“‘We’re as valid as anything by Beethoven,’ declared Jon Lord of his band, Deep Purple … [He] was not merely adopting a rebellious stance. An accomplished classical composer as well as rock musician, he believed with some justification that his group’s music was as profound in structure and as significant in cultural impact as any work from the symphonic canon.”
Tag: 06.16.12
Thieves Steal Nova Scotia Sculptors’ Work, Sell It For Scrap
“The thieves received $1200 for selling the sculptures as scrap but the art is valued at upwards of $250,000. The pieces were not insured.”
The Man Who Deciphered Egyptian Hieroglyphs
“On Sept. 14, 1822, as legend tells the tale, Jean-François Champollion burst into his brother’s Paris office at the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, flung a bundle of drawings upon the desk and cried, ‘Je tiens mon affaire!’ (‘I’ve done it!’).”
Could E-Books Revolutionize Primary Education In Africa?
The Humble School in Uganda “is on the front lines of an effort to reinvent developing world literacy programs with technology. The premise is that the new economics of digital publishing might make more and better books available in classrooms … A vision of “one Kindle per child” for developing countries faces considerable challenges, including the cost of e-readers and making sure that kids actually learn better on the devices than with old-fashioned books.”
I Almost Never Pay For Music, And Never Have, Says 21-Year-Old DJ
Emily White, manager of a college radio station and NPR intern: “I’ve never supported physical music as a consumer. As monumental a role as musicians and albums have played in my life, I’ve never invested money in them aside from concert tickets and t-shirts. … I honestly don’t think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience.”
Djuna Barnes, Grandmama Of Stunt Journalism
In the 1910s and ’20, the Brooklyn-born writer wrote dozens of colorful stories about colorful characters, very much including herself. (She also drew her own illustrations.) A century before Christopher Hitchens had himself waterboarded, Barnes had herself force-fed by tube so as to be able to describe what British suffragettes were being subjected to in prison.
Australia’s Oldest Aboriginal Art Found
“An archaeologist says he has found the oldest piece of rock art in Australia and one of the oldest in the world: an Aboriginal work created 28,000 years ago in an outback cave.”
Noam Chomsky Tells Us Who Invented Email
“Email, upper case, lower case, any case, is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, the email we all experience today — and email was invented in 1978 by a 14-year-old working in Newark, NJ. The facts are indisputable.”
Not Sexy Enough: Desmond McCarthy’s Original Review Of James Joyce’s Ulysses
1923: “The author has been compared to Rabelais. He has only in common with Rabelais a gust for and an exuberant command of words; a like avidity for verbal analogies and assonances, which he carries to a point characteristic of a peculiar mental aberration which used to be called puns, alliterations, or repetitions, which here and there flash into wit, or form an amusing or brilliant collocation of vocables, but more often make an echoing rumble which is not addressed to the intelligence; he flings about a lot of dirty words as well as crashing learned ones. And here all resemblance stops between the author of the inestimable life of the Great Gargantua and that of Ulysses.”
Think Facebook Is Distracting? Try Theatre
“For Rousseau, theater was little more than an app of a broken society, and it was the world that had gone wrong. … Staged productions representing life, he believed, distracted us from one another, and from ourselves. Theater replaces lived experience with vicarious experience and condemned participants to wander the sea of the non-present.”