“Although the sea witch is singular among Disney villains, there is a person behind this character. She is [sic] a real-life Ursula with a crimson mouth, eyebrows sharp as switchblades and a homicidal gleam in her eye. She is Divine.” Yes, John Waters’s Divine.
Tag: 01.14.16
How We Made The High Line
Two of the designers involved in creating the popular park talk about what the elevated railroad was like before they started working on it, what made their proposal for the project successful, and what they do when a client asks for “another High Line.”
Al And Tipper Gore Didn’t Inspire ‘Love Story’ – Here’s The Woman Who Did
“‘What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?’ reads the opening line of Erich Segal’s 1970 best-seller Love Story. Well, for starters, Jenny – or the real-life model for Segal’s fictional tragic heroine – didn’t die. Her name is Janet, she’s Jewish, and she’s alive and well and living in New York City.”
When Does A Lie Not Count As A Lie? 10,000 People Weigh In
Last month, Gerald Dworkin posted a list of ten lies he considered justified and asked readers to respond. They “brought forth almost every position that has ever been put forward by philosophers on the subject.”
Photographs Have A Point Of View. So Why Do We Pretend They Don’t?
“The camera is an instrument of transformation. It can make what it sees more beautiful, more gruesome, milder, darker, all the while insisting on the plain reality of its depiction. This is what Brecht meant in 1931 when he wrote, ‘The camera is just as capable of lying as the typewriter’.”
Conductor Bernard Labadie Makes His Way Back After Stage Four Lymphoma
After the diagnosis in May of 2014 began “a grueling convalescence that included bouts of chemotherapy so violent that the founder of Les Violons du Roy was placed in a coma the following November. Only last month, more than a year after awakening, did Labadie return to the podium.”
Medieval Britain’s Version Of A Trash-Talking, Shade-Throwing Rap Battle
It was called flyting – “a stylized battle of insults and wits that was practiced most actively between the fifth and 16th centuries in England and Scotland. Participants employed the timeless tools of provocation and perversion as well as satire, rhetoric, and early bathroom humor to publicly trounce opponents.”
The Birth And Life Of Modern Sculpture: Rodin, Picasso, Calder, Stella
Jed Perl: “We are at a moment in the arts when historical reckonings, involving as they do considerations of precedent, genealogy, and chronology, can too easily be dismissed as reactionary gestures, canonical considerations to be tossed aside. There is all the more reason to press for a reconsideration of the tradition that begins with Rodin.”
The Internet – Plus Dance Apps – Spread New Dances As Fast As They’re Invented
“It isn’t easy for aspiring music stars to stand out from the pack, but Daryon Simmons has a gift that record labels covet in the Internet era: The 20-year-old performer can start a dance craze.”
Remembering The Fierce, Kind, Elegant Poet C.D. Wright
“She’ll be grieved in the public ways well-known writers are, but within the poetry community — on Facebook, Twitter, via text and email and phone — a kind of keening wail has sounded since the news of her death began to spread. Wright was beloved to many of us, a model poet and person.”