“Award-winning poet Alice Oswald has pulled out of prestigious poetry award the TS Eliot prize in protest over its sponsorship by an investment company.” Says Oswald, “I think poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions.”
Tag: 12.06.11
Creating Our Own Soundtracks As We Watch Silent Films
“If moviegoers find the sensory experience of watching the new silent film The Artist dramatically different from taking in the average 3-D blockbuster, it’s not just in their heads – audiences are actually using the auditory parts of their brains to create their own soundtracks.”
Hugh Jackman Fashions His Own Kind Of Masculinity
Charles McNulty: “How many other movie star pinups are also giddy song-and-dance men? His new concert show is a glitzy advertorial for his career that combines action hero with ripped abs and what I’d affectionately call (draining the term of any homophobic taint) a show queen, a category that can no longer be limited to gay men.”
Scott Joplin’s Ragtime Opera As More Ragtime Than Opera
Treemonisha‘s first modern revival, in 1975 at Houston Grand Opera, was in a European-style grand opera orchestration by Gunther Schuller. A new edition, just released on record, is based on Joplin’s scoring notes in his own piano score and on the makeup of old ragtime bands.
Two Virginia History Museums Try, Tentatively, To Change Their Approach To The US Civil War
“In an institution whose approach to memory is based on relics of a Lost Cause, how is such a new vision to take shape? How are loyalties to Southern culture to be reconciled with the evils of one of its fundamental institutions?”