“In seven poetry collections, the most recent, Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, published this year, Mr. Hoagland found insights and imagery in the everyday: a pool in an Austin, Tex., park; a spaghetti strap on a woman’s dress that won’t stay put; an old man dying awash in paranoia from too much Fox News.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Unsold on ‘The Price of Everything’: HBO’s Art-Market Epic
I recently sat disconsolately through a screener of director Nathaniel Kahn’s new artworld documentary, The Price of Everything. Its dyspeptic take on the art world turned my stomach
Rachael Worby and MUSE/IQUE
Over the years I’ve attended several musical events put on by Rachael Worby, a human dynamo who has operated several series in and around Pasadena. Worby — who was once, I think, the First Lady of West Virginia — seems interested in something both populist and unorthodox.
Recent Listening In Brief: Annie Chen, Woody Shaw And Dexter Gordon
Annie Chen Octet, Secret Treetop (Shanghai Audio&Video Ltd)
Woody Shaw, Tokyo 1981 (Elemental Music)
Dexter Gordon Quartet, Tokyo 1975 (Elemental Music)
Warhol’s 102-Canvas Painting Is Restored And Back On View
“Installing Shadows (1978-79) according to Andy Warhol’s precise instructions has always been tricky. Not only does this single, monumental work consist of multiple silk-screened and painted canvases (102, to be exact), but they must also hang in the round, edge to edge.”
The Evolution Of Police Training Simulators (Annals Of Unusual Media)
Ernie Smith offers a brief history of these law-enforcement teaching tools – “where they came from, how they inspired technology’s evolution, and their impact on fighting crime.”
The Incredible Drama Around ‘Doctor Zhivago’ And The Nobel Prize (A Dive Into The New York Times Archives)
“Sixty years ago, the Swedish Academy awarded the Russian author Boris Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature, but less than a week later, under pressure from the Soviet government, Pasternak rejected the award. The story, which had more twists and turns than a Cold War-era spy novel, played out in The New York Times with one front-page story after another.”
The Vatican’s New Game App Is Like Pokémon Go, But With Saints
Follow JC Go “is based on the hugely popular Pokémon-catching game. But instead of collecting as many Pokémon as possible, players must try and find saints, biblical characters, and other religious figures to add to their Evangelization Team, known as an eTeam, and complete in-game challenges. Similar to Pokémon Go, Follow JC Go uses GPS to detect a user’s location in the city.”
How Fantasy Novelists Create Maps Of The Worlds They Dream Up
Anyone who’s flipped back and forth between the texts and the maps in books by J.R.R. Tolkien or Robert Louis Stevenson knows how much help they can be to the reader. But authors themselves find their maps to be a tremendous help, too.
Composer Ennio Morricone Wants Us To Know He’s Really A Modernist (Despite All Those Film Scores)
“[Playing in the avant-garde improvisation group] Nuova Consonanza really reunited me with the love of my life — composing absolute music, music that is not related to a film, or to a pop song. One of our rules was to avoid anything that was melodic, anything that was usual. We had to produce very strange sounds, very complicated sounds, because we wanted to get as far away as possible from the so-called traditions of classical music. The experience with them really helped me to bear the burden of working in the commercial sector.”