“His films resembled literary essays or epistles more than traditional documentaries, finding room for quirky personal observations, wit and seeming irrelevances. … His one brush with fiction was a 29-minute sci-fi short called La Jetée (1964) … [which] came to be regarded as Marker’s masterpiece, more for its form than its content.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Latest Dance Reality TV Series Mixes Big Brother Into The Footwork
All the Right Moves “follows four friends in Los Angeles as they try to launch a new contemporary dance company with the regrettable name Shaping Sound. The four are not quite famous, but they’re known to avid watchers of dance shows.” Naturally, the series has them sharing a house – and having arguments in the hot tub.
What’s The Value Of Theatre? This Show Lets Ticket-Buyers Decide
“How much would you pay for 10 minutes of theatre? £2? £3? Maybe even £5 if the actors ask really nicely? Might you decide to pay nothing at all? These are some of the questions posed by Bush Bazaar, an intriguing interactive show, conceived and produced by the theatre company Theatre Delicatessen.”
The ‘Hava Nagila’ Backlash
Yes, for years it was the Jewish-American party tune, heard at numberless weddings and bar mitzvahs. But those years were the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, and now the song is profoundly uncool. Says one mother-of-the-groom, “‘Hava Nagila’ at a wedding is like pouring sour milk on cereal.” An ethnomusicologist calls it “a really crummy little tune” that became “the equivalent of a knish.”
Jonah Lehrer, Caught Fabricating Quotes From Bob Dylan, Resigns From New Yorker
An investigation in Tablet magazine has found that, in his recent bestseller Imagine: How Creativity Works, Lehrer invented quotes he attributed to Dylan. Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is recalling the book, and Lehrer has given up his staff writer position at The New Yorker, a post he took just last month.
The Article That Busted Jonah Lehrer
Michael Moynihan: “A month ago, when Lehrer’s self-plagiarism scandal emerged, some supporters argued that it was simply the misstep of a young journalist. But making up sources, deceiving a fellow journalist, and offering accounts of films you have never seen and emails never exchanged, is, to crib Bob Dylan, on a whole other level.”
NBC Dropped Akram Khan’s Big Dance Number In Olympics Opening Ceremony
“[The] time-delayed broadcast on Friday was missing a crucial segment – a dance tribute created by British choreographer Akram Khan. NBC edited out Khan’s sequence and replaced it with a segment featuring Ryan Seacrest interviewing swimmer Michael Phelps.”
An Underground University In Iran – For Baha’is
The Baha’i faith “has been under attack in Iran almost since its founding there in the mid-1800s … [and believers today] are not allowed to hold government positions, face property seizures and are routinely discriminated against and harassed,” including in university admissions. So beleaguered Baha’is have banded together to create a clandestine university of their own.
Who Stole The Missing Pages Of The World’s Oldest Hebrew Bible?
The Aleppo Codex, a thousand-year-old manuscript that is considered the most authoritative text of the Hebrew scriptures, had an odd, murky, clandestine journey from its longtime Syrian home to the Israel Museum. But along the way (and probably after it arrived in Israel), about 200 pages – 40% of the total – went missing.
Stradivarius Violin Turned In At Swiss Lost-And-Found Office
“A Stradivarius violin – possibly worth several million euros – was handed in at a Swiss lost-property office after a hapless musician left it on a train … The owner had lent the precious instrument to a musician friend who took it on a train on Friday but forgot it when he got off at Bern … Police did not disclose the names of anyone involved, nor the value of the instrument.”