Author: Douglas McLennan

How George Lucas Helped Reinvent Movie-Making By Challenging Hollywood

“Lucas’s titanic achievement is even more stunning when you consider his modest roots: he is from, ironically, Modesto, a small city in northern California where his dad owned a stationery store that he expected his son to take over. The taciturn young Lucas had other ideas, heading to film school at the University of Southern California (USC) where he fell in with a new generation of cineastes — among them, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola — who would be his co-conspirators in the takedown of the old Hollywood order.”

The Perilous Art Of Restoring Leonardo’s Art

In 2011, the Louvre’s director of conservation, Ségolène Bergeon Langle, resigned in the midst of a scandal that followed the restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne” (c. 1503). Begun in 2009, the restoration was supposed to be a celebratory event to kick off a series of restorations of Leonardo paintings in the Louvre’s collection (of 15 known to exist, the museum owns six). However, Langle, along with other experts, felt the conservators had gone too far in removing the various layers of yellowed varnish, eliminating or modifying original aspects of the painting.

Paul Dresher Remembers Pauline Oliveros

“While she was fully grounded in the practicalities of making music, living and thriving in the physical world, she was always able to connect directly to that place in our less-than-conscious experience of the world—a place where we experience the moment more deeply than we assume possible and a place that can reveal mystery and magic.”

Artists Should Be Entrepreneurs? Why?

“In the wake of this deprofessionalization, we find ourselves without professional careers, and so observe with common sense that we must go into business for ourselves, we must be entrepreneurs. Common sense, of course, as an expression of dominant cultural ideas, is the most ideological of the senses. We’ve become hybrids, hyphenates—just like actor-managers were. While we can think of this positively, that yes, we have diverse interests and opportunities as artists, we should remember the economic conditions that force us to be hybrids: single professional career tracks that would pay for our bills and our retirements are closed off.”

Why Did The West Become Such A Dominant Global Cultural Power?

Can one identify the intellectual tools that made progress possible? I think so. The first is a belief in “discovery”, in the very possibility of intellectual progress. There was no such belief, there were not even words meaning “discovery” and “progress”, before the discovery of America which shattered the long-established conviction that there was no important new knowledge to be had. Moreover the discovery of the New World was the achievement of semi-educated sailors — it brought about a new cooperation between intellectuals and practical men, a cooperation particularly fostered by the mathematicians who taught the skills of navigation and cartography and who had long believed in the importance of useful knowledge.