“He was controversial, to say the least, but his influence has been, and continues to be, extraordinary. No one in the last century did more to change the way much of the world now thinks about, makes and consumes art.”
Tag: 09.01.12
Ranking Literary Devils By Their Fearsomeness
“A look at how writers channeled pure evil into its cutest and its creepiest forms” – from Mephistopheles to Screwtape (C.S. Lewis) to Woland (Bulgakov) to that wicked spirit that made poor little Regan hurl green vomit at the priesty. (Though they forgot Bob from Twin Peaks.)
Salman Rushdie On How Cinema Has Changed Literature
“As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn’t exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you’re doing. Close-ups too. Writers can use filmic devices that we’ve all accepted so much that we don’t even see them as devices any more.”
‘Iridescent Dragonfly Wing’: The Louvre’s New Islamic Art Building
“The Louvre’s astonishing new wing for the department of Islamic art undulates like molten gold, so liquid-smooth in contrast to the surrounding neoclassical architecture framing it that at a glance from afar it almost looks like a digitalized, fake rendering of what visitors can hope to see in the distant future.”
Lyricist Hal David, 91
“David and his longtime partner composer Burt Bacharach etched an indelible footprint on the American songbook when they penned dozens of top 40 hits. The two crafted a slew of memorable singles in the 1960s and early 1970s for a range of artists including Dionne Warwick, the Carpenters, Dusty Springfield, Gene Pitney and Tom Jones.”
How The Human Brain Is Like An Old European City
“We effectively have three evolutionary versions of brains in our heads. Our brains are rather like a city that has existed since ancient times” – a historic core (the brain stem), later neighborhoods expanding outward (the limbic system), and outer areas with modern office and techolopgy parks (the cortex and its lobes).
Alan M. Kriegsman, 84, First Dance Critic To Win A Pulitzer
“[He was] a critic for The Washington Post whose fervid prose style earned the first Pulitzer Prize for dance coverage and who chronicled an era of surging popular enthusiasm for dance in forms ranging from classical ballet to break dancing” over a 30-year career.