“Expand our universe!” Lucas commands his artists and technicians. He is a man of machines yet a lover of nature, his wily persona of genial blandness masking one of the most powerful and tenacious minds in contemporary culture.
Tag: 10.15.12
Japan Abolishes Literature Translation Program – Based On Faulty Numbers
The defunct program “is called the JLPP, or Japanese Literature Publishing Project, a service launched in 2002 … to promote the translation of modern Japanese literature into four languages, English, French, German and Russian.” The decision to end JLPP was based, it turns out, on a badly botched report.
Evil – How Can We Think About It?
“To say that a murderer has killed because she or he is evil is really to point to an absence of motive. Far from the usual muddle of human motivation, evil has a cold, horrifying purity. Phrases like ‘unthinkable evil’ or ‘unspeakable evil’ highlight the way the word is used to say the unsayable, to explain the inexplicable. So how can we think about evil?”
How To Raise A Little Conservative (Or Liberal)
“Providing the best evidence yet to back up a decades-old theory, researchers writing in the journal Psychological Science report a link between a mother’s attitude toward parenting and the political ideology her child eventually adopts. In short, authoritarian parents are more prone to produce conservatives, while those who gave their kids more latitude are more likely to produce liberals.”
Saudi Arabia’s Underground Cinema
“In a country with no public cinemas and where only a few films have been shown to the public in more than three decades, it is a radical step: a handful of film-makers in Saudi Arabia has launched a secret cinema group, showing their own films that explore social and political issues such as women’s rights, the lives of migrant workers, urbanisation and the belief in black magic.”
The Guardian‘s Not The Booker Prize (A Mug) Goes To The Best Electioneer
Ewan Morrison’s Tales From the Mall won more reader votes than the next two contenders combined. But Morrison did some last-minute e-mail campaigning that prize honcho Sam Jordison found both unseemly and self-contradictory – and then he got into a weird exchange with Jordison himself.
Why Milwaukee Ballet Did Away With The Principal-Soloist-Corps System
Artistic director Michael Pink: “I don’t subscribe to the class structure; I mean especially an organization where there’s so few dancers – if you have 25, 24 dancers, they’re all going to have to work equally well … You see the obvious people that can do those things, and I think we have less ego and less ego issues – we don’t have any issues with anybody who assumes they’re greater than anyone else, and that’s lovely.”
Why Do Audiences Cough More At Plays Than At Movies?
Lyn Gardner: “Why does it happen at a live show but not at a filmed one? American lyricist Alan Jay Lerner may have been right when he suggested that ‘coughing in the theatre is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.'”
How Big A Problem Is Amateur Art Restoration?
“Amateur restorations have always been a problem. In the US, you buy a Reader’s Digest so you can fix your plumbing or your gutters, so why not also try to fix your paintings?”
David Henry Hwang On How To Make A Living As A Playwright (Don’t)
“Being a playwright is not really a way to make a living. Most of us have some sort of day job — whether it is teaching or, in my case, doing commercial work, writing movies and things. This gives me a certain amount of financial freedom to focus on my theatre work, which is a great blessing.”