Despite the show trial he underwent in 1964, “inwardly Brodsky resented and rejected his identification as a dissident, and fought it for the rest of his life – not because he disliked or disapproved of dissidents, but because he felt he had other aims than they did. His goal was to make his mark in literature, and everything else was secondary.”
Tag: 05.18.12
Alain De Botton Wants To Make Pornography Better
Says the philosopher of his latest project, which will be based at a website called “Better Porn”, “Ideally, porn would excite our lust in contexts which also presented other, elevated sides of human nature – in which people were being witty, for instance, or showing kindness, or working hard or being clever – so that our sexual excitement could bleed into, and enhance our respect for these other elements of a good life.”
Topless Dancers In Paris Strike For Better Pay
“Topless dancers at Parisian cabaret Crazy Horse are negotiating with management over pay after strike action caused the show to be cancelled twice. The dancers work six nights a week earning €2,000 a month.”
How David Zinman Got The Idea Of 10PM Concerts For Young Adults
The conductor recounts how he asked his 16-year-old son, “‘You like classical music, but why don’t you go to concerts?’ He said ‘but none of my friends go to concerts’. I said ‘why don’t they go to concerts?’ He thought about it and said ‘they don’t want to be seen with their parents’. A little light bulb went off in my head: Let’s have late concerts where parents aren’t allowed.”
Can Architecture Fix Urban Problems – Like Murders? (Maybe)
“Around the world, followers of architecture with a capital A have focused so much of their attention on formal experiments, as if aesthetics and social activism, twin Modernist concerns, were mutually exclusive. But MedellÃn is proof that they’re not, and shouldn’t be. Architecture, here and elsewhere, acts as part of a larger social and economic ecology, or else it elects to be a luxury, meaningless except to itself.”
Forget Your Synthesizer? No Worries: Just Draw A New One
“Thanks to Carnegie Mellon student Billy Keyes who created SketchSynth, anyone can sketch his or her own control panels using a webcam, a piece of paper and a marker.”
Painting Of Canada’s Prime Minister Au Naturel Doesn’t Go Over Well Online
A nude Stephen Harper reclining like the Rokeby Venus or Olympia? OK, it’s art – but Twitter doesn’t deal with it well.
More On The E-Word For Composers
That is, entrepreneurship. Why? “Most composition programs are built along the business model of South Park‘s underpants gnomes [collect underpants + ? = profit].”
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, A Man Who Could Even Intimidate Benjamin Britten
“Britten to Fischer-Dieskau, 1961: ‘Please forgive me writing to such a busy man as yourself — you can be sure that if I did not feel very strongly I should not be troubling you! … I am writing what I think will be one of my most important works. It is a full-scale Requiem Mass for chorus and orchestra … Peter Pears has agreed to sing the tenor part, and with great temerity I am asking you whether you would sing the baritone.'”
Taking Another Look at Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion
“Grand Illusion repeatedly shows such examples of the potential for human feelings to bridge national boundaries. It is also a stunning example of Renoir’s skillful melding of realism and glittering artifice.”