“What was once a series content to celebrate simple boy-racer pleasures, the seventh Fast & Furious fell prey to a recent tentpole-film affliction: ridiculously over-complicated plotting.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
UK Denies Ai Weiwei Business Visa, Citing His ‘Criminal’ Past
“The dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has accused British authorities of turning their backs on human rights defenders after UK immigration officials rejected his application for a six-month business visa, claiming he had not declared a criminal conviction in his home country.”
Happy Days: Northern Ireland Town Loves Its Beckett Festival
“The barber offers Beckett haircuts; a local coffee shop sells Krapp (banana and nutella) and Endgame (I didn’t investigate) sandwiches named after his plays. Events take place in theaters, churches, halls, at the Portora School, on the small islands that surround the town and in other improbable places, often kept a secret until a bus deposits audiences at the spot. All of this creates a festive and buoyant atmosphere that works strangely well with Beckett’s famously dark, difficult and often mordantly humorous oeuvre.”
Inside The Floating 3-D Head Of Marlon Brando
“One unusual sequence in the documentary Listen to Me Marlon shows a seemingly low-tech digital version of the actor Marlon Brando quoting Macbeth. His head floats in black space and the image looks three-dimensional yet still raw. These visuals were constructed by the filmmakers from a series of scans of Brando’s head that were made around 20 years ago.” (includes video)
Bringing Ballet To Farms In (Where Else?) Vermont
“[Charles] Pregger, a ballet teacher, said Farm to Ballet was born after he led outdoor classes at Oakledge Park in Burlington. He saw that alfresco ballet was possible and joked that he’d like to do something like a flash-mob-styled performance halfway up Mount Philo. That lighthearted thought became a more meaningful and concrete plan to bring dance to Vermont farms.”
New Musical Loses Half Its Cast Amid Delays And Dissension
Five actors and four dancers will be leaving the 19-person cast of Dusty, a new show about the singer Dusty Springfield, by the end of August. The producers of the show, which began performances in an Off-West End theatre in late May, keep postponing the press night.
Is The Next Bolaño A Middle-Class Brazilian Housewife Who Died Almost 40 Years Ago?
“No one converts the uninitiated into devout believers as suddenly and as vertiginously as Clarice Lispector, the Latin American visionary, Ukrainian-Jewish mystic, and middle-class housewife and mother so revered by her Brazilian fans … She writes like a medieval saint who time-traveled to a high-rise apartment building in Rio and took up chain-smoking and visiting fortune-tellers.”
Ernest Hemingway, Godfather Of Long-Form Journalism
“Unlike Joyce’s innovations, Hemingway’s experimental fusion of fiction and nonfiction [in Green Hills of Africa] remained largely at the level of theory – but it has proven to be even more enduringly influential. Hemingway’s stream has become hard to recognize and to distinguish, because it has become the mainstream.”
Archaeology Frauds – They’re A Lot Of Trouble, So Why Would Scientists, Even Crooked Ones, Go To The Bother Of Perpetrating Them?
“There is a reason that we keep buying into hoaxes such as the ‘Shroud of Turin’ or the ‘Wife of Jesus’ fragment.” (Note: This article begins with an actual three-archaeologists-walk-into-a-bar joke – it’s a recently excavated prehistoric bar, of course.)
Republics Of Letters: How Medieval Scribes Fashioned Modern Writing
A millennium after the Greeks created European civilization’s first written culture, the scholar Alcuin and his monks at Charlemagne’s court fused Roman and Celtic scripts to create the alphabet we use today – and established standards and rules such as leaving a space between words and beginning sentences with a capital letter.