“The ‘new’ Barnes that contains the ‘old’ Barnes shouldn’t work, but it does. It should be inauthentic, but it’s not. … The architects have succeeded in retaining its identity and integrity without resorting to a slavishly literal reproduction. This is a beautiful building that does not compromise its contemporary convictions or upstage the treasure inside. And it isn’t alchemy. It’s architecture.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
If We Met Advanced Aliens, Could We Distinguish Them From Gods?
“Sci-fi classics, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, explore precisely this idea, that highly advanced alien intelligences would be essentially indistinguishable from gods. This is not news, really, as it has already happened right here on Earth a few centuries ago.” (Think of Cortes and the Aztecs.)
Terry Gilliam Carrying On About Hollywood (And About Terry Gilliam)
“The first Harry Potter film. I was the perfect guy for that movie. They all knew it. J.K. Rowling wanted me to do it; David Heyman, the producer, wanted me to do it. But one guy from Warner’s overruled everyone and Chris Columbus got the gig. I was furious at the time but in hindsight, the level of studio interference on a project that size would have driven me insane.”
My Grandma And Martha Gellhorn
Amy Shearn’s family found, among her grandmother’s papers, a stack of elegant and quirky letters from the famous writer and war correspondent, who had been an old family friend in St. Louis. (The whole bit about having been Mrs. Ernest Hemingway barely figured.)
Trying Out MIT’s New High-Tech Mask Enhancement For Sleep No More
Tod Machover’s MIT Media Lab has designed a souped-up face mask which adds extra material (including interactivity) to Punchdrunk’s now-famous immersive-theatre adaptation of Macbeth. Bravely, they invited a New York Times reporter to give the new device a test run.
Bloomsbury Silliness: Rediscovering Virginia Woolf’s Play
“Yes, Woolf wrote a play. There is a good reason why you’ve probably never heard of it: it’s pretty terrible. First written in 1923, and then revised for a performance at Vanessa Bell’s art studio in 1935, Freshwater is a gentle satire of the bohemian world of her great-aunt” and centering on the the young actress Ellen Terry’s departture from her marriage to a middle-aged painter to “lead a life of corruption […] in Bloomsbury.”
Watching Merce Move (In Pre-Arthritis Days)
“Footage of Merce Cunningham’s choreography is everywhere on YouTube, but it’s much harder locating film of him dancing, and this 1964 snippet is a collector’s find. Capturing an extract from Septet (created in 1953), it counters all those memories of Merce’s late, Lear-like performances, when his 70-something body had become straitened and hobbled by arthritis.”
Is The Best-Selling Non-Anglophone Film In History Just Silly Racist Claptrap?
France’s The Intouchables has a worldwide gross of near $300 million (and it’s only just beginning its US release). “Viewers in numerous countries have eagerly devoured this feel-good fable about two men of different races and classes who forge an improbable friendship (dubbed by some wags ‘Driving Monsieur Daisy’). … At the same time, heated transatlantic debate has erupted over whether [the movie] traffics in offensive racial stereotypes.”
Russian Publishers, Claiming Inaccuracies, Scrap Translation Of Orlando Figes’s Stalin-Era History
“Figes had commissioned hundreds of interviews with the relatives of victims of the gulag labour camps to produce a 700-page chronicle” – titled The Whisperers – “of ‘private life in Stalin’s Russia’ … But the Moscow-based publishers, and a historian who conducted some of the interviews, claim some of the material was misrepresented” and that the book contains numerous errors of fact.
Biggest Festival In Interior BC Cancelled For Insufficient Interest
“The Merritt Mountain Music Festival attracted crowds of nearly 150,000 campers in past years and stars like Vince Gill and Crystal Gale. But organizers of this year’s event, scheduled for July 19-22, say in a statement they have cancelled the 2012 festival because of low ticket sales.”