“Four art critics for The New York Times select artworks from New York museums and discuss the varied use of light.” (No, there’s no Thomas Kincade; yes, of course there’s Vermeer, but there’s also Mondrian, a Mesopotamian potter and an unknown colonial Peruvian.)
Month: January 2013
St. Louis Symphony Keeps David Robertson Through 2015-16
“The St. Louis Symphony has extended Music Director David Robertson’s contract through the 2015-16 season. Robertson joined the symphony in the 2005-2006 season as its 12th music director.”
Remembering Australia’s Forgotten Nobel Laureate At 100
“A hundred years after his birth, Patrick White (1912-1990) remains Australia’s only Nobel laureate for Literature (in 1973), but he’s as unknown to most readers as his name is nondescript. Though it rightly inducted him into the company of Faulkner, Hemingway, Beckett, and Bellow, White’s Nobel has done little to ensure the longevity of the work that earned it.”
M. S. Gopalakrishnan, 82, Master Of South Indian Violin
One of the greatest exponents of Carnatic music, Gopalakrishnan was equally revered as a soloist and for accompanying singers and fellow instrumentalists. Unusually, he was equally comfortable playing in the very different styles and forms of Hindustani (North Indian) classical music.
Fighting And Fuming Over French Cinema (And Its Subsidies)
An essay in Le Monde titled “French Actors Are Paid Too Much!” has occasioned a great debate among cinéastes about how many and what kind of films get made in France – and how government funding supports, or distorts, the country’s film industry.
Talks Resume, With A Bit More Civility, At Twin Cities’ Orchestras
“The rhetoric softened noticeably … [as] management and musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra agreed Wednesday to create a ‘fresh start to negotiations’. … Meanwhile, union and management negotiators at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra also met Wednesday for the first time in nearly two months.”
The Man Who ‘Takes A Low Crime And Turns It Into An Art Form’
Apollo Robbins “is a peculiar variety-arts hybrid, known in the trade as a theatrical pickpocket. Among his peers, he is widely considered the best in the world at what he does, which is taking things from people’s jackets, pants, purses, wrists, fingers, and necks, then returning them in amusing and mind-boggling ways.”
Achieving Mindfulness, Or How I Learned To Think Like Sherlock Holmes (A Little)
Maria Konnikova: “What I found … was that it would be hard work indeed to even begin to approximate the essence of the detective’s approach to the world: his ever-mindful mindset and his relentless mental energy. Holmes was a man eternally on, who relished that on-ness and floundered in its absence.”
Dancercise And Moldy Jokes From 1920s Chorus Girls
Antics of Arabella, a comic strip that ran in a New York City tabloid, “featured photographs of Broadway ‘chorus girls’ demonstrating stretches that showed off their bodies while they told mildly funny jokes.”
Computers Writing Music (But Is It Any Good?)
“We have taught a computer to write musical scores. Now we can produce modern classical music at the touch of a button.”