“Miranda July is the kind of artist who switches media about as frequently as most of us replace toothbrushes, bouncing from performance art to visual art, to movies to fiction. Now she’s taking on the craft of fortune-telling” and is offering her services to public radio listeners.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Jell-O As Artistic Medium
“Long a cubed dessert of hospital cafeterias, flavored gelatin is turning up in the work of avant-garde chefs and established design studios across the country. Artists are using the wobbly medium to create sculptures of everything from colorful cities to President Barack Obama.”
Roland Petit: A Career In Video Clips
Revisiting the late choreographer’s works, from Le jeune homme et la mort, Carmen and The Little Mermaid to his 1972 Pink Floyd ballet.
George, Earl Of Harewood, 88, Pathbreaking Opera Head (And Cousin To The Queen)
He co-founded both Opera magazine and Opera North and chaired the British Board of Film Classification, but Harewood made his greatest mark as managing director of English National Opera during the “powerhouse” years, when he hired such directors as Nicholas Freeman, Nick Hytner, Jonathan Miller and Harry Kupfer to stage productions.
Pattern Recognition: Why Some Viewers Can’t Connect With ‘Difficult’ Art Movies
“Moviegoers fed a strict Hollywood diet may find themselves squirming through, say, a film by the Hungarian director Bela Tarr less because of the subtitles than because of the long takes during which little is explained. The same may hold true for those who watch The Tree of Life and want Terrence Malick to connect the dots overtly among his characters, the dinosaurs and the trippy space images.”
New York City Opera’s Plans Would Gut Orchestra And Chorus, Says Union
“A day before New York City Opera was to announce its first post-Lincoln Center season, the company’s unions charged on Monday that the company had made proposals for a new contract that would gut the chorus and the orchestra, and turn the ‘people’s opera’ into a freelance outfit.”
The Butcher, The Bible And The Boleyn: Genesis Of A Play
“As his … Anne Boleyn, a drama of Henry VIII’s reign, returns to [Shakespeare’s] Globe, Howard Brenton recalls how it all started with his father’s argument with a butcher.”
Anna Deavere Smith On The Future Of The Medical Profession
“What is clear to me is that science is essential to medicine. But just because you’re a great scientist doesn’t make you a healer. Yes, you might be able to fix something, but it doesn’t mean you can heal a person. I think more health professions may evolve that have more to do with healing as doctors have more and more obligations to keep up with science.”
Why Some Of Us Choke Under Pressure (It’s All About RAM)
“Working memory is our mental scratch pad, the cognitive horsepower that allows us to focus on things that are relevant to solving a problem or task, and to ignore less relevant things. In stressful situations, the ability of working memory to direct attention to what’s relevant is compromised.”
Brain Fag Syndrome, Running Amok, And Old Hag Syndrome: Culture-Specific Mental Disorders
“The American Psychiatric Association has conceded that certain mysterious mental afflictions are so common, in some places, that they do in fact warrant inclusion as ‘culture-bound syndromes’ in the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”