Back in the 1980s in deepest Ontario, Dr. Michael Persinger hit on the idea of using a helmet with wire coils to stimulate the temporal lobes of the brain with particular patterns of low-level electromagnetic waves. Numerous people who wore the contraption reported feeling a presence, and sometimes the Divine Presence. The press got word, and the legend of the “God Helmet” was born. Problem is, other researchers have had trouble replicating the results.
‘Hamilton’, Prince Hal, And The Nature Of Honor
“A playwright in his mid-30s wants to pen an epic tale of ambition, authority, and power. He turns to his nation’s history, to characters familiar to his audience from school and legend. He performs a kind of magic trick.” Hamilton or Henry IV, Part One? Both, of course – and they have more than that in common.
So A Glitzy New Concert Hall For London Is Canceled? No Great Loss
“Those who thought the whole thing an unnecessary extravagance, a vanity project dreamed up by Rattle and Nicholas Kenyon, director of the Barbican Centre, at a time when arts organisations across the country were struggling to fund performances in the spaces that already existed, were drowned out by those determined to give the returning hero Rattle whatever he wanted.”
How Do You Get Audience Data That Matters? (Some Suggestions From Someone Who’s Been Doing It)
“The difference in data collection priorities is not simply a qualitative versus quantitative debate, as one of the shared areas of interest for organisers and funders is whether the event has reached individuals who do not normally engage with culture. But even here, opinions differ on how much information is needed from visitors, sample size and how it should be collected (the data collection mechanisms used).”
Jean Jacques Perrey, Granddaddy Of Pop Electronica, Dead At 87
“For those who don’t realize it, Jean-Jacques first started recording electronic music in 1952, long before the Moog synthesizer was first made for sale in 1967. … “His crazy, happy music has been heard everywhere from commercials, to Sesame Street – in hip-hop songs, in dance remixes and most famously, for decades in the delightful featured music in Disneyland’s ‘Main Street Electrical Parade.'”
Classics Are Being Re-Translated. But Are These New Translations Really Serving The Originals?
“In Italy, with the lapse of copyright on Faulkner’s writing, there have been a number of new Faulkner translations that are doubtless more semantically accurate than those made back in the Forties and Fifties. And yet those old translations—made when a modernist work was still a matter of excitement, rather than an aesthetic museum piece—seem more aware of the energy and spirit of the original and certainly a better read than more recent, academic efforts.”
‘Fairy Tales For The Disillusioned’: French Authors Put Twists On Perrault’s Classic Stories
“The 36 stories are by Charles Baudelaire, Anatole France Guillaume Apollinaire and other writers associated with the French decadent literary movement. … Each story comes with a twist, from a wolf who is tricked by Red Riding Hood into strangling the girl’s grandmother and is then arrested for being an anarchist (‘I did 20 years of hard labour, while the slut inherited her grandmother’s savings’) to a Cinderella keen to be humiliated.”
The Nauseous Anxiety We’ve Been Feeling Over The Election Is A Good Thing (If You’re A Sartrean)
Simon Critchley, on the connection between the “Brexistential dread” in his homeland and the fear and loathing on this side of the Atlantic: “The lesson of existentialism is that the nausea that we feel is actually the emergence of a genuine, lived sense of our freedom. Anxiety is the motor that drives the engine of freedom.”
Pennsylvania Ballet Is About To Premiere A Dance Called ‘Chicken Bone Brain’
And it’s by one of the least likely choreographers for such a traditional company: Brian Sanders, whose own aerial dance company is called JUNK. When artistic director Ángel Corella asked him to collaborate, says Sanders, “I was flabbergasted.”
Guns Onstage – How Theatre Handles Firearms And What We Might Learn From It
“It is unlikely that the country will turn to the performing arts to guide its gun policy, but it could do a lot worse. The stage and screen are the places where the balance of freedom of expression and scrupulous attention to safety have been achieved. If only this were true on our streets and college campuses.”
How Scientists See History – Is It Random or Governed By Natural Laws?
“Do we see regularities in the unfolding of the past, or is history all disorganised confusion – just ‘one damn thing after another’? Are there laws that control the unfolding of history?”
What Would Happen If You Made Millions Of £ Available To Arts Groups For Entrepreneurial Projects?
Nearly 100 organisations have applied to the £7m Arts Impact Fund to invest in commercial ventures such as cinemas, restaurants and Intellectual Property licensing businesses to subsidise their work. Thus far, more than £3m of unsecured loan finance at affordable interest rates has been shared by eight organisations that are planning to use a cross subsidy model to finance their activities.
A Glut Of TV – So Much Production, In Fact, That Hollywood Is Overwhelmed
“The TV business is facing its biggest explosion of new productions in the medium’s history, sparking a billion-dollar arms race between established TV networks and a deep-pocketed insurgency of online streaming giants. That boom is reshaping the industry from Atlanta to Hollywood, where even washed-up actors are suddenly in high demand and open studio space is the holy grail.”
Explaining Consciousness With Quantum Physics? Really? (Yeah)
“The mere mention of ‘quantum consciousness’ makes most physicists cringe, as the phrase seems to evoke the vague, insipid musings of a New Age guru. But if a new hypothesis proves to be correct, quantum effects might indeed play some role in human cognition.”
Why Movie Comedies Are A Dying Genre
Ten years ago, the blockbuster comedy was a key to any studio’s profit margin, given their relative cheapness to produce and propensity to linger in theaters on good word of mouth. Now, as worldwide box office becomes more crucial to the studio’s bottom line, comedies are vanishing from the schedule—because, in the words of one distributor, they don’t “travel well.”
How Miró’s Only Mosaic Mural Was Restored
“Joan Miró painted many murals in his lifetime, but he designed only one made of glass and marble, for Wichita State University’s Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art. Personnages Oiseaux, or ‘Bird People,’ … adorned the building’s southern-facing wall from 1978 until 2011, when the museum removed it for an extensive, $2.2 million restoration project to repair the deteriorating mosaic. Last month – nearly exactly 38 years from its unveiling – the mural of colorful characters finally returned to its wall.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 11.07.16
Remembering and Re-imagining an Era
Danspace Project’s Platform 16: Lost & Found revisits and examines the decades when HIV/AIDS felled so many. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2016-11-07
An ideal concert
Anderson and Roe, the piano duo, at the National Gallery in DC, on October 30. And why was it ideal? Well, first, … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2016-11-07
Otis Redding at the Whisky — Revisited
You can never really have too much Otis Redding. The great R&B singer and songwriter died in a plane crash in 1967, at just 26 years old, and just about everything he recorded … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2016-11-07
Monday Recommendation: David Baker
Buselli-Wallarab Jazz Orchestra, Basically Baker, Vol. 2 (Patois) … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-11-07
The unstructured room where it happens
In my last post I noted that, when I look at an orchestra’s structure, I don’t see anything that parallels a musician’s practice room. Scaled for an organization, what would a workshop like that look like? … read more
AJBlog: SongWorking Published 2016-11-07
Born in Vail
Vail Dance Festival: Re-Mix NYC performs at City Center, November 3 through 6. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2016-11-06
Home is the wanderer
Luciana Souza and I go back a long time. The first posting on this blog was about her. We’d met a year before that, in the summer of 2002. A friend told me that she’d … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-11-07
Bob Cranshaw, 1932-2016
Bassist Bob Cranshaw succumbed to bone cancer yesterday at his home in New York City. He was 83. He may be best remembered as Sonny Rollins’s bassist for more than half a century, but Cranshaw’s … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-11-05
Lit Crawl L.A./ North Hollywood
The other night I ventured out to Los Angeles’s North Hollywood neighborhood for the latest installment of Lit Crawl L.A. This annual night out has been going since 2013, but … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2016-11-04
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Sotheby’s Reports Big Loss
An expected loss, the auction house says. Sotheby’s on Monday reported a loss of $54.5 million in the third quarter, compared with a $17.9 million loss for the same period a year ago.
Protests Over Gallery Openings In Los Angeles Escalate – The Anti-Gentrification Side Gets Noisy
“The protests come at a time when the city has gained a reputation as a contemporary art capital that some critics say eclipses New York. Over the past decade, the Los Angeles art scene has grown tremendously, with the opening of the popular Broad museum, large flagship spaces created by local galleries, and outposts set up by a string of prominent New York and European dealers, including Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s 100,000-square-foot complex, all of which have helped transform downtown.”
How Will The U.S. Election Affect The Art Market?
Flagship autumn sales were pushed from early November to late in the month, when whatever has happened is established fact. That’s because auction houses remember all too clearly what happened in the fall of 2000.
The Billionaire Working To Put Shanghai On The International Culture Map
The Long Museum West (long means “dragon” in Chinese) opened in 2014, on a scenic stretch of land on the western shore of the Huangpu River. The Shanghai government had offered a generous discount on the property, in an area that was once a manufacturing hub but is being transformed into a “cultural corridor” intended to rival New York’s Museum Mile and London’s South Bank.
Want To Write A Bestseller? This Algorithm Is Startlingly Accurate In Predicting How To Do It
“After four years of work, Jodie Archer, a former acquisitions editor, and Matthew Jockers, an academic specializing in computational analysis of style, have been able to ‘predict’ which books were bestsellers and which were not with ‘an average accuracy of 80 percent.’ This means that, out of a randomly selected group of 50 bestsellers and 50 non-bestsellers, the algorithm would predict 40 of each correctly.”