“There’s a great deal of psychological evidence showing that people find cell phone conversations particularly more annoying than general conversations or ambient noise … because our brains expend a lot of energy trying to guess what words will come next.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Martha Graham Dance Co. Makes Do After Loss Of Sets And Costumes
The flooding of the troupe’s storage space during Hurricane Sandy “gave us an opportunity actually to try a new version of one of Martha Graham’s classic dances, Errand into the Maze. And we decided to feature the choreography itself without the classic set and without the traditional costumes to give audiences a fresh look at it,” says artistic director Janet Eilber.
Baz Luhrmann Completes Great Gatsby Via Skype
“Having blown his budget and his schedule, Luhrmann was bunkered down in an editing suite in New York late last year while secret final reshoots wrapped up in Sydney. He used Skype to monitor the set.”
Alfredo Guevara, 87, Fidel Castro’s Film Czar
“At Fidel’s behest, Guevara founded the I.C.A.I.C., the Cuban Institute for the Arts and Cinematography, which sponsored Cuba’s state-funded, leftist ‘new’ cinema … Paradoxically, Guevara was also the preëminent homosexual in a Communist regime where … homosexuality was brutally suppressed.”
Indian Readers Snap Up Reworkings Of Hindu Myths
“With several mythological tales getting a modern makeover and imaginative retellings crowding bookshelves, Dadwal and millions of other urban, educated Indians who prefer to read in English have more choices than ever before.”
Creating A Musical From Scratch In 24 Hours
“Ben Folds, the indie-rock songwriter, spent most of Sunday watching people on the streets of New York and thinking about what might make them burst into song. ‘That was my only preparation,’ he said … ‘If you go in with melodies or words and things preconceived you really hang yourself in something like this’.”
Street Art Of Sid Vicious Violates Copyright, Says Judge
“The Los Angeles-based street artist Thierry Guetta, better known as Mr Brainwash, has lost a copyright case involving a 1977 photograph of the punk rock musician Sid Vicious shot by the British photographer Dennis Morris. Guetta had claimed that the seven works he created using Morris’s black and white photograph … were sufficiently altered to be protected by the fair use defence.”
Almodóvar Releases ‘My Gayest Film Ever’
I’m So Excited (Spanish title Los amantes pasajeros) is “a screwball comedy set in a transatlantic jet, full of mile-high blow jobs and dancing cabin stewards camping it up to the Pointer Sisters.” Says the filmmaker, “I like the idea of helping people to have fun because the atmosphere [in Spain] right now is so very bleak.”
Vita Sackville-West Erotic Poem Discovered
“[The] verse, written in French to her lover Violet Trefusis and translated by Harvey James, the scholar who found it, contrasts daytime strolls through floral meadows with ‘intoxicating night’ when ‘I search on your lip for a madder caress/ I tear secrets from your yielding flesh’.”
Pornography Gets Its Own Academic Journal
It had to happen sooner or later. “Porn Studies, to be published by Routledge starting in 2014, is described as ‘the first dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic and their cultural, economic, historical, institutional, legal and social contexts.”