L.A. Philharmonic associate concertmaster Nathan Cole (who’s been on both sides of the screen): “Imagine that you have a great-uncle who’s an automobile fanatic. He owns an entire fleet of amazing vehicles, and he makes you an unbelievable offer: he’ll give you whichever one you want. There are only two conditions: this will be the last car you’ll ever own; and you’ll have to make your decision based solely on three-minute test drives. You won’t be able to do any research beforehand. You won’t even know what car you’re test-driving since all the identifying marks will be covered up.”
Tag: 11.21.16
The Underappreciated Art Of Painted Movie Backdrops
“Paradoxically, the painted image often looks more realistic than the photographic image. Scenic artists can manipulate backings by adjusting light, color, and texture, helping to support the movie camera’s constructed image. Some information and details can be selectively accentuated, while others can be deemphasized. A photograph, on the other hand, is static and has a tendency to contradict the artifice of the rest of the setting.”
Arts Prizes Should Not Have Cash Awards, Period
When Hepworth Prize for Sculpture winner Helen Marten announced that she would share her prize money with the other four nominees, David Lister writes, “she didn’t question the actual idea of cash awards. I do.”
Reconstructing The Soundscape Of 18th-Century Paris
“Archaeologist of sound” Mylène Pardoen: “The houses were very tall, so the sound stayed. It … sound remained there and seemed thicker than it would today. It was not louder, nor was it less loud. It was denser. There were more sounds that collided with one another.” (includes audio)
Each Age Imagines That Technology Will Make The World Better. There Are Problems With This Idea…
Technological utopianism is always self-aggrandizing. “We stand at the high peak between ages!” the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote in his “Manifeste du Futurisme” in 1909, predicting, among other things, that the Futurist cinema would spell the end of drama and the book. Every other modern era has seen itself in exactly the same way, poised at the brink of an epochal transformation wrought by its newly dominant technology, which, as Carr notes, is always seen as “a benevolent, self-healing, autonomous force […] on the path to the human race’s eventual emancipation.”
Fifty Years Ago, Truman Capote’s Black And White Ball Was The Best Soirée Ever
“Before the Black and White Ball, no one had ever imagined, let alone attended, a formal party with a guest list so wildly catholic that it brought into one room the poet Marianne Moore and Frank Sinatra, Gloria Vanderbilt and Lionel Trilling, Lynda Bird Johnson and the Maharani of Jaipur, the Italian princess Luciana Pignatelli (wearing a 60-carat diamond borrowed from Harry Winston) and the documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles.”
The Totally Inspiring Story Of How Two Kenyans Started A Library And A Bookstore
The online store, which Arunga described as “Amazon for Africa, with fewer payment options,” has now sold a thousand books in Kenya and beyond—a relative handful, but, to Williams, a meaningful start. In order to support a full-time employee, he said, the store only needs to sell fifty books a day. And if that happens it could serve as a proof of concept for literary entrepreneurship in the developing world.
The “Tinder Of Square-dancing” Has Sparked A Dance Craze In China
On most mornings, loud EDM, tinged with strokes of traditional Chinese music, blasts from giant speakers in the nation’s parks. Those parks fill with grandmas and a smattering of grandpas who have forsaken tai chi for “sailor dancing.”
Big Drop In UK Arts Funding As Lottery Sales Plummet
“The arts are bracing for an £18.4m cut in funding after a significant fall in Lottery ticket sales means the amount available for the National Lottery Good Causes has fallen by £92m so far this year, compared with last.”
So What Exactly *Is* ‘Longform Journalism’? It’s Not Just A Word Count
Brendan Fitzgerald considers, and questions, the taxonomy: “such labels sometimes reward the writer, who becomes associated with a popular movement. They sometimes reward the reader, who has a new word for what she seeks. … Whether labels like ‘longform’ reward a story is another matter.”