Brewster Kahle, who’s expanding his archive to about 10 million books (and films): “We must keep the past even as we’re inventing a new future,” he said. “If the Library of Alexandria had made a copy of every book and sent it to India or China, we’d have the other works of Aristotle, the other plays of Euripides. One copy in one institution is not good enough.”
Author: ArtsJournal2
How Does Fran Leibovitz Feel About Polar Fleece? (Just About How You’d Expect)
Leibovitz: “I actually hiked once, and it’s possible that it was the worst experience I ever had outdoors. And I was in Alaska–a very beautiful place. To me, it’s meaningless. I don’t see the point of it. It’s a hard–physically–thing. I found it hard. And when you get there, there’s nothing there, just more of what you passed.”
Where’s The LACMA Rock? Stuck In Traffic, And Taking Sunday Off
The prodigiously slow progress of the prodigiously huge LACMA boulder continues – and it’s slow enough that dozens of people walk behind it on the closed highways.
Quebec Cinema Is Booming. Great, But Why?
Why is Quebecois cinema suddenly so popular with the Oscars (Incendies, Monsieur Lazhar) and with filmgoers? “For way too long, Quebec cinema was stuck in a pure-laine universe that was virtually entirely white and Franco. Quebec cinema is opening up to the real Quebec and that’s partly why the world is opening up to Quebec cinema.”
How To Make Scouting Relevant Again: It’s The Technology, Stupid
Boy Scouts & Girl Scouts: The venerable organizations have lost thousands of members. But with badges for 3-D printing or biohacking, a virtual troop or an iPad app, they could adapt – and thrive.
Naked Tensions And Borgesian Libraries: A Q&A With Novelist (And Book Reviewer) Jonathan Lethem
Lethem: “You see the most amazing acts of curation and resurrection on the internet. It is a spectacular Borgesian library, and at the same time it represents a flattening of a tangible or a hierarchical life. I had to decide what record to own. Now I just own them all.”
Julie Taymor Sues Spider-Man Producers For Fraud
“Taymor’s lawyers claim in the document that producers ‘fraudulently induced’ her to continue working on the musical even though they were ‘secretly conspiring to oust Taymor and use and change her work without pay.'”
What We Talk About When We Talk About Classical Music (And How To Do It Better)
“Yes, classical musicians can be amazing, and their performances are the result of a kind of intense dedication (those hours of practice) that rightly inspire respect in those who don’t do it themselves. Yet all artists spend hours and hours making their art, and few other artists are greeted with the same kind of awe simply for doing what they do (‘You wrote a BOOK? All those WORDS? Wow!’).”
I Killed The Internet – And So Did You
The Internet is closing off, with apps, pages and content providers in individual silos. How do we bring back the open days of the Web?
Are U.S. Theatres Terrified Of Politics? One Playwright Says Yes
Karen Malpede: “The McCarthy era maintains a lethal, if invisible, grip on the American theater. The bugaboo may no longer be Communism, but there are plenty of ideas forbidden, still. To be a political playwright in the United States is to be censored–financially.”