The board of the National Music Festival recently announced its decision to cancel the popular August event.
âThe safety of our musicians, audience, and community is of paramount importance,â said NMF Artistic Director Richard Rosenberg in a news release. âSome of our musicians have told us that they are not yet comfortable traveling or congregating with groups of people, and we take those concerns seriously.â
While vaccination rates continue to rise, Rosenberg said it was not possible â or responsible â for the festival to go forward as planned with musicians traveling from all over the world to perform.
The National Music Festival is the latest in a long line of street fairs that have had to postpone or reschedule events planned for this summer due to the pandemic. This lack of traffic is being felt by businesses across the country.
Cassell’s Book of Birds makes a great Boring Book for Bedtime
I love the feeling of drifting off to sleep while listening to a podcast, said Nicholas Alexander in The Guardian. “Sentences swim around you, stripped of their meaning. Words collect in little incoherent groups at the edge of consciousness, as you tiptoe a tightrope on the outskirts of sleep.” In the BBC Sounds “comedy-horror” podcast The Sink: A Sleep Aid, writer Natasha Hodgson, producer Andy Goddard and composer David Cumming recreate that agreeably woozy sensation.
Struggling to sleep? Try this nifty good exercise. Listen to The Sink: A Sleep Aid - The brand new comedy-horror from @NatashaHodgson on BBC Sounds https://t.co/RMbshXqIj3pic.twitter.com/cBkKpZrSHa BBC Sounds (@BBCSounds) October 28, 2020
Chosen by Nicholas Alexander
Do you ever pop on a podcast to fall asleep to? I do. Every night. If youâre anything like me, youâll be familiar with that feeling of drifting off while listening. Sentences swim around you, stripped of their meaning. Words collect in little incoherent groups at the edge of consciousness, as you tip-toe a tightrope on the outskirts of sleep.
In BBC Soundsâ comedy-horror âsleep-aidâ The Sink, writer Natasha Hodgson, producer Andy Goddard, and composer David Cumming, have somehow managed â through alchemy of language and sound â to recreate that exact feeling.
Even while trying to remember certain scenes to write this piece, I find them slipping away like dreams. I think itâs something to do with their lack of internal logic â shapes shift, locations lurch, characters change â but I canât be sure. What I do remember is that there are birds, scarecrows, fires, swimming pools, other things.
“Six Minutes to Midnight” (M)
WHAT a disappointment this film turns out to be!
Its narrative basis is fiction. Its dramatic basis unfolds among a minor historical truth leading up to the beginning of World War II that history has, if not forgotten, at best ignored.
Open from 1932 to 1939, the Augusta Victoria College (AVC) at Bexhill-on-sea, in Sussex, was a Nazi school for teenage girls and young women ages 16-21. For the film’s purposes, they number about 20, drawn from families in the upper ranks of the Nazi regime.
The authors of the screenplay for the film include Eddie Izzard, who also plays main protagonist Capt Thomas Miller, inserted into AVC by the War Office late in August, 1939, to find out what happened to the male English-language teacher.
After weekend previews in select cinemas, Six Minutes to Midnight debuts nationwide on April 22.
Eddie Izzard does not write. Those are her words, not mine: despite her long and illustrious stand-up career, Izzard is much more likely to improvise her comedy live on stage than sit at her computer and script a show beforehand. But it’s that very approach that stood her in good stead, she says, when it came to sitting down and writing her first film. “In all my standup, I just come up with an idea,” she says. “And then I workshop it on stage and craft it into a shape…. Which probably leaves the way clear for me to write screenplays.