“Most people are fans of some cultural product or another: a football team, a soap opera, a rock band, a political party. But organized fandom is widely derided for its allegedly excessive devotion to trivial entertainments. Similar stereotypes used to dominate the academy, particularly among critics of capitalism and/or modernity, for whom the fan was the slack-jawed, brainwashed embodiment of consumer culture—the viewer who didn’t merely swallow passively the pulp fictions produced by the culture industry, but centered a large part of her life around those same products…”
Month: April 2004
Fleisher: Music In Words
Leon Fleisher is king of the musical metaphors. “Listening to Fleisher talk about music is delightfully dizzying. The metaphors come in an endless flow. Play like a cat, he might say, but with sheathed claws. Play it like a Bavarian milkmaid, not like Britney Spears. Fingers shouldn’t be hammers, they should be dolphin flippers. This chord change could be from a Marlene Dietrich song; croak over it.”
Margaret Atwood On Being Atwood:
“Atwood’s dragon persona is less fire-breathing than gently, relentlessly smouldering. She can isolate the moment she became a writer – “became”, naturally, not “wanted to become” – in 1956, when she was “crossing the football field on the way home from school. I wrote a poem in my head and then I wrote it down, and after that writing was the only thing I wanted to do.”
Building A Case For War
Historically, wars have influenced the architecture of their times. And is the current war finding its way into our buildings? “It is fascinating to see these concerns translated into architectural styles: unselfconsciously, as in the Cambridge Crown Court; and flamboyantly, like the mock castles built at the time of the Napoleonic wars, or the concrete bunkers built during the cold war.”
Stone Reshoots Fidel And Gets Spot On Schedule
Last year Oliver Stone went to Cuba and produced a movie portrait of Fidel Castro. When he presented the finished product to HBO, the network refused to air it because they said it was too fawning and flattering. So Stone went back to Cuba and reshot. This time his movie has been accepted…
Psychology Critique Under Attack
Psychologist Lauren Slater’s new book “Opening Skinner’s Box” has been hailed as “a bridge the gap between academic and popular psychology,” but the experts are attacking. “Some say that she put invented quotations in her new book. Others question her methods and data in her own experiment in faking mental illness or challenge the accuracy of her description of some famous past experiments. Critics have been publicizing their accusations in book reviews on Amazon.com and other Internet sites, while professors at several schools, including Harvard, Columbia and Emory universities, have been exchanging information on their views of the book’s failings.”
Two Magazines – A Letter Between Them
There’s “America” magazine and “American” magazine, and they couldn’t be more different. “The two magazines nicely convey the dyads: rural and urban, mass and elite, red and blue. America’s America is sleek, multiracial and wonderfully coiffed. The images on the oversize, foil-edged pages are outré; in one photo essay the actress Juliette Lewis is curled up in a refrigerator, having a moment with herself. Using hip-hop as its motif the magazine roams across fashion, film and technology. It takes the reader behind the velvet ropes and assumes anyone who is reading it belongs there: America magazine defines and covers its own species. American Magazine’s America seems more like a teddy bear you can hold on your lap.”
Brooklyn Museum’s New Building, New Focus
The Brooklyn Museum unveils a $63 million renovation this week. But it’s also unveiling a new focus. “It has all but abandoned efforts to lure visitors from Manhattan and is now, with the help of an image consultant, concentrating almost exclusively on its own backyard — the 2.5 million residents of Brooklyn.”
A Rossini Find Worth Finding
It was 170 years between performances of Rossini’s opera Ermione. Anne Midgette is aware that such long lost finds more often than not prove why they were forgotten. But “for my money, this is the best rediscovery to cross the radar in a long time. Anyone who likes 19th-century Italian opera — from Donizetti to Verdi — should see City Opera’s “Ermione.”
Going Young At Humana
Just how are plays chosen for inclusion at the Festival of New American Plays in Louisville? This year, five of the six full plays presented were by women. And they were also young. “This time the plays we liked happened to be mostly by younger writers. We just felt the writing was interesting and strong and worthy of production.”