Author and journalism professor Ben Yagoda recommends such mainstays of the comedian’s art as the power of surprise and (yes) panic.
Tag: 07.14.14
What We Really Taste When We Drink Wine
Researchers are finding that we – all of us – are way more suggestible than we’d like to think, and influenced by factors even the savviest of us might not expect. (They’ve even fooled a class of oenology students by coloring a white wine red.)
The Art Of Laughing (How Does Laughing Define Us)
Laughter has been a key marker of what we feel about other cultures, about our own past and our views of the “progress of civilization.”
When One Culture “Steals” From Another Culture (Why Is That Wrong?)
“Over time, the concept of cultural appropriation has morphed into a parody of the original idea. We are now to get angry simply when whites happily imitate something that minorities do. We now use the word steal in an abstract sense, separated from any kind of material value. It used to be that we said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But now there is new way to see the matter: Imitation is a kind of dismissal.”
Tupac Shakur Musical Flops Hard On Broadway
Holler If Ya Hear Me “never brought in more than $175,000 a week in gross revenues, becoming one of the worst-selling musicals of recent years.”
£10,000 Caine Prize For African Writing To Okwiri Oduor
Her 2003 short story “My Father’s Head” opens “with the narrator’s attempts to remember what her father’s face looked like as she struggles to cope with his loss, and follows her as she finds the courage to remember.”
Troubled Delaware Symphony’s Chairman Dies Suddenly
“Bruce Kallos, board chairman of the Delaware Symphony Orchestra, died suddenly Sunday afternoon at Wilmington Hospital from complications associated with a blood infection. He was 79. … Kallos was elected in April to the symphony’s highest leadership post, after former board chairwoman Tatiana Copeland abruptly resigned.”
The Genius Of Lorin Maazel
“He had an incomparable stick technique (something he pooh-poohed as a technique). A brilliantly accomplished musician (he was a virtuoso violinist and a composer), he boasted what must have been a genius-level IQ. He appeared capable of playing four-dimensional mental chess while carrying on a dinner conversation with lesser mortal beings.”
Fair Trade Music?
“Fair trade deals with the ethical treatment of labor in the production and supply chain rather than the ethical sourcing of materials, so it works well for a field like music, where the primary product is good vibrations. The fair trade movement is a project 50-plus years in the making, with a core set of criteria by which to evaluate if products have been produced ethically.”
Video Game Industry’s Obsession With Big Sales Hurts The Art Form
“It’s as if, through sales figures, profits and other assorted fiscal headlines video games will be able to buy their way to legitimacy. How fitting that a medium which typically encourages its players to exert dominance over the competition would frame its worth as a battle, usually with cinema, as if this were a fight to be won, as if the winner would somehow usurp the loser, as if each venue for human expression didn’t have unique capacity for joy, wonder and meaning.”