“No other American orchestra comes close to equaling the Minnesota Orchestra’s achievement as a recording powerhouse over the past quarter-century. Most orchestras in the U.S. are not recording at all or release only occasional live recordings, usually on in-house labels with zero support from major record companies.” But Osma Vänskä and the Minnesotans have been racking up rave reviews, awards, and sales figures with their CDs on the BIS label. Reporter Terry Blain looks at how they do it.
Tag: 10.27.18
Why Lucinda Childs Is Shutting Down Her Dance Company For A Second Time
“The postmodern choreographer and director came to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s, first with Judson Dance Theater and then with her own eponymous company. She shut down her troupe almost two decades ago to work as a freelance director, relaunched it nine years later to stage a couple of revivals … and then just kept going.” Rachel Elson talks to Childs about how having her own company has been different the second time around and why she’s decided to stop.
In The Absence Of Understanding, Researchers Propose “Thousand Brains” Theory Of Intelligence
The architecture of most deep learning models is based on layers of processing– an artificial neural network that is inspired by the neurons of the biological brain. Yet neuroscientists do not agree on exactly what intelligence is, and how it is formed in the human brain — it’s a phenomena that remains unexplained.
A British Graphic Novel Author Wants To Create A Woman As Rotten As Scrooge
Well, as Scrooge in the majority of A Christmas Carol, anyway. Posy Simmonds, author of Gemma Bovary and Tamara Drewe, is ready to let her grump loose on the world. “I start in notebooks and was drawing a character who I thought might run an art gallery. I’ve always thought that, with rare exceptions like Mrs Danvers [from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca], women really aren’t allowed to be total rotters.”
Oaxacan Musicians Use Rap And Hip Hop To Fight For Change
In Oaxaca, Mexico, rap and hip hop have been dominated by men. But women are changing the scene. Every month in the central plaza, Oaxacans can hear “a tight-knit group of women who are rapping as a way to draw attention to issues like poverty, gender inequalities and disenfranchisement of indigenous communities.”
Anne Lamott Didn’t Set Out To Be A ‘Guru Of Optimism’
But writers don’t get to choose what their words mean after they send them out into the world. “Kindly and self-skewering, Lamott, now 64, has been doggedly chronicling the messy stuff of life — refracting her own complicated stories of addiction and loss — in mordantly comic and sharply observed memoirs and novels for over three decades.”
An Actor And Playwright Needs A Tennis Lesson, And In Return, She Gets Her Coaches Small Parts On ‘Game Of Thrones’
Amanda Peet of The Romanoffs (and many, many other shows) wanted to get better at tennis so that a play she was writing could be more realistic. But “‘writing is easier than tennis,’ she said. ‘And that’s saying a lot.'”
Betzabe Garcia Is Emerging As An Atypical Director Who Takes On Whatever She Wants
Betzabé Garcia broke out with a documentary in 2015, and since then she’s won awards for her short films – and now she’s working on “an over the top, hyper-stylized documentary which peers into the life of Garcia’s roommate, the now-famous YouTuber #Mickey, who at the age of 11 started making videos as a way of dealing with the intense homophobia present in her community.”
Ted Hughes Was Obsessed With Shakespeare (And His Own Inner Demons)
The poet believed that Shakespeare wrote some of the plays almost as a single work, about Puritan suppression of sexuality and an avenging goddess. Why read it now? “The thrilling effrontery of Hughes’s vision has three outstanding and transcendent qualities. First, it hot-wires the reader into the wild voltage of his fascination with myth, language and folklore.”
The Monster Lies Within (Just Ask Your Screen)
Take a look at films and movies from the past, say, 20 years. It’s not pretty. “If this survey of today’s extreme culture tells us anything, it is that humans have worn out their welcome.”