“A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control. As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
The Tango As Tool Of Middle East Peace
In Buenos Aires, “Israeli and Palestinian ambassadors sat side by side in the final hours of 2006 in a show of unity at a concert led by the renowned Argentine-born conductor Daniel Barenboim, a prominent advocate for peace in the Middle East. On Sunday night, Barenboim departed from his usual repertoire of classical music, and instead focused on Buenos Aires’ signature genre: tango.”
Springtime For Hitler, German Variety
“Coming soon to German cinemas: a demoralized, drug-addled Adolf Hitler who plays with a toy battleship in the bathtub, dresses his dog in a Nazi uniform and takes acting tips from a Jewish concentration camp inmate. The movie, which opens Jan. 11, is treading ground that once would have been off-limits. This is not Mel Brooks’ ‘The Producers’ or Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Great Dictator,’ but a German movie that dares to treat Hitler as comedy.”
Self-Appointed Avenging Angels: They Sit Among Us
“With higher ticket prices and higher stakes – and not just at La Scala, but on the recent Barbra Streisand tour, for example – hecklers claim the power to hijack a public event, besides giving an artist who may already be in distress a very bad day. And that heckler power comes with no responsibility. In a huge crowd, who can find you?”
How To Retain Artworks In The Public Sphere?
“With art, money talks. Now it’s talking again, with perhaps [Philadelphia’s] greatest work of American art, Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic, sold Nov. 10 by Thomas Jefferson University for $68 million. In the midst of the controversy over the sale and the local effort to raise $68 million by next Tuesday to match the price being paid by an Arkansas museum and the National Gallery, the questions are again being raised: What other works of art are at risk of sale or removal? What, if anything, can be done to stanch an outflow?”
Vietnam Vets’ Memorial Wins 25-Year Award
“The once-controversial Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, designed by Maya Lin, will receive the Twenty-five Year Award from the American Institute of Architects, bestowed on a design that has stood the test of time for 25 years, the AIA announced Monday.”
Public Art Meets Public Surveillance In Chicago
“What strikes you about Jaume Plensa’s twin glass towers at Millennium Park are the faces, as big as JumboTrons, that appear to be looking at you. And since late November, they actually have been. A $52 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security bought the Chicago area a host of public safety improvements–including an obvious and ungainly camera atop each of Plensa’s giant glass towers.” The move has not been a hit with the aesthetically inclined.
Bringing Back The Kids’ Books That Got Away
The New York Review Children’s Collection is in the business of resurrecting beloved kids’ books. “Reprint rights come cheaply enough, [editor Edwin] Frank says, for the New York Review to make money on reissues that sell as few as 5,000 copies. And whatever the numbers, the books’ reappearance makes booksellers and buyers happy — reversing, in a tiny but symbolic way, the odious publishing trend toward keeping books in print for shorter and shorter periods of time.”
Guettel Orchestrates A Life In The Family Business
“Adam Guettel craves control. Journalists arriving for interviews without tape recorders have even known the composer-lyricist to proffer his own digital device. ‘I turn it on and say, “I’m going to e-mail this to you, and this is what you’re going to make your interview based on,” ‘ Guettel explains crisply.” The two Tony Awards he won for “The Light in the Piazza” have given Guettel, the 41-year-old grandson of Richard Rodgers, a measure of control over his career.
Now On Bookshelves: Culture-War Sci-Fi
“The right’s sleep of reason is bringing forth dark, futuristic political thrillers” — science fiction in which Chelsea Clinton is president and terrorists rule Manhattan. For conservatives, such writing is “coping behavior. It’s similar to the tricks some doctors teach young patients who are struggling with cancer or other fatal diseases: They should visualize their maladies. If they picture the tumors ravaging their bodies, they can picture their bodies fighting them off and blasting them into oblivion. Culture war fiction serves the same function.”