Icelandic singer Bjork releases an album, sort of – as 10 apps for iPad, one per song, including interactive games, information and all kinds of other goodies. Is this the way music will go?
Author: ArtsJournal2
Men Can Too Read (And Write) About Houses, Family And Domesticity
“I wanted to write about love and marriage, houses and children, school runs and shopping and ageing parents. In all these everyday concerns I find the stuff of drama: this is the actual life so many of us are living,” says writer William Nicholson. “The first publisher to read it said to me, ‘It’s wonderful. I’d publish it if you were a woman.'”
Winning Awards For Playing Bad Guys: The Secret Is Not To See Them As Villains
“These men who are monstrous, so to speak, are enormously, enormously rewarding to play — much more so than a good man,” Frank Langella says. Not that there aren’t rewards to playing heroes. “But there’s so much more that you can draw on when you play a man who’s complicated, difficult and downright mean.”
Pity The (Kindle) Fools Who Can’t Show Off Books They Haven’t Read
Sure, you might have 2000 books on your Kindle, but who would ever know? After all, the point of bookshelves is to make your erudition clear.
North And South: London, Divided And United
“The south side worked, stored, processed, brewed. The north was another sort of bank, a money magnet. A collided necklace of palaces and privilege.”
Wild English Gardens: A Meme Begun By The French
English landscapes didn’t just happen. Is a French painter to credit, or blame? “These new landscapes were contrived to look natural: clumps of trees wrapped around lakes, clearing to reveal views to the far horizon, just like in Lorrain’s Judgment of Paris. As in the paintings, classical ruins would be slotted into this apparently wild landscape.”
Should We Preserve Merce Cunningham’s Choreography – Or Leave It To Its Time?
“Cunningham’s art, though highly choreographed, was linked in part to the art scene in New York which produced a series of ‘happenings’ – works that questioned the fundamental principles of dance by putting everyday actions on stage, or breaching conventions in other ways. Their revolutionary nature was part of their importance.”
Stolen Picassos Recovered in Serbia
A few years after they were stolen from Switzerland, two Picasso paintings worth millions of dollars have been found, and may be coming home soon.
Art For Art’s Sake, Or At Least Writing For Writing’s Sake
Novelist Richard Ford doesn’t understand why so many writers are all about “show me the money.” His first advance “was real money, okay. But it wasn’t ‘serious money.’ That, you got from a job. And writing wasn’t really a job. It was more of a lark.”
Those Mysterious Mayan Crystal Skulls? Probably Created In Germany
Museums all over the world collected “Mayan” crystal skulls in the 19th century. Oops. “Studies a few years ago with a scanning microscope showed, in fact, that the skulls exhibit traces of a processing method which lapidaries have used only for the last 150 years.”