When filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, one of the stars of the Iranian New Wave, finished The Nights of Zayandeh-rood in 1990, the country’s censors cut about a third of it (some of that at the direct request of supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei) and then locked it away after a screening at a Tehran festival. Makhmalbaf, now living in London, somehow (he won’t say) got the footage out of the archive and into release in Britain.
Tag: 03.07.17
300 Years’ Worth Of Self-Playing Instruments: A Visit To Siegfried’s Mechanical Music Cabinet
Housed in a 15th-century manor on the Rhine, the museum “showcases 350 mechanical instruments dating back three centuries. Think delicate music boxes, one with a chirping bird on top, or massive pipe organs, and pretty much everything in between. The extensive collection also includes tools and machines used to produce the instruments, and cardboard sheet music.” (includes videos)
A Visual Search Engine For Every Object On Earth
“The neural nets that we trained here are the beginning of counting oil tanks, or buildings, or windmills. Imagine we wanted to look at sustainable energy infrastructure—solar farms, solar panels on roof—you could start to think about counting their growth through time. You start to get really interesting data streams.”
Parallels Between The Arts And Medicine
“It’s said that literature helps us to explore ways of being human, grants glimpses of lives beyond our own, aids empathy with others, alleviates distress, and widens our circle of awareness. The same could be said of clinical practice in all of its manifestations: nursing to surgery, psychotherapy to physiotherapy. An awareness of literature can aid the practice of medicine, just as clinical experience certainly helps me in the writing of my books. I’ve come to see the two disciplines as having more parallels than differences, and I’d like to argue they share a kind of synergy.”
The Astonishing And Perplexing Internet War On Science
“Here, climate change is a government-sponsored hoax, fluoridated water is poisonous, cannabis can cure cancer, and airplanes are constantly spraying pesticides and biological waste into the air. Genetically modified food is destroying humanity and the planet. Vaccines are experimental, autism-causing injections forced on innocent babies. We can’t trust anything that we eat, drink, breathe, or medicate with, nor rely on physicians and public health agencies to act in our best interests.”
So It Appears Early Cave Artists In France Were Pointillists Like Seurat
“These pointillist creations of early modern humans were recently discovered when scientists revisited Abri Cellier, a cave site in France’s Vézère Valley. There, they found 16 limestone tablets left behind by a previous excavation. Images of what appear to be animals, including a woolly mammoth, were formed by a series of punctured dots and, in some cases, carved connecting lines. Combined with previous images from nearby caves in France and Spain, the tablets suggest an early form of pointillism, and a very early point on art history’s timeline.”
Why Are American Orchestras Willfully Ignoring Women Composers?
“Brian Lauritzen, a broadcaster with the Los Angeles classical radio station KUSC, has been tracking the gender breakdown of the composers represented on the upcoming season schedules of American orchestras and opera companies. The picture his numbers paint isn’t a pretty one. There are organizations, including major orchestras in St. Louis, Houston and Dallas, that are contentedly planning all-male seasons for the coming year. The New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra join San Francisco in the one-woman-is-plenty club.”
Arts Coverage In The Black Press In The Jim Crow Era
“The black press flourished in the United States during these years, providing rich, varied reporting on political and cultural happenings that mainstream press outlets distorted or ignored. Critics and reporters on the arts beat not only brought to light the creative output of black artists, but also investigated the role the arts played in the long struggle against oppression, as well as the economic and cultural impact of the arts on black communities and the United States as a whole.”
An Obituary For The NEA, Dead At 52 ‘Of Unnatural Causes’
“After brushes with extinction in the 1980s and 1990s, along with a three-decade wait to be launched after the McCarthy-era’s relentless attacks on artists, police are describing the NEA’s demise as ‘totally preventable, but oddly, both a homicide and a suicide.'”
Pennsylvania Ballet Cuts Back On Balanchine, Adds More Corella
“Though the Pennsylvania Ballet has long been considered a Balanchine company, it will perform fewer of his works than usual. [Artistic director Ángel] Corella has maintained that he is not a choreographer, but he is creating three new [story] ballets.”