The benefits of price discrimination
AJBlog: For What It’s Worth Published 2015-01-20
Excited audience
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2015-01-20
The Will of Eva Perón, Painted in Tango
AJBlog: Fresh Pencil Published 2015-01-20
The Prototype Festival’s Scarlet Ibis
(and the day I almost ate glue)
AJBlog: Condemned to Music Published 2015-01-19
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Author: Matthew Westphal
Russia’s New Film Rules Could Outlaw Its Oscar Nominee
“Russia has introduced new rules regarding the issuing of exhibition licenses for films, decreeing that films ‘defiling the national culture, posing a threat to national unity and undermining the foundations of the constitutional order’ will not be allowed to be screened in cinemas.” As it happens, more than a few people in Russia (including the culture minister) think that description could apply to Leviathan, which has already won a Golden Globe
Were These Two Gay Erotic Novels Written By Oscar Wilde?
“Teleny, anonymously published in 1893, describes the erotic relationship between two men – Camille Des Grieux, who has ‘always struggled against the inclinations of my nature’, and Rene Teleny. Its prequel Des Grieux was published in 1899. The authorship of Teleny was first attributed to Wilde decades later by the French bookseller Charles Hirsch, who had opened a London shop in 1889, and who counted Wilde among his customers.”
We Thought We’d Never Hear Górecki’s Fourth Symphony. Now We Can – And It’s A Knockout
Everyone had thought that the Polish composer – whose Third Symphony actually hit the pop charts in 1992, 15 years after it was written – hadn’t completed the Fourth when he died in 2010. Turns out he did – and Mark Swed says it’s “a major symphony and possibly a great one.”
If Artworks Could Watch Us Watching Them
“As museumgoers, we’re used to looking at art, but a new project from filmmaker and artist Masashi Kawamura inverses the traditional relationship of viewer to artwork. For his blog What They See, Kawamura has taken photographs from the perspectives of famous artworks, inviting us into their visual fields. We see what they would see – if they could see.”
The People Who Say Michel Houellebecq’s New Novel Is Islamophobic Are Wrong: It’s *Francophobic*
Adam Gopnik: “Houellebecq is, simply, a satirist. He likes to take what’s happening now and imagine what would happen if it kept on happening. … The principal target of the satire [in Submission] is not French Islam – which is really a bystander that gets, at most, winged – but the spinelessness of the French intellectual class”
French Mayor Bans Oscar-Nominated Anti-Jihadist Muslim Film
“While Charlie Hebdo returned to Parisian newsstands with a defiant image of a contrite Mohammad emblazoned on its cover, Timbuktu, a much-praised, Oscar-nominated movie by the internationally known Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako, was unceremoniously yanked out of a theater in the Paris suburb Villiers-sur-Marne.”
It’s Frightening How Easy It Is To Make People Falsely Remember Committing A Crime
“By the end of the third interview, after a bunch of carefully crafted nudging to do their best to remember, a full 70 percent of the students [in the study] said, ‘Yep, I committed that crime when I was younger,’ and they ‘volunteered … detailed false account[s]’ of those crimes.”
Kierkegaard Gets Right To The Heart Of Boredom
In a section of his 1843 masterwork Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, … the Danish philosopher defines boredom as a sense of emptiness and examines it not as an absence of stimulation but as an absence of meaning – an idea that also explains why it’s possible, today more than ever, to be overstimulated but existentially bored.”
How To Care For Your Feet When You Torture Them By Dancing En Pointe
Advice from a ballet master at Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo.