Good Morning,
In April 1861 a watchmaker cleaning Lincoln’s pocket watch the day Fort Sumter fell engraved inside the case: “Thank God we have a government.” Nobody saw it until the Smithsonian opened the watch in 2009 (NPR). Aardman, the Bristol animation studio behind Wallace and Gromit, 50 this year and still winning BAFTAs with stop-motion, says AI won’t reach the storytelling; its academy teaches students to keep the imperfections of a hand-made blink (BBC).
The Kennedy Center’s African Lounge held a Ghanaian carving of grief at Kennedy’s death, kente cloth and Yoruba doors. The room is now empty, the curator wasn’t told where the works went, and the center calls them “fully safeguarded” while declining to show them (The New York Times).
Venue owners got Macklemore pulled from Ed Sheeran’s tour; within a week Sheeran and Robert Kraft had pledged millions to Gaza relief and the rapper had his first headlines since the 2010s. Netanyahu is threatening to strip the citizenship of the two Israeli directors of NAZA, a documentary on civilian deaths in Gaza, which took a record 25-minute ovation at Venice and reaches the New York Film Festival September 26 (Los Angeles Times).
Deborah Sandler Kemper, general director of the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, is leaving after 15 seasons; she kept the company alive after Covid with a $2.5 million state appropriation she won by lobbying Missouri’s governor herself, unannounced, in a year of headlines about arts cuts (Kansas City Stack).
All of our stories below.
