Having come through what can only be described as a midlife crisis, she is getting ready to find solace not through any of the traditional remedies (sports car, younger paramour, dangerous hobby), but with a new city — New Orleans, which she now describes as “the great love of my life that I just didn’t know about.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Maria Popova: Why Storytelling Matters
“A great storyteller — whether a journalist or editor or filmmaker or curator — helps people figure out not only what matters in the world, but also why it matters. A great storyteller dances up the ladder of understanding, from information to knowledge to wisdom. Through symbol, metaphor, and association, the storyteller helps us interpret information, integrate it with our existing knowledge, and transmute that into wisdom.”
Hamburg’s New Elbphilharmonie Concert Hall Is A Sensation. Why?
Why this building? What about its design, its location and the implicit social messages embedded in its architecture have made it so successful? Carsten Brosda, a senator in Hamburg’s state government and head of its cultural authority, says location is a primary factor in its success. “I was never a fan of iconic buildings because so many of them are rather generic,” he says. But Elbphilharmonie is exceptional, located in the geographical heart of the city, on a site that demanded some exceptional public use. “There were architects saying this is on the verge of being unbuildable, but that is what makes it unique.”
See Something, Say Something?
“We knew that there was going to be a water feature but we didn’t know there would be a 30-foot long exposed electric circuit along the drip edge of this pool which had three- to 4,000 gallons of water.”
Amazon Versus Book Publishers, Round 87
“For all outward appearances, the relationship between Amazon and the publishing industry had settled into a wary peace, following a highly publicized dust-up in 2014 between Amazon and Hachette, wherein Amazon tried to bully Hachette in negotiations over e-book prices. But tensions had been quietly ratcheting up since then. While some of Amazon’s advances against the publishing industry have gained headlines, many of its most damaging moves have received little coverage outside publishing trade publications.”
The Downfall Of The Once Magical Pixar
The studio literally reinvented the genre with Toy Story, the first computer-generated 3-D-animated feature film. Each subsequent Pixar release offered new feats of technical wizardry, from engineering the delicate trajectories of millions of individual strands of fur in 2001’s Monsters, Inc. to capturing the wondrous interplay between light and water in 2003’s Finding Nemo. Even as others gradually caught up with Pixar’s visual artistry, the studio continued to tell stories of unparalleled depth and sophistication. Pixar’s signature achievement was to perfect a kind of crossover animated cinema that appealed equally to kids and adults.
Creative Privilege: Cultural Appropriation Is Just Fine
The argument goes that “there’s a vast sea of images, ideas, stories and experiences out there and imaginative voyagers should be encouraged to pluck from it whatever flotsam they please. Beyond the very limited applications of copyrights and trademarks, there are no rules to say they are wrong, just lots of contexts in which those assumptions start to look really dubious. Why? Because they may elbow out people who haven’t had enough time or space to make their own mark.”
Report: Here Are The Cities That Spend The Most On Culture Worldwide
It suggests that a high proportion of national culture budgets is spent on capital cities because they have large ‘sunk investments’ that create a revenue and capital legacy. By contrast, in cities in China, which have less ‘legacy’ cultural infrastructure in which to invest, “it appears that Chinese cities are placing a greater priority on investing in newer and more commercial cultural forms”.
Why Gustavo Dudamel Has Angered Venezuelans
“The idea that art and politics don’t mix, and that silence is therefore perfectly acceptable, is prevalent in Europe and North America, leading to more indulgence towards Dudamel. But this view is based on a profound misunderstanding of the conductor and the program behind him. El Sistema and politics have been mixed since the arrival of Hugo Chávez in power in 1999, and Dudamel’s career and program have been heartily supported by the Bolivarian Revolution. The idea that silence equates to political neutrality is therefore misguided, as many Venezuelans are well aware.”
A Return To Complexity? Signs That Today’s Audiences May Want More
“Young people’s brains aren’t experiencing a backward evolution. Their ability to articulate points of rhythm, melody and the flow of words in musical genres they have made or developed themselves prove that, as human beings, our urge for musical expression and facility lies deep. Young people are not afraid of things that need to be worked through. Complexity, curiosity and adventure is the new counter-culture.”