“Taymor’s film reveals more of the spectacle than any one spectator at the theater could have seen. Nonetheless a filmed version of a stage production cannot quite capture the sense of being there, even if the wizards currently developing the science of virtual reality no doubt are conceiving ways to eliminate the distinction.”
Tag: 06.25.15
Argentine Writer Faces Prosecution For Doing Borgesian Things To A Borges Story
“Pablo Katchadjian decided in 2009 to remix one of Borges’s most renowned short stories, ‘The Aleph’, keeping the original text but adding a considerable amount of his own writing. The result was the short experimental book called El Aleph engordado (The Fattened Aleph) … Katchadjian has now been formally charged with the un-literary sounding crime of ‘intellectual property fraud’. If found guilty he risks spending up to six years in prison.”
How You Lie – And Whether You Think You’re Lying – Depends On Your Culture
“Some aspects of lie detection, especially those elements measured by lie detector tests, might be cultural. For instance, what if the person who might be lying is speaking a second language? What if she grew up in a different place than you, with different social norms? How difficult is it to spot a liar then? Is there any hope for a scientific approach?”
It Seems There Are Four Kinds of Introversion
“As more regular, non-scientist types started to talk about introversion, psychologist Jonathan Cheek began to notice something: The way many introverts defined the trait was different from the way he and most of his academic colleagues did.”
Former NYCity Ballet Principal Albert Evans, 46,
“Mr. Evans joined City Ballet in 1988 and was named a soloist in 1991 and a principal four years later, becoming only the second black dancer in the company’s history to hold that position. The first, Arthur Mitchell, now 81, performed with City Ballet in the 1950s and ’60s and in 1969 helped found Dance Theater of Harlem.”
Those Deeply Ugly Ebook Fonts Are Getting A Makeover
“For typography fans, electronic books have long been the visual equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard. The fonts are uninviting. Jarring swaths of white space stretch between words. Absent are all the typesetting nuances of a fine print book.”
What If The Only Shakespeare Play To Survive Had Been ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’?
“The mystery of Midsummer Night gets bound up in the larger mystery of Shakespeare. Yet it is an anomaly, distinct from anything he wrote before or after, a world to itself with its own rules and its own moods.”
The Most Controversial Ballerina In The U.S., In Her Prime
“The ballerina Sara Mearns, now 29, has entered her prime. She has surely become the most Dionysiac artist in an Apollonian genre, very probably the most talked-of ballerina in America and quite possibly the most argued-about ballerina anywhere.”
How Ticket Reselling Is Killing Live Music (And There’s Nothing We Can Do About It)
“Defenders of the ticket resale market will tell you ticket resale is a simple extension of the free market; that the resale market is the best way to learn the true value of a ticket (as opposed to the perceived one asked by promoters, venues and artists); and that if artists don’t like resale (and many don’t), they should set higher prices (in fact, certain top artists, defenders correctly point out, work a percentage of resale profits into their contracts).”
Asian Americans, Playing Roles Well Beyond Maid, Nurse Or Grocer
“When the actress Mia Katigbak was a student at Barnard College in the 1970s, she was the only Asian-American studying theater and mostly got to play ‘maids and hookers,’ she said. One day the department head asked her to join a Molière comedy. She would play the harpsichord from behind a screen, Ms. Katigbak recalls his saying, ‘because there were no Asians in France at that time.'”