“The alleged carjacker is strapped to a chair as the video stream goes live and a distorted voice is heard describing his crimes. Footage is then shown of an attack before the words ‘Guilty or Not Guilty? You Decide …’ flash up on screen alongside a website address. The verdict is overwhelmingly guilty and the man is killed by lethal injection while the camera is running.”
Seven Stars Remember Their Mid-Dance Disasters
“Darcey Bussell was very friendly with the floor in rehearsals. Kevin Clifton’s Thriller-style tango tanked on live TV. And Thomas Whitehead got trapped in his ballerina’s underwear.” (And that ballerina was – uh-oh – Sylvie Guillem.)
Reason Won’t Make Life Meaningful, Argues Neuroscientist
Robert A. Burton: “Any philosophical approach to values and purpose must acknowledge this fundamental neurological reality: a visceral sense of meaning in one’s life is an involuntary mental state that, like joy or disgust, is independent from and resistant to the best of arguments. If philosophy is to guide us to a better life, it must somehow bridge this gap between feeling and thought.”
Master’s Program In Critical Theory Canceled By College Six Days Before Classes Start
“Six days before the start of the fall semester at Pacific Northwest College of Art [in Portland], a group of Master’s candidates and professors received an email from the dean of students informing them that their program was suspended and they would not be teaching or studying as planned.”
NYT Theatre Critic Charles Isherwood On The Art Of Being A Critic
In this podcast he discusses: Why we’ll never go back to making reviewers review the opening night performance.
What he thinks when he sees a quote from one of his reviews splashed on a marquee. Why Writers should NOT read his reviews. What he’s looking forward to this season. How he responds to “hate mail.”
This Linguist *Loves* What’s Happened To ‘Literally’
John McWhorter, as part of an interview with Renee Montagne on the ways English has always been changing: “[The word literally has become] something called a contronym. Contronyms, let’s face it, are neat. We should rejoice that our language has interesting little wrinkles as long as they don’t interfere with comprehension.”
We Owe Almost Everything About The Ways We Communicate Today To This Man
“Like today’s tech moguls, Guglielmo Marconi was heavily contested by some of his rivals. Like them, he rose above the fray by sheer determination, as well as talent, luck and vision. But more than any of today’s icons – more than Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and the rest – Marconi was uniquely at the center of the communication revolution of his time.”
Everyone’s Talking About Virtual Reality. So When Will It Really Be A Mainstream Thing?
“With VR, it feels like early days. It’s powerful, but it still requires standardization. Everyone needs to commit to a format. And there has to be one or two killer pieces of content that people who don’t yet own a device will be so interested in that they feel compelled to get one in order to get engaged. We haven’t seen that yet.”
Michel Butor, 89, Experimental French Novelist
“Mr. Butor objected to being characterized as a member of the nouveau roman movement, although he shared a publisher … [with] leading figures in the school. His novels shared certain characteristics with theirs – a cameralike detachment, an indifference to psychology, a preoccupation with physical details and the instability of human perception – but he took a more philosophical and political approach.”
Charge: Costs Of Arts Administration Have Gotten Out Of Hand
“The managerialism class in the arts have become somewhat like a self-serving class – a mafia, perhaps, in some people’s views – so they will fight tooth and nail to sustain their positions and their incomes.” An Arts Council England spokeswoman said it took fair pay for artists “very seriously”, and stressed that portfolio organisations who failed to pay them properly could lose their funding.
Proposition: Health Of A Country’s Infrastructure Suggests Health Of Its Democracy
“The secret of the country’s infrastructure success lies in a forgotten political history: the demands by millions of Americans over time for fairer and more equitable access to rails, pipes, wires, roads and more. The wondrous US infrastructure achievements happened when citizens participated in infrastructure decisions. One can even propose a rule: the better the democracy, the better the infrastructure.”
Canadians Won’t Watch Canadian Shows Just Because They’re Canadian
“Canadian content rules and changes made by the CRTC. A lot of wild talk about supporting Canadian talent has been thrown about, as if patriotism is involved in making and watching Canadian TV.” But. “Nobody will watch TV out of patriotism.”
Glenn Gould Prize Aims To Be “Nobel For The Arts”
One prize in each two-year cycle would be for Artistic Excellence; a second for Creative Innovation in the arts; and a third for Cultural Humanitarianism. Tripling the number of awards would help the Glenn Gould Prize meet its potential — “to become the world’s preeminent arts prize,” Brian Levine, the Gould foundation’s executive director, told the Star.
Brown University President Writes About Universities And Safe Spaces
“Universities are doing something difficult and important. We are grappling with how to create peaceful, just and prosperous societies, even as we live in a society that often feels more divided and rancorous than ever, fractured along lines of race, ethnicity, income and ideology. With the right of academic freedom comes the moral responsibility to think carefully about how that right is exercised in the service of society to confront these divides.”
‘Trigger Warnings’ On Campus And The Psychology Of Trauma
“Given the myths and emotions enveloping the issue of trigger warnings and safe spaces, it’s worth asking what science can tell us about the actual effects of verbal triggers on the body, brain, and psyche. Certain people experience certain words as dangerous. Should they have to listen to those words anyway?” Katy Waldman looks at the physical effects that being triggered can have on trauma survivors, the leading therapeutic approaches for overcoming the trigger effect, and the implications for teaching college students.
Dreams, Visions, Hallucinations, And Neurochemistry
It turns out that the neurochemistry of the human brain during REM sleep (the kind when we have the most vivid dreams) is similar to what happens after taking some hallucinogens. “Dreams, in short, are transient ‘trips’ and, when they forcibly and suddenly break through into waking life, they sometimes become visions or hallucinations.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 09.05.16
Labor Day 2016
In the United States this is Labor Day, since 1894 a national holiday that celebrates working peoples’ contributions to the nation. … From 1962 — when the average price of a gallon of regular gas was 31 cents — here is the unofficial Rifftides Labor Day song. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-09-05
In chains
At some point in my younger days, I got it in my head that a musical composition, like a chain, was only as strong as its weakest link. … More recently, I considered whether a musical composition might only be as strong as its best ideas, weak links be damned. … read more
AJBlog: Infinite Curves Published 2016-09-05
This Week In Audience: Connecting The Dots As Louvre Visits Decline 20%
This Week: Tate goes for an artificial intelligence art project … UK has more amateur orchestras than you can shake a stick at … Does community storytelling take advantage of the storytellers? … Why the Louvre’s attendance is down 20% … When data drives your art experience the art changes. … read more
AJBlog: AJ Arts Audience Published 2016-09-04
This Week’s Notable AJ Stories: An Artist Erased, A Cautionary Tale
This Week: What exactly does cultural equity actually mean? … In our social media world everything is about images … A cautionary tale as an artist is erased from the internet … There’s a difference between culture and art … Why Italy fought to keep Venice off the endangered list. … read more
AJBlog: diacritical/Douglas McLennan Published 2016-09-04
Artists Erased From The Web And Our Growing Problem With Facts
Are we comfortable letting shareholder-driven companies – any private company – have absolute control over infrastructure that is increasingly essential for the functioning of civil society? Deciding who is visible and who is not? … read more
AJBlog: diacritical/Douglas McLennan Published 2016-09-04
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The Secret Life Of David Lynch
“David would only be caught doing mundane things if it’s what he was actually doing. He’d never play up to the camera. It just turned out that it was just morning to night, he’s in the studio and he’s like that since he was a child, working and working on the studio. That’s all he does, he’s a hardcore artist.”
We Love Moomins, But We’re Missing Out On So Much Other Potential Literature
“There is a fair bit of children’s literary traffic around the Anglosphere. … But we resist the rest of the world, as if the 90-something per cent of people who don’t principally speak English have no stories to tell us. Just think what we’re missing!”
If A Show Is Written About Millennials, Will They Come To The Theatre?
“One theme all three shows explore is the dual nature of contemporary identity. With the pervasiveness of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, most young adults have two, if not three, versions of themselves—ranging from the public and curated to the private and sometimes secretly chaotic.”
The V&A’s Director, Who Is German, Quits Because Of Brexit Vote
“In interviews with the German broadcaster DW, he said the vote to leave the EU felt like a personal defeat and he was particularly upset to hear aggressive ‘war rhetoric’ during the referendum campaign.”
Music That Hovers Between Appearing And Disappearing: Alex Ross On The Wandelweiser
“This is not music for everyone. No music is for everyone, just as no language or no religion is for everyone. But [the work of this group of composers] poses a particular challenge to long-established notions of how a piece should unfold. Silence overtakes sound to the point where the work seems on the verge of vanishing.”
How Upright Citizens Brigade Turned Improv Into Big Business
“In 2003, the Times reported that ‘some 500 students’ were enrolled in ’30 or so improvisation and sketch-comedy classes’ at U.C.B. In 2011, New York had the figure at approximately eight thousand. The organization doesn’t reveal numbers (the better to avoid quibbling about not paying its performers), but one current employee let slip the latest tally: last year, U.C.B. trained twelve thousand students. That’s about five million dollars in revenue.”
Yuja Wang And Her Dresses Get The Janet Malcolm Treatment
“As she performed, the thigh, splayed by the weight of the torso and the action of the toe working the pedal, looked startlingly large, almost fat, though Yuja is a very slender woman. Her back was bare, thin straps crossing it. She looked like a dominatrix or a lion tamer’s assistant. She had come to tame the beast of a piece, this half-naked woman in sadistic high heels. Take that, and that, Beethoven!”
Enlightenment Philosophers Posed Questions About The Modern World (We’re Still Trying To Figure Them Out)
“Modernity cannot be identified with any particular technological or social breakthrough. Rather, it is a subjective condition, a feeling or an intuition that we are in some profound sense different from the people who lived before us. Modern life, which we tend to think of as an accelerating series of gains in knowledge, wealth, and power over nature, is predicated on a loss: the loss of contact with the past.”