He pursues height and depth at the expense of breadth and fine-grained texture, qualities which can only be found if one lowers one’s gaze, and deigns to look at music’s everyday reality, amid the muddle of ordinary human life—and beyond the west, to music in the wider world. That stance is more and more the stance of musicology nowadays, but Roger Scruton wants nothing to do with it.
Tag: 08.22.18
The Untranslatable Japanese Phrase That Keeps The Entire Country Running
Yoroshiku onegaishimasu. “It’s a crucial term in Japan heard every single day in thousands of contexts. But it’s really hard to come up with a simple, easily translatable definition. And some foreigners might find it completely baffling.”
Why Burning Man Worked And Why It Doesn’t
At the heart of Burning Man—not just the artworks but the entire festival—is its ability to inspire in attendees a combination of awe and pride: We made it. Look what we did. Look at what we’re capable of. There’s an earnestness to this sentiment that’s both admirably pure and grossly myopic, as if Burners were the only ones ever to have built a city, experimented with alternative models of living, or spent time in the Black Rock Desert. This is the root of so much of the self-congratulatory language that can make the festival seem insufferable to those who’ve never been.
Watch A Real Urban Planner Play ‘SimCity’
“SimCity is one of the greatest video game franchises of all time, if only because it demonstrates something important: Designing a city from scratch is very hard, and it’s impossible to make everyone happy all the time. That’s even more evident thanks to UC Berkeley PhD student Dave Amos, who studies urban planning and whose commentary on the game offers a hilarious criticism of both game design and planning bureaucracy.”
Is This The Worst Novel Ever Written?
“If there is a Pride and Prejudice of kitschy bad fiction, Amanda McKittrick Ros’s 1897 masterpiece of overwriting” — Irene Iddesleigh — “is it. The book’s legion of avowed ‘admirers’ includes Mark Twain, the Bloomsbury Group, Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis. At parties, ardent devotees have been known to compete in seeing how long they can read aloud from its pages without laughing. The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature aptly sums up Ros’s work as ‘uniquely dreadful.'”
How A Mathematician Turned Game Theory, Myths And Comic-Book Drawings Into A Massively Popular Card Game
“‘The question is,’ Richard Garfield once asked, ‘can systems be dramatic? Can math be breathtaking? Can numbers move your soul?'” In 1991, Garfield (the great-great-grandson of President James Garfield) walked into the offices of a Seattle game publisher with a proposal that ultimately morphed into Magic: The Gathering – the first-ever trading-card game, which, over 25 years, has acquired roughly 20 million players and 20 billion cards printed, some of which are now worth tens of thousands of dollars. Magic, writes Chris Randle, “balances chess’s chilly purity with the social theatre of poker.”
Glassblowers Stuck By A Severe Shortage Of Glass
The shortage seems to be the culmination of stricter environmental laws, which led to a cutback in suppliers, compounded most recently by heavy demands on an overseas supplier.
David Simon On Why He Doesn’t Make TV For The Networks
“Frankly, I’ve never been good at writing to the common denominator. I’m still not. I haven’t done one show that was a huge ratings hit. And at this point, I’ve done about 130 hours of television. … As long as you had to go for the mass audience, you couldn’t have stories that were dark, that vexed people, that had lead characters who were morally inconsistent, unlucky, or tragic. You couldn’t write tragedies that any self-respecting Greek might recognize.”
Bomb Destroys Palestinian Theater
The Said al-Mishal Centre brought theatre, dance and music to the beleaguered residents of Gaza City. Its destruction in an Israeli air strike has sparked outrage – and dealt a heavy blow to Palestinian culture
Aretha Franklin Didn’t Leave A Will
In documents filed with the Oakland County probate court, Ms. Franklin’s sons — Clarence, Edward and KeCalf Franklin, and Ted White Jr. — listed themselves as “interested parties.” One document, signed by KeCalf Franklin, checked a box indicating that “the decedent died intestate,” or without a will.