“To approach someone else convincingly you must do so with open arms and head held high, and your arms can’t be open unless your head IS high. … The key word is reciprocity.”
Tag: 10.09.15
Why We Need To Overhaul The Humanities
“By the end of the 20th century, the humanities departments in universities had become closed enclaves. The writing of scholars in these disciplines had grown increasingly dense and jargon-filled, inaccessible to anyone without years of graduate study. For some academics, this enforced isolation became stifling. They sought new forms of expression. Thus literary theorists Wendy Steiner, Frank Lentricchia and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have turned to opera librettos, mystery novels and PBS documentaries.”
LOVE Conquered All: How Robert Indiana’s Sculpture Went From Artwork To Meme To Icon
“With its four letters stacked in a square and its O at a jaunty angle, [LOVE] is so famous that many millions of viewers may not even realise it’s an artwork at all. But it is an artwork – one that hovers over Indiana’s career like a helicopter, and that has obscured almost all his other work over the past six decades.” (If only he’d copyrighted it.)
Researcher: The Link Between Music And How Food Tastes
“One of the most common things we see is a relationship between pitch and taste. Lower pitches tend to be associated with bitter tastes and higher pitches with sweet tastes. There are possible health benefits to this: if you play music that makes people think their food is sweeter, the sugar content of the food could be lowered.”
Why Are Critics These Days So Defensive?
“People who enjoyed what were once known as guilty pleasures have absolved themselves of guilt. Arguments that people should be ashamed of lower-order tastes – like Ruth Graham’s attack on adults who read young-adult books – are actually quite rare. Yet anxiety about all this is pervasive, as if everyone’s high-school English teacher were lurking around the corner, ready to scold us for skipping Middlemarch on the summer reading list.”
A Pop-Up Arts Center In A Calais Migrant Camp
“The venue – a dome-shaped tent dubbed the Good Chance Theatre – runs workshops on writing, drama and choral singing, as well as poetry and spoken word events. It was founded by playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, who plan to stage weekly productions created by migrants, as well as host touring productions by theatre companies and artists from around the world.”
Watching 100 Volunteers Dance A Twyla Tharp Piece
Jean Lenihan joins a group of ordinary folks learning and dancing in Tharp’s The One Hundreds in Los Angeles.
Philadelphia City Paper Bought By Competitor And Closed Down
Last week, City Paper was “purchased by Broad Street Media, a small local media conglomerate that owns the city’s other alt-weekly, Philadelphia Weekly. The staff only learned that their publication, and their jobs, would soon cease to exist after other journalists started calling them for information.”
The Robot Gamelan – Traditional Indonesian Orchestra Gets Automated
“The Gamelatron is the world’s first completely robotic gamelan orchestra – a kinetic, site-specific structure created by Aaron Taylor Kuffner, who has rigged 27 Javanese gongs and mallets on five separate steel towers, programming them to play music that he digitally arranged.”
We Should Go Back To The Warmth And Immediacy Of Film To Win Back The Movie House
Christopher Nolan: “I have conversations with studio heads and at some point when I’m passionately advocating using film they’ll say ‘at the end of the day doesn’t storytelling trump everything?’ I say ‘no it doesn’t, otherwise we’d be making radio plays, it would be a lot cheaper.'”