“The notion of a cadre of literary novelists, young or old, eager to depict the moment we live in – let alone battling conservative naysayers for the right to do so – is almost quaint. When reading for a American literary prize a couple of years ago, I was struck by how strenuously most of the entrants seemed to be skirting that challenge.”
Tag: 01.15.11
Suzuki Evangelist John Kendall, 93
“The Suzuki Association of the Americas estimates that perhaps 100,000 students annually are taught with Suzuki techniques, although the true number is impossible to define. Suzuki practitioners agree that it brought more kids into music training.”
Prairie Home Companion to Continue Experimenting With Guest Hosts
“[Garrison] Keillor has been talking about the future of A Prairie Home Companion for some time. At 68 he says there are other things he’d like to do, but he feels a responsibility to the show. ‘It was the result of the hard work of a lot of people and I don’t think I should let it go into dry dock just because the captain gets old. There are other captains,’ he said.”
A New Art Gallery Way Out on the Edge – in Tasmania
“Next week MONA, the $80-million [Aus] private museum and ideological playground of Hobart-born David Walsh, will finally open to the public, two years overdue. … Walsh is a self-made millionaire … beholden to nobody, which leaves him free to present art and ideas that public institutions or private museum owners with more polite tastes would not dare touch.”
Playwright Romulus Linney, 80
“‘In terms of scope of ambition, Mr. Linney may be our bravest living playwright,’ Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote in 1996, ‘running from rural dramas about hillbilly homicides to lush meditations on Lord Byron’s ghost and Frederick the Great’.”
Open Source, Theoretically Speaking
“At least theoretically, open source could also resolve the main dilemma that bedevils innovation policy. On the one hand, most inventors need incentives to keep inventing. On the other, the social value of an invention is maximised if anyone–not just those willing to pay for it–can use it. Open source seems to satisfy both conditions.”
British Films Are Good. So Why Isn’t The British Film Industry?
“While the U.K. has a long cinematic tradition, world-class facilities and a glut of homegrown talent, it has yet to develop a self-sustaining domestic film industry. Instead, the sector relies on grants, lottery funding and the investment of Hollywood studios that choose to shoot in the U.K., lured by a tax break worth about £100m a year.”
Reinventing Pop Music – But Not Yet Sure How To Talk About It
“Great music is now constantly becoming available in ways that force us to reconsider what we’re hearing, and how we listen. For half a century, musicians and fans have congregated along two poles: the album and the single. The problem is, we still haven’t devised a language to describe the increasingly vibrant area between the two poles of the studio album and the hit single.”
Behind The Improbable Success Of “Black Swan”
“At a time when Hollywood studios are fixated on cookie-cutter movies with built-in audience recognition, “Black Swan” is a hit from the entirely opposite direction: dream-like, ambiguous and even polarizing. It even raises the question of whether there’s a larger audience for original, unpredictable films than the studios may believe.”
Why A Museum Of “Moving” Images?
“A still image can seem fairly commonplace; that is how the world has been portrayed for millenniums. But it is also artificial; stillness is rarely discerned in daily life. Moving images, though the familiar substance of experience, have only been created in recent centuries.”