By @RadioHouston
The groundbreaking Netflix comedy series
Special which focused on the life of a gay man with cerebral palsy is coming back for its second and final season. Ryan O Connell, the star and creator of the show, says After two seasons, Special is sadly coming to an end. Thank you to the fans and Netflix for allowing me to make exactly the show I wanted to make and for giving me 30-minute episodes to finish the story. Ryan continues, Creating this show has been the highlight of my g-damn life.
The final season of
Special is expanding to a full half-hour comedy, a departure from its original short-form. According to Netflix, this will allow the show to dive deeper into all the fan-favorite characters.
Baggage: Alex Caldiero in Retrospect @ UMOCA
Alex Caldiero ranks among Utah s most distinctive creative minds, with a career spanning 50 years as a writer, performer and multidisciplinary innovator just don t call him an artist. Caldiero prefers the term maker, and a new exhibition at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (50 S. West Temple, utahmoca.org) explores the many things and ideas he has made.
Baggage: Alex Caldiero in Retrospect currently running digs through Caldiero s archives for a showcase of notebooks, drawings, sculptures, recordings of his live performances and more. The curators state that the exhibition was put together without an attempt to define chronology or any specific progression in Caldiero s career, using custom-made shelves and pedestals similar to those from Caldiero s own studio as a way to convey the range and scope of his work. In an opening event with the curators, Caldiero described the rush he felt from looking at items as they were unpacked:
Author Russell Banks In one respect, the coronavirus pandemic freighted with a monk-like mantra of distancing and isolation has been a boon to upstate New York author Russell Banks.
Foregone, his 19th work of fiction, is out this month. Denied his usually busy travel routine, Banks completed another book having researched the topic in pre-pandemic times and is working on a long-form story about the cult of Trumpism. This is the fastest I ve ever been able to work, he told
Seven Days in a recent phone interview. The pandemic forced me to turn to my writing because there wasn t anything else I could do to give my life structure.
Sonderimmersive
We all remember where we were, and how it felt, when the COVID-19 pandemic truly hit home a year ago this week. Businesses and schools shut down, toilet paper became more precious than gold and we became very aware of how much we did or didn t like the people we were stuck in our homes with.
Arts organizations in particular were forced to scramble in a world where isolation was the norm; how could you adjust a paradigm built on shared experiences of creative work? But as hard as the past 12 months have been on so many such organizations, they ve also shown remarkable resilience and creativity in figuring out how to continue their missions and connect with their communities. While we all eagerly anticipate returning to the things we miss from The Time Before and see a faint light at the end of a vaccine-illuminated tunnel here s a nod to just some of the many ways that local a