Tag: 11.22.17

John Waters Gave A Commencement Speech That Went Viral And Became A Book – Then What Happened?

“I thought I could get in this racket. I thought I’d be turning down three and four speeches a year. Not one other school has asked me to do it! I was just amazed. I thought that I would have a whole other career here doing them and, come May, I would be working for two weeks straight. But not a one asked me, not even a prison school.”

Do We Have Time For Utopias? How About Dystopias?

“It is a tough job to reclaim the idea of utopia for the twenty-first century and deploy it in the battle against the neoliberal agenda. But – if we were to want to do such a thing – these are books that could help us. If there is an alternative to a neoliberal future, the imaginative effort required by utopian thinking is a necessary step to achieving that alternative.”

SpongeBob, The Broadway Musical? There’s A Lot Riding On This

It has spawned two feature films, with a third on the way, and has generated more than $13 billion in retail merchandise sales. adapting family entertainment to Broadway has brought mixed results, especially when not from Disney. Recent examples include “Matilda” (a hit), “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (a failure) and two outright bombs, “Seussical” and “Shrek the Musical” (though both have ended up with longer lives in high schools). If “SpongeBob” sinks on Broadway, it could damage a carefully cultivated two-decade-old brand.

When These Books Faced Obscenity Trials, What Exactly Was Deemed ‘Obscene’?

Emily Temple: “‘Obscenity,’ after all, is a pretty wide field. It’s obscene, the number of things I’ve called obscene. So what was it? A certain number of bad words? General sexiness? A queasy feeling in the gut by a well-connected reader? I tracked down a few answers for famous books deemed (by some) obscene. Mostly, it’s about bad words – but sometimes it’s also communism!”

Jazz Singer Jon Hendricks, Of Lambert, Hendricks And Ross, Dead At 96

“Once dubbed the ‘poet laureate of jazz,’ Mr. Hendricks expanded the vocabulary of jazz singing as the leading exponent of a style known as vocalese. He wrote witty lyrics for dozens of jazz tunes that otherwise had no words. Moreover, as a vocalist, he performed at breakneck speed, winning the admiration of such jazz giants as pianist Art Tatum and saxophonist Charlie Parker.”

The Art Market’s Blowout Week – So What Does It Say About The Market?

“Christie’s sold a whopping $1.42 billion worth of art last week, besting rival Sotheby’s by nearly $700 million. The publicly traded auction house made a total of $724 million across its four sales, while Phillips—which held only two—trailed in third place with $134.6 million. All told, the houses made a combined total of $2.3 billion during the so-called auction “giga-week,” one of the highest aggregate results ever. The market has not seen such lofty totals since the spring 2015 season when the sales made a record $2.7 billion.”

Artificial Intelligence Can Now Identify Forged Art

“Analyzing the works, the AI identified 80,000 individual strokes, and, through the neural network, learned what features in the strokes were specific to which artists. A machine-learning algorithm was also taught to look for these features, such as the differences in line weight, which reflect how hard the artist was pushing. By combining the neural network and the machine-learning algorithm, the study found that AI was able to correctly identify a work’s author 80 percent of the time.”