The (grand-)mother of all blonde European starlets, now 93, “was seriously injured Saturday after falling out of bed and breaking several bones.” She is reportedly at UCLA Medical Center, surrounded by her family.
Tag: 07.18.10
Scenes From The Life Of A Freelance New York Ballerina
Taylor Gordon remembers doing four shows a day some days as a corps member in the Radio City Christmas Show – at a time when she was taking ballet class 30 hours a week, getting bachelor’s and master’s degrees, working the occasional magazine internship, and going to countless auditions. “Now, thinking back,” she says, “I don’t know how I did this.”
Why Are Big Scientific Discoveries So Much Harder These Days?
“If you look back on history, you get the sense that scientific discoveries used to be easy. Galileo rolled objects down slopes. Robert Hooke played with a spring to learn about elasticity … Today, if you want to make a discovery in physics, it helps to be part of a 10,000-member team that runs a multibillion dollar atom smasher. It takes ever more money, more effort, and more people to find out new things.” Why is this?
Revolution In 91 Measures, In Sonata Form
Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation may have stuck to a traditional format, but it broke almost every other mold one might think of. The piece, composed back in 1931, is “a rigorously organized discourse for 13 percussionists playing on 40 instruments, and nothing else”; it employed “timbre, texture and density, rather than melody and harmony, as organizational tools”; and it “dramatically raised the bar for virtuosity among percussionists,” in terms of both dexterity and command of complex rhythms.