“The rebuilding of Port-au-Prince won’t start for years, yet there’s already hope it will herald a brighter future for the Caribbean capital. What, asks Rob Sharp, can we learn from the architectural reinvention of other ruined cities?”
Tag: 04.21.10
Chicago Dance Co.’s Hoped-For Arts Center Still A Hole In The Ground
“A circular concrete barrier behind a tattered chain-link fence at the corner of 47th Street and Greenwood Avenue in the Kenwood neighborhood is all there is to show for once-ambitious plans” – by the nonprofit Muntu Dance Theatre – “to remake a struggling business corridor into a hub for African-American arts and culture.”
Puzzles And Brain Teasers Probably Don’t Make You Smarter (Take That, Will Shortz!)
“People playing computer games to train their brains might as well be playing Super Mario, new research suggests. In a six-week study, experts found people who played online games designed to improve their cognitive skills didn’t get any smarter.”
Bea Arthur’s Final TV Gig: A PETA Ad Campaign
The late sitcom legend “was a staunch supporter of PETA’s initiatives against so-called factory farming techniques and she will be the public face of an effort in that campaign to be aimed at McDonald’s. A photograph of Ms. Arthur is to appear in the ad next to this headline: ‘McCruelty. It’s enough to make Bea Arthur roll over in her grave’.”
Students Can’t See, But They’re Learning To Make Movies
Kevin “Bright, the Emmy-winning producer of the smash sitcom ‘Friends,’ is involved in a groundbreaking partnership with the Perkins School for the Blind.” He “has developed a filmmaking course for blind students, teaching them how to shoot, light, direct, and produce.”
Terrence McNally’s Unflattering Love Letters To Opera
“Many classical music lovers do what McNally has done: emphasize the stereotypes of the field in order to bring it across to others who have no idea how to approach this strange beast. This has the effect of pushing away exactly what they want to bring closer.”
A 1773 Protest Poem, In A Mouse’s Voice
In the 18th-century lab of Joseph Priestley, “animals didn’t last long,” so the chemist’s “lab assistant, a young woman named Anna Barbauld, decided that Priestley should give his lab animals a little more respect.” She wrote “a protest poem” and “called it ‘The Mouse’s Petition to Dr. Priestley, Found in the Trap where he had been Confined all Night.'”
Touting Film Locations, The World Flocks To L.A.
“Reflecting the more austere climate, there were a few notable absences” from the annual Locations Trade Show, “including film commissions from South Africa and China,” yet “there were several new foreign participants eager to tout their locations and new film programs” — such as Abu Dhabi, which helpfully pointed out that it has both “modern architecture and desert islands.”
The Trouble With Mary Sue
“Whenever a character serves as an improved or idealized version of his or her author, as a vehicle for the author’s fantasies of power, allure, virtue or accomplishment rather than as an integral part of the story, that character is a Mary Sue.” And what do all Mary Sues have in common? “They irritate readers.”
On Architecture’s Troubled Relationship With The Future
“To the extent that we are now designing brand-new cities at all, they tend to be marked more by wariness and anxiety — particularly about looming environmental disaster, terror attacks and global epidemics — than sweeping optimism. If Brasilia embraced the future, in other words, today’s cities seem to be on guard against it.”