What’s in your earbuds at the ocean? “Mention Bach and the beach, and most people think of the Brandenburg Concertos. In the stately French manner, and equally entrancing, is Bach’s third Orchestral Suite. You can stop after the rollicking six-minute overture, but few will be able to resist the second movement Air (on a G String) and the dance movements that follow.”
Tag: 06.22.12
An Interview WIth Santiago Calatrava, Architect Of Swooping Bridges (And A Lot More)
“‘Engineering came first but now, after 30 years, I don’t see any difference between architecture and engineering. If you look at Brunel’s [Clifton Suspension] bridge in Bristol you could ask, “Is that architecture or engineering?” The details are architecture but the solution is engineering.'”
Can’t Learn To Dance? Try On These Shoes
“The shoes are equipped with accelerometer sensors that correspond to an app on the users’ smartphone. The app illustrates the proper way to do certain dance moves and gives live feedback to let you know if you’re really shakin’ ’em down.”
‘American Bandstand,’ Slice Of Rock ‘n’ Roll History, Just Doesn’t Have The Rights
“Dick Clark Productions counts among its assets more than 30 years of episodes of ‘American Bandstand,’ the weekly dance show of top hits that usually featured big-name singers performing as well. That would seem to be a potential gold mine of rock ‘n’ roll history, but making money off of it is another story. Although Dick Clark Productions (DCP) owns the shows, it doesn’t own the musical rights to the performances (most of which were lip-synced).”
What Is This Thing Called Love? And Why Is It Still So Damned Confounding?
“May we all — the women, anyway — put down the self-help books that haven’t exactly been doing us any good anyway. Love is a greater thing than arranged marriage, and it’s a greater thing than daddy issues and attachment theory. It can transcend it all, as long as you know what the true barriers are.”
Daniel Barenboim On Germany, Israel, And Wagner
“Hitler made Wagner into a prophet. But Hitler, of course, reinterpreted even the worst things Wagner wrote about the Jews in a way for which Wagner cannot be held responsible.”
Who Remembers National Book Award Finalists? The Internet, Of Course
On a new National Book Foundation site that commemorates all of the finalists and winners, “the fun is in happening upon the lesser-known, like the The Balloonist, MacDonald Harris’s 1977 novel ‘about a Swedish inventor and his two companions who embark on a hydrogen-balloon voyage to the North Pole at the end of the 19th century.'”
Not Getting Parts? Asian-American Actors Head To YouTube Instead
“When it comes to Asian American actors and their younger YouTubing peers, who should be schooling whom? At a time when Asian American actors like Kang struggle to score the limited roles open to them in film and TV, YouTubers like Higa are amassing huge audiences without going to a single cattle call, pulling in six-figure salaries from the online ads that accompany their broadcasts. Both groups collide on You Offend Me, You Offend My Family, a new online network that’s part of YouTube’s expanding stable of channels dedicated to original programming.”
Autry Museum President Abruptly Resigns
“Daniel Finley, the president and chief executive of the Autry National Museum, has abruptly stepped down from the institution after just two years on the job. The Autry said Thursday that it had named W. Richard West Jr. as its new president and CEO.”
UK Writers Protest Destruction Of Thousands Of Public Library Books
“The poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, and a host of other literary names have joined calls to halt the destruction of hundreds of thousands of books at one of the UK’s greatest municipal libraries. They have written to the head of libraries for Manchester, demanding that the book pulping stop immediately.”