Look down at your desk. Is it messy? Feeling bad about that? Well don’t. According to “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder”, by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, “a clean desk really does signify an empty mind. Office messiness tends to increase sharply with increasing education, increasing salary, and increasing experience, they write.”
Tag: 01.17.07
A Lot Of Heavy Lifting For A Sculpture Park
Seattle’s new Olympic Sculpture Park “sits at a thrilling locus of aesthetic, social, and environmental potential, a site formerly used to process the fuel for modern cities, now cleaned up and made into a place for this city to come and process itself. In tension all around the park are the allure of the natural, the promise of the scientific, the call of the commercial, the nagging sense of the ethical, the mixed bag of the philanthropic, and the basic desire for comfort.”
Literary LA On The Move
New Yorkers love to disparage Los Angeles’ literary scene. “In fact, there has never been a shortage of serious, gifted writers in Los Angeles and its surroundings. In the last decade, however, Los Angeles has fortified this reservoir of talent with a new sense of literary community, and a growing literary infrastructure. The two go hand in hand.”
Movies Used To Be Art (So What Happened?)
“It should be remembered that the birth and growth of cinema was almost immediately parallel to the birth and growth of modernism in the other arts. Film is generally at its best when it recognises its roots in modernism, ie when it rejects conventional notions of realism, disengages from bourgeois values, and questions the primacy of narration.”
Why Does Gergiev Need The London Symphony?
Valery Gergiev is taking over leadership of the London Symphony Orchestra. But skeptics have “wondered about the wisdom of appointing Gergiev when the LSO made the surprise announcement last year. Would he have time to devote to the nurturing of his London orchestra? Why did he want yet another string to add to his already amply furnished bow?”
Unsigned And Successful – The Way Of The Future?
The first band without a record contract has cracked the UK Top 40 chart. “Koopa, a punk pop three-piece from Colchester, made history on Sunday by entering the chart at No 31 with a download-only single Blag, Steal & Borrow.” This could be the start of a tend…
After 13 Years, An End To “Beauty”
“To make room for the Dec. 6 opening of ‘The Little Mermaid,’ Disney Theatrical has announced the closing dates for ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ the gold and purple warhorse that marked Disney’s debut on Broadway and has put in nearly 13 years on the boards. ‘Beauty,’ now playing at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater will close on July 29, when it will have played 46 previews and 5,464 regular performances, making it the sixth-longest-running show in Broadway history.”
A Hyperbolic Sculture Park Description Too Far
Seattle’s got a new sculpture park. And it may or it may not be swell. But Joel Connelly is awfully tired of art critics who mke like the park is ging to “transform” the city. “Can we just stop with this horse pucky and quietly appreciate the park, our town’s thriving, creative art scene and the setting in which we live?”
The Multimedia Merce
Blogger Doug Fox has pulled together a page of links to videos, articles and pictures of Merce Cunningham…
Quality TV – Into The Dark
“I know I’m not supposed to use this trope anymore, but I can’t resist: On ‘quality TV,’ Darkness is The New Black. Darkness has become a signifier for deepness, for deep seriousness–most often a substitute for it, alas.”