“Astronomers are exploring ancient tombs in Portugal that they believe may have been used by prehistoric humans to enhance specific views of the night skies. Researchers are focusing on the alignment of the stars with … dolmens that feature long narrow entrances that act as apertures, essentially zooming in on stars and planets that wouldn’t always be visible from the outside.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Philly’s New-Music Orchestra Has New Music Director
“After spending last season trying out candidates, Orchestra 2001 says it has hired a new artistic director: Jayce Ogren. He starts the job at the group’s concerts in late October.” He is only the second director Orchestra 2001 has ever had.
Opera San Antonio Chooses Its New Director
“Enrique Carreón-Robledo has been named the new general and artistic director for Opera San Antonio. He will step into his new role Aug. 1. He succeeds composer Tobias Picker, who left the company in January 2015.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 07.11.16
Do Artists Have A Vision For The Future?
Around the beginning of the 20th Century, several French artists were asked to design a series of cards that would imagine what life would be like 100 years in the future in the year 2000. … read more
AJBlog: diacritical/Douglas McLennan Published 2016-07-10
Today in mathiness
Suppose I suggested that we can think about how the plot of a work of fiction is progressing according to whether the emotional valence is rising or falling. … read more
AJBlog: For What It’s Worth Published 2016-07-11
I’m Back — With A Masterpiece
Caspicara. Never heard of him? He was an indigenous artist of whom Spanish King Charles II once said, “I am not concerned that Italy has Michelangelo; in my colonies of America I have the master Caspicara.” … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2016-07-11
A visit to the memory hole
In December of 1969, Esquire invited twenty-five venerable celebrities to offer end-of-the-decade advice, most of it predictably platitudinous, to the magazine’s younger readers. … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-07-11
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South Africa’s Public Broadcaster Lurches From Crisis To Crisis
Battles over the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) go back decades before the end of apartheid, but the network’s biggest problems these days seem to sten from its COO, Hlaudi Motsoeneng. He has been accused of censorship and interference in media content, sudden and capricious decrees, lying about his educational credentials, and a bullying management style that South Africa’s Public Protector called “pathological.”
Samuel Beckett, Master Of The Short Story
Chris Power: “It is an irony of Beckett’s posthumous reputation that his plays are now far better known than his prose, although he considered the latter his primary focus. … I suspect the real problem with Beckett’s short fiction is its difficulty, and that his greatest achievements in the form do not comply with what some gatekeepers suppose to be the genre’s defining traits.”
For Eid Ul-Fitr, Check Out These Panoramic Photos Of Gorgeous Persian Mosques
Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji, a physics student turned photographer, is becoming famous for his images of the intricate, geometric, colorful religious architecture of his native Iran. Here are rotating 360-degree views of five spectacular sites.
There’s A Reason So Many Artists Have Synesthesia
It’s actually the other way around: “If music makes you see colors and shapes, you might be more likely to pick up a guitar or sit at a piano in the first place … Ssynesthetes see the similar in the dissimilar (music and color; pain and color; syllables and shapes), and people who excel at making metaphors are generally more creative.
Eight Nearly Forgotten Female Composers Who Were Hits In Their Own Day
Not many of us remember Barbara Strozzi and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre; more of us know of Clara Schumann and Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn). Here’s an opportunity to get to know all four of them, as well as four more, a bit better.
Why Mike Daisey Implicates Democrats In His New Monologue About Trump
“People in the theater are the left. I’m always interested in skewering, examining and implicating the people in the room because they are the ones that showed up for the performance. Once you implicate them, then they actually start thinking about what their position is. I’m doing the monologue and if I’m telling you, ‘You agree with me, don’t you?’ and you say ‘I do,’ and I say ‘I do too, I feel so good about that,’ that’s not useful.”