As one trucker told reporter Alan Yu, “Every single driver I’ve ever talked to listens to NPR.” Why? Some of it is that the substance can keep people engaged for mile after mile. But this is also another case where geography is destiny.
Tag: 08.21.17
So Much For The Public Square – Charlottesville Reveals Tech Platforms’ True Nature
“The recent rise of all-encompassing internet platforms promised something unprecedented and invigorating: venues that unite all manner of actors — politicians, media, lobbyists, citizens, experts, corporations — under one roof. These companies promised something that no previous vision of the public sphere could offer: real, billion-strong mass participation; a means for affinity groups to find one another and mobilize, gain visibility and influence. This felt and functioned like freedom, but it was always a commercial simulation.”
Brian Aldiss, Novelist Who Helped Turn Science Fiction Into Literary Art, Dead At 92
“Author of the classic Helliconia trilogy, and the story on which Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film AI: Artificial Intelligence was based, … he began publishing his stories in the mid-1950s, a time when SF was heavily dominated by US writers schooled in the markets of commercial magazines. Aldiss’s work came as a breath of fresh air to a genre beginning to suffocate in its own orthodoxies.”
Bea Wain, 100, Last Of The Big-Band Era ‘Girl Singers’
“[She] started singing on the radio at age 6, became a hit-making pop vocalist” – “Deep Purple,” “Heart and Soul,” “Kiss the Boys Goodbye” – “in the late 1930s and performed into her ninth decade.”
The Manchester Model – A Solution For Shared Community Arts Spaces?
The idea is to offer areas that are affordable to everyone, all the while “cross-pollinating” ideas that lead to a culturally vibrant city, whether it’s providing a desk for a playwright, allowing a theatre group share services with an asylum seeker’s support group, or renting out a cheap space for a club DJ to try out music’s next big thing (maybe).
What The French Understood About Jerry Lewis
Agnès C. Poirier: “Jerry Lewis was always a subject of a deep trans-Atlantic misunderstanding, one that triggered sarcasm in the United States, and bewilderment in France. While some Americans felt embarrassed by this contortionist comic, the French embraced Mr. Lewis’s humor as both an abstract art and social satire of American life. Americans mocked the French for falling for this crass clown, while the French couldn’t understand why Mr. Lewis’s genius was not obvious to his compatriots.”
Finally, A Ballet Movie Whose Heroine Resembles Actual Ballerinas
“She has friends. She goes out. She has a sense of humor. What she’s not? ‘Totally depressed and anorexic,’ said the filmmaker Valérie Müller, who, with her husband, the choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, directed the film Polina.”
A New ‘Anna Karenina’ Coming From Joffrey And Australian Ballet
“The partnership will team the Russian composer Ilya Demutsky, who has been commissioned to compose a new score, with the Russian choreographer Yuri Possokhov. A former Bolshoi dancer, Possokhov currently is choreographer in residence at the San Francisco Ballet.”
Ai Weiwei To Build Fences Across New York City
The exhibition uses fences as a way to explore immigration, boundaries and the ongoing refugee crisis. Ai, who lived in New York in the 1980s when he was a student, says it is “a love letter to the city and its people”. The outdoor show will include large-scale site-specific sculptures as well as photography to be presented in more than 300 spots, both public and privately owned, across the city
The Time Miles Davis Drag-Raced With Herbie Hancock
“We both get to the stoplight at Sixth Avenue. It’s like 2, 3 o’clock in the morning. I knew what was going to happen: As soon as the light turns green, we’d floored it, right! So we drove several blocks before the next red light. I got to the light shortly before Miles, and I smoked Marlboros in those days. I grabbed one, lit it, rolled down the window as Miles drives up.”