Changi in Singapore, which has long striven to enthral and entertain its users, outdid itself with its new “Jewel” extension to its existing terminals, essentially a shopping mall and nature-based theme park. From a great oculus in its glass roof descends the “rain vortex”, a funnel of falling water described as the “world’s tallest indoor waterfall”. It has a “butterfly garden”. It has the Shiseido Forest Valley, a 900-tree, 60,000-shrub indoor landscape named after the Japanese-based personal care company Shiseido. The forest concept is, in marketing terms, a good fit with its corporate mission: “Beauty innovations for a better world.” – The Guardian
Tag: 12.30.19
Is Walt Whitman The Writer We’ll Need In 2020?
“Watch clips of fevered crowds, from today or the past, chanting against ‘enemies of the people’; they are malignant scenes, but ones that in no small part mimic religious revivals. … Human beings are meaning-making creatures. A politics that is unable to translate its positions into some sort of transcendent language, pointing to something greater than the individual, is a politics that will ultimately fail. Whitman understood this.” – The New York Times
The Snopes Of Musicology? No, Linda Shaver-Gleason Has Been Much More Than That
“Since 2016, California musicologist Linda Shaver-Gleason has been using [her] site” — called Not Another Music History Cliché! — “to compile a clear-eyed and level-headed accounting of the ways in which the conventional wisdom about classical music (like conventional wisdom in all walks of life) consistently leads us astray.” Alas, as Joshua Kosman writes, she’s leaving all too much unfinished. – San Francisco Chronicle
New York Is Losing Its Human Scale – Here’s How It’s Happening
“If we continue to allow the erosion of the human-scale city and long-evolved urbanism on which it depends, then I fear for the future. The first thing needed is a public exhibit of the many empty sites across the boroughs of New York, and a representation of what further, unchecked upzoning will it make possible to build in the future. But without a well-organized, well-financed campaign like the effort to save Grand Central, or a singular leader like Jane Jacobs able to take on the powers that be and a press willing to give these battles full coverage, the perilous undermining of authentic urbanism will continue.” – New York Review of Books
Historic San Francisco Printing Plant To Become Arts Space
“The long-term vision is to create a constellation of buildings to address the whole issue of affordable space for artists.” – San Francisco Chronicle
Russia Relaunches Its First (Post-Soviet) International Film Festival
“Titled Kinotavr. Special Edition as a reference to the Russian national festival Kinotavr, … the festival will run for the first time in Moscow from late January through early February. … In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Kinotavr had an international competition that featured films by celebrated international directors. The new festival is viewed as a continuation of that effort focused on bringing the best global films to Russian viewers.” – The Hollywood Reporter
How Clyfford Still, For Better And Worse, Kept Iron Control Over The Market For His Paintings
“In 1951, the Abstract Expressionist stopped working with galleries and became his own dealer. He continued to paint for nearly three decades, retaining complete authority over his canvases’ whereabouts: Until his death in 1980 at age 75, no one could purchase a Still on the primary market without going through the artist himself. This was no easy task. Content to live and paint in Maryland, selling the occasional work in order to get by, Still made admirers prove themselves worthy of his art.” – Artsy
Lily Tomlin At 80
The comedy legend talks to David Marchese about what she couldn’t do when she was starting out in comedy, marrying Jane Wagner after more than 40 years as a couple, how she almost came out on the cover of Time in 1975, and the story behind that infamous fight on the set of I Heart Huckabees. – The New York Times Magazine
Legendary Leaders: Foundry’s Melanie Joseph and Playwrights Horizons’ Tim Sanford Talk About What They Did Right
Passion for artistic freedom is ballasted by a concern for the economic welfare of artists. Whatever excitement the future holds for the American theater, it’s thanks to artistic leaders likes these whose ethics have been as forward-thinking as their aesthetics. – Los Angeles Times
Notre Dame’s Risky New Phase
The removal of melted scaffolding requires “three levels of steel beams to be positioned around its exterior to form a stabilising “belt”. Once this operation is complete, the same firm that built the scaffolding (Europe Echafaudage) will start to dismantle it, using telescopic crawler cranes that will allow roped technicians to descend into the forest of pipes and gradually cut them away after having coated them with a protective layer to avoid spreading the pollution caused by the melting of the lead roof.” – The Art Newspaper