“On the 50th anniversary of Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color, Yale University Press has released the work as an interactive teaching tool along the lines of what the Bauhaus master originally intended.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Kongar-ol Ondar, 51, Superstar Of Tuvan Throat-Singing
He traveled the globe introducing audiences to his people’s art of overtone singing (producing two or more notes at once), becoming an audience favorite on the world-music circuit. In Tuva, a republic within the Russian Federation, he was “like John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley and Michael Jordan kind of rolled into one.”
When Writers Change Languages
“The experience is nothing short of life-threatening. Not only do you have to start everything again from scratch, but you also have to undo what you have been doing for almost as long as you have been around. … Painful as it can be at a strictly human level, the experience can also be philosophically fascinating. Rarely do we get the chance to observe a more dramatic re-making of oneself.”
Building, Literally, The Architecture Of A Novel
Matteo Pericoli gets his graduate students to analyze the structure of a favorite work, then pairs them with architecture students to build 3-D models of those structures.
A Tale Of Two Marilyns
“We’ve got this picture of Marilyn, but what’s behind it? One of the most written-about figures in American history, Monroe has been scrutinized and glorified, pumped up with air and brought back down to earth. For generations, the American public has been fascinated by her story, a story whose contradictions are embodied in two articles published four decades apart in the pages of The Atlantic.”
Avatar To Get Three Sequels; America Shrugs
“Because while Avatar was arguably instrumental in pushing more filmmakers to use 3-D (for better or worse), it really does seem to have otherwise largely vanished from the cultural landscape. … So what happened?” David Haglund has some ideas.
Parsing The Body Language That Leads To A Fight
“Oddly enough, it seems no one in academe has really looked at the subtle non-verbal cues that indicate we’re going to exchange blows. Until now.”
The Oscars Of Water Ballet?
“Sink or Swim, a four-minute water ballet about love, marriage and pool fights, swept the awards Saturday at SynchroSwim 2013, a quasi-annual spectacle organized by the Washington Project for the Arts. About 400 people gathered around the Capitol Skyline Hotel pool, curious to see what this year’s coterie of competitive performance artists, dancers and swimmers would do.”
Why Tom Hanks Just Loves Old Typewriters
In an Op-Ed for the Sunday New York Times, the actor writes, “Computer keyboards make a mousy tappy tap tappy tap like ones you hear in a Starbucks – work may be getting done but it sounds cozy and small, like knitting needles creating a pair of socks. Everything you type on a typewriter sounds grand, the words forming in mini-explosions of SHOOK SHOOK SHOOK. A thank-you note resonates with the same heft as a literary masterpiece.”
Fear And Loathing Of Clowns: A Brief History
“Not a lot of people actually suffer from a debilitating phobia of clowns; a lot more people, however, just don’t like them” – including young children. And this has been true, to a greater or lesser extent, for centuries.