Jon De Lucia Octet + Ted Brown, Live At The Drawing Room (Gut String Records)
Author: Matthew Westphal
The Problem With Movies About Real-Life Terrorism Incidents
“You want to honour the victims, but you also want to provide a thrilling night at the movies. Maybe there is no way of squaring that circle.” Steve Rose considers the two new films about the 2011 mass murders by a white nationalist terrorist in Norway.
Philadelphia’s New Holocaust Memorial Includes Rails From Treblinka, Tree Sapling From Theresienstadt
The Nathan Rapaport sculpture Monument to Six Million Jewish Martyrs has been at the site, near the eastern end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, since 1964, but around it has been built a new $13 million plaza that includes those artifacts — plus testimony about them from survivors, available via a free app.
Highbrow Lit Has Been Possessed By Ghost Stories
“Literature — the top-shelf, award-winning stuff — is positively ectoplasmic these days, crawling with hauntings, haints and wraiths of every stripe and disposition. These ghosts can be nosy and lubricious, as in George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo … [or] confused by their fates, as in Martin Riker’s new novel, Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return … They terrify, instruct and enchant — sometimes all in the same book.” For instance, Lauren Groff’s Florida, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees, Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House, Hari Kunzru’s White Tears, and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. Parul Sehgal looks at the genre’s hold on writers and readers alike.
Leonardo’s Command Of Depth May Have Been Due To A Visual Impairment
Based on a study of Leonardo’s portraits (including Salvator Mundi), a research opthalmologist argues that the artist had a rare form on strabismus, “a binocular vision disorder characterized by the partial or complete inability to maintain eye alignment on a fixed object.”
The Oldest Printed Book In The World Is 600 Years Older Than The Gutenberg Bible
Erica Eisen tells the story of the Dunhuang Diamond Sūtra, a Chinese block-printed scroll dated 868 CE that was bricked up in a cave for eight centuries and ended up at the British Library (which the Chinese government is not happy about).
Trifonov, Wolfe, Costanzo, JACK Quartet Win Musical America’s Awards For 2019
The 27-year-old pianist Daniil Trifonov was named Artist of the Year, while Julia Wolfe took Composer of the Year honors. Carlos Miguel Prieto, music director of the Louisiana Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico, and the DC-based Orchestra of the Americas, is Conductor of the Year. Vocalist of the Year is countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, and the JACK Quartet is Ensemble of the Year.
Drug Dealers Busted For Smuggling Meth Disguised As Faux-Aztec Statuary
“The various chunks of meth were part of a 90-pound package of miscellaneous Mexican souvenirs. Each piece had been intricately carved or molded and then painted to resemble items like masks, wall hangings, statues, and ancient calendars. However, a simple breakage in the decorative replicas revealed the deception.”
Why Are We Only Now Seeing Orson Welles’s Last Film? Because The Process Of Making It Was Utterly Insane
Six years of shooting in dozens of locations, famous film auteurs playing versions of themselves, the cast and crew posing as film students to get a cheap rental rate for the MGM backlot (they smuggled Welles in a van), half a dozen or so different kinds of film stock — and that’s only the beginning of the story.
Museum Of The Bible Pulls Dead Sea Scroll Fragments Found To Be Fakes
“The five fragments now believed to have ‘characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin’ have been displayed at the Museum of the Bible since it opened in November. Labels on the exhibit since it opened have warned guests that some scholars were skeptical of the fragments’ authenticity.”