#pulitzer

saw “Next to Normal” at the @costamesaplayhouse last night. my brief reflections below.
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//Rating: 9/10.
///Next to Normal opened this week with a great #OClocal cast—I highly recommend seeing this smart, humorous, and emotionally intelligent musical. The musical provides a keen, fly-on-the-wall, realist style musical assemble that cuts deep into everyday family life in our present, post-truth 21st century. With a thoughtful script and scenes stripped down, allow the audience to tap into a universally riveting slice of life that’s bound by commitments of ceremonial love, while juxtaposed with sacrifice, loss, and bloodline duty. The musical, which centers around a seemingly surface-level American nuclear-family whose lives have become curated by their well-intentioned, but severely bipolar mother—and as a result, the subtle passive-emotional-armor that each family member is bound as they strive for normalcy—a concept that becomes as questionable futile in nature as in their to efforts to bottle up their existential despair at the expense of the fabricated families around them, filling the suburban tracks around them with mirrors of fearmongering fools.
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But this musical is far from cliche in its treatment of external familial considerations. It navigates survive interpersonally. It invites actor/viewer alike metacognitive inventory, over social considerations.
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Things I enjoyed: intangible, ontological themes, which maintain honest and an organic treatment of mental illness, grief, fear, insecurity, sex, vices, ethics, drugs, suicide, and modern psychiatry which felt more like normalization than a tired case study. The family dynamic in this #Pulitzer-winning Musical serves as a gentle, yet vital reminder of the modern American family, its plights as unhushable norms, psychological obstacles are equally common as they complex, & such personal traits are much more #NexttoNormal than the dwindling, pre-millennial, 20th-century modernist view of the American family unit… a long expired archetype that Musical like this invite us, once again, loosen the mental-grip from yesterworld’s Americana.
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#cmplayhouse #musical #nexttonormalreview #costamesa (at Costa Mesa Playhouse Page)

Here are this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners. 

[via LitHub]

The winners and nominated finalists of the 106th Pulitzer Prizes were announced May 9th. The winners each take home $15,000 dollars and serious bragging rights, not to mention an instant ticket into a very illustrious club.

Biography

The late Winifred Rembert and Erin I. Kelly,Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South

History

Nicole Eustace, Covered with Night

Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

General Nonfiction

Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

Fiction

Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

Andrew Sean Greer, Less(2017)

And we realize that we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable, in the world; that the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure, like the playing pieces of a game, and cannot move of their own accord; that they are held in place by our need for them, by our love. How stupid.

The comics have arrived! In this video we talk about the emergence of the modern comic strip in two places: Rodolphe Topffer’s “histoires en images” and the newspaper funny pages!

On a trip this week, so not too much to add right now. I’m particularly proud of this one, we’re really getting into “my” territory. Next week will be exciting, too!

Ronan Farrow: ‘Catch And Kill’ Tactics Protected Both Weinstein And Trump

Ronan Farrow’s 2017 exposé of the sexual misconduct allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein in The New Yorker earned him a Pulitzer Prize and helped usher in the #MeToo movement. Now, in his new book, Catch and Kill, Farrow writes about the extreme tactics Weinstein allegedly used in an attempt to keep him from reporting the story.

“Harvey Weinstein’s attorneys … signed a contract with this Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube explicitly tasking secret agents with killing reporting on Harvey Weinstein,” Farrow says. “There was a full-on international espionage operation that was built up around this.”

Farrow says that he was followed and that his house was bugged as a result of his work on the story. He eventually moved into a safe house and put his reporting documents into a safe deposit box with a note reading, “Should anything happen to me, please make sure this information is released.”

Farrow had started investigating Weinstein as a reporter at NBC News. But, he says, network executives blocked the story from ever being broadcast and eventually let Farrow go. Farrow speculates that the network was doing so, in part, to protect news anchor Matt Lauer, who was subsequently accused of sexual misconduct. Farrow spoke about NBC’s efforts to stifle the Weinstein story in this NPR interview. NBC News has maintained that Farrow’s story on the sexual misconduct allegations was not solid — that he had no accusers on record, specifically — when it refused to move forward with the story in 2017 before he took it to The New Yorker.

Farrow notes that NBC’s efforts to quash the story are part of a broader “catch and kill” strategy, whereby powerful entities and individuals go to extreme lengths to keep unfavorable stories from being reported. His book alleges that American Media Inc., the parent company of the tabloid National Enquirer, engaged in such practices in an effort to control negative stories about then- presidential candidate Donald Trump.

“I personally reported a number of stories about cases in which AMI sought or actually did buy the rights to a story in order to get rid of it during the election, and that subsequently has become the subject of a serious criminal investigation,” Farrow says.

He adds that the practice of catch and kill is “used both literally in the plot with respect to several stories that AMI goes after and tries to bury for Donald Trump and others, but also figuratively about the media’s role in sometimes not just advancing, but also suppressing, stories.”

Photo: A.J. Chavar for NPR

“Former Batista Army Jose Rodriguez Receives Last Rites From a Priest at Matanzas, Cuba” by Andrew Lopez
Lopez, photographer for United Press International, won the Pulitzer award in 1960 for his series of four photographs of a corporal, formerly of Dictator Batista’s army, who was executed by a Castro firing squad. Fidel Castro and his Barbudos (Bearded Ones) guerillas stormed through Havana in January 1959, celebrating the fall of hated dictator Fulgencio Batista. Lopez was assigned to the war crimes trial at San Severino Castle, a former military installation complete with a moat. Hundreds of Cubans were on hand, eager to testify against brutal Batista army corporal Jose Rodriguez, known as “Pepe Caliente”. The principal picture shows the condemned man receiving the last rites before his execution.