“Why commit yourself to one gigantic classic when you can read a whole lot of small classics in the same period of time, racking up at least as much intellectual cachet while you were at it?”
Tag: 05.16.11
New Government Internet Filters Set Off Protests Around Turkey
“Thousands of people in more than 30 cities around Turkey took to the streets on Sunday to protest a new system of filtering the Internet that opponents consider censorship.”
Taking The Kid To The School For Comedy
“The children line up in the middle of the room and take turns to fulfil a comic brief called out by [the teacher]. They run through a load of situations: world’s worst newsreader; things you’d least expect to hear from a headmistress (‘Hello children – today we’re going to be watching Black Swan‘). Not everything works, but the performers are rarely stumped. I’ve never seen children so eager to volunteer for anything.”
San Francisco Builds A Home For Jazz
The San Francisco center, “is stand-alone, but it’s not going to be a monument or a citadel of culture. Those Beaux Arts buildings (nearby) are beautiful, but we want to have a building that looks like a jazz building, so you can see the building is alive.”
Ai Weiwei Permitted Visit From Wife (He’s In Good Condition)
“Detained artist Ai Weiwei seems to be in good physical health but mentally conflicted and tense, his wife has said after seeing him for the first time in six weeks.”
Grand Delusion: What You See Is (Literally) Not What You Get
“Your senses are your windows on the world, and you probably think they do a fair job at capturing an accurate depiction of reality. Don’t kid yourself. Sensory perception – especially vision – is a figment of your imagination.”
Roberto Bolle, Reduced To Dancing Atoms
“It’s unlike any ballet you’ve ever seen – a swarm of swirling particles gradually form the shape of a dancer and transform into a lifelike model before they explode into digital bits for the grand finale. This performance, dubbed Dancing Atoms, is the result of a collaboration between ballet dancer Roberto Bolle and a team lead by researchers at [MIT].”
Playwright Pam Gems Dead At 85
For many years an associate of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Gems became best known for a series of plays that “reconsidered the lives of iconic women” – works that included the international success Piaf as well as Queen Christina and an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s Camille.
Why Doesn’t Acting Get Enough Discussion In Theatre Reviews?
Lyn Gardner: “The obvious reason for this decline is space, the difficulties of being truly descriptive in just 320 words. The only form of critical writing in print I can think of in which performances are routinely – and often exquisitely and poetically – described is the football match report. … It’s not just space, though. … There is also, perhaps, less consensus today about what constitutes good acting.”
Free Bob Dylan From The Bobolator Cult!
Ron Rosenbaum: “Bob Dylan has a big birthday coming up (70), and it occurred to me that one of the best presents we could give him would be to extricate Bob from the treacly, reductive, crushing embrace of the Bobolators. (My name for those writers and cultists who still make Dylan into a plaster saint, incapable of imperfection.)”