trailerpilot

Tobi Tobias reviewed on June 7 two of this year’s graduation performances at the School of American Ballet. Also that day, Judith Mackrell reviewed the considerably darker and more adult Viktor by Pina Bausch, which opened a monthlong celebration of Bausch’s choreography in London. A special edition of The Guardian’s excellent MoveTube series focused on Bausch the previous day.

For something still more adult — or maybe less — read this great profile of male strippers by Francesca Steele for The Independent, occasioned by Steven Soderbergh’s new film, Magic Mike. Wanna hear a bunch of gay comedians dish on the film? Here you go.

“I feel every cut, especially the ones that sever the balls.” Film director Terry Gilliam on editing, courtesy of Boing Boing.

There was a “rampage” involving about 100 workers, The Guardian reported June 8, at a Foxconn factory in southwestern China.

Feeling nostalgic about faxes? Consider moving to Japan.

Feeling nostalgic about aristocracy? Enjoy high fashion and Depeche Mode? Watch this filmlet, shot at Versailles, promoting designs from Dior. Not that being creative is haute couture and gilt palaces for all. Blind spots, false equivalences and generalizations have stymied the recent debate about dancers and poverty, at The Huffington Post and elsewhere, but this weigh-in from Candice Thompson for DIY Dancer is solid.

This is how promotions to étoile (“star”) go at the Paris Opéra Ballet.

“Thanks to a new, two-tiered system meant to separate the serious from the speculative, VIPs have been awarded either black cards or purple ones. Those holding the black have four extra hours to spend their money over two full days before Thursday’s public opening.” —From Linda Yablonsky’s June 16 post for Artforum about Art Basel 43.

There’s a pop-up Design Museum in Humboldt Park, Fridays and Saturdays through June 30. I like design and I live in Chicago, so this is good news.

Voyager 1 is far out.

Imagine San Francisco without the Golden Gate Bridge, or Seattle without the Space Needle, “and you have some idea of what it’s like when cities stop dreaming of gravity defiance on a grand scale.” That’s from Timothy Egan’s blog post “Miracles in the Clouds” for The New York Times, which is worth a read.

“There is a growing worry,” warns Times media columnist David Carr, “that the falling value and failing business models of many American newspapers could lead to a situation where moneyed interests buy papers and use them to prosecute a political and commercial agenda.” Carr also recently assessed The Huffington Post’s new weekly magazine for tablets.

“There’s simply no legitimate rationale,” argues Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, “for selling off a critically valuable public revenue stream to private interests.”

On June 10, I read this obituary for Canadian dancemaker Rachel Browne in The Winnipeg Free Press. On June 18, I read this obituary for Ballet San Jose dancer Tiffany Glenn. I’ve spent the last ten days working on my first obituary, a remembrance of ballet teacher Truman Finney for Dance Magazine. The result? A lot of thoughts about mortality.

Not sure what balletomanes mean when they talk about ballon? Watch Stuttgart Ballet principal Friedemann Vogel in Swan Lake’s Black Swan pas de deux. (Polina Semionova’s Odile ain’t bad, either.)

“man, this is the future. stuff gets crazy around 2:00,” tweeted technology reporter Chris Ziegler about this on June 11. Ziegler writes for the Verge, which on June 13 published Lessley Anderson’s giant feature article titled “Snuff: Murder and torture on the internet, and the people who watch it.”

Twelve artists were reportedly arrested and detained in Myanmar on May 24, during the Beyond Pressure performance-art festival in Mandalay.

Dance, technology and corporate public relations collided head-on in Norway recently. From this GeekWire story: “ ‘The words MICRO and SOFT don’t apply to my penis…or vagina,’ as the on-stage slide added, strangely.”

According to DESIGNTAXI, “social media is getting serious. Finally.” Semi-related: Boy, that @sweden Twitter account sure got interesting, didn’t it?

According to Randy Kennedy, writing for the Times, if you build, over time, a personal relationship with a work of art, that work becomes, in effect, unique to you.

According to Frank Rich, Barack Obama needs to go all-in on going negative if he wants to be reelected.

On June 19, Isaac Butler looked at critical consensus about plays in relation to the Stagegrade project.

Inbox: zero.