Her death-defying dancers rehearse Ascension. (video)
Author: Matthew Westphal
Even Dadaism Had A Racial Subtext
Tzara composed what he termed “African poems,” and his girlfirend led a danse nègre at the Cabaret Voltaire. Grosz danced jigs while wearing a straw hat and blackface. Picabia painted two canvases he titled Negro Song. Clément Pansaers published a pamphlet titled Le Pan Pan au Cul du Nu Nègre. “Clearly, Norman Mailer did not invent the ‘white negro’.”
‘I’m The Most Influential Composer In The Last 50 Years,’ Says La Monte Young
“What’s more, when I die, people will say, ‘He was the most important composer since the beginning of music.’ It’s not just a work of genius – I did things no one ever dreamed of and I set up an approach to sound that parallels universal structure.”
There’s No American Sitcom Harder To Translate Into Other Languages Than This One
“Two decades after it went off the air, Seinfeld remains relevant to American audiences … but in much of Europe it is considered a cult hit, and commonly relegated to deep-late-night time slots. Its humor, it seems, is just too complicated, too cultural and word-based, to make for easy translation.”
Dumb Criminals, Precocious Animals, And The Entire State Of Florida: How Oddball Items Came To Dominate The News Business
“The rise of clickbait has made weirdness ubiquitous, but it has also selected for those memes that are just weird enough to glide smoothly through social media: things that are unexpected in the most expected kind of way.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 07.06.15
Valuable data, questionable field recommendations (a response to Irvine’s latest report on arts participation)
AJBlog: Jumper Published 2015-07-06
Li Po Refills His Cup: A Little Song for All Seasons
AJBlog: Straight|Up Published 2015-07-06
Weather in my head
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-07-06
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Welcome To The Orgy! How The Sex Movie Got Its Groove Back
“The fact that Fifty Shades of Grey is a phenomenon at all ‘just shows how mainstream it is, and it’s blasted the door wide open, saying sex is back in a big, big way. Now, sex has moved to the internet, and it’s on Girls, and that’s where people are getting it now. They’re not going to R-rated movies for titillation; you can get it on your phone. But that kind of subject matter is coming back in a big way.”
Amazon’s ‘Pay-Per-Page’ Plan Isn’t Just About Royalties – It Could Change The Way Writers Write
“The retail giant’s new way of calculating payments for Kindle book loans has worrying implications for how literature is read – and how it’s written.”
Haruki Murakami: The Moment I Became A Novelist
It happened at a baseball game …
An Episode Of Diaeresis: Why ‘The New Yorker’ Always Spells ‘Coöperate’ With Those Two Dots
“Here we learn how to pronounce it and how to use it, as well as how to avoid it, if desired.” One of the magazine’s copy editors, Mary Norris, explains the diaeresis in the latest episode of the podcast Comma Queen.