“I thought that if I were going into old age I would want to do what Verdi did, which is to write extraordinary things, and to really find myself. I’ll be eighty-three shortly, and I want to be renewed. We all want to be renewed, don’t we?”
Tag: 09.07.11
On ‘Ruin Porn’ Images Of Decaying Cities
“These photos … are not created so much out of the need to raise consciousness as out of the need to stand before these ruins in awe. It isn’t clear what you do next, after awe. … We are not ready, perhaps, to think about visiting Detroit in the same way that we would visit the Palais des Papes in Avignon. But what, really, is the difference?”
Head Of America’s Newest Center For Dance Is Very, Very Excited
Frank L. Sonntag of the new Cowles Center in Minneapolis: [We’ll be] “raising dance to a level that’s been enjoyed by music and theater here for a very long time, providing a venue that is discipline-specific, and just wait until you see it. This is going to be one of the finest venues in the whole world for dance, with amenities that [dance] artists usually have to make do without.”
Should English Be The Lingua Franca Of Research?
“The critics of the anglification argue that the use of English as preferred language of research worldwide works against all those who do not have English as their mother tongue, while at the same time giving an unfair advantage to the native speakers of the language of Shakespeare.”
How Scientists Identified The Sailboat Under The World Trade Center
“Although it may have been a simple grain or cargo vessel making trades up and down the Hudson River and between the Caribbean, perhaps it also peacefully helped ferry British soldiers out of New York City after the war, or maybe more notoriously the ship had a run-in with the Marsh Pirates of New Jersey.”
Does Reading Fiction Make Us More Aggressive?
“The research suggests having a scene in our head can impact our subsequent behavior, and that scene needn’t be conveyed in the form of eye-popping computer graphics. Descriptive prose will do quite nicely.”
The 9/11 Memorial Isn’t Comforting, It’s Nihilistic
Witold Rybczynski: “[There] is nothing comforting about gazing into the vast pit – or, rather, two pits – of the 9/11 memorial, the water endlessly falling and disappearing into a bottomless black hole. The strongest sense I came away with was of hopelessness.”
David Hockney Moves Into Filmmaking (And Thinks He Might Save Cinema)
“The artist has some valuable pointers for television and Hollywood. ‘It has occurred to me that it could save cinema,’ Hockney said, outlining plans to exhibit his landscape films, in which he used nine cameras to create large moving images across multiple screens.”
Reading Fiction Increases Empathy, Says Study
“Burying your head in a novel isn’t just a way to escape the world: psychologists are increasingly finding that reading can affect our personalities. A trip into the world of Stephenie Meyer, for example, actually makes us feel like vampires.”
Michael Moore On Being ‘The Most Hated Man In America’ [sic] After Oscar Speech
“Wishes for my early demise seemed to be everywhere. … I was not unaware that my movies had made a lot of people mad. It was not unusual for fans to randomly come up and hug me and say, ‘I’m so happy you’re still here!’ They didn’t mean in the building. Why was I still alive?”