The Art of Science at Princeton

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

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?”

More

Artistic labour and occupational choice in Baroque painting

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).

More

John Williams: The Last Movie Maestro

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.

More

Poetry in paint: The art of Elizabeth Bishop

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.

More

Where Does Innovation Come From?

Wall Street Journal
November 29, 2011

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

More

Crowdsourcing Brings Historical Archive Online

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.

More

George Eastman House Collections

Symphony of Swing

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

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."

More

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

More

The Misery Memoirist

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."

More

A Trove of Faulkner Recordings

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.

More

Memories of Chekhov

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)

More

Star Wars - Binary Sunset

Episode IV: A New Hope
Music: John Williams

A Mash-Up of Actors Playing Woody Allen

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.

More

No, pagliaccio non son

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"

from Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo (1892)

performed: Budapest, 1991

Jerry Seinfeld in Oprah

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

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.)

More

When Mahler Took Manhattan

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.

More

The National Gallery: 30 Highlight Paintings

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."


More


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

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.

More

Your name, sir?

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)

Bureaucracy

"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...

More

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: Tila Tequila

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

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

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

Read more

Esperanza Spalding

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

The Welsh soprano Dame Margaret Price has died

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.

More

Margaret Price

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

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.

More

Weimar Cinema, 1919–1933: Daydreams and Nightmares

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)

Orhan Pamuk: Finding an Authentic Voice

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