“Taymor’s film reveals more of the spectacle than any one spectator at the theater could have seen. Nonetheless a filmed version of a stage production cannot quite capture the sense of being there, even if the wizards currently developing the science of virtual reality no doubt are conceiving ways to eliminate the distinction.”
Argentine Writer Faces Prosecution For Doing Borgesian Things To A Borges Story
“Pablo Katchadjian decided in 2009 to remix one of Borges’s most renowned short stories, ‘The Aleph’, keeping the original text but adding a considerable amount of his own writing. The result was the short experimental book called El Aleph engordado (The Fattened Aleph) … Katchadjian has now been formally charged with the un-literary sounding crime of ‘intellectual property fraud’. If found guilty he risks spending up to six years in prison.”
How You Lie – And Whether You Think You’re Lying – Depends On Your Culture
“Some aspects of lie detection, especially those elements measured by lie detector tests, might be cultural. For instance, what if the person who might be lying is speaking a second language? What if she grew up in a different place than you, with different social norms? How difficult is it to spot a liar then? Is there any hope for a scientific approach?”
It Seems There Are Four Kinds of Introversion
“As more regular, non-scientist types started to talk about introversion, psychologist Jonathan Cheek began to notice something: The way many introverts defined the trait was different from the way he and most of his academic colleagues did.”
Former NYCity Ballet Principal Albert Evans, 46,
“Mr. Evans joined City Ballet in 1988 and was named a soloist in 1991 and a principal four years later, becoming only the second black dancer in the company’s history to hold that position. The first, Arthur Mitchell, now 81, performed with City Ballet in the 1950s and ’60s and in 1969 helped found Dance Theater of Harlem.”
Those Deeply Ugly Ebook Fonts Are Getting A Makeover
“For typography fans, electronic books have long been the visual equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard. The fonts are uninviting. Jarring swaths of white space stretch between words. Absent are all the typesetting nuances of a fine print book.”
What If The Only Shakespeare Play To Survive Had Been ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’?
“The mystery of Midsummer Night gets bound up in the larger mystery of Shakespeare. Yet it is an anomaly, distinct from anything he wrote before or after, a world to itself with its own rules and its own moods.”
The Most Controversial Ballerina In The U.S., In Her Prime
“The ballerina Sara Mearns, now 29, has entered her prime. She has surely become the most Dionysiac artist in an Apollonian genre, very probably the most talked-of ballerina in America and quite possibly the most argued-about ballerina anywhere.”
How Ticket Reselling Is Killing Live Music (And There’s Nothing We Can Do About It)
“Defenders of the ticket resale market will tell you ticket resale is a simple extension of the free market; that the resale market is the best way to learn the true value of a ticket (as opposed to the perceived one asked by promoters, venues and artists); and that if artists don’t like resale (and many don’t), they should set higher prices (in fact, certain top artists, defenders correctly point out, work a percentage of resale profits into their contracts).”
Asian Americans, Playing Roles Well Beyond Maid, Nurse Or Grocer
“When the actress Mia Katigbak was a student at Barnard College in the 1970s, she was the only Asian-American studying theater and mostly got to play ‘maids and hookers,’ she said. One day the department head asked her to join a Molière comedy. She would play the harpsichord from behind a screen, Ms. Katigbak recalls his saying, ‘because there were no Asians in France at that time.'”
What We Can Learn From The Greeks About Violence Onstage
“The violence in Greek tragedies is a form of therapy and education for the audiences both then and now, Doerries argues, a communal response to suffering. The violence in many of the contemporary American plays I’ve been seeing, by contrast, is intended as a form of entertainment, a thrill ride.”
The Japanese Photographer Who Spent Decades Taking Pictures Of The Navajo Code Talkers
“‘My father said the war ended early so he could come home,’ Mr. Kawano recalled. ‘That’s why I was born and I came to America, taking pictures of the former enemy.'”
Projection: Netflix Will Have Bigger Audiences Than Traditional Broadcast Networks By End Of Year
“Analysts predict that if Netflix were measured as a 24-hour station by Nielsen, it would have more viewers than ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox within the year.”
Why Are We So Eager To Turn Humanism Over To The Machines?
“We’re eager to optimise our workouts, our sleep patterns, our pregnancies, our policing tactics, our taxi services, and our airline pilots. Even the academy is intrigued. From spatial history to the neurohumanities, digital methods are the rage. Lecture halls have been targeted for disruption by massive open online courses (MOOCs). Sometimes it seems as though there’s little that can’t be explained by scientific thinking or improved upon through digital innovation. What are the humanities for at such moments, when we’re so sure of ourselves and our capacity to remake the world?”
Conlon Nancarrow – Music Too Complicated For Humans To Play
“Nancarrow explored the limits of the player piano with staggering imagination and persistence, diligently punching piano rolls by hand and often with the aid of a magnifying glass. He lived in obscurity and near-isolation for many years before his work was championed by prominent composers such as the Hungarian experimentalist György Ligeti, who claimed that Nancarrow was the most important composer of the late twentieth century.”
Discovery Of Long Lost Trove Of Art That Hitler Loved
“The discovery of the horses, and of several sculptures and reliefs created by another Hitler favorite, Arno Breker, stunned researchers who had long lamented their disappearance.”
The Relationship Between Music And Technology Hasn’t Always Been So Obvious
“One of the most sweeping changes wrought by audio recording and broadcasting technology was that, for the first time ever, music was no longer, by necessity, a visual as well as an aural experience. Music had always been only heard in live performance—which meant the listener was there, looking as well as hearing. (Even exceptions—Vivaldi’s female choristers singing behind a screen or Wagner’s enclosed pit orchestra or the like—were more like unusual variations of the visual context.) But with recordings and radio, the visual portion of musical performance disappeared. All one had was the sound. The technology decoupled eye and ear.”
Taylor Swift Versus The Concert Photographers – What’s Rights For The Singer Is Right For The Photographer?
“On the one hand, I know a band has to protect its image. The problem with that is that we are living in an age where everyone literally has a camera in their pocket at all times. You can’t control all the fans who are posting terrible photos that they took with their phones all over the Internet. So it makes no sense to me to try to control the professionals—the ones out there to do a job, who are there to make you look good, to make your concert seem like one they just can’t miss.”
ISIS Posts Pictures Of Destroyed Historic Sites In Palmyra
“The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, also reported the destruction, releasing photographs online that showed fighters carrying explosives. The photos gave views of the sites before, during and after the detonation. The fate of the rest of Palmyra’s antiquities remains unclear.”
Plans For New Helsinki Guggenheim – Where’s The “Wow” Factor?
“It is extraordinary that a design that triumphed over 1,700 competitors should turn out to be rather ordinary. It is respectful, yet teases out no identity unique to Helsinki. Moreau Kusunoki makes nothing of the waterfront site (in contrast to the much-loved Oslo Opera House, where the alluringly warped roof dips into the sea). The design considers no new way to look at art that would make it a must-visit.”
What Happens When Your Entire MFA Program Class Quits The School? USC Having Trouble Attracting Students For Next Year
“In an exclusive interview with The Times, Erica Muhl, dean of the Roski School, reveals that for the fall semester set to begin in less than two months, only one incoming student is enrolled in the studio art MFA program’s class of 2017.”
Building Collapses Under Weight Of Vinyl Record Collection
Too many vinyl records stored on the second floor of a San Diego building caused a collapse that damaged a popular thrift store. (picture here)
Welcome To The Orgy! How The Sex Movie Got Its Groove Back
“The fact that Fifty Shades of Grey is a phenomenon at all ‘just shows how mainstream it is, and it’s blasted the door wide open, saying sex is back in a big, big way. Now, sex has moved to the internet, and it’s on Girls, and that’s where people are getting it now. They’re not going to R-rated movies for titillation; you can get it on your phone. But that kind of subject matter is coming back in a big way.”
Amazon’s ‘Pay-Per-Page’ Plan Isn’t Just About Royalties – It Could Change The Way Writers Write
“The retail giant’s new way of calculating payments for Kindle book loans has worrying implications for how literature is read – and how it’s written.”
Haruki Murakami: The Moment I Became A Novelist
It happened at a baseball game …