“Music, Daniel J. Levitin argues, is not just something to help pass the time on road trips anda swell facilitator for meeting girls: it is, he writes,’the soundtrack of civilization’ — a force that shaped us as a species and prepared us for the higher-order task of sharing complex communications with one another.”
Tag: 08.29.08
The Red Shoes, Classic Dance Film, Holds Up 60 Years Later
“The film pays fetishistic attention to all of ballet’s detailed contrivance: the elaborate makeup, the constant audience-consciousness, the endless attention to minutiae of musical timing and technical articulation. Brilliantly it closes in on one particular feature of ballet technique.”
Document This (And This)
“We live in an age of conspicuous documentation. As digital cameras have proliferated, picture-taking has become compulsive: It is as if people fear that moments won’t exist unless they’ve been reduced to bits. No transgression goes undocumented, no inebriation goes unpublicized and no child goes un-camcorded.”
Democratic Convention Showed Off Denver Arts
“Make no mistake, Denver is getting noticed by the larger art world. Indeed, certain insiders in places like New York might have a better handle on the dramatic changes sweeping the city’s art scene than some members of the general public here.”
Do We Still Need Professional Music Critics?
“Are professional music critics still relevant? As consumers become more attuned to the wisdom of the masses, a once-elite cadre of professional music writers is facing a new reality: They aren’t as influential as they once were.”
Did Censorship Help Solzhenitsyn?
“It’s probably heresy to say so, but it seems censorship in its more benign manifestations — along with a skilled editor — was good for Solzhenitsyn’s prose, forcing some of the compression and ellipses that contribute so much to the power of “Ivan Denisovich” and, to a lesser extent, the other early novels.”
Dealer: Portrait Is Not By Leonardo
“An American dealer who in 1998 bought — and later sold — a mixed-media portrait of a young woman that some art and scientific experts now attribute to Leonardo da Vinci has come forward to say that she does not think it is by that Renaissance master.”
Boston’s Snappy Dance Closes
After 10 years, the company, which developed a growing following in Boston, has dissolved because of funding challenges, artistic director Martha Mason said
Banksy Decorates New Orleans To Commemorate Katrina
“New works by the elusive illustrator have been popping up around the city to coincide with the third anniversary of the natural disaster, which killed more than 1800 people as it swept across the US Gulf Coast.”
Discovery: Amazon Forest Was Once Cleared
“Huge swathes of the Western Amazon were cleared 600 years ago, though back then it wasn’t for logging, it was to make way for an urban network of towns, villages and hamlets. This means that decent chunks – some 20,000 square kilometres – of the Western Amazon forest is not, strictly speaking, what could be called “virgin” forest. It is what took over after local cultures were wiped out by European settlers and imported diseases and their towns and villages were left untended.”