Author: Douglas McLennan

Bob Dylan’s Singular, Quirky Performance Of His Nobel Speech

“Dylan submitted his lecture, four thousand and eight words long, to the Swedes on June 5th. You can read it here, and listen, too; Dylan made a recording of his text, speaking for twenty-seven minutes over a smoky, meditative jazz-piano arrangement. Not for him, the sombre pomp of the podium. He sounds like a lounge singer lost in contemplative patter, just letting the thoughts flow. Pour yourself a whiskey, honey, pull up a chair, and stay awhile.”

Why Frank Lloyd Wright’s Los Angeles Houses Are Unique

He was trying to shape an indigenous regional architecture for Southern California. And he was attempting to put a definitive end to — to bury for good — a deeply troubled decade in his personal and professional lives. The regionalism of the houses, their response to the landscape, history and climate of Southern California, is at once their most powerful and most naive feature.

Rich People’s Demonstrations Of Status Are Changing – It’s No Longer Just About Conspicuous Consumption

“The democratisation of consumer goods has made them far less useful as a means of displaying status. In the face of rising social inequality, both the rich and the middle classes own fancy TVs and nice handbags. They both lease SUVs, take airplanes, and go on cruises. On the surface, the ostensible consumer objects favoured by these two groups no longer reside in two completely different universes. Given that everyone can now buy designer handbags and new cars, the rich have taken to using much more tacit signifiers of their social position.”

The Differences Between “Political” Art In Response To London And Manchester Attacks And Activist Political Art

It was different from the calls for “resistance” art we have been seeing in other Western countries because, this time, the existential threat being responded to was not part of out own culture; it was from outside. One could talk of a difference between “protest art” (aimed at Western-generated political problems) and “solidarity art” (designed to lift morale in the face of terrorism). And although the solidarity art is not a complaint directed at any particular state or policy, it nevertheless serves a uniting and inspiring function.

If The Globalization Of Writing Is So Great, Why Are People Attacking It?

“If the argument for globalism is so water-tight and damn-near irreproachable, why in the area of literature does one find so many supposedly progressive voices constantly bashing the very books that come out of the cauldron of heterogeneity? Why, in other words, are those from the intellectual class so quick to assume the mantle of the God of Genesis, impugning works that should be celebrated for either depicting or inhabiting the qualities of our modern world?”

Why Sony Is Producing “Clean” Versions Of Its Movies

“The shift to new home options for these ‘clean’ versions aligns with the public movement away from traditional broadcast venues towards on-demand or streaming services. Simply waiting for scrubbed content to arrive on television is not only inconvenient from the audience’s new get-it-now standpoint, but allows studios including Sony a new vector for improved profitability. While the streaming revolution has, for the most part, been a knife in the heart of network television, it could prove a long-run boom for the studios who, in some cases, manage better distribution deals through these new services.”

Researchers Are Teaching Machines How To Draw. Is This A Way To Teach Them To Think?

“For humans, a sketch is a depiction of a real thing. We can easily understand the relationship between the abstract four-line representation and the thing itself. The concept means something to us.  For SketchRNN, a sketch is a sequence of pen strokes, a shape being formed through time. The task for the machine is to take the essences of things depicted in our drawings and try to use them to understand the world as it is.”