“We look at cathedrals returning to being the cultural hubs that they once were. Each cathedral around the country is desperately looking for a cultural agenda for their own sustainability.” He added: “It’s okay; they’re not that religious these days,” noting that cathedrals now run “everything from art exhibitions to beer festivals”. – Arts Professional
Author: Douglas McLennan
Walter Gropius, The Great Survivor/Modernist
“It was a balancing act of extraordinary deftness that only someone with strong self-discipline and steely ambition could pull off. Yet history has not dealt kindly with Gropius, especially after Tom Wolfe’s ignorant anti-Modernist diatribe From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), which mercilessly lampooned him as the chief perpetrator of a hopelessly inhumane mode of architecture and an insufferable prig to boot.” – New York Review of Books
Invent A Better Book? Maybe We Don’t Need To
“In hindsight, we can see how rarely one technology supersedes another: the rise of the podcast makes clear that video didn’t doom audio any more than radio ended reading. Yet in 1913, a journalist interviewing Thomas Edison on the future of motion pictures recounted the inventor declaring confidently that “books … will soon be obsolete in the public schools.” – The Paris Review
The Simple Structure That All Human Languages Share
Sentences and phrases of human languages, all human languages, have an inaudible and invisible hierarchical structure. When we are children, we impose this structure on the sequences of sounds that we hear. Our minds can’t understand continuous streams of sound directly as meaningful language. Instead, we subconsciously chop them up into discrete bits—sounds and words—and organize these into larger units. This means that sentences have a hierarchical structure. – Nautilus
The Best Dance Of The 21st Century (So Far)
Be wary of lists such as these. The Guardian attempts to select the best dance this century. But with dance spread out all over the world, can a critic (or group of them) choose (let alone judge) best performances? Doubtful. And yet, there are some great candidates for a best-of list here. – The Guardian
A New Library In Queens Is Terrific. So Why Can’t New York Build More Like This?
“Compact, at 22,000 square feet and 82 feet high, the library is among the finest and most uplifting public buildings New York has produced so far this century. It also cost something north of $40 million and took forever to complete. So it raises the question: Why can’t New York build more things like this, faster and cheaper?” – The New York Times
Russia’s Culture Minister Called Comic Books Stupid. Sales Soared
Dmitry Yakovlev, head of one of Russia’s leading indie comic producers, the St Petersburg-based Bumkniga, was unfazed by the minister’s dig. “Medinsky’s comment was pure stupidity, therefore supporting the comic industry,” he told the Guardian. “Sales increased.” – The Guardian
The Man Who Would Be Beckett
Bill Irwin finds Beckett’s remarkable use of language something of a balm at a time when the use of words has grown so imprecise. “Our culture runs away from words,” he bemoaned. “It seems to me one of the things this language can do is help us reconnect with human intelligence, as distinct from artificial intelligence. A lot of Beckett’s language is a portrait of consciousness — of how the mind works.” – Los Angeles Times
Silent Discos Are A Scourge!
“Much like the bubonic plague of 1347, silent disco is a blood-curdling infection that spreads across the city, carried on the back of headphone-wearing fleas! Fleas! Its biggest problem is the performed transgression of the whole experience, for which you pay a princely sum of £15. I’m not mad at the individuals taking part, for they know not what they do. I’m incensed that we live in a society where stumbling through the streets of Edinburgh half-yowling the words to YMCA (because nobody knows all the words) is someone’s idea of a good time and a rebellion. Whatever happened to imagination?” – The Guardian
It’s Big: eSports Gets Its Own TV Network
“You have this $150 billion-a-year industry that has no TV network. We are a universal network — that means we will be distributed and consumed anywhere our audience is consuming gaming content.” – CBC