In Commentary, Terry Teachout explains why King Lear is one Shakespeare’s best plays as long as directors resist the urge to make it “relevant”: “Even the best conceptual Lears have in common a self-limiting tendency: They tell you how to understand the play instead of letting you come to your own conclusions about it. But much of what makes Lear so theatrically effective is its lack of specificity. It is not a history play but a story set in a legendary kingdom of the imagination about which we know no more than is needed to set the plot in motion. And we respond with empathy to its characters not because they look like us but because they act like us. Hence a director’s decision to set Lear in modern times and stage it naturalistically can have the paradoxical result of diminishing the play’s relevance (in the cant sense of the word) rather than heightening it.”
The forgotten art of the Armenian church: “There are one hundred and forty objects in the show, including jewelry and reliquaries, as well as church models, illustrated manuscripts, and textiles for liturgical use—one fourteen-foot-long red and gold ‘omophorion’ of interwoven square crosses is reminiscent of the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich’s crosses on canvas and icons on paper. The objects on display range from the fourth to the seventeenth centuries and represent the different regions Armenians inhabited, from their homeland at the base of Mount Ararat, to the kingdom of Cilicia, and further East to New Julfa, in Iran. Armenia was one of the first states to adopt the Christian religion—as early as AD 301—and its history has been defined both by this, its status as an outpost of Eastern Orthodox religion surrounded by Muslim neighbors, and by its role in establishing trade routes from China and India to Western Europe, and from Egypt and the Holy Land to Russia.”
There’s a new Monopoly for Millennials. The kids at The Weekly Standard gave it a shot. Jim Swift reports: “This version of Monopoly does not involve real estate. There are no houses or hotels. As the box jokes: ‘Forget real estate. You can’t afford it anyway.’ Touché.” And, of course, they posted a few photos on social media.
Teen magazines like Seventeen and Teen Vogue are in decline. “In the year 2000, there were seven major teen magazines publishing monthly; now, there are none,” Rebecca Onion writes in Slate. May they disappear online, too, or be replaced by glossies devoted to Marian virtues or Puritan spiritual disciplines for teens.
Children are no longer taught to fear the right things. Instead, they are taught to avoid anything at all fearful. Frank Furedi on how we got here and how “protecting” children can sometimes hurt them.
Essay of the Day:
In Bloomberg Businessweek, Ashlee Vance writes about the work of Alexander Weygers—or, as the editors put it, Silicon Valley’s forgotten “flying saucer man”:
“An idyllic ease permeates California’s Carmel Valley. Wealthy people have built ranch-style houses into the mountains, giving them views of the Pacific on one side and pine and cypress forests on the other. It’s neither too hot nor too cold, and the fresh ocean air makes you feel calm inside. These conditions, which give big ideas room to grow, have attracted artists to the area, as well as retirees who want to meditate on the good life. But every now and then, the gentle rhythm of this place gets disturbed. Someone’s perfectly manicured existence goes in a turbulent, unexpected direction.
“For some people, it’s a real estate shock. For others, it’s an earthquake or—God knows—a wildfire. For Randy Hunter, a local art dealer, that moment arrived in 2008. The financial crisis had come to paradise. Artists and galleries accustomed to a steadyish stream of wealthy collectors fell on hard times. Things got bad enough that Larry Fischer, the owner of a sculpture foundry, decided to auction off pieces he’d held on to for years to help make ends meet. Ahead of the auction, he invited Hunter to come see if there was anything he liked. He guided his friend through the gritty warehouse toward a collection of bronze sculptures he thought might be of particular interest.
“He chose well. The first sculpture Hunter saw, Up With Life, was a foot tall and depicted an adult’s face morphing vertically into a hand cradling an infant. Fischer explained that the sculpture, made by an unknown artist named Alexander Weygers after World War II, represented humanity rising up to find hope in the darkest of times. Its beauty overwhelmed Hunter, leaving him giddy and a little dazed. ‘I freaking started crying,’ he later said. As he surveyed the room and saw one magnificent work after another, Hunter knew he had to have them. ‘I bought the whole collection of 30 Weygers statues.’
The sculptures came with an incredible story. Weygers spent close to half a century as the valley’s hidden da Vinci, crafting his home over the years from reclaimed wood and junkyard scrap metal, using tools he made on the premises. In separate workshops he produced sculptures, highly stylized photos, wood carvings, and home finishings. He also wrote books on blacksmithing and toolmaking and shared his talents firsthand with youngsters willing to camp on the property. He taught them to make their own tools, sculpt, and embrace his minimalist, recycling-centric philosophy. And amazingly, Weygers was a world-class engineer who in the late 1920s designed a flying saucer, a machine he called the Discopter.”
Photo: Alpe di Siusi
Poem: Danielle Chapman, “Advent”
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