Seattle's Pulitzer Connection The Seattle Symphony is not a Pulitzer Prize winner, but it’s the Medici to the artist who is. Alaska-based composer John Luther Adams received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his work Become Ocean, inspired by the oceans of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. The piece had its world premiere on June 20, 2013, in Seattle, and will be performed again May 6 at Carnegie Hall in New York, again by Seattle Symphony. Music awarded the Pulitzer is not necessarily beloved for all time, but maybe there’s hope for the posterity of Become Ocean. Of the world premiere, The New Yorker’s marvelous Alex Ross (himself a Pulitzer Finalist) opined, “It may be the loveliest apocalypse in musical history.”
It's Prize Season: Annie Baker's play The Flick, about three weirdos who work in a small movie theater, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama (one of her other plays, Circle Mirror Transformation was at the Rep a couple of years ago). And smaller, non-commercial theaters—the Brits call 'em "subsidized"—defeated some West End giants at the Olivier Awards. Quoth Alexander Pope: "It is not strength, but art, obtains the prize."
Speaking of Prizes: The nominations are open for the Mayor's Arts Awards. Categories (with last year's winners in parens) include being nice to kids (826 Seattle), "raising the bar" (Preston Singletary), cultural ambassadorship (Barbara Earl Thomas), being well-known (Seattle Repertory Theatre), making stuff better (Frye Art Museum), and social justice (Pongo Teen Writing Project). You have until tomorrow. Nominate your face off!
TAM Gets a Facelift: A date’s been set—November 16—for the grand reopening of the grand new Tacoma Art Museum. An added wing for Western art, already visibly rising south along Pacific Avenue, will double the museum’s overall gallery space. And the design?
Tom Kundig designed the Haub Family Galleries as an elegant horizontal structure with a nod to Native American long houses and railroad boxcars.
Squeaky Wheel Gets Greased: After an outcry from trans activists, RuPaul's Drag Race has stopped using the terms "she-male" (used on the show in reference to drag queens) and "she-mail" (used as a drag-queeny pun on email). Gawker's Rich Juzwiak lays out how it all went down in his post, "Here's How RuPaul's Drag Race Censored Itself."
English, Broken: One of the many pleasures of the movie Ilo Ilo, which is set in Singapore during the 1997 financial crisis (in short, it is movie that speaks to our post-crisis times directly), is that a lot of the dialogue in this film is conducted in the second language of the characters, English. The function of this kind of English, which is stiff and raw, is to convey basic information and perform business transactions. But occasionally it has to convey deep emotions, particularly in the case of film’s main character, the boy of a Chinese Singaporean family, and his nanny, a young Filipino women. The closer the two get, the more emotional work their rudimentary English has to do. You will love this film. Watch it tonight!
