Once upon a time, the leaders of our country were the kind of men — and, let’s face it, it was a men’s club at the time — who were learned, who valued scholarship and science. That was then. This is now:
Month: June 2008
How Louis Armstrong Made His Masterpiece
“On a summer’s day in late June 1928, Armstrong and his quintet, the Hot Five, went into a recording studio in Chicago and created his supreme masterpiece, one that summarizes the brilliance of his art and points a way forward for all jazz — and many other kinds of music as well.”
The Role Every Ballerina Wants
“When Kenneth MacMillan choreographed Romeo and Juliet for the Royal Ballet in 1965, he created the most fiercely coveted ballerina role of them all. The canon isn’t short of tragic heroines – Giselle, Odette in Swan Lake, Tatiana in Onegin – but it’s the beautiful, doomed Juliet every ballerina dreams of dancing.”
Man Accidentally Throws Out Hirst Painting
“Chris Evans, the BBC Radio Two disc jockey, has accidentally thrown out a piece of artwork by Damien Hirst. Evans, 42, made the admission on his evening drive- time show, saying the print – worth thousands of pounds – was now lying in a charity shop waiting to be bought for a fraction of its true value.”
An Actor Explains Why He Hates The Theatre
“I have a big problem with the audience. I don’t feel the desire to engage them. Which is what theatre is all about. And I also dislike an environment where people feel free to bandy about words like ‘Brechtian subtext’. As if we’re all supposed to know what that means. Do we? I don’t.”
Bollywood Takes It To The West
“For all Bollywood’s flash, it cannot compete with Hollywood. India makes about 1,000 movies a year, 10 times Hollywood’s total. Unlike the US, though, its films don’t travel. Nor has it achieved the crossover successes of films from Britain, Japan and, more recently, China and South Korea.” Now a push to go head-to-head with Hollywood.
Boys Of Summer – The Beach Boys Influence On This Summer’s Bands
“Perhaps it is a result of the Beach Boys’ influence on pop culture that this summer you can’t get away from them. Today, as in the late Sixties, America is a country whose reputation has been battered by an unpopular war. Perhaps this is why bands have been driven towards the innocence and purity of their musical roots.”
How Do You Control TV When It’s Everywhere, Any Time?
“Today’s wealth of customer-driven, see-it-when-you-want TV is a revelation for adults, who have won a glorious freedom from the networks’s long hegemony. For more and more people, live TV has become a special, rarefied category of viewing, reserved for sports and “Idol”-style reality contests.”
The Inner Buckminster Fuller
“Recent research has shed new light on Fuller’s inner life and what really drove him. In particular, it now appears that the suicide story may have been yet another invention, an elaborate myth that served to cover up a formative period that was far more tumultuous and unstable, for far longer, than Fuller ever revealed.”
A Long, Strange Road To Literary Stardom
The rookie novelist who captured the €100,000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award this week isn’t even a native English speaker, yet his prose won over the judges of one of the world’s most prestigious prizes. “The unsolicited manuscript, written in Mr. Hage’s third language… was famously plucked out of a slush pile at Toronto-based publisher House of Anansi Press.”