“The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue is sightseeing tour-cum-performance piece that captures a neighborhood in flux. The project’s stage is literally the South Bronx streets; its seats, a moving bus. An audio guide is pumped through headphones, and features a narrator (who performs live at the front of the bus) and two prerecorded characters.”
Tag: 09.02.09
Why The Ikea Font Controversy Matters
Ikea’s catalogue typeface switch, from the venerable Futura to Microsoft’s omnipresent Verdana, has design people fuming. The “new look has been defined not by a company proudly parading its 66-year heritage, but by something driven by the clarity of the digital age. Nothing wrong with that – it’s a business. … But what would happen to our appreciation of the world if all our decisions were governed by commerce alone?”
The Most-Listened-To Public Radio Station In America?
It’s southern California’s KUSC which says “that it has been ranked as the most listened to public radio station in the nation for the spring quarter by Arbitron.”
Will Wikipedia’s Rule Change Alter Its Very Nature?
Some users worry about the new policy that alterations to certain high-profile entries must be cleared by an editor. No need to fret. “Rather than a signal Wikipedia’s coming of age or a shift away from democracy, these new rules merely formalize, for certain pages, what’s already happening on the site.”
A Child Finding His Vocation As A Pianist – In Nazareth
“I grew up in the old town of Nazareth,” says Saleem Abboud Ashkar. “With its narrow streets and its bazaar – all the oriental cliches, in fact. The mosque. The call to prayer. This is what my auditory environment was. And in the middle of it I was sitting there practising Haydn.”
Mimì And Rodolfo In The Ethiopian Desert
“Leave it to stubbornly iconoclastic filmmaker Werner Herzog to breathe new life into the well-worn score of Puccini’s La Bohème. In a new short film that will screen this week at the Venice Film Festival, Herzog takes the love duet “O soave fanciulla” … and sets it to images of the Mursi people in southwest Ethiopia.”
From The Book Group Discussion Guide To Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
“2. In [this novel], painful personal setbacks often occur at the same moment as sea-monster attacks, suggesting a metaphorical linkage of ‘monsters’ with the pains of romantic disappointment; for example, Marianne is rebuffed by Willoughby at Hydra-Z precisely as the giant mutant lobsters are staging their mutiny. Have you ever been ‘attacked by giant lobsters,’ either figuratively or literally?”
Sleepy Jazz Musician Wakes On Subway, His Horns Stolen
“Matthew Jodrell, a jazz musician, was riding the subway home after a Sunday night performance in Lower Manhattan. Then he made the mistake of nodding off,” whereupon he was robbed. “The thief did not take Mr. Jodrell’s money, but he did take two beloved brass instruments: a flugelhorn made in Switzerland and a Bach Stradivarius trumpet, together worth nearly $10,000.”
Carving Crazy Horse Out Of The Black Hills (Since 1948)
“It’s easy to feel affection for Mount Rushmore’s strange grandeur, but only if you forget where it is and how it got there. … The Crazy Horse Memorial has some of the same problems: it is most definitely an unnatural landmark. Some of the Indians I met in South Dakota voiced their own misgivings, starting with the fact that it presumes to depict a proud man who was never captured in a photograph or drawn from life.”
Planned For 2012: A Giant Lunar Clock On The Thames
“The aim is to create a new London landmark close to the proposed Olympic stadium as a monument to a more natural way of marking time. The proposed site is at East India Dock, six miles along the river from Westminster Palace. Its designers hope their clock will become as iconic as Big Ben, which has been marking time for 150 years. The site is currently a bedraggled nature reserve.”