Yasuhisa Toyota’s Nagata Acoustics has just 20 employees globally, but it dominates acoustics work for halls in Japan and is expanding abroad. He’s designed the acoustics for orchestras in Los Angeles, Helsinki, Paris and Shanghai. Another of his projects, the Elbephilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, opened Jan. 11.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Judge Orders Vandals To Read Books
A judge sentenced the teenagers to read the books, as well as watching 14 films, visiting two museums and writing a research paper to encourage “a greater appreciation for gender, race, religion, and bigotry” (sic) after they were caught vandalising the Ashburn Colored School in Virginia.
Nope! In India, Apparently, You Can’t Make Fun Of Lawyers In A Bollywood Film, Says Court
“An Indian court has ordered filmmakers to cut four scenes from a forthcoming Bollywood movie after ruling that they show lawyers in a bad light, media reports said on Tuesday.”
“Professor” Irwin Corey, 102
Corey’s dizzying mix of mock-intellectual circumlocutions, earnest political tirades and slapstick one-liners made Corey the king of comedic confusion and earned him the nickname “professor.”
Anish Kapoor Awarded $1 Million Genesis Award
“The profound impact of Anish’s work continues a long history of Jewish contribution to the arts, while his social activism reaffirms the commitment of the Jewish people to humanitarian causes,” the Genesis Prize Foundation’s chairman and cofounder, Stan Polovets, said in a statement.
Met Museum Posts 375,000 Public Domain Images To The Web
“In a blog post on Wikimedia, Richard Knipel, the Met’s “Wikimedian-in-Residence,” stated the goal of the initiative was to “Wiki-fy the Met, and Met-ify the Wiki.” The museum is currently planning edit-a-thons and further efforts to update the data entries for each work. Among the institutions helping with the Open Access program are Pinterest, the popular picture-sharing social media platform, and Artstor, the online database for images of artworks used mainly by academics and researchers.”
Math As Performance Art
“The world is full of mundane, meek, unconscious things materially embodying fiendishly complex pieces of mathematics. How can we make sense of this? I’d like to propose that sea slugs and electrons, and many other modest natural systems, are engaged in what we might call the performance of mathematics. Rather than thinking about maths, they are doing it.”
In Just Four Years Hemingway Became A Master Writer. What A Four Years It Was!
“Having entered the four-year period aged twenty-seven as a promising if uncommercial newcomer backed by obscure experimental presses, he will exit it at thirty transformed into a literary lion and international celebrity.”
Race, Opera, And A Historical “Nixon In China”
“Opera remains far too white-dominated an art form. And operatic stereotypes and conventions are valid subjects for ongoing re-evaluations. Opera companies everywhere are wrestling with shifting expectations. We all have our personal and racial hot buttons and blind spots. But we should be wary of letting them distort our perceptions of historic works of art—and a 30-year-old opera about events 45 years ago is now a product of history.”
IMDb, The Go-To Movie Info Website, Is Shutting Down Its Discussion Boards
In a statement posted to its website, the company said that the decision was made “only after careful consideration and was based on data and traffic.” It added, “We have concluded that IMDb’s message boards are no longer providing a positive, useful experience.”