A Blog About Nothing

In Philadelphia, Van Gogh's Nature Cure

2012-01-28T08:43:00.000+02:00

by Dan Neil

Wall Street Journal
January 28, 2012

Vincent Van Gogh was a handful: almost certainly a victim of epilepsy, perhaps an alcoholic, maybe mad from the leaded paint he worked with, but in any case a raving, God-haunted lunatic most of the time and nobody's favorite neighbor.

Fortunately for him, and us, Van Gogh was able to self-medicate.

"Focus on a small detail of nature allowed him to keep a calm frame of mind," writes Anabelle Kienle, co-curator of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's "Van Gogh: Up Close," a retrospective covering 47 of the Dutch painter's astonishing, point-blank paintings from nature, particularly those from the last two years in Arles, Saint-Rémy and Auvers-sur-Oise, France. They come from collections around the world.

Ms. Kienle argues, with Van Gogh's many letters as evidence, that the greatest Dutch painter since Rembrandt managed to survive, in part, by employing a kind of self-hypnosis, sessions of superhuman focus that helped Van Gogh put down the fires in his head.

It's not surprising that Van Gogh found transcendence in a "blade of grass"—an image he perhaps borrowed from the Calvinist critic Thomas Carlyle. And Van Gogh was not the only artist possessing a Zen-like zoom lens. Ms. Kienle might as easily have name-checked T.S. Eliot, who writes in "Four Quartets": "We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion."

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The Whirling Sound of Planet Dickens

2012-01-14T20:30:00.000+02:00

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

New York Times
January 14, 2012

In death, Charles Dickens still keeps his greatest secret to himself — the essence of his energy. None of the physical relics he left behind betray it. The manuscripts of his novels — like Our Mutual Friend at the Morgan Library — look no more fevered or hectic than the manuscripts left behind by other novelists.

The handwritten words on the page, round and legible in blue ink, are the marks of a mind that has already settled itself to composition.

Dickens, who was born 200 years ago, wrote a long shelf of novels, 14 in all, not counting The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which lay half-finished at his death. They sit plump and bursting with life, spilling over with the chaos of existence itself. It’s easy to imagine writers working the way Dickens’s prolific contemporary, Anthony Trollope, did — steadily, routinely, knocking off his 2,000 words a day until, by the end of his life, he had written 47 novels. But this is not how Dickens wrote.

Find the tumultuous heart of your favorite Dickens novel, the place where 19th-century London seems to be seething, smoking, overcrowded, in a state of vulgar contradiction. Then imagine Dickens working in the midst of it — a small, brisk figure rushing past you on a dark and dirty street. He is lost in a kind of mental ventriloquism, calling up his emotions and studying them. Every night he walked a dozen miles, without which, he said, “I should just explode and perish.”

Under the pseudonym Boz, he wrote, “There is nothing we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy,” walking through London as though “the whole were an unknown region to our wandering mind.” Yet there was nothing remotely solitary about Dickens. One person who saw him in the highest spirits at a family party wrote that he “happily sang two or three songs, one the patter song, The Dog’s Meat Man, and gave several successful imitations of the most distinguished actors of the day.”

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Can You Hear Him Now?

2012-01-13T08:02:00.000+02:00

New York Times
Editorial
January 12, 2012

“A symphony must be like the world,” advised Gustav Mahler, who composed nine symphonies across a brilliant career. “It must contain everything.”

Little could Mahler, a century gone from the modern world, have anticipated the horrific intrusion of an incessant cellphone ring near the end of his ethereal 90-minute masterpiece, the Ninth. The instrument rang untended across excruciating minutes Tuesday night at Lincoln Center from the pocket of a front-row listener, sending the audience, the New York Philharmonic players and the conductor Alan Gilbert into shock and dismay.

As the ringing (one connoisseur said it was the iPhone’s marimba signal) vied with the Adagio climax of bittersweet quietude, Mr. Gilbert had had enough. He stopped the orchestra and turned, one witness said, and sternly asked the offender: “Are you finished?” The rage in the hall was general, according to bloggers who were there. “Kick him out!” came a shout from one music lover. “A thousand dollar fine!” demanded another.

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The Art of Science at Princeton

2011-12-31T00:21:00.000+02:00

by Rebecca Horne

Wall Street Journal
December 30, 2011

Princeton’s annual “Art of Science” contest is open to students, faculty, staff and alumni, and aims to prove that science is beautiful–these images were created during the course of research. The 56 winners of the 2011 Art of Science contest represent this year’s broadly interpreted theme of “intelligent design,” and were chosen by a panel based on their purely visual qualities as well as scientific interest. The images will also be included in an exhibition at the university, up through November 2012.

Gerald Poirier of Princeton explains the science behind this image: “The material is piezo electric material developed in the Princeton Imaging and Analysis Center. This particular material is being studied because of its unique ability to convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, offering a wide range of energy harvesting applications. It may be possible to embed this material in tires and road surfaces to produce energy to power highway lights and possibly more…. This image was taken with an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope, which allows us to see nanostructures in their native state with extraordinary three-dimensional clarity. ESEM images are originally black and white. But colors can be added subsequently (in order to give better clarity to the image) by assigning a given color to a specific gray scale.”

To see a gallery of images from the contest, click here.

First Place

Second Place

Third Place

A Victorian Christmas

2011-12-24T22:00:00.000+02:00

by Maureen Dowd

New York Times
December 24, 2011

At the end of his life, Charles Dickens did not have great expectations for Christmas.

He had separated from his wife, describing his marriage as “blighted and wasted.” His mistress was not around. He was disappointed that his sons lacked his ambition. His final Christmas, he wrote a colleague, was painful and miserable.

“The Inimitable,” as he had christened himself when he was young and celebrated, was drained from traveling to give paid readings and suffering from such severe gout that he could not write clearly or walk well. He was confined to bed all Christmas Day and through dinner, bleak in his house.

Literature’s answer to Santa Claus, as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst writes in “Becoming Dickens,” had always gravitated to the holiday.

“Christmas was always a time which in our home was looked forward to with eagerness and delight,” his daughter Mamie said.

Dickens would dance and play the conjurer. “My father was always at his best, a splendid host, bright and jolly as a boy and throwing his heart and soul into everything,” recalled his son Henry.

Douglas-Fairhurst wonders if this “inventor of Christmas” might have developed his “ruthless” determination to enjoy the day because of the traumatic year he spent as a child working in a rat-infested shoe-polish warehouse in London after his father went to prison for debts. Did England’s most famous novelist need “to recreate his childhood as it should have been rather than as it was?”

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Artistic labour and occupational choice in Baroque painting

2011-12-23T08:59:00.001+02:00

by Federico Etro

Vox
December 23, 2011

To some, the world of art and world of economics are diametrically opposed. To others, such as the author of this column, they are part of the same. This column looks at the wages of painters during the 17th century Baroque art movement and asks what insights it can provide for art lovers, economists, and those who consider themselves both.

Exhibit 1. Caravaggio, The Fortune Teller, Paris, Louvre Museum ©

Economists are always on the lookout for new data to test their theories. But rather than sit around itching for the latest surveys or commissioning new randomised trials, researchers might want to dig up what we already have. With a bit of luck, the pages of history can be a rewarding friend. Take for instance the well-documented details of painters in 17th century Italy, at the height of the Baroque age. This is an example of a high-skilled labour market and can provide a fruitful area for study.

One of the most impressive and rapid features of the Baroque art movement was the innovation that led mass productions of new genres of painting – to the economists among us, this is a form of horizontal product differentiation.

Beyond old genres such as figurative paintings (including religious, mythological, and historical subjects) and portraits, the new genres of the Baroque art market included still lifes (reproducing animals, fruits, flowers, and lifeless objects), landscapes (reproducing the countryside or the urban environment), so-called genre paintings (reproducing daily life scenes, as in Exhibit 1 by Caravaggio) and battles (reproducing fights without necessarily a specific historical content). Each genre represented a specific sector of production, and painters either specialised in one or few genres or they could switch between them according to the market opportunities driven by price differentials (think of Caravaggio, who introduced still lifes and genre paintings and yet was often engaged in figurative paintings and portraits).

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John Williams: The Last Movie Maestro

2011-12-16T21:09:00.000+02:00

Wall Street Journal
December 16, 2011

John Williams, composer of the iconic movie scores for "Indiana Jones," "Jaws," "Star Wars" and "Superman" has two new films, both directed by Steven Spielberg, opening this month. But the business of making movie scores has begun to change dramatically around him. John Jurgensen has details on Lunch Break.

Poetry in paint: The art of Elizabeth Bishop

2011-12-14T17:10:00.000+02:00

Economist
December 14, 2011

Had Elizabeth Bishop got her way, she may never have become one of North America’s finest modern poets. “How I wish I’d been a painter,” she once wrote, “that must really be the best profession—none of this fiddling with words.”

“Objects and Apparitions”, an exhibition of Bishop's artwork at the Tibor de Nagy gallery in New York, lends a glimpse of her private life as a painter. The show gathers together a selection of the relatively unknown pieces she produced in her lifetime—for friends, lovers or as gifts, never intended for public display—along with some of the objects she adorned her homes with in Brazil and America.

The result is illuminating. As in so many of her poems, Bishop’s paintings—all small, averaging around 8 by 8 inches in size—are intricately detailed. And yet they can trip you up with a sudden, vertiginous shift in perspective (as in “Table with Candelabra”, in which objects on a flowery tablecloth seem to be poised somewhere between forever slipping off the table, and forever staying still), just as the break of an enjambment in her poetry might suddenly lift you to another, unexpected plane. These paintings feature pansies for one lover, Lota de Macedo Soares; or capture another lover lying asleep on her bed. One depicts a lonely tea service laid out, a single cup and saucer ready for use.

As in her poetry, these domestic details have a darker undercurrent. The sleeping lover looks more dead than alive, whereas the provenance of “Pansies” goes on to describe how the painting was returned to Bishop after de Macedo Soares’s suicide. In “Tombstones for Sale” a row of white tombstones with “FOR SALE” signs written upon them shine out of the landscape she has set them in, like a collection of a child’s gleaming white milk teeth. Her assemblage “Anjinhos” touches on the theme of infant mortality in Brazil, with rows of paper-cut cherubim placed next to a small, discarded sandal.

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Where Does Innovation Come From?

2011-11-30T01:18:00.000+02:00

Wall Street Journal
November 29, 2011

WSJ's Senior Technology Editor, Julia Angwin discusses innovation with panelists at WSJ's Ideas Market.

Crowdsourcing Brings Historical Archive Online

2011-10-20T20:47:00.001+03:00

Wall Street Journal
October 20, 2011

In an effort to bring the George Eastman House archive online, Dr. Anthony Bannon, Director at George Eastman House in Rochester New York, has announced partnership with Clickworker, an international crowdsourcing company. The project involves photo-tagging of more than 400,000 images from the George Eastman House, one of the world’s oldest photography museums. Using a guided and tiered tagging system, Clickworker hopes to bring the Eastman archive into the digital age, making the photographs accessible to the public — in many instances, for the very first time. To get these images online, Clickworker is using its global crowd of paid “clickworkers’, more than 115,000 strong.

People who register to work on the project as “clickworkers’ will also be able to see the results of their work just a short while later on the Eastman House licensing website. Among the images from the venerable George Eastman House archive are classic favorites like views of Paris by Eugene Atget and immigration photos by Lewis Hine–but among are some surprises, like the Hippo Back, Hippo Front photographs by Lewis Hine, and the electric portrait of Judy Garland by Nickolas Muray.

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George Eastman House Collections

Symphony of Swing

2011-10-19T14:21:00.001+03:00

directed by Joseph Henabery

Artie Shaw and his Orchestra
songs performed by Helen Forrest and Tony Pastor

The Vitaphone Corporation
Warner Bros. Pictures
1939

Artie Shaw and his big band do four numbers, a lyric "Alone Together," "Jeepers Creepers" with vocals by Tony Pastor, "Deep Purple" sung by Helen Forrest, and a swinging "Lady Be Good." Shaw leads the band and gets in a few licks on his clarinet. The cinematography and editing include arty angled shots of the band and, for "Lady Be Good," double exposure of the band superimposed on a dance floor of young people.

More about the movie

The Storyteller's Secret

2011-10-19T08:55:00.000+03:00

by Jim Fusilli

Wall Street Journal
October 19, 2011

Tom Waits suggests a Chinese restaurant here as a place to meet. Amid wall fans, a goldfish tank and a zodiac placemat that he later folds and slips into his black flap-over book bag, he says: "There's no such thing as bad Chinese food."

If you know Mr. Waits's work—and his new album, "Bad as Me" (Anti), surely represents it well—you know that he and his songwriting partner, Kathleen Brennan, could make a song out of a line like that. They do as much on the new disc. "Everybody knows umbrellas cost more in the rain" sets up the hard-luck tale of "Talking at the Same Time." "We won't have to say goodbye if we all go" is a line in "Chicago." One song, "Hell Broke Luce," got its title from three words Mr. Waits saw during a visit to Alcatraz—they were knife-carved into a stone wall during a prison riot. "I figured he thought if you spell it 'loose,' that's more letters," Mr. Waits said. "It's during a riot." The 61-year-old keeps memo pads in his back pocket to jot down phrases he's heard.

Though he said a line can pop up at inopportune times ("They're like erotic thoughts in church. Or at a PTA meeting. They're not welcome."), he's reluctant to discuss how the songwriting process begins. "No one really wants you to tell them how it's done any more than you want to know how a card trick is done." When pressed, he added: "If you want a recipe for banana bread, I'll leave three things out."

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A Guide to Navigating NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books

2011-10-02T11:31:00.001+03:00

The Misery Memoirist

2011-09-10T10:29:00.001+03:00

by James Hall

Wall Street Journal
September 10, 2011

In the Renaissance, a man's soul was believed to be mirrored in his body, and an artist's soul in his art works. Artists had nowhere to hide. Leonardo was said to have imbued all his figures with his own physical beauty and elegant manners—and he complained that devout artists gave all their figures bowed heads, and good-for-nothing artists painted figures who looked lazy.

No Old Master has been more praised—and blamed—for "painting himself" than Caravaggio (1571-1610), the archetypal bad-boy genius. Few commentators have strayed far from the verdict of Giovanni Pietro Bellori, writer of the first detailed biography (1672):

Caravaggio's style corresponded to his physiognomy and appearance; he had a dark complexion and dark eyes, and his eyebrows and hair were black; this coloring was naturally reflected in his paintings . . . the dark style . . . is connected to his disturbed and contentious temperament.

For Claudio Strinati, curator of last year's exhibition in Rome (one of more than a dozen marking the 400th anniversary of the painter's death), Caravaggio's art was revolutionary not simply for the bold stylistic and thematic innovations but because for the first time in Western culture the autobiographical impulse is explicit and ever present: "The master speaks of himself from beginning to end and interrogates the spectator." For Caravaggio's latest biographer, the British art critic and television presenter Andrew Graham-Dixon, the style is the man: "Caravaggio's life is like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of nights. . . . When Caravaggio emerges from the obscurity of the past he does so, like the characters in his own painting, as a man in extremis. . . . Caravaggio always paints himself."

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A Trove of Faulkner Recordings

2011-07-27T11:15:00.000+03:00

Wall Street Journal
July 26, 2011

William Faulkner will be forever linked to Mississippi, but he was also the first writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, arriving on that campus in 1957.

As it happens, many of his readings, speeches, classes, and Q & A sessions in Charlottesville were recorded. (He’d won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, so there was no question about his place in the canon by that point.) Very Short List today points to a trove of recordings from that period.

One section of the website “Faulkner at Virginia” is organized by novel. You’ll find the usual fare of author’s-talk questions: What’s your favorite book? Which novel of yours should a reader begin with? But also lots of questions about authorial intent, and plot points.

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Memories of Chekhov

2011-07-19T22:53:00.004+03:00

New York Review of Books
July 5, 2011

Memories of Chekhov, from which this excerpt is drawn, is the first documentary biography of Anton Chekhov to be based on primary sources: the letters, diaries, essays, and memories of Chekhov’s family, friends, and contemporaries that I collected from Chekhov archives in Yalta and Moscow, as well as the New York Public Library, the Russian State Library, and the Library of Congress. All of this material appears in English translation for the first time. My favorite discovery was a rare editorial by Chekhov dedicated to the life of Nikolai Przhevalsky, a famous Russian geographer. At the very end of the nineteenth century Chekhov wrote, “Reading this biography, we do not ask: ‘Why did he do this?’ or ‘What did he accomplish?’ but we say, ‘He was right!’” These words also describe Chekhov’s own life.

—Peter Sekirin, Editor, Memories of Chekhov

I got to know Chekhov in Moscow at the end of 1895. I remember a few specifically Chekhovian phrases that he often said to me back then.

“Do you write? Do you write a lot?” he asked me one day.

I told him, “Actually, I don’t write all that much.”

“That’s a pity,” he told me in a rather gloomy, sad voice which was not typical of him. “You should not have idle hands, you should always be working. All your life.”

And then, without any discernible connection, he added, “It seems to me that when you write a short story, you have to cut off both the beginning and the end. We writers do most of our lying in those spaces. You must write shorter, to make it as short as possible.”

Sometimes Chekhov would tell me about Tolstoy: “I admire him greatly. What I admire the most in him is that he despises us all; all writers. Perhaps a more accurate description is that he treats us, other writers, as completely empty space. You could argue that from time to time, he praises Maupassant, or Kuprin, or Semenov, or myself. But why does he praise us? It is simple: it’s because he looks at us as if we were children. Our short stories, or even our novels, all are child’s play in comparison with his works. However, Shakespeare… For him, the reason is different. Shakespeare irritates him because he is a grown-up writer, and does not write in the way that Tolstoy does.”

Ivan Bunin, “Chekhov,” from The Russian Word (1904)

Star Wars - Binary Sunset

2011-06-21T21:29:00.003+03:00

Episode IV: A New Hope
Music: John Williams

A Mash-Up of Actors Playing Woody Allen

2011-06-15T01:00:00.000+03:00

FilmDrunk
June 14, 2011

Writers of fiction strive to create compelling characters who feel real, and managing that almost always requires drawing on your own personality and experiences. Protagonists often end up as thinly-disguised stand ins for the author, and for someone like Woody Allen, who hasn’t gone a full calendar year without putting out a film since 1978 (between Annie Hall and Manhattan), it naturally happens quite often. In celebration of Woody Allen’s latest critical darling and legitimate box office hit, Midnight in Paris, our video editor, Oliver Noble has gone through thousands upon thousands of hours (approximately) of footage from past Woody Allen movies and put together this compilation of quasi-fictional stand ins for Woody Allen, showing what Oliver believes to be the central tenets of the Woody Allen persona, the character traits and idiosyncrasies that most often shine through. And Oliver has particularly keen insight into Woody Allen’s mind, being that he is also a Jewish man who has sexual thoughts about his daughter. In fact, we frequently engage in turgid discussions about categorical imperatives.

No, pagliaccio non son

2011-06-05T12:40:00.000+03:00

Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo (1892)

Metropolitan Opera
New York, 1994
Conductor: James Levine
Stage Director: Fabrizio Melano

Canio: Luciano Pavarotti
Nedda: Teresa Stratas
Tonio: Juan Pons
Silvio: Dwayne Croft
Beppt: Elijah Chester

Luciano Pavarotti, "Vesti la giubba"

2011-06-05T12:38:00.000+03:00

from Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo (1892)

performed: Budapest, 1991

Jerry Seinfeld in Oprah

2011-05-27T00:51:00.000+03:00

Robots Retrieve Books in University of Chicago’s New, Futuristic Library

2011-05-19T00:52:00.001+03:00

Wired
May 11, 2011

If Google Books was a physical place instead of a web service, it would probably look a lot like the University of Chicago’s new library

The Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, opening next week, is designed to accommodate the way people study and research today — online. The structure’s large spaces are made for computer work and have no traditional bookshelves.

Instead, the library boasts a massive underground storage area holding 3.5 million volumes on 50-foot-high shelves. The collection is managed by robotic systems that help create an environment where scholars can scour the web for hours for academic papers and still get a hard-to-find volume from the stacks.

As more books and journals become easily accessible online, it’s easy to wonder if brick-and-mortar libraries could go the way of the video store. But research at the university has shown that the more people look to digital resources, the more they consult physical materials as well, according to Judith Nadler, director of the University of Chicago Library.

“For scholars, the two formats complement each other, opening the door to a new era in research — and new libraries designed to make the best use of print and digital options,” Nadler said in a message e-mailed to Wired.com announcing the library’s upcoming opening.

Designed by architect Helmut Jahn and covered in 700 panels of glass, the library looks like a half-buried crystal Fabergé egg from the outside. Under the dome sits the library’s 8,000-square-foot main reading room.

All books can be requested online, then pulled up to the surface by an automated retrieval system that keeps track of every volume through barcodes. (The video below explains the process.)

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When Mahler Took Manhattan

2011-05-18T03:45:00.000+03:00

by Peter G. Davis

New York Times
May 17, 2011

Here's an often overlooked bit of music history: Gustav Mahler, who died in Vienna a century ago today, was a New Yorker for the last three years of his life and, for that brief time, arguably the most famous musician in town. It’s not a trivial point — as a conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and then at the New York Philharmonic, he set musical standards that resonate even today.

New York has always held its conductors in chief close. Mahler was followed by Arturo Toscanini, who ruled the musical scene for nearly half a century. New York’s love affair with Leonard Bernstein was long and adoring, while James Levine is no less appreciated today, as we celebrate his 40 years at the Met and worry over his health.

Despite his short time among us, Mahler left as large a footprint as his successors. Already a world-famous composer and conductor, he was hired by the Met in 1907, and he arrived with a reputation as an autocrat who demanded nothing less than perfection.

In his previous post at the Vienna Court Opera, this newspaper reported at the time, this “martinet” had “reformed everything ... He was orchestral conductor, singer, actor, stage manager, scenic painter, costumer.” Worse still, Mahler was rumored to be a difficult, even neurotic personality more interested in composing endless symphonies no one wanted to hear than in working in an opera house.

All that was bad news for Met artists and administrators accustomed to more easygoing managers. They were also used to conductors who specialized in one style, be it Mozart, Wagner or the latest contemporary novelties. Mahler could do them all, and expected his performers to follow suit.

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The National Gallery: 30 Highlight Paintings

2011-04-29T21:57:00.001+03:00

Vincent van Gogh, "Sunflowers" (1888)

Vermeer, Seurat, Gainsborough, Rembrandt - the National Gallery in London presents this website with thirty "greatest hits" of their collection. Visitors to the site can zoom in on the details of any of the paintings, such as a close-up of Venus' elaborately braided hair in Sandro Botticelli's Venus and Mars, 1485, or get close enough to see the individual brushstrokes in Van Gogh's Sunflowers, 1888. Each painting is accompanied by commentary, for example, this version of Sunflowers is one of four that Van Gogh painted in 1888 (not counting several in other years), and "the various versions and replicas remain much debated among Van Gogh scholars."

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Source: The Scout Report (April 29, 2011)

Sandro Botticelli,"Venus and Mars" (about 1485)

CLAUDE-OSCAR MONET, "BATHERS AT LA GRENOUILLERE" (1869)

Canaletto,"The Stonemason's Yard" (about 1725)

Paul Cézanne, "Les Grandes Baigneuses" (about 1894-1905)

Joseph Mallord William Turner, "The Fighting Temeraire" (1839)

Raphael,"La Madonna dei Garofani" (about 1506-7)

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, "The Supper at Emmaus" (1601)

Diego Velázquez, "The Rokeby Venus" (1647-51)

Georges Seurat,"Bathers at Asnières" (1884)

A God's-Eye View of the World

2011-04-23T23:12:00.000+03:00

Wall Street Journal
April 22, 2011

A wave of ambitious social-network experiments is underway in the U.S. and Europe to track our movements, probe our relationships and, ultimately, affect the individual choices we all make. WSJ's Robert Lee Hotz reports.

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Your name, sir?

2011-04-01T00:05:00.000+03:00

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie perform a hilarious short comedy sketch in a police station. A man making a statement has a surname that is pretty hard to pronounce! Watch this classic moment from the ground-breaking comedy sketch show A Bit of Fry and Laurie for free with BBC Worldwide.

Steve Breen (March 23, 2011)

2011-03-25T01:33:00.000+02:00

Bureaucracy

2011-03-20T20:10:00.005+02:00

"036"

directed by Juan Fernando Andrés Parrilla and Esteban Roel García Vázquez
written by Andrea Gómez
cinematography by Ángel Amorós
music by Paco Martín

with Carolina Bang and Tomás del Estal

Only somebody brave, with a rebel soul, may enter the jungle of the outlaw and fight face to face against the most dangerous men at this side of the river...

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: Tila Tequila

2011-03-16T01:34:00.002+02:00

Zach sits down with Tila Tequila who may become his new best friend and also welcomes another guest on the show who some people may recognize.

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: Tila Tequila from Between Two Ferns

Between Two Ferns With Zach Galifianakis: Natalie Portman

2011-03-16T01:18:00.002+02:00

Zach interviews Natalie Portman and her dog, Whiz.

Between Two Ferns With Zach Galifianakis: Natalie Portman from Between Two Ferns

Paul McCartney Wins Grammy for Helter Skelter

2011-02-15T11:42:00.000+02:00

McCartney won for a rendition of the Beatles tune Helter Skelter, which he recorded for his 2009 live album "Good Evening New York City.".

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Esperanza Spalding

2011-02-15T11:35:00.001+02:00

Jazz bassist Esperanza Spalding has won the Best New Artist award at the Grammys.

The Welsh soprano Dame Margaret Price has died

2011-02-01T20:53:00.000+02:00

Gramophone
January 29, 2011

Dame Margaret Price has died at her home near Cardigan in Wales aged 69. Her pure, warm, lyric soprano will always be associated with the music of Mozart, a composer whose music ran through her career like a thread. In 1962 she made her stage debut as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro for Welsh National Opera and, as a young singer at Covent Garden later that year, she took over the role from an ailing Teresa Berganza: her career took off overnight. Her first major recording was as Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte under Otto Klemperer (EMI). And she would go on to perform and record the roles of the Countess (Figaro), Pamina (Die Zauberflöte) and Donna Anna (Don Giovanni). She also sang the soprano part on Peter Schreier’s Gramophone Award-winning recording of the Requiem (a disc that had critic Robin Golding commenting that she sang the part “more beautifully than I can remember ever hearing it”).

Though her career took to the world’s great houses, her dislike of travel meant that she always preferred to make her base with a particular company, first Covent Garden, then the Cologne Opera and finally the Bavarian State Opera in Munich where she lived until her retirement in 1999.

Like many Mozart sopranos, Price also excelled in the music of Richard Strauss and her stage roles included Ariadne auf Naxos. Sadly, she never made a commercial recording of a work she was perfectly suited to, Strauss’s Four Last Songs (though she was due to record the work for CBS with Michael Tilson Thomas). She also included a number of Verdi roles in her repertoire and was a memorable Desdemona in Otello (the role with which she made her Met debut in 1985, and which she recorded twice – once with Solti for Decca and then with Alain Lombard for Forlane). She also sang Amelia (Un ballo in maschera – an opera she recorded alongside Pavarotti for Decca). The most surprising addition to her repertoire was on record as Isolde in the DG recording of Wagner’s opera under Carlos Kleiber, a conductor with whom she often worked.

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Margaret Price

2011-02-01T20:50:00.000+02:00

Incredible Image: 24-hours shot from Greece’s Temple of Poseidon

2011-01-30T16:03:00.001+02:00

TNW
January 28, 2011

After a moment of inspiration and hours of planning and preparation, photographer Chris Kotsiopoulos created this beautiful image portraying 24 hours, shot from Greece’s Temple of Poseidon, also known as Sounion promontory. It took him 12 hours to pull together and process a single image that included over 500 star trails, 35 shots of the Sun and 25 landscape pictures.

Waiting for a clear day, Kotsiopoulos shot the above image on December 30th-31st of 2010. He had to stay at the same place for approximately 30 hours, on location 2-3 hours before sunrise in order to make the preparations and test shooting and an extra 2-3 hours the second day so as to shoot part of the Sun’s sequence that he lost the first morning due to clouds.

In the morning, he took photos with his camera and tripod facing east. He captured dozens of shots throughout the day and night of the landscape from east to west, then west to east at night. He also took images of the Sun and Moon’s courses across the sky, from sunrise to sunset and to sunrise. Kotsiopoulos recorded the Sun’s position exactly every 15 minutes using an intervalometer, with an astrosolar filter adjusted to the camera lens. The “all-night” star trail shots lasted almost 11 hours. Finally, he took a series of night-to-day transition shots.

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Weimar Cinema, 1919–1933: Daydreams and Nightmares

2011-01-21T23:02:00.000+02:00

Variety. 1925. Germany. Directed by Ewald André Dupont

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
New York, USA

Organized in association with the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation in Wiesbaden and in cooperation with the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, this exhibition—the most extensive ever mounted in the United States of German films made between the world wars—includes seventy-five feature-length films and six shorts, along with a gallery exhibition of Weimar-era film posters and stills. The exhibition continues the tradition of Iris Barry, the world’s first curator of film and founding curator of MoMA’s Department of Film, who began adding German films to the collection in the mid-1930s and exhibited a deep commitment to this rich period of film culture throughout her career. Daydreams and Nightmares also builds upon the scholarly legacy of Siegfried Kracauer’s seminal 1947 book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, which the émigré film and social critic wrote (at Barry’s invitation) at The Museum of Modern Art.

In addition to classic films by Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and G. W. Pabst, among others, the exhibition includes many films, unseen for decades, that were restored after German reunification. The extensive program reaches beyond the standard view of Weimar cinema—which sees its tropes of madmen, evil geniuses, pagan forces, and schizophrenic behavior as dark harbingers of Hitler—by adding another perspective: that of the popular German cinema of the period. The development of Weimar cinema coincides with the coming of sound, and German filmmakers also excelled in the making of popular musicals, cabaret-type comedies, and dramas, shot outside the studio, that tackled social issues.

All silent films have piano accompaniment by Ben Model, Stuart Oderman, or Donald Sosin.

Glenn McCoy (Jan 12, 2011)

2011-01-13T19:44:00.002+02:00

Orhan Pamuk: Finding an Authentic Voice

2011-01-04T12:45:00.000+02:00

Conversations with History
University of California at Berkeley
Institute of International Studies
November 6, 2009

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. On the occasion of publication in the United States of his new novel, The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk reflects on his intellectual journey, including the influence of his parents, writers who shaped his world view, the "huzun" of Istanbul, writing, and recurring themes in his novels.

Orhan Pamuk

2011-01-04T12:30:00.000+02:00

Amazon.com Widgets

Paul McCartney's Tribute to John Lennon (SNL, December 11, 2010)

2010-12-19T18:03:00.000+02:00

When Overlooked Art Turns Celebrity

2010-12-14T01:46:00.000+02:00

New York Times
December 13, 2010

The painting was beautiful, just not admired. Then suddenly, after more than four centuries, it was. It acquired a pedigree. The art hadn’t changed, but its stature had.

And there it was the other day, propped on an easel in the Prado’s sunny, pristine conservation studio here, like a patient on the table in an operating theater. The most remarkable old master picture to have turned up in a long time revealed its every blemish and bruise, but also its virtues.

In September the Prado made news. It announced that this painting, “The Wine of St. Martin’s Day,” a panoramic canvas showing a mountain of revelers drinking the first wine of the season, and a few of them suffering its consequences, was by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Only 40-odd paintings by this 16th-century Flemish Renaissance master survive. This one, from around 1565, came from a private seller, whose ancient family, unaware and clearly unconcerned, had kept it for eons in the proverbial dark corridor, in Córdoba, where it accumulated dirt. Then the Prado conservators took a look. What seemed to be the artist’s signature turned up beneath layers of grime and varnish.

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A detail of the painting, showing a peasant celebrating during a festival for the first wine of the season.

Vintage Photos from Robert McCabe's Trips to Greece in the 1950s

2010-12-14T00:23:00.005+02:00

Rhodes 1954. This marble Aphrodite, in the museum in Rhodes, was found in the sea.

Huffington Post
December 12, 2010

Legendary photographer Robert A. McCabe has compiled what are, in essence, stunning photographic journals of Cuba and Antarctica, among other places.

McCabe also traveled as a Princeton undergraduate to Greece in June 1954, witnessing firsthand soaring unemployment (at the time of his visit, unemployment was hovering around 30%) and poor wages (those who did work were making a little less than a dollar a day). McCabe recalls in his introduction to his book, Greece: Images of an Enchanted Land, 1954-1965, how unspoiled the landscape of Greece felt before all the tourists and development starting happening, which has forever changed the landscape in Athens.

He traveled extensively through the Aegean after that, from 1954-1965, to document fully the experiences, people and places there (he was, in particular, interested in Greece's iconic architecture).

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Sounion 1955. At the temple of Poseidon.

Epeiros 1961. Young friends.

Athens 1955. The Agora and the Acropolis from Observatory Road.

Athens 1955. Acropolis. The Propylaia from the Parthenon.

Athens 1955. The Caryatid Porch of the Erechtheion.

Serifos 1963. A church in Chora.

The Aegean 1954. On the bow of a caique.

Mykonos 1955. At a baptismal festival.

John Lennon (1940-1980)

2010-12-08T23:05:00.000+02:00

The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

2010-11-20T19:23:00.000+02:00

by Timothy Farrington

Wall Street Journal
November 20, 2010

As a young man the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk painted seriously and dreamed of becoming a professional artist. This early passion shows in The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, an engaging but sketchy account of the novel as an "essentially visual" literary form. Novels, the Nobel Prize winner argues, consist of "ordinary human details which are quite often visual details," strung in sequence like beads on a necklace. An author's first task is to evoke each image as precisely as possible in the reader's mind, because it is the immediacy and realism of this welter of detail that gives the novel its uniquely immersive quality.

The proper subject of the novel thus becomes, in Mr. Pamuk's view, not people's moral character but the sensibility revealed in how they react to "the manifold forms of the world—each color, each event, each fruit and blossom." The features of a character's physical and social environment, in turn, must be a "necessary extension" of their inner "emotional, sensual, and psychological world." The snowflakes that Anna Karenina watches from a train "reflect the mood of the young woman to us."

In these essays, originally presented as the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard last year, Mr. Pamuk shows himself to be at the very least an excellent reader, and his enthusiasm for his favorite novels (especially Anna Karenina but also Moby-Dick and The Magic Mountain) is winning. He also touches on the work of many earlier critics, including Nabokov, E.M. Forster and Friedrich Schiller, whose 1795 essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry inspired his title. But Mr. Pamuk's own attempts at theory can be frustratingly vague.

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10 Questions for Woody Allen

2010-11-20T19:16:00.000+02:00

Time
January 17, 2008

He's brilliant at portraying neurotics of all kinds. But the multitalented director swears he's actually quite normal.

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Also see

The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848–1875

2010-11-20T17:40:00.000+02:00

National Gallery of Art
October 31, 2010–January 30, 2011

A few years after the discovery of photography was announced in 1839, the British art critic John Ruskin named it "the most marvelous invention of the century." Making permanent what the eye saw fleetingly, the new technology seemed an almost magical revelation.

As photography gained a foothold in the 1840s, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. These young painters and their followers wished to return to the purity, sincerity, and clarity of detail found in medieval and early Renaissance art that preceded Raphael (1483–1520). But they were also spurred on by the possibilities of the new medium, which could capture every nuance of nature. Indeed, Pre-Raphaelite artists painted with such precision that some critics accused them of copying photographs.

Many photographers in turn looked to the language of Pre-Raphaelite painting in an effort to establish their nascent medium as a fine art. Both photographers and painters—many of whom knew one another—drew inspiration directly from nature. In choosing subjects, they also mined literature, history, and religion, as well as modern life. Together they developed a shared vocabulary that is explored in this exhibition through the genres of landscape, narrative subjects, and portraiture.

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Fantasy Not Just For the Young

2010-11-20T13:59:00.004+02:00

by Salman Rushdie

Wall Street Journal
November 20, 2010

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking-Glass
By Lewis Carroll (1865, 1871)

The only good thing, I found, about having gone to Rugby School, the famous and wretched boys' boarding school in the British Midlands, is that Lewis Carroll went there too. The two Alice books are wonderful for children, and in some ways perhaps too good for children, full of adult wisdom and trickery. The first book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was initially met with dismissive notices (though John Tenniel's illustrations were well received), but it quickly became a beloved classic. What is most admirable about the second book, Through the Looking-Glass, is that it is emphatically not a return to Wonderland; Carroll's great feat is to have created two entirely discrete imagined worlds for his heroine. I have loved Alice all my life and can still recite "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter" from memory if asked to do so, or even if nobody asks.

Peter Pan
by J.M. Barrie (1911)

The Lord of the Rings
by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954-55)

The Golden Compass
by Philip Pullman (1995)

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
by Mark Haddon (2003)

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Surprise! Jaimy Gordon Wins The National Book Award, And Patti Smith Weeps

2010-11-19T03:41:00.000+02:00

National Public Radio
November 18, 2010

The National Book Awards are like the Oscars of literature, without the national telecast, the security guards to watch over the Harry Winston jewels or the glowing Hollywood tans (most of the nominees bear the wan, indoors-y look of the writer's life). But, like the Academy Awards, there are fancy dresses, cummerbunds and cater waiters passing around Bellinis and caviar bites — trust us, book people can party. And, much like the Oscars, the NBAs are a particular industry's biggest night, in which a career can be made (or at least pushed heartily along) with the opening of an envelope.

This year, that career belongs to Jaimy Gordon, a mid-career novelist from Baltimore living and teaching in Kalamazoo, Mich. Her fourth novel, Lord of Misrule, won the NBA for fiction on Wednesday evening, a victory that came as a surprise to many — including Gordon herself. When the announcement was read, the author's table companions shrieked at full volume, and Gordon seemed to be in shock when she finally took the stage. "I'm totally unprepared, and I’m totally surprised," she told the crowd. Later, we observed the author standing alone outside the grand façade of the Cipriani Ballroom on Wall Street in her long red gown, talking quietly into her cell phone: "I won," she said into the receiver, still seeming stunned. "I won ... the National Book Award."

Lord of Misrule, a weird, magical tale about a dusty West Virginia town and its downtrodden racetrack, follows the lives of jockeys, loan sharks, metal smiths and other outcasts over the course of a year and four horse races. The novel just arrived on shelves this month from McPherson — a small indie publisher out of Kingston, N.Y. — and while it was considered the underdog pick of the bunch, the book had already begun to gain a small momentum with critics. As Jane Smiley recently wrote in The Washington Post, "Gordon has thought so thoroughly about her characters that each voice dips into racetrack lingo in a distinctive way. It is an impressive performance."

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Where Cinema and Biology Meet

2010-11-17T02:18:00.000+02:00

New York Times
November 16, 2010

When Robert A. Lue considers the Star Wars Death Star, his first thought is not of outer space, but inner space.

“Luke’s initial dive into the Death Star, I’ve always thought, is a very interesting way how one would explore the surface of a cell,” he said.

That particular scene has not yet been tried, but Dr. Lue, a professor of cell biology and the director of life sciences education at Harvard, says it is one of many ideas he has for bringing visual representations of some of life’s deepest secrets to the general public.

Dr. Lue is one of the pioneers of molecular animation, a rapidly growing field that seeks to bring the power of cinema to biology. Building on decades of research and mountains of data, scientists and animators are now recreating in vivid detail the complex inner machinery of living cells.

The field has spawned a new breed of scientist-animators who not only understand molecular processes but also have mastered the computer-based tools of the film industry.

“The ability to animate really gives biologists a chance to think about things in a whole new way,” said Janet Iwasa, a cell biologist who now works as a molecular animator at Harvard Medical School.

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Love and Dirty, Sexy Ducats

2010-11-14T16:19:00.000+02:00

by Ben Brantley

New York Times
November 13, 2010

They belong to worlds that, in the normal course of events, would never intersect. But Shakespeare, as the creator of their universe, saw fit to let their paths cross just once. And when Portia finally meets Shylock, in Daniel Sullivan’s absolutely splendid production of The Merchant of Venice at the Broadhurst Theater, the collision lights up the sky.

Giving what promise to be the performances of this season, Lily Rabe, as Portia the heiress, and Al Pacino, as Shylock the usurer, invest the much-parsed trial scene of this fascinating, irksome work with a passion and an anger that purge it of preconceptions. You may find yourself trembling, as one often does when something scary and baffling starts to make sense. At the same time you’re likely to have trouble figuring out exactly where your sympathies lie. For at this moment everybody hurts.

In traditional presentations of Act IV, Scene 1 of “Merchant” Portia, disguised as a male lawyer to rescue a man under threat of death, emerges as an avenging angel; Shylock, viciously poised to kill an enemy in an act of legal redress, is usually the vanquished villain or, in more fashionable contemporary readings, the Jewish victim of a Christian social order reasserting itself.

But what you read in Ms. Rabe’s delicately expressive features is hardly a look of triumph. Her face is that of someone registering a precious and irrevocable loss. In an odd way the fatalistic, shrunken sorrow of Mr. Pacino’s crouched Shylock, who has not only been thwarted of his revenge but also stripped of his identity, seems to mirror Portia’s own state of mind.

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As Complex as the Music She Plays

2010-11-12T11:37:00.000+02:00

New York Times
November 11, 2010

It seems safe to predict that the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter will play a run of concerts with the New York Philharmonic in 10 years or so, as she did in 2000 and as she is doing again this season, as artist in residence. After all, unless she were finally to act on occasional vague hints of an early retirement, Ms. Mutter, now 47, should still be at the height of her considerable powers.

What is harder to predict is what she might play. If she follows form, she will present several pieces that have yet to be written. In 2000 she played only 20th-century music, including newish works by Witold Lutoslawski, Krzysztof Penderecki and Wolfgang Rihm. Now, in three orchestral programs and in assorted chamber concerts, she is adding four new works — two by Mr. Rihm, one each by Mr. Penderecki and Sebastian Currier — to the 14 world premieres she has listed on her own Web site and giving the New York premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina’s “In Tempus Praesens” (2007), also written for her.

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My Endless New York

2010-11-10T00:16:00.000+02:00

by Tony Judt

New York Times
November 7, 2010

I came to New York University in 1987 on a whim. The Thatcherite assault on British higher education was just beginning and even in Oxford the prospects were grim. N.Y.U. appealed to me: by no means a recent foundation — it was established in 1831 — it is nevertheless the junior of New York City’s great universities. Less of a “city on a hill,” it is more open to new directions: in contrast to the cloistered collegiate worlds of Oxbridge, it brazenly advertises itself as a “global” university at the heart of a world city.

But just what is a “world city”? Mexico City, at 18 million people, or São Paulo at near that, are unmanageable urban sprawls; they are not “world cities.” Conversely, Paris — whose central districts have never exceeded three million inhabitants — was the capital of the 19th century.

Is it a function of the number of visitors? In that case, Orlando, Fla., would be a great metropolis. Being the capital of a country guarantees nothing: think of Madrid or Washington (the Brasília of its time). It may not even be a matter of wealth: within the foreseeable future Shanghai (14 million people) will surely be among the richest places on earth; Singapore already is. Will they be “world cities”?

I have lived in four such cities. London was the commercial and financial center of the world from the defeat of Napoleon until the rise of Hitler; Paris, its perennial competitor, was an international cultural magnet from the building of Versailles through the death of Albert Camus. Vienna’s apogee was perhaps the shortest: its rise and fall coincided with the last years of the Hapsburg Empire, though in intensity it outshone them all. And then came New York.

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Being There: Berlin

2010-11-08T01:52:00.000+02:00

by Jonathan Rosenthal

Intelligent Life
Autumn 2010

Every city has its history. Some, such as Paris, revel in theirs, while others—London comes to mind—draw gravitas from it. My home town of Johannesburg, which could be weighed down by its history, wears it lightly. And some cities just have too much: Berlin is one of them.

It was because of some of this history that my family fled Germany two generations ago. Our branch of the family was lucky. My grandfather, who lived in a village outside Frankfurt called Gedern, had a run-in with a local Nazi which turned violent. Family lore has it that he left town that night with his parents and brothers. Aunts, uncles and cousins stayed, and few of them survived the Holocaust.

It was a history that followed him to our dinner table in South Africa like a brooding relative who suddenly speaks up in the middle of a meal. Grandpa Ludwig’s fierce temper was supposedly a German trait; my father’s square head was called a “Krautkopf”. And there was bitterness. My father visited Germany just once in the early 1960s and couldn’t stand to stay more than one night. Whenever he looked at men his father’s age, he wanted to ask what they had done during the war. Had he stayed a little longer, he would have found many Germans his age asking similar questions of their parents.

Many still do. History in these parts is not neatly layered like a German chocolate cake: it is all jumbled up, so the past is always present. Berlin’s new business school is housed in the cathedral to communism that was built for East Germany’s rulers in 1964, so blond hammer-wielding workers and athletic, short-skirted women smile down from huge stained-glass windows on bank executives and MBA students debating the intricacies of corporate finance. The national treasury is inside a building that was first built as Hermann Goering’s air ministry, then used by the Soviet army, and later by the East German government.

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Jill Clayburgh (1944–2010)

2010-11-06T20:44:00.002+02:00

An Unmarried Woman (1978)
written and directed by Paul Mazursky

Clayburgh’s Unforgettable Unmarried Woman (Washington Post, November 7, 2010)

The Spanish Manner: Drawings from Ribera to Goya

2010-11-05T22:02:00.001+02:00

Inspired by the technical and aesthetic achievements of Italy and Flanders, Spanish draftsmen in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries created works that continue to impress modern viewers. This online exhibition was designed to complement an in situ exhibit at the Frick Museum in New York, and it features works by Goya, Ribera, and Murillo. On this site, visitors can look over introductory essays on the exhibit and read over a nice piece on the emotional and artistic content of works by Goya. Moving on, the "Podcasts" area contains several podcasts, including a conversation with curators to discuss several key works in the exhibition. The site is rounded out by an exhibition checklist which allows users to view the various works here.

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Source (The Scout Report)

Pacino Wants to Be Fair to Shakespeare

2010-10-31T15:12:00.003+02:00

New York Times
October 29, 2010

Some stars get their names above the title. Others’ appear in lights on the marquee. Then there’s Al Pacino. A giant photo of his weary-looking face in the new production of The Merchant of Venice towers above West 44th Street, high above signs for Phantom of the Opera and American Idiot. The Public Theater production of Merchant, staged by Daniel Sullivan at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, received glowing reviews last summer, but this simple, unadorned portrait explains why the show is transferring to Broadway at the Broadhurst Theater: star power, pure and simple. And, sure enough, ticket sales have already been brisk.

Down below the portrait, Mr. Pacino, wearing rumpled clothes and a tangled mop of hair, walked out the stage door recently and across the street to Sardi’s, where he set up in his usual corner table and ordered a shrimp cocktail. His deep-set eyes and raspy laugh were familiar, but in some of his flat vowels and musical stammer you could detect his distinctive performance as a vengeful, proud Shylock. Mr. Pacino, who turned 70 this year, talked with Jason Zinoman about his career, his craft and a lifetime of Shakespeare, although he deflected many questions about Shylock, which he said he preferred to avoid looking at from a critical distance.

At several moments, when pressed about what he was thinking, he turned quiet. Then he’d pivot and fly in a new direction: “Marlon Brando said a great thing once,” he said interrupting one such interval. “In movies, when they say, ‘Action,’ you don’t have to do it. I like that.”

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Read the review by Ben Brantley (NYT, June 30, 2010)

See a video from the theatrical performance

Joan Sutherland, Flawless Soprano, Is Dead at 83

2010-10-12T10:40:00.002+03:00

by Anthony Tommasini

New York Times
October 11, 2010

Joan Sutherland, one of the most acclaimed sopranos of the 20th century, a singer of such power and range that she was crowned “La Stupenda,” died on Sunday at her home in Switzerland, near Montreux. She was 83.

Her death was confirmed by her close friend the mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne.

It was Italy’s notoriously picky critics who dubbed the Australian-born Ms. Sutherland the Stupendous One after her Italian debut, in Venice in 1960. And for 40 years the name endured with opera lovers around the world. Her 1961 debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, generated so much excitement that standees began lining up at 7:30 that morning. Her singing of the Mad Scene drew a thunderous 12-minute ovation.

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Mario Vargas Llosa

2010-10-12T03:38:00.001+03:00

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Why Literature?

2010-10-10T16:27:00.000+03:00

by Mario Vargas Llosa

New Republic
May 14, 2001

It has often happened to me, at book fairs or in bookstores, that a gentleman approaches me and asks me for a signature. "It is for my wife, my young daughter, or my mother," he explains. "She is a great reader and loves literature." Immediately I ask: "And what about you? Don't you like to read?" The answer is almost always the same: "Of course I like to read, but I am a very busy person." I have heard this explanation dozens of times: this man and many thousands of men like him have so many important things to do, so many obligations, so many responsibilities in life, that they cannot waste their precious time buried in a novel, a book of poetry, or a literary essay for hours and hours. According to this widespread conception, literature is a dispensable activity, no doubt lofty and useful for cultivating sensitivity and good manners, but essentially an entertainment, an adornment that only people with time for recreation can afford. It is something to fit in between sports, the movies, a game of bridge or chess; and it can be sacrificed without scruple when one "prioritizes" the tasks and the duties that are indispensable in the struggle of life.

It seems clear that literature has become more and more a female activity. In bookstores, at conferences or public readings by writers, and even in university departments dedicated to the humanities, the women clearly outnumber the men. The explanation traditionally given is that middle-class women read more because they work fewer hours than men, and so many of them feel that they can justify more easily than men the time that they devote to fantasy and illusion. I am somewhat allergic to explanations that divide men and women into frozen categories and attribute to each sex its characteristic virtues and shortcomings; but there is no doubt that there are fewer and fewer readers of literature, and that among the saving remnant of readers women predominate.

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A universal Peruvian

2010-10-08T03:20:00.000+03:00

Economist
October 7, 2010

It had seemed inevitable that Mario Vargas Llosa was condemned to join the list of great writers never to receive the Nobel prize, while many of lesser talent but more fashionable views were honoured. So this year’s award is welcome, if overdue, recognition for the most accomplished living Latin American novelist and writer.

In its citation, the committee commends Mr Vargas Llosa for “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” These themes are treated most powerfully in what are perhaps his two finest novels, written more than three decades apart. Conversation in the Cathedral, an early work of astonishing maturity, is set in Peru in the 1950s during a military dictatorship. The Feast of the Goat, published in 2000, explores the cruel regime of General Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. While novels about dictators are a staple of Latin American literature, Mr Vargas Llosa took the genre beyond political denunciation, crafting subtle studies of the psychology of absolute power and its corruption of human integrity. These are themes he returns to in his latest book, El Sueño del Celta (The Dream of the Celt), a novel about Roger Casement, an Anglo-Irish diplomat and early crusader for human rights, which will be published in Spanish in November.

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Mario Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel Literature Prize

2010-10-07T14:53:00.000+03:00

Associated Press/New York Times
October 7, 2010

Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Spanish-speaking world who once ran for president in his homeland, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday.

The Swedish Academy said it honored the 74-year-old author "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat."

Vargas Llosa has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including Conversation in the Cathedral and The Green House. In 1995, he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor.

His international breakthrough came with the 1960s novel The Time of The Hero, which builds on his experiences from the Peruvian military academy Leoncio Prado. The book was considered controversial in his homeland and a thousand copies were burnt publicly by officers from the academy.

Vargas Llosa is the first South American winner of the prestigious 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) Nobel Prize in literature since it was awarded to Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982.

In the previous six years, the academy rewarded five Europeans and one Turk, sparking criticism that it was too euro-centric.

Born in Arequipa, Peru, Vargas Llosa grew up with his grandparents in Bolivia after his parents divorced, the academy said. The family moved back to Peru in 1946 and he later went to military school before studying literature and law in Lima and Madrid.

In 1959, he moved to Paris where he worked as a language teacher and as a journalist for Agence France-Presse and the national television service of France.

He has lectured and taught at a number of universities in the U.S., South America and Europe. He is teaching this semester at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J.

In 1990, he ran for the presidency but lost the election to Alberto Fujimori. In 1994 he was elected to the Spanish Academy, where he took his seat in 1996.

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Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature (NYT)

Official Website of the Nobel Prize

Jonathan Franzen: 'I must be near the end of my career – people are starting to approve'

2010-09-26T10:10:00.000+03:00

Interview to Ed Pilkington

Guardian
September 25, 2010

Last month, Jonathan Franzen became the first author in a decade to appear on the cover of Time magazine. Over a shot of him looking characteristically serious appeared the words "Great American Novelist".

In his famous Harper's essay of 1996, Franzen had bemoaned the magazine's lack of literary pin-ups as evidence of the declining importance of serious fiction, so you might think he'd be in celebratory mood. Being Franzen, he isn't comfortable with the label. "It paints a big bullseye on the back of my head," he says. "I always hated the expression anyway, mostly because I encountered it in stupid or sneering contexts."

He switches to a high-pitched mocking tone: "Still working on the Great American Novel?" Then adopts the barrel voice of a dunce: "I'm thinking of taking a year off to go to France and write a Great American Novel."

The sneering began after Franzen expressed misgivings over the selection of his last novel, The Corrections, for the Oprah Winfrey book club, in 2001. It sold nearly 3m copies and established Franzen as one of the leading literary voices of his generation, but, thanks to his perceived snub to Winfrey, it also established his reputation as, variously, an "ego-blinded snob" (Boston Globe), a "pompous prick" (Newsweek) and a "spoiled, whiny little brat" (Chicago Tribune).

The fallout set back his writing by more than a year. This time, Franzen has toughened up. "Whatever happens," he says, of his new novel Freedom, "it's not going to get to me. It's just not."

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Still Loving You - Scorpions with The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (2000)

2010-09-25T11:53:00.000+03:00

More and more.

Scorpions

Scorpions will perform at the Peace and Friendship Stadium (Athens, Oct. 6, 2010).

Why I Hate Ordering Wine by the Glass

2010-09-18T12:56:00.001+03:00

by Lettie Teague

Wall Street Journal
September 18, 2010

Every wine drinker I know maintains at least one wine-related prejudice or another—whether he admits it or not. One friend, for example, abhors drinking white wine while another eschews all rosés (he has labeled them "Pepto de Provence.") Yet a third disdains Riesling on account of the bottle, which she calls a "needle nose." (She's a former fashion editor—of course.)

I have a wine prejudice of my own: I simply hate wines by the glass. But unlike most prejudices, born of ignorance and fear, my prejudice was acquired through experience.

Foremost among my glass-hating reasons is price. Wines by the glass are almost invariably the worst deal in the house. After all, the conventional rule of thumb calls for the price of the glass to equal the wholesale cost of the bottle, plus, often, a few dollars more. And with five glasses in a bottle (or four, at a more conservative measure) that's a profit margin so large that only the greediest restaurateurs would dare to charge a similar markup on a full bottle. As Michael Madrigale, wine director of New York's Bar Boulud, put it: "The wine-by-the-glass program pays for corked bottles and when wine gets sent back. For most wine directors, it's the profit engine of a wine list."

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Forget What You Know of Twain, Then Delight in Your Rediscovery

2010-09-18T11:09:00.000+03:00

New York Times
September 17, 2010

Mark Twain’s heroes tend to land in unexpected places: caves, locked cabins, long-gone eras, the Czar’s palace, a Tasmanian jungle, Southern drawing rooms. Whether it’s Huck Finn floating on a raft with an escaped slave or Hank Morgan thrust into the court of King Arthur, they are generally good-humored about their quandary and come out in pretty decent condition, tossing off a few wisecracks, learning a few things, maybe even making a fortune.

But puzzling it all out isn’t easy: how do you make sense of an alien or changing world? Can you make judgments based on what you’ve been taught or what you think you already know, whether as prince or pauper? People are different there: what are we to make of them? How are we to act?

Samuel Clemens, of course, must have often felt the same way, his 74-year life arcing from rural poverty to world renown, from the antebellum South to 20th-century industrial New England, from Confederate sympathies to the rationalist skepticism of liberal modernity. He created a persona so familiar to us, so amiably congenial and sardonic, at once so folksy and high-toned with its attempt to cudgel and cajole the sense out of things, that we may think we understand him too. He landed squarely on his feet late in life, a modern man. And 100 years after his death and 175 after his birth, he still comfortably stands in our company. But in this year of dual birth and death commemorations, go to the Morgan Library & Museum, where a major new exhibition, Mark Twain: A Skeptic’s Progress, draws from two great collections of books and manuscripts at the Morgan and the New York Public Library.

Περισσότερα

Guggenheim: Interact

2010-09-17T21:33:00.000+03:00

The Scout Report
September 17, 2010

Interacting with the Guggenheim museums' collections is a great experience, and if you can't make it to one of their physical locations, this is the next best thing. The site is replete with creative assemblages of video ("YouTube Play"), blogs ("The Take"), and electronic newsletter options. Visitors shouldn't miss the "Voices from the Archives" area. Here they can listen to recent podcasts and as well as events from the past, including a conversation with Kandinsky scholar Rose-Carol Washton Long from 1964. Perhaps the most interesting part of the site is the "Declarations" section. Here, the Guggenheim has invited a "wide range of artists, scholars, activists, businesspeople, and government leaders to contribute concise remarks on related topical themes." One of the recent queries was "How is the idea of progress part of your practice?", and the responses are quite revealing. Finally, visitors can also make their way through their scrolling Twitter feed, and they are also encouraged to use the social media connections on the site to stay up-to-date.

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They Had Great Character

2010-09-17T20:29:00.000+03:00

by Stephen Tobolowsky

New York Times
September 16, 2010

One evening not long ago, my wife and I were standing in the lobby of a theater when a group of women approached me with “that look.” It’s a look that I have come to know as the “You are either someone in show business or my former chiropractor” look.

The women smiled bashfully and the brave one asked, “Are you who we think you are?” I responded, fearful of litigation, “That all depends on who you think I am.”

She giggled and said, “The actor.” I bowed and replied, “Yes, ma’am.” She brightened: “The one on ‘Lost.’”

I said, “No, no, sorry.”

Undeterred, she followed up with, “No, I meant the movie by the Coen brothers, ‘A Serious Man.’ ”

I was not in that movie either, though I auditioned for it and offered to wash Joel and Ethan’s cars if they would cast me. I suggested to the women that they had seen me in “Groundhog Day” or “Glee,” neither of which they had heard of. At this point I was certain that I had to be talking to visitors from another world or time travelers.

This is an encounter that I have had quite often. I am a character actor: the perfect combination of ubiquity and anonymity. But this particular comedy of errors made me give some serious thought to the strange, occasionally delightful and often humbling path we character actors tread. My thoughts were tinged with the sadness of having recently lost five magnificent companions on that road — Kevin McCarthy, Carl Gordon, Maury Chaykin, James Gammon and Harold Gould.

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Woody Allen on Faith, Fortune Tellers and New York

2010-09-15T13:20:00.000+03:00

by Dave Itzkoff

New York Times
September 14, 2010

Asked on Tuesday morning if it was appropriate to wish him a happy Jewish New Year, Woody Allen made it clear that such formalities were not necessary. “No, no, no,” he said with a chuckle, seated in an office suite at the Loews Regency hotel. “That’s for your people,” he told this reporter. “I don’t follow it. I wish I could get with it. It would be a big help on those dark nights.”

At 74, Mr. Allen, the prolific filmmaker and emblematic New Yorker, has hardly found religion. But the idea of faith informs his latest movie, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, which Sony Pictures Classics is to release next Wednesday. In the film, as the marriage of a London couple (Anthony Hopkins and Gemma Jones) unravels, the wife seeks comfort in the supernatural, which has unforeseen consequences on the marriage of her daughter (Naomi Watts) and her husband (Josh Brolin).

“To me,” Mr. Allen said, “there’s no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They’re all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.”

Mr. Allen spoke with Dave Itzkoff about his new film, how its themes resonate in his life and whether he has made his last movie in New York. These are excerpts from that conversation.

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‘His Glory and His Curse’

2010-09-13T23:39:00.000+03:00

by Charles Baxter

New York Review of Books
September 30, 2010

In his essay “Mr. Difficult,” Jonathan Franzen reports with a certain glum satisfaction that following the publication in 2001 of his third novel, The Corrections, he began to receive large quantities of angry mail. Some of the anger was sociological. “Who is it you are writing for? It surely could not be the average person who just enjoys a good read.” And some of it was just plain personal. One reader accused Franzen of being “a pompous snob, and a real ass-hole.”

Franzen’s novel spent twenty-nine weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and won the 2001 National Book Award. But no general readerly consensus seemed to exist concerning the book’s merits. The novel had hit a nerve, and it polarized its readers into two camps: those who hated it with particular venom, and those who felt it was a fine and beautiful book. (I was among the latter.) The author’s own ambivalence about the mass media didn’t help matters. After saying some indiscreet words about the Oprah Winfrey imprimatur on his novel’s book jacket, Franzen was disinvited from appearing on her show. It was a scandal, for a week or two.

The disagreements haven’t gone away. In his recent Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, David Shields denounces The Corrections without having read it: “I couldn’t read that book if my life depended on it,” he asserts. For him, Franzen’s novel—sight unseen—exemplifies “the big, blockbuster novel by middle-of-the-road writers, the run-of-the-mill four-hundred-page page-turner.” Shields claims that he is amazed that people still want to read such fiction. Oddly, what Shields seems to distrust about Franzen’s work (its mass appeal, its middleness) is exactly what the author’s enraged readers claimed The Corrections lacked. Was it still possible for a mass-audience novel to be artistically refined and thematically important? On this point there was no agreement because there hasn’t been any for decades.

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French New Wave film director Claude Chabrol dies

2010-09-12T22:18:00.000+03:00

AFP/Yahoo News
September 12, 2010

Prolific French film maker Claude Chabrol, who helped start the New Wave movement in the 1950s and went on to create some of the darkest portrayals on the silver screen, died on Sunday aged 80.

Chabrol was "an immense French film director, free, impertinent, political and verbose," Paris deputy mayor Christophe Girard, the city's top culture official, told AFP.

Born in Paris on June 24, 1930, Chabrol became famous for his sombre portrayals of French provincial bourgeois life.

Along with Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, he was an icon of French New Wave cinema, with all three writing for the renowned Cahiers du Cinema.

He authored dozens of films over more than 50 years, from his first work, Le Beau Serge, made in 1958 thanks to his wife's inheritance, to his last film, Bellamy, starring Gerard Depardieu which was released in 2009.

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The Art of Ancient Greek Theater

2010-09-10T21:03:00.000+03:00

The Scout Report
September 10, 2010

The Getty Museum provides this glimpse of Greek theater by utilizing both images and audio. Text at the website informs us that "Colorful characters, elaborate costumes, stage sets, music, and above all masks" were characteristic of Greek drama. Examples of images available to view on the site include sculpture and relief depicting actors. Many of these images feature actors wearing masks, such as Statue of an Actor as Papposilenos, dating from A.D. 100-199. In Greek myth, Papposilenos is the father of the band of satyrs that raised Dionysos. There are also over a dozen vessels to view; these vessels were used for various purposes including cooling wine, storage jars, and mixing vessels. The vessels are painted with scenes from the theater, and several are accompanied by audio of curators explaining the iconography. One of the featured items in the collection is a papyrus fragment from 175-200 A.D. with a few lines from a play by Sophocles. The exhibition closes with a reading, in ancient Greek, of an excerpt from this play, entitled The Trackers; a scene in which satyrs also appear, hearing music played on the then-newly invented lyre.

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Helen Vendler's new commentary on Emily Dickinson

2010-09-09T17:21:00.001+03:00

by Helen Vendler

Washington Post
September 9, 2010

Any good bookstore is likely to offer a half-dozen different editions of Emily Dickinson's poetry. But the reason to consider buying Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries lies, of course, in the commentator, Helen Vendler.

Vendler -- A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard -- is widely regarded as our finest living critic and champion of contemporary poetry. Many would say of poetry, period, since she has produced important studies of half the Western canon, from Shakespeare's sonnets and George Herbert's metaphysical verse to the work of Keats, Whitman, Yeats, Stevens, Plath, Heaney and Ashbery. Vendler's sheer appetite for poetry and her explicatory power are phenomenal.

She is, however, a thoroughly serious, academic critic. Now, some professors are fun to read: Think of the cool Olympian clarity of Northrop Frye, the astonishing encyclopedism of Hugh Kenner, the delicious precisions of Guy Davenport, the Empsonian dash and brilliance of Christopher Ricks. Vendler's strength, meanwhile, lies in clearly, patiently explaining what's happening in a poem. But -- and it's a big but -- you really do need to pay attention. As Vendler writes in her introduction to Dickinson, hers isn't so much a book to read through as "a book to be browsed in, as the reader becomes interested in one or another of the poems commented on here."

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The Neuroscience of Jazz

2010-09-05T22:59:00.000+03:00

by Stuart Isacoff

Wall Street Journal
September 4, 2010

Among the young lions of jazz piano, Indian- American artist Vijay Iyer is a standout. He is perpetually on "best of" lists, most recently as the recipient of the Jazz Journalists Association 2010 award for Musician of the Year (an honor previously given to Herbie Hancock, Ornette Coleman and Wayne Shorter). His 2009 recording, "Historicity," was chosen as the No. 1 jazz album by myriad critics in the U.S. and in Europe. And his newest effort, "Solo," released last week, is already garnering raves. He'll be celebrating with a performance at (Le) Poisson Rouge, New York's Greenwich Village music club, on Sept. 10.

But that's only the most visible part of his career. During the '90s, while Mr. Iyer was cultivating his artistic voice at late-night gigs, his daylight hours were spent working as a physics major at the University of California at Berkeley, where he produced a doctoral thesis that focused on "the role of the body in music perception and cognition"—that is, the part played by bodily experience in the comprehension of music. The two spheres may seem worlds apart. Yet, speaking of his two lives, the pianist reveals that in some ways, each was made possible by the other.

For example, his individuality at the keyboard has much to do with the sheer physicality of his approach, which he traces to a major influence, Thelonious Monk. That late pianist's assertive style, filled with quirky dissonances, craggy rhythms, and oddly tangible moments of silence (it was once described by Monk's wife, Nellie, as "melodious thunk"), brings to mind what avant-garde improviser Cecil Taylor said of another jazz performer, Horace Silver. Mr. Taylor admired Mr. Silver's playing, he said, because of "the filth of it," the "movement in the attack."

"When I first started checking recordings out of my local library," remembers Mr. Iyer, "and I heard Monk, I found something there that I could really relate to. His perspective was very physical and intuitive, but also logical and rigorous—and insistent in its rigor. I've always been inspired by the percussive school of pianism—to artists like [Duke] Ellington and Monk, who exhibit ferocity, sparseness and elegance. Then the documentary film about Monk, 'Straight, No Chaser,' came out. And seeing him in action made me understand—it's been said before—that you haven't heard Monk until you've seen him. The full impact of his art hit me like a lightning bolt. It was so vivid and intense."

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Laurindo Almeida with The Modern Jazz Quartet

2010-09-05T18:37:00.001+03:00

The Modern Jazz Quartet with classical guitarist Laurindo Almeida playing Jobim’s One Note Samba.

thanks to Orin Kerr

Time Marches ... Backward!

2010-09-03T21:33:00.000+03:00

by Neil Genzlinger

New York Times
September 2, 2010

I’ve learned to shrug off some fairly ignominious baggage associated with being a resident of New Jersey: the Burr-Hamilton duel, the Hindenburg disaster, “Jersey Shore,” the Nets’ 2009-10 season. But the news that my state was once part of the Third Reich — that was an unsettling surprise.

It’s one of the odd bits of trivia that emerge from the fresh look being taken at The March of Time, a series of short films created from 1935 to 1951, an era when people expected more than just previews and a feature when they settled into their movie theater seats. The Museum of Modern Art is in the midst of a week and a half of screenings of these illuminating curiosities, and on Sunday night TCM (in conjunction with HBO Archives) is showing a four-hour marathon of them, introduced by the film historian Robert Osborne.

It’s hard to know today even what to call these films. (Raymond Fielding, a retired college educator who wrote a book about the series, told me that roughly 290 were made.) “Newsreels” seems inadequate; they are longer, more detailed and much more opinionated than the standard-issue newsreels that preceded them. “Documentaries” is closer, but the blaring orchestrations and outlandish voice-overs sound nothing like a modern documentary.

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MoMA Marches to the Beat of History

2010-08-31T10:40:00.000+03:00

Wall Street Journal
August 31, 2010

The faux documentary on Charles Foster Kane that follows his death at the beginning of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is one of the cleverest pieces in the movie's brilliant puzzle. With its mix of pristine and artificially aged footage, sternly detached narrator, newsreel-style editing, quirky grammar and grandiose title, News on the March sends up the newsreel series The March of Time, which entertained American moviegoers from 1935 to 1951.

The Museum of Modern Art is marking the 75th anniversary of that ground-breaking series—which brashly mingled actuality with Hollywood-style narrative techniques—by screening nine programs containing dozens of episodes, organized by curator Charles Silver. The retrospective is being presented in collaboration with HBO Archives, which has been managing and restoring the films. (On Sunday, cable viewers will be able to catch Turner Classic Movies' four-hour March of Time marathon.)

Mr. Welles had been a gung-ho performer on the radio version of The March of Time, which launched in 1931 after Time Inc.'s Roy E. Larsen had the idea of hiring actors to dramatize news items. The catchy title came from a Harold Arlen song written for Broadway, and such actors as Everett Sloane, Art Carney and Agnes Moorehead were enlisted to impersonate newsworthy figures like Adolf Hitler and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (though the FDR skits were dropped after the president complained). Hugely popular, the broadcasts were a publicity gold mine for Time magazine.

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Journalist Walter Winchell appears in The March of Time episode 'What to Do With Germany,' from 1944.

The Tolstoy of the Internet Era

2010-08-31T03:21:00.000+03:00

by Judith Shulevitz

Slate
August 30, 2010

A person who read only the first chapter of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom might be tempted to dismiss it as a pretty callow piece of writing. That chapter freeze-dries the novel's protagonists, the Berglunds, at a moment in history, the 1980s, when they and their kind were still relatively unselfconscious and thus shrink-wrappable. "Walter and Patty were the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill—the first college grads to buy a house on Barrier Street since the old heart of St. Paul had fallen on hard times three decades earlier." They drive a Volvo 240, listen to public radio, cook from The Silver Palate cookbook, worry about lead in their Fiestaware, use cloth diapers, fret about maximizing their children's brilliance.

The voice that checks off the items in this yuppie's handbook seems giddy and smug, amused by its own sociological precision. I kept thinking of it as a hectoring presence: that voice. Patty Berglund, says that voice, was "a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee." "There were people," says that voice, "with whom her style of self-deprecation didn't sit well … as if Patty, in exaggerating her own minor defects, were too obviously trying to spare the feelings of less accomplished homemakers." The reader might be forgiven for feeling plunged into a faintly mean-spirited sendup of gentrifiers and overparenters. Franzen himself has called this sort of relentless cataloguing of bourgeois delusions "fault-finding fiction."

The reader of just that first chapter, however, would be wrong about Freedom. The novel aspires to be a portrait of America on a Tolstoyan scale—at least that's one way to interpret the many references to War and Peace in it—and Franzen has indeed absorbed some of Tolstoy's astonishing capacity for empathy. Gentrification and the fetishizing of parenthood occupy the foreground of Franzen's panoramic canvas but have not been reduced to caricature, except in that curious first chapter, which I'll get to later. Rather, they are made to seem like aspects of an urge to nurture that has run amok, two of the many ironies of life under late capitalism chronicled by this exuberant but keenly critical novel.

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What's the Big Idea?

2010-08-30T21:49:00.000+03:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education
August 29, 2010

For the 10th-anniversary issue of The Chronicle Review, we asked scholars and illustrators to answer this question: What will be the defining idea of the coming decade, and why?

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The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.

2010-08-29T23:49:00.000+03:00

Are you a Ph.D. student? Do you like charts that explain the nature of your scholarly pursuits? Matt Might, who works and teaches at the University of Utah’s School of Computing, has created a series of illustrations to explain exactly what your Ph.D. research looks like.

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Freakonomics Movie Trailer Released!

2010-08-28T21:15:00.002+03:00

An Illustrated Guide to the 5 Levels of Inception

2010-08-28T12:16:00.001+03:00

Cinema Blend
July 18, 2010

Like a lot of you we’ve spent most of the weekend thinking about one thing: Inception. You can see our attempt to explain what’s going on the movie here but before you can even begin to guess at director Christopher Nolan’s intentions or what happens after the movie’s mind-blowing final sequence, you’ll need a clear idea of all the levels of Inception.

SPOILER WARNING: What follows should only be viewed by people who have already seen Inception. It contains heavy, critical spoilers which will impact your viewing of the film. If you haven’t seen Inception yet, stop reading and don’t come back until you do.

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Everything you wanted to know about "Inception"

2010-08-28T12:14:00.002+03:00

by Sam Adams

Salon
July 19, 2010

Even before it hit theaters on Friday, Christopher Nolan’s Inception was one of the year’s most talked-about movies, and one of its most argued-over. But before you can form an opinion, you need to know what’s going on, something even a few seasoned critics seem to be having trouble with.

Like Nolan’s breakthrough movie, Memento, Inception is an elaborate, deliberately disorienting maze of interlocking time frames, only here the stakes are raised. Rather than challenging us to figure out what happened, Inception presents events that may not have happened at all. Set in the world of dreams, and dreams within dreams, the movie is the narrative equivalent of a set of Russian nesting dolls. Every time you think you’ve reached the center, Nolan pulls the film apart and shows us another world hiding within.

By structuring Inception as a subconscious heist movie, following a team of dream thieves led by Leonardo DiCaprio as they infiltrate the mind of business heir Cillian Murphy, Nolan provides a strong thread for us to cling to as we bounce between the concentric layers of dreams. But if you want to truly understand the mechanics of Inception’s world rather than simply go along for the ride, you need to see the film more than once and spend some serious time untangling its mysteries.

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Read the film review by Roger Ebert

Chopin's Small Miracles

2010-08-28T11:32:00.001+03:00

by David Dubal

Wall Street Journal
August 28, 2010

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), whose 200th anniversary it is this year, is the overwhelming favorite composer for the piano. He possessed the most subtle intuitions and fathomed the mysteries of the world. Oscar Wilde once said of him, "After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own."

Most of the 24 Chopin Preludes were sketched out between 1837 and 1838. They are the ultimate miniatures. In an age when the symphony and sonata still held sway, writing these aphoristic Preludes was revolutionary. All except two contain a single musical idea, each boiled down to its essence. Never had brevity been so brief. Ten are under a minute in length; nine last just over a minute. Only the celebrated No. 15, the so-called "Raindrop Prelude," attains the length characteristic of a small piece, clocking in at 4½ minutes.

Fourteen of the Preludes are full of light, gaiety, serenity and a kind of happiness. Seven contain anguish, rage and fury. Three are simply sorrowful. No matter how tiny, the Preludes loom large musically. Each one is a masterpiece of compressed emotion blended with an unequaled pianistic ingenuity and originality. Many of them are horribly difficult to play. When Robert Schumann read them, he proclaimed Chopin to be the "proudest poet soul of the age."

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Brooklyn Museum: Andy Warhol: The Last Decade

2010-08-27T23:14:00.001+03:00

Andy Warhol: The Last Decade is the first U.S. museum survey to examine the late work of American artist Andy Warhol (1928–1987). Encompassing nearly fifty works, the exhibition reveals the artist’s vitality, energy, and renewed spirit of experimentation. During this time Warhol produced more works, in a considerable number of series and on a vastly larger scale, than at any other point in his forty-year career. It was a decade of great artistic development for him, during which a dramatic transformation of his style took place alongside the introduction of new techniques.

Warhol continued to expand upon his artistic and business ventures with commissioned portraits, print series, television productions, and fashion projects, but he also reengaged with painting. In the late 1970s, he developed a new interest in abstraction, first with his Oxidations and Shadows series and later with his Yarn, Rorschach, and Camouflage paintings. His return to the hand-painted image in the 1980s was inspired by collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Keith Haring. The exhibition concludes with Warhol’s variations on Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, one of the largest series of his career. Together, these works provide an important framework for understanding Warhol’s late career by showing how he simultaneously incorporated the screened image and pursued a reinvention of painting.

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Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987). The Last Supper, 1986. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 116 x 390 in. (294.6 x 990.6 cm). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

Cloak and Swagger

2010-08-27T22:31:00.000+03:00

by Justin Cartwright

New York Times
August 26, 2010

Since the publication of Night Soldiers in 1988, Alan Furst has made a considerable reputation as a writer of historical spy thrillers. These are set in that fraught period of European history starting in 1933, with Hitler’s rise to power, and ending in 1945. Though Furst is a native New Yorker, he lives some of the time in Paris and has adopted a European sensibility — perhaps aiming to evoke the atmosphere of his books, which have been compared to the works of John le Carré and Graham Greene.

His latest, Spies of the Balkans, is set in the winter of 1940-41 in Salonika, in northern Greece. Greece is threatened by the Axis powers; the Greeks have driven the none-too-fervent Italians back over the mountains toward Albania but believe Hitler will soon exact retribution.

Salonika is a louche and exotic port full of brothels, bars, international trade and Byzantine intrigue. In its sleepy police department is Constantine Zannis, called Costa, whose qualities of tact, bravery, honesty and charm have ensured him a special position as a fixer. He sorts out indiscretions by politicians’ children, supplies travel papers and keeps tabs on foreign security services. Lately he has taken to helping Jewish refugees from Berlin complete the increasingly difficult route to safety.

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Change Agent

2010-08-26T23:50:00.000+03:00

by Isaac Chotiner

New Republic
August 26, 2010

Like a number of successful novel sequences or film franchises, the James Bond movies have spawned a stream of books that analyze, often too solemnly, the artistic merit and the cultural relevance of the original works. These books tend to be written by people who take great pleasure in complete immersion in their subject. A book on, say, Arthur Conan Doyle’s famed detective is likely to know what kind of pipe Sherlock Holmes smoked, or where Dr. Watson underwent his training in medicine. The James Bond scholar (there’s a phrase!) is likely to know that Noël Coward was considered for the role of Dr. No, and that if Cary Grant had been willing to sign on for more than one film, he very well might have been cast as the lethal British spy.

Very well and good, you say—an author ought to know his subject. The problem is that such arcane trivia tends to cloud out the bigger picture; fandom, with its purely obsessive approach, does not always produce the most considered or insightful judgments. Most James Bond books (and I do not mean the fiction on which the films are based) tend to get lost in the universe under review—and, to paraphrase Ian Fleming, this world is not enough. Fans of Conan Doyle or P.G. Wodehouse or Star Trek know what I mean, however loathe they may be to admit it.

Another danger stems from the opposite problem: a tendency to condescend to the subject. There are few things worse than a 007 obsessive who pens an entire book about his hero, but, out of an apparent need to appear serious or highbrow, ends up trashing what he most worships. Where is the fun in that? This is a longwinded way of saying that Sinclair McKay’s new book is one of the very best attempts to take stock of the Bond films. It has its share of quirks, and is by no means appropriate for someone with a minimal interest in the series. But his analysis of the movies is smart and unexpected, and his grasp of Bond is obviously the result of thought and study.

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Life, literature and dogs

2010-08-26T22:29:00.006+03:00

by Bob Minzesheimer

USA Today
August 26, 2010

Writer Caroline Knapp was 42 when she died, seven weeks after being diagnosed with lung cancer in 2002.

She's best known for Drinking: A Love Story, her 1996 memoir about life as a "high-functioning alcoholic." But she also wrote Pack of Two (1998) on why people, including herself, are so attached to their dogs.

And it was dogs — not books — that connected Knapp with book critic Gail Caldwell, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for her reviews at The Boston Globe.

Theirs is "an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too," Caldwell writes in the opening sentence of Let's Take the Long Way Home, a heartbreaker of a memoir.

If grief can ever be graceful, then Caldwell gracefully weaves a thread of stories that describe and ponder friendship and loss.

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The stuff of life

2010-08-26T21:43:00.004+03:00

Economist
August 26, 2010

Jonathan Franzen’s brilliant new novel studies the planet, happiness and marriage

It was John DeForest, a writer of the civil-war period, who defined the Great American Novel in an 1868 essay for the Nation as “painting the American soul within the framework of a novel”. DeForest was arguing over the relative merits of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, two writers who definitely fit the bill. Others have laid claim to the title (or had claim laid to it by their hopeful publishers), including J.D. Salinger, Don DeLillo, Tom Wolfe and John Updike.

Indeed, there has never been a shortage of candidates for this peculiarly American compulsion, and disagreements over who should wear the laurels are as long as the continent is wide. This year, though, the award may enjoy almost universal acclaim. The novel that America will be talking about in the coming weeks will be Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.

A mop-haired Midwesterner who looks far younger than 51, Mr Franzen rose to fame a decade ago. This was when his third novel, The Corrections, a multigenerational family saga about American yuppies and their square parents, was first selected as a candidate for Oprah Winfrey’s book club and then very publicly dismissed by the television star. (Ms Winfrey did not care for Mr Franzen’s complaint that her book club appealed only to women readers.) The brouhaha did his book no harm. Though largely plotless, uneven in structure and weighed down with sarcastic observation, The Corrections went on to spend 29 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and win the 2001 National Book Award.

Mr Franzen’s work will not appeal to those seeking sharp-edged experimentalism in their fiction. But for readers who believe the novel to be an old-fashioned thing that, at its best, should bring alive fully imagined characters in a powerful narrative with a social context, his new book will be a huge draw. The author has spent the past ten years doing what he does well and making it better. Freedom has all its predecessor’s power and none of its faults.

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Jonathan Franzen's new novel, "Freedom"

2010-08-25T15:28:00.004+03:00

by Ron Charles

Washington Post
August 25, 2010

So what is it about Jonathan Franzen and poo? In 2001, his wonderful breakthrough novel, The Corrections, was momentarily stunk up by a scene in which a senile old man imagines his feces talking back to him. A decade later, Franzen's more staid, more mature, but all around less exciting Freedom reaches its comic zenith when a young man searches through his own excrement with a fork. What seemed like a sophomoric indulgence in that earlier tour de force now smells stale.

Which is one of the problems with Freedom. We've read this story before in The Corrections, back when it was witty, when its satire of contemporary family, business and politics sounded brash and fresh, when its revival of social realism was so boisterous that it ripped the hinges off the doors of American literature. The most anticipated, heralded novel of this year gives us a similarly toxic stew of domestic life, but Franzen's wit has mostly boiled away, leaving a bitter sludge of dysfunction.

Cannily, the slyest part comes up front: a 23-page preface that outlines the rise and fall of Walter and Patty Berglund's marriage in St. Paul, Minn. (You may have read this section last year in the New Yorker.) "Walter's most salient quality, besides his love of Patty, was his niceness," Franzen writes, while Patty was "a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee . . . famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else." It's classic Franzen, a smart, acidic take on suburban life and particularly green yuppies, "the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lacked the courage of their privilege."

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The Soulful Side of Bordeaux

2010-08-25T12:05:00.000+03:00

by Eric Asimov

New York Times
August 24, 2010

Compared with the grand chateaus of the Médoc, the tiny Domaine du Jaugaret may seem irrelevant. The critics don’t score its wines, it’s barely mentioned in guides, it doesn’t play in the futures game. The winemaking facility is no more than a series of stone sheds with floors of dirt and gravel and walls covered in a mushroomlike mold. Calling it rustic would be putting it kindly.

Yet for me, the importance of a place like Domaine du Jaugaret in St.-Julien cannot be overstated. In globalized, commercial Châteaux Bordeaux, a world of brand-name products sold like luxury goods, where too many wines seem polished and lustrous yet lacking in character, Jaugaret brims with soul. Its proprietor, Jean-François Fillastre, epitomizes the French vigneron, one who tends the vines and makes the wines.

Vignerons like Mr. Fillastre make up the backbone of wine regions all over France, from Burgundy to Languedoc to the Loire, embodying the essential truth that wine is both agriculture and culture, a centuries-old expression of French character. (Indeed, Jaugaret has been in Mr. Fillastre’s family for more than 350 years.) But in the famous terroirs of the Médoc like St.-Julien, Margaux, Pauillac and Sauternes, such vignerons are the rare exception.

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Popcorn Reverie

2010-08-21T22:25:00.000+03:00

by Dave Kehr

New York Times
August 20, 2010

Scratch a film critic, and you’re likely to find a jazz buff. That the opposite is also true was suggested as far back as the 1930s by Otis Ferguson, the startlingly prescient critic who covered jazz, when it was a genuinely popular art, along with Hollywood movies, then entering their classical phase, for The New Republic. It’s demonstrated again by Gary Giddins, the eminent jazz critic of The Village Voice from 1973 to 2003, and more recently the DVD columnist of The New York Sun (which ceased publication in 2008).

A collection of Giddins’s film columns for The Sun, filled out by work for other publications, including DGA Quarterly (a journal from the Directors Guild of America) and The New York Times Book Review, has been published under the alarming title Warning Shadows: Home Alone With Classic Cinema, which somehow conjures a 1970s baby sitter watching The Late Show while waiting for the neighborhood slasher to show up. The book itself is considerably cozier: an anthology of informed, engaged, illuminating writings, mainly concerned with American movies of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.

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Peace and War

2010-08-20T22:20:00.001+03:00

by Sam Tanenhaus

New York Times
August 19, 2010

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, like his previous one, The Corrections, is a masterpiece of American fiction. The two books have much in common. Once again Franzen has fashioned a capacious but intricately ordered narrative that in its majestic sweep seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life. Franzen knows that college freshmen are today called “first years,” like tender shoots in an overplanted garden; that a high-minded mom, however ruthless in her judgments of her neighbors’ ethical lapses, will condemn them with no epithet harsher than “weird”; that reckless drivers who barrel across lanes are “almost always youngish men for whom the use of blinkers was apparently an affront to their masculinity.”

These are not gratuitous observations. They grow organically from the themes that animate Freedom, beginning with the title, a word that has been elevated throughout American history to near-theological status, and has been twinned, for most of that same history, with the secularizing impulses of “power.”

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The New Adventures of Old Elaine

2010-08-19T14:40:00.000+03:00

by William Van Meter

New York Times
August 18, 2010

On a recent August night, young women in stilettos teetered precariously through the cobblestone streets of the meatpacking district in Manhattan. Appropriately for the neighborhood, they were squeezed into minidresses that were as snug as sausage casings. But a few blocks south, far away from the blare of Hummer limousine horns, at the fashionable opening of the Algus Greenspon Gallery on Morton Street, a more demure look prevailed.

Like a modest Robert Palmer-girl army, the women mingled in floor-length print dresses and brown lace-up boots with their hair in messy secretary buns. The genesis of the look could have been those unforgettable images of fundamentalist Mormon women that dominated the news a couple of years back. But if you squinted, what you saw was a sea of Elaines. Listen and you could almost hear the funky slap bass that played as segue music on Seinfeld. Could it be that the stars have somehow aligned to make Elaine Benes the summer’s downtown fashion muse?

Over the years, Elaine has stood out as a beacon of a faded era, in long floral skirts, blazers with padded shoulders and granny shoes with socks. Just about every inch of her skin was covered as if she were photosensitive. Unlike other 1990s series with a more easily imitable style (see Melrose Place), Seinfeld was decidedly anti-fashion. But now, if you happen upon an old episode, Elaine just looks cool — and of-the-moment.

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A Film Unfinished

2010-08-18T23:42:00.000+03:00

by Jeannette Catsoulis

New York Times
August 17, 2010

For almost half a century, an unfinished Nazi propaganda film of the Warsaw Ghetto, simply titled Das Ghetto and discovered by East German archivists after the war, was used by scholars and historians as a flawed but authentic record of ghetto life. Shot over 30 days in May 1942 — just two months before deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp would begin — this hourlong silent film juxtaposed random scenes of Jews enjoying various luxuries with images of profound suffering.

Like the flickering shadows in Plato’s Cave, these images were subjected to a radical rereading with the appearance of another reel in 1998: 30 minutes of outtakes showing the extent to which scenes had been deliberately staged. Over and over, in multiple takes, we see well-dressed Jews enter a butcher’s shop, ignoring the children begging outside. In a similar scenario, prosperous-looking passersby are directed to disregard the corpses abandoned on the sidewalk. The propagandists’ manipulation of their half-million prisoners was now clear, even as its eventual purpose — perhaps more than just to manufacture scenes showing callousness on the part of wealthy Jews toward their less fortunate brethren — remained as murky as ever.

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Trailer

Jonathan Franzen picks up the torch for US literary tradition

2010-08-16T22:16:00.000+03:00

by William Skidelsky

Guardian
August 15, 2010

Last week an event took place that hasn't occurred since 2000: a living author appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The recipient of this accolade was novelist Jonathan Franzen, best known – until now – for his multi-generational epic about a midwestern family, The Corrections, which came out in the week of 9/11 and was one of the most talked about (and bestselling) novels of the last decade.

It has taken Franzen nine years to complete his follow-up, Freedom, which is about to be published in the US. (It doesn't hit UK bookshops until late September.) Understandably, Franzen hasn't significantly departed from the template that served him so well last time. The novel is another multi-generational epic that microscopically examines the tensions within an outwardly successful but inwardly unhappy midwestern family. There are striking plot similarities: both books feature get-rich-quick schemes and copious extra-marital affairs. It has been suggested, in fact, that the main difference between the two is that, while the family in The Corrections had three children, the family at the centre of Freedom – the Berglunds – have just two.

Time's decision to make Franzen its cover star is intriguing, for reasons both obvious and less straightforward. Ever since The Corrections appeared, Franzen, who is 50, has been regarded as one of America's most important novelists, a leading member of the generation down from the "old guard" of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and John Updike that dominated US fiction from the 1950s until at least 2000. The appearance of a new novel by him, especially after such a long absence, is a major literary event, which it is appropriate for Time to honour.

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Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding

2010-08-09T00:58:00.000+03:00

Americans agree about government arts funding in the way the women in the old joke agree about the food at the wedding: it's terrible--and such small portions! Americans typically either want to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts, or they believe that public arts funding should be dramatically increased because the arts cannot survive in the free market. It would take a lover of the arts who is also a libertarian economist to bridge such a gap. Enter Tyler Cowen. In this book he argues why the U.S. way of funding the arts, while largely indirect, results not in the terrible and the small but in Good and Plenty--and how it could result in even more and better.

Few would deny that America produces and consumes art of a quantity and quality comparable to that of any country. But is this despite or because of America's meager direct funding of the arts relative to European countries? Overturning the conventional wisdom of this question, Cowen argues that American art thrives through an ingenious combination of small direct subsidies and immense indirect subsidies such as copyright law and tax policies that encourage nonprofits and charitable giving. This decentralized and even somewhat accidental--but decidedly not laissez-faire--system results in arts that are arguably more creative, diverse, abundant, and politically unencumbered than that of Europe.

Bringing serious attention to the neglected issue of the American way of funding the arts, Good and Plenty is essential reading for anyone concerned about the arts or their funding.

Tyler Cowen is professor of economics at George Mason University. His books include Creative Destruction (Princeton) and Create Your Own Economy. He frequently writes for the New York Times, Slate, and the economics blog Marginal Revolution.

A Lot of Everything on the Upper West Side

2010-08-09T00:21:00.000+03:00

New York Times
August 7, 2010

Crowded with shops, serviced by multiple subway lines and bordered by Central and Riverside parks, the Upper West Side has no problem attracting residents.

Traditionally a working-class neighborhood, the area has been transformed in recent years by an influx of affluent young families and more than a few local and national artists, musicians and actors.

Celebrities known to have an address on the Upper West Side include Yoko Ono, Alex Rodriguez and Sting. They're living side by side with longtime residents and Columbia University students, who have a quick walk to campus. It's not surprising to catch a celebrity or two strolling through the neighborhood, or come across blocked off streets due to a television show or movie filming. Recent sightings: Al Pacino, Kelsey Grammer and Keanu Reeves, according to Torrey Taralli, co-founder of the My Upper West Side blog and an eight-year resident.

The neighborhood is made up of a mix of prewar buildings, many originally built as rental properties before being converted into cooperatives and condominiums. High-rises constructed in the 1960s often went co-op in the 1980s. Rental conversions continue today at such high-end buildings as the Apthorp. The neighborhood is also stocked with tenements, brownstones, a few low-rise brick buildings and some public housing.

There's no shortage of cultural attractions. Parents and children flock to the Children's Museum of Manhattan and the American Museum of Natural History. There's also the New York Historical Society, where current exhibitions include Slavery in New York.

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French Roast sits at Broadway and W. 85th St. in the Upper West Side


Upper West Side businesses along Broadway include Coach at West 84th Street

A statue of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback at the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History

Larry David: Earth to America

2010-08-08T14:44:00.000+03:00

Earth to America! Live at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, November 17, 2005

In the Catacombs: Paris's True Underground Scene

2010-08-08T14:29:00.000+03:00

Wall Street Journal
August 6, 2010

Sixty-six feet under the City of Light's scenic streets, people are gathering each weekend to explore Paris's true underground arts scene. The 160 miles of centuries-old tunnels have become a unique gallery for artists.

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Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917

2010-08-07T01:34:00.000+03:00

The Scout Report
August 6, 2010

The Art Institute of Chicago website has a wonderful online interactive feature that complements its in situ Matisse exhibit, called "Matisse: Radical Invention 1913-1917". The focus of the exhibit is the aforementioned time period, but the Art Institute of Chicago, in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, New York, takes it one step further by using technology to uncover how Matisse's painting, Bathers By a River, and the sculpture, Back, evolved. To understand the technology used to uncover the evolution of Matisse's work, visitors should check out the "Glossary" in the menu at the top of any page. There, x-radiography, infrared reflectography, and overlays are concisely explained to visitors interested in learning about this x-ray approach to art. Finally, visitors interested in seeing Matisse working on an actual painting, will definitely want to check out the 26-minute film from 1946, "A Great French Painter, Henri Matisse". Some of the film is even shot in the Issy studio where he created many of his works from 1913 to 1917.

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