Back in the 1980s in deepest Ontario, Dr. Michael Persinger hit on the idea of using a helmet with wire coils to stimulate the temporal lobes of the brain with particular patterns of low-level electromagnetic waves. Numerous people who wore the contraption reported feeling a presence, and sometimes the Divine Presence. The press got word, and the legend of the “God Helmet” was born. Problem is, other researchers have had trouble replicating the results.
Tag: 11.07.16
‘Hamilton’, Prince Hal, And The Nature Of Honor
“A playwright in his mid-30s wants to pen an epic tale of ambition, authority, and power. He turns to his nation’s history, to characters familiar to his audience from school and legend. He performs a kind of magic trick.” Hamilton or Henry IV, Part One? Both, of course – and they have more than that in common.
So A Glitzy New Concert Hall For London Is Canceled? No Great Loss
“Those who thought the whole thing an unnecessary extravagance, a vanity project dreamed up by Rattle and Nicholas Kenyon, director of the Barbican Centre, at a time when arts organisations across the country were struggling to fund performances in the spaces that already existed, were drowned out by those determined to give the returning hero Rattle whatever he wanted.”
How Do You Get Audience Data That Matters? (Some Suggestions From Someone Who’s Been Doing It)
“The difference in data collection priorities is not simply a qualitative versus quantitative debate, as one of the shared areas of interest for organisers and funders is whether the event has reached individuals who do not normally engage with culture. But even here, opinions differ on how much information is needed from visitors, sample size and how it should be collected (the data collection mechanisms used).”
Jean Jacques Perrey, Granddaddy Of Pop Electronica, Dead At 87
“For those who don’t realize it, Jean-Jacques first started recording electronic music in 1952, long before the Moog synthesizer was first made for sale in 1967. … “His crazy, happy music has been heard everywhere from commercials, to Sesame Street – in hip-hop songs, in dance remixes and most famously, for decades in the delightful featured music in Disneyland’s ‘Main Street Electrical Parade.'”
Classics Are Being Re-Translated. But Are These New Translations Really Serving The Originals?
“In Italy, with the lapse of copyright on Faulkner’s writing, there have been a number of new Faulkner translations that are doubtless more semantically accurate than those made back in the Forties and Fifties. And yet those old translations—made when a modernist work was still a matter of excitement, rather than an aesthetic museum piece—seem more aware of the energy and spirit of the original and certainly a better read than more recent, academic efforts.”
‘Fairy Tales For The Disillusioned’: French Authors Put Twists On Perrault’s Classic Stories
“The 36 stories are by Charles Baudelaire, Anatole France Guillaume Apollinaire and other writers associated with the French decadent literary movement. … Each story comes with a twist, from a wolf who is tricked by Red Riding Hood into strangling the girl’s grandmother and is then arrested for being an anarchist (‘I did 20 years of hard labour, while the slut inherited her grandmother’s savings’) to a Cinderella keen to be humiliated.”
The Nauseous Anxiety We’ve Been Feeling Over The Election Is A Good Thing (If You’re A Sartrean)
Simon Critchley, on the connection between the “Brexistential dread” in his homeland and the fear and loathing on this side of the Atlantic: “The lesson of existentialism is that the nausea that we feel is actually the emergence of a genuine, lived sense of our freedom. Anxiety is the motor that drives the engine of freedom.”
Pennsylvania Ballet Is About To Premiere A Dance Called ‘Chicken Bone Brain’
And it’s by one of the least likely choreographers for such a traditional company: Brian Sanders, whose own aerial dance company is called JUNK. When artistic director Ángel Corella asked him to collaborate, says Sanders, “I was flabbergasted.”
Guns Onstage – How Theatre Handles Firearms And What We Might Learn From It
“It is unlikely that the country will turn to the performing arts to guide its gun policy, but it could do a lot worse. The stage and screen are the places where the balance of freedom of expression and scrupulous attention to safety have been achieved. If only this were true on our streets and college campuses.”