“Six years after independence the country is seeing what [one academic observer] calls ‘a new wave’ of Montenegrin writers. Only a handful have really come to the fore internationally. But as the country is so small, he says, this is the ‘equivalent of 30 or 50 in the UK. It is very significant. There is something going on.'”
Month: May 2012
Kander Has A New Partner, Eight Years After Ebb’s Death
Kander and Ebb were the legendary team who created Cabaret, Chicago and well over a dozen other musicals over five decades. Fred Ebb died in 2004, but composer John Kander, now 85, has a new lyricist partner: Greg Pierce, 34, “more earnest and less deadpan than Ebb, but just as determined and, lately, just as busy.”
The Market Cost Of Being A Female Artist
“[The] proceeds on all the works by women artists in [this month’s enormous] Christie’s sale tallied up to a mere $17m – less than 5% of the total and not even half the price achieved that night by a single picture of two naked women by Yves Klein. Indeed, depictions of women often command the highest prices, whereas works by them do not.” Things are slowly getting better, however.
Asking The Right Questions Makes All The Difference – So How Do We Find The Right Questions?
Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana of the Right Question Institute “are among a handful of thinkers making a career of taking a close look at how questions work, what our brains are doing when they put a question together, and how questions could drive learning, child development, innovation, business strategy, and creativity.”
Hollywood Finds, To Its Surprise, That Films About Older People Put Older People’s Butts In Seats
“Anytime a film costs $10 million to make and ticket sales approach $100 million, Hollywood pays attention. But jaws really drop when a movie starring actors in their 70s and aimed at people over 50 pulls off that trick. Wait. Stop. Older people will go to the movies if we give them something to watch besides superheroes and special effects?”
‘So How Does It Feel To Have One’s Core Beliefs Turned Upside Down?’ – Ada Louise Huxtable On The New Barnes
“The ‘new’ Barnes that contains the ‘old’ Barnes shouldn’t work, but it does. It should be inauthentic, but it’s not. … The architects have succeeded in retaining its identity and integrity without resorting to a slavishly literal reproduction. This is a beautiful building that does not compromise its contemporary convictions or upstage the treasure inside. And it isn’t alchemy. It’s architecture.”
If We Met Advanced Aliens, Could We Distinguish Them From Gods?
“Sci-fi classics, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, explore precisely this idea, that highly advanced alien intelligences would be essentially indistinguishable from gods. This is not news, really, as it has already happened right here on Earth a few centuries ago.” (Think of Cortes and the Aztecs.)
Terry Gilliam Carrying On About Hollywood (And About Terry Gilliam)
“The first Harry Potter film. I was the perfect guy for that movie. They all knew it. J.K. Rowling wanted me to do it; David Heyman, the producer, wanted me to do it. But one guy from Warner’s overruled everyone and Chris Columbus got the gig. I was furious at the time but in hindsight, the level of studio interference on a project that size would have driven me insane.”
My Grandma And Martha Gellhorn
Amy Shearn’s family found, among her grandmother’s papers, a stack of elegant and quirky letters from the famous writer and war correspondent, who had been an old family friend in St. Louis. (The whole bit about having been Mrs. Ernest Hemingway barely figured.)
Trying Out MIT’s New High-Tech Mask Enhancement For Sleep No More
Tod Machover’s MIT Media Lab has designed a souped-up face mask which adds extra material (including interactivity) to Punchdrunk’s now-famous immersive-theatre adaptation of Macbeth. Bravely, they invited a New York Times reporter to give the new device a test run.