“Carla Chehadeh, 17, remembers a teacher at her school who was shot and killed in an attack and Christine Chehadeh, 12, recalls huddling in a hallway during a large bomb blast. While they lived in Damascus, the sisters took cello and violin lessons, in part because their parents always regretted never learning themselves.”
Tag: 02.01.17
‘Rococo And Flemish Influences’ – An Art Critic Has A Go At Beyoncé’s Pregnancy Pic
Anna Furman: “An appealing remix of rococo excesses, Flemish portraiture and Latin American funerary symbols.”
Getting Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto Back To What Tchaikovsky Really Wrote
“What we commonly hear is an overly ostentatious misrepresentation, tarted up after Tchaikovsky’s death” by a former student who had also studied with Liszt. Pianist Kirill Gerstein has gone back to the composer’s own conducting score and other sources to create a cleaner edition. “It’s still very much the Tchaikovsky concerto we love,” Gerstein says, “but it perhaps has a different facial expression than we are used to.” (includes sound clips)
Kazakhstan Bids To Become A Real Player In Ballet World
The futuristic new capital of the energy-rich Central Asian republic has two fully professional ballet theaters, and talented dancers no longer need to go to Russia or the West to make a career.
Author Bharati Mukherjee, 76, Pioneer Of India’s Literary Diaspora
She was known for depicting, in books like The Middleman and Other Stories and Jasmine, the lives of young women from traditional societies as they navigate new lives in America. She’s also remembered for a stinging essay about her decision to leave Canada after 14 years for the United States.
For The First Time Since 2008 Book Seller Waterstone’s Makes A Profit
“The bookseller made a £9.8m pretax profit in the year to 30 April 2016. The previous year is made a £4.5m loss. Bought from HMV by the Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut in 2011 for £53m, Waterstones has shrugged off the rise of ebooks and Amazon to record a 4.3% increase in sales to £409m. Sales growth has continued in the past year, with a 4.7% rise over Christmas.”
Can A New App Finally Track Media Ratings Across All Platforms? (How’s That For Sexy?)
“It does so with an integrated app that passively collects audio fingerprints for all programming, both live and playback. Every single program automatically has an audio fingerprint, which is a condensed digital summary generated from an audio signal. The app simply matches it to a database that ingests all programming content across networks and streaming channels. The San Francisco startup, which launched in September 2015, depends on a diverse panel of users who run the app in the background of mobile devices, TVs, or laptops. The app offers brand-new insight into consumer behavior.”
This Year Netflix Tried To Take Over Sundance
“At this year’s festival, things were different from the word go. Netflix wasn’t just in Park City to buy: It was making a full show of force, starting with the first movie in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. That film was I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, the writing and directing debut of actor Macon Blair; Blair had pitched Netflix on the concept at Sundance 2016, and they financed the movie from the ground up.”
Report: Top Women Hollywood Directors Make Few Films
“According to an analysis of race, gender, age, and equity across 1,000 films released between 2007 and 2016, the majority of women spearheading these productions are from a narrow pipeline, and they rarely released more than one film in the nine years analyzed.”