecture at Columbia University on February 9; and Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, wrote that “the problems with online attribution aren’t due to a lack of syntax: they’re due to the economics and realities of online publishing.”

Thomas B. Edsall got graphic in his March 12 blog post for The New York Times, which argued that “the class-reinforcing trends of higher education pose an acute dilemma for the American political system.”

@brianstelter on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon: “.@jeremyscahill asks: why is the U.S. keeping a journalist in prison in Yemen, & why isn’t U.S. media covering it?” along with a link to this article by Scahill in The Nation.

Via Evan Hill: Seventy-five people including policemen and Masry officials have been charged in connection with the violence in Port Said, Egypt on February 1.

Last year was a big one for ridership on Chicago transit, according to the Sun-Times. Too bad the CTA continues to be horribly suckerrific.

“Horribly suckerrific” pretty much sums up Richard J. Evans’s review for the New Statesman of Hitler: a Short Biography by A N Wilson.

“People’s capacity for bullshit is rapidly diminishing,” delcared Brad Frost in his article Tuesday for A List Apart.

There’s a “lack of standards throughout journalism except at the Reader,” according to Michael Miner of the Reader.

Dana Fouras is “a dancer of genius,” according to Ismene Brown.

Tuesday gave the internet Shakespearean spam by Megan Amram.

Monday took from the realm of the living performance-artist Tom Murrin.

Lindsey Dietzler wrote a remembrance for In Our Words of queer Chicago artist and UIC MFA student Mark Aguhar, who also died on Monday, unexpectedly. Here’s an item from Austinist (Texas); here’s another from The Awl (New York). Aguhar’s death doesn’t appear to have been acknowledged by any local media outlets. You can donate here to Aguhar’s family and help cover costs associated with her passing.

On Monday, London’s Royal Ballet announced the live vocalists for a new Wayne McGregor creation opening April 5, to songs by Mark Ronson and Miike Snow’s Andrew Wyatt orchestrated by Rufus Wainwright, with costumes by Gareth Pugh. Prediction: Carbon Life: The hippest ballet event of 2012. Brown thinks it could be a sign of things to come at Covent Garden.

One more from Ismene Brown: this Q&A with Jonathan Moulds, arts benefactor and president in Europe at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

La Rocco loved talking with choreographer Reggie Wilson. So did I. Through a Joyce Foundation grant, Columbia College Chicago is a partner in the creation of his new work.

Gia Kourlas interviewed Robert Swinston about a possible resurrection of sorts of the Cunningham company in France.

Deborah Jowitt went in-depth Sunday on Batsheva Dance Company, which I’m seeing perform tonight and again tomorrow afternoon. Here’s Evan Namerow’s interview with Ohad Naharin for The Brooklyn Rail.

Marina Harss went in-depth Thursday on the Paris Opéra Ballet, which performs for the first time in Chicago this summer.

“An extraordinarily brave evening of dance-theatre: but for whom?” asked Judith Flanders on Tuesday in the dek of her review of DV8. Sarfraz Manzoor advanced the company’s new piece, Can We Talk About This? that same day for The Guardian.

“Why are teachers so upset?” —The title of an open letter to Deborah Meier published March 13 by Diane Ravitch

“Who owns choreography?” Dance Teacher has answers.

Professional musicians took exception on Tuesday to being excepted from performances by the Paul Taylor Dance Company.

A man took exception to Rahm Emanuel upon the mayor’s acceptance of an award from New Trier High School.

Two men kissed at a rally for Rick Santorum at Christian Liberty Academy in Arlington Heights.

Via @youvecottmail: A possible future for arts journalism, one that “isn’t pretty: one where you can only contribute to it as a hobby, not as a paying career.” Via the same source, details on how you can buy yourself a whole big ol’ opera, should the mood strike.

In honor of what would’ve been the dancer’s 100th birthday on March 13, @pointe_magazine tweeted this video of Igor Youskevitch in Invitation to the Dance (1952).

Alastair Macaulay reviewed Ratmansky’s Le Corsaire for the Bolshoi as filmed for live broadcast to cinemas. Repeat screenings of it in the area are April 4 and 8 at the Wilmette Theatre.

Bored? Draw a Stickman. (via @Lisekit)

On Monday, @MaleDancerProbz posted a “rage comic” about dance belts.

On Monday, @realcadymcclain posted the Doonesbury strip that was pulled from numerous newspapers. @mariabustillos and others linked to a PDF of “All the Doonesbury shaming-wand strips on a single page” on the Poughkeepsie Journal site, which document now appears to be gone.

“Most Americans who claim to be ‘Irish’ are about as Irish as a piñata filled with borscht.” —@robdelaney

“Shark jumped; shark died; boat and skis, long ago rotted; lake dried; shark fossilized, excavated, displayed as museum piece.” —@TCMcG, about Chicago media’s coverage of The Rod Blagojevich is Going to Prison Farewell Tour 2012; here’s Robert Feder on the circus for Time Out Chicago

“Most people are so busy trying to get their story straight they don’t even know what their story is.” —@mxjustinVbond

“Librarians are the SENTIENT INTERNET.” —@logandecker

“Rarely hear fans of digital ragging on printed books. Only hear the opposite from authors high on their own supply.” Follow-up tweet: “(Perhaps not ‘only’ but ‘most often.’)” —@ourmaninchicago

“I was asked ‘when did you feel you became an artist?’… I answered ‘isn’t that the perpetual search? Rarely feel like I am am one’ ” —@DavidHallberg

“I love how George [Clooney] has to wash off the shame of Oscar season every year by doing great things for all peoples in the world.” —@AwardsDaily

“Dear DARPA Claus: All I want for Xmas is an eight-cylinder, collapsible black tungsten Robo-Incubus with both the Zumba and stun-baton apps.” —@xintra

“ ‘What is love?’ – Haddaway on Jeopardy!” —@meganamram

“Thanks to Twitter, the story about the Goldman dude quitting now seems like it happened in 1835.” —@BorowitzReport

“My iPad 2 just keeps repeating ‘We had real newspaper men in those days!’ and would like more tapioca.” —@DJRotaryRachel

Notes to Self: Choice Internet and the Tweets of the Week

On Tuesday, @roslynsulcas shared her Times review of “Present/s,” a festival of new works for the Dutch National Ballet. The lineup “made clear [that William] Forsythe’s style and aesthetic dominate a new generation of choreographers, much as Balanchine dominated a previous one,” she wrote. “Isn’t deconstructive wordplay passé?” she asked.

The day before, Sulcas profiled the new artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater, Paul Lightfoot. On NDT’s announcement in September 2011 that he would succeed Jim Vincent in the role, Lightfoot told Sulcas, “I think the board [of NDT] came to a decision that it would be good to have a choreographer leading the company again.” As Vincent is also a choreographer, I’d say that qualifies as a burn.

@JudithFlanders reviewed NDT’s junior company for the arts desk on Wednesday. Lise Smith reviewed it for Londonist.

Elaine Coorens reviewed NON GRATA’s Force Majeure for Our Urban Times. She confused the Metra with the El but got most of the rest of it right. I was there taking photos and shooting videos with my phone; here’s my interview with NON GRATA’s Al Paldrok for Time Out Chicago.

@PiaCatton was “pleasantly surprised” by anti–Cindy Sherman emails provoked by her Wall Street Journal piece about the artist.

@dancingtimes published Monday an in-depth look at eating disorders in ballet in which dancer health specialist Nick Allen is quoted saying, “Nobody has ever done a proper incidence or prevalence study with dancers and eating disorders.” Can this be?

Former Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre member Dustin Crumbaugh is one dancer featured in Nancy Wozny’s Dance Magazine story on PTJs.

Vin Reed posted on Facebook nice photos of the duet Benjamin Wardell premiered at Monday’s Dance Chance showcase. The piece, danced by Wardell and Matthew McMunn, was inspired by The Velveteen Rabbit and good stuff.

On Tuesday, Chris Ziegler (@zpower) of the Verge wrote an editorial about wireless carriers that’s worth your time.

Architectural Record tweeted its feature package on post-tsunami building projects in Japan.

Comedy highlights from the past week: Megan Amram vs. Christian Finnegan for the Huffington Post; a new installment of the excellence that is Drew Droege as Chloë Sevigny; and an interesting interview with Patricia Lockwood, whose reading at Bar DeVille during the AWP conference I thoroughly enjoyed.

Also funny, kinda: There was a fistfight at Orchestra Hall on March 8, during a Riccardo Muti–conducted performance of Brahms.

Dance videos that came my way included two excerpts from George Céspedes’s Mambo3XXI, clips from rehearsals for Julie Mayo’s Man in the City and the choreographic contribution to an upcoming multidisciplinary take on Shakespeare’s Pericles, and this great short of YAMAN freestyling on the High Line.

@FearNoArtChgo posted video of its February 27 episode of The Dinner Party, with Gustavo Ramírez Sansano, JC Brooks and other good folk.

On the latest episode of #SKYNOVA, Sydney Skybetter and Tim Cynova talk with Dance/USA executive director Amy Fitterer. Here’s my interview with Fitterer for Time Out Chicago last summer.

@pointe_magazine shouted out Mikhail Baryshnikov’s warm-up from the movie Dancers (1987), in which the ballet star performs the role of Albrecht in Giselle. American Ballet Theatre presents its production of Giselle—which got its start as the version built for the film—at the Auditorium Theatre March 22–25. Look for interviews soon at Time Out Chicago Dance with ABT director Kevin McKenzie and star dancer David Hallberg.

Deborah Jowitt reviewed Stephen Petronio’s new Architecture of Loss on Friday for her ArtsJournal blog, DanceBeat. She’s fairly certain it’s “fraught with more stillness and more silence than any of the works he’s made over the last couple of decades.”

@4dancers posted an interview the same day with @adultbeginner, who began taking ballet lessons at age 32 and who’s consistently a warm and engaging presence on the Twitter.

@siobhanfburke and @ChristineSHou collaborated on a piece for Hyperallergic about black dance.

From the Sun-Times: “Chicago’s Department of Aviation blew at least $171,000 on GPS-equipped cell phones and vehicles with tracking devices that either did not work or were never used, the inspector general concluded Thursday.”

Also from the Sun-Times: Historians discovered last week documents thought lost from the life of Richard T. Greener, including “his law license, photos and papers connected to his diplomatic role in Russia and his friendship with President Ulysses S. Grant.” Greener’s Harvard University diploma also survived; in 1870 he became the school’s first black graduate.

From The Guardian: Unemployment among young black men in Britain “has doubled in three years, rising from 28.8% in 2008 to 55.9% in the last three months of 2011.”

From Reuters: Wolf spiders fleeing floods are covering southeast-Australian farmland in webs.

From Gizmodo: “The state of West Virginia has developed an app that will turn people into government informants.”

According to Art Fag City, there’s a banality bubble at the 2012 Armory Show.

According to Alastair Macaulay, Boris Eifman’s Rodin is a crime against humanity. Here’s my interview with Eifman for Time Out Chicago.

According to The Atlantic, we’re underestimating the risk of human extinction.

“This is unacceptable,” tweeted @doylearmbrust on a different subject.

“I’m sure that is not true,” tweeted @GWDanceWriter about a third thing.

“Chicago Tribune lauds NYC’s humiliation of teachers with junk science, wants same for Chicago teachers,” tweeted @DianeRavitch, about the Tribune’s March 3 editorial asking Chicago parents to demand “value-added” ratings of the city’s educators.

“When we dream about jumping, this is what it feels like,” tweeted @pointe_magazine about this photo by Gene Schiavone of the Bolshoi’s Anastasia Stashkevich mid–grand jeté.

“Stop rooting for brands. Root for competition.” —@joshuatopolsky

“Everything happens for a reason that you arbitrarily infer in retrospect.” —@BAMBItheband

“The saddest story was of a child who kept going through shelves of books, looking for someone who reminded him of himself + was discouraged.” —@Regina_Griffin

“A hazy plan to allow private firms to take over public services will be introduced to the City Council in days? What could go wrong?” —@ourmaninchicago

“4ORGY?! I HARDLY 3G!” —@kellydeal

“1. Off-guard 2. Pouty 3. Silly 4. Album Cover – everyone’s photo booth pics” —@DJRotaryRachel

“Las Vegas should be renamed Evil EPCOT.” —@louisvirtel

“Condescension is my first language. You wouldn’t understand it.” —@louisvirtel