“That Mr. Thielemans, who performed with greats like Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman and Charlie Parker, played jazz on the harmonica was unusual enough. Even more unusual was how he first gained widespread international attention: by playing guitar and whistling in unison.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Is Sleep Music A Real Thing?
“I give these inventors credit. They are launching their product at a moment when the market for sleep music is starting to stir. In recent months, I’ve encountered a surprising number of creative projects targeted at an unconscious audience. But this raises many questions: Is sleep music a real genre?”
Are “Middle Class Rules” Holding Back The Arts?
“Forgive my generalisations and my bluntness, but there’s sometimes a deadness that comes when middle-class people run stuff. They get the content right, the ideas, the themes, the politics. But they haven’t a clue about how to embrace things.”
This Week In Audience: Understanding Troll Culture
This Week: A look at online troll culture – were these awful people always among us?… Here’s who goes to choral concerts… A look inside the brain as it watches movies… Lin Manuel Miranda’s crusade against ticket bots.
This Week In Culture – Some ArtsJournal Highlights
This Week: An artist collective skewers Trump… How Florence’s Uffizi is dramatically addressing its problems… Our fetishizing of “authenticity” doesn’t ring true… So what if Google is changing the way you think… An inspiring comeback after medical calamity by one of America’s best musicians.
What’s It Like To Be A Dancer?
“Every dancer knows, soon enough, that standing still is remarkably more tiring, and painful, than moving. The blood pools in your feet and lower legs, which swell and throb. And when you are in the corps de ballet and learning new choreography, you spend much more time standing in the back of a studio than you do dancing. The cursed burden of being an understudy.”
The Internet Is Changing The Ways We Think (But Then, So Did Writing)
For “writing” read “Google” and you have much of the burden of current worries about how use of the internet may be degrading our minds. Writing itself is just as much an external prosthetic technology (“characters which are no part of themselves,” as the Egyptian king complains) as the internet is. Writing is also a tool of extended cognition. The difference is that we have had thousands of years to get used to it. The truth about the question of whether our reliance on modern electronic prostheses is better or worse for us is that it’s simply too early to tell.
Organic Cultural Spaces Versus The Top-Down Kind
“We have many spaces that are organized from the top down, that are well-renovated and secure, and that people don’t use. We call those places the hospitals of culture. What interests us is a new model of collective creativity, not just working away in our own corners but making something together.”
Scientists: Michelangelo’s “David” Is Suffering From A Balance Problem
The seed of the problem is a tiny imperfection in the statue’s design. The center of gravity in the base doesn’t align with the center of gravity in the figure itself; when the base is level, in other words, the David’s body is slightly off-balance. There is, as the article nicely puts it, “an eccentricity of the loads.”
The Artist Behind The Naked Trump Statues (And How He Did It)
“Monroe was chosen to create the likeness of the “monstrous” presidential candidate because of his experience designing monsters for horror movies and haunted houses, including serving as the director for Eli Roth’s now defunct “Goretorium” in Las Vegas.”