Thoreau’s 200th birthday is July 12. With lectures, essays, and of course Walden, he helped inspire parks in cities, but also the National Park System. “The true largess of Thoreau, then, can perhaps best be discovered by experiencing one of the outdoor temples that his ‘in wildness’ declaration helped protect.”
Author: ArtsJournal2
Of *Course* There’s An ‘Accidental Wes Anderson’ Reddit Thread
The internet, and Reddit, can be terrible cesspools – and they can also be very, very wonderful places, where people who love Wes Anderson films and sets and filmography know how to replicate the eye of the director. “There are the eye-popping colors and the strong, well-defined lines. There are the eccentric architectural triumphs and eerie quiet. But most importantly, there are those shots ― the ones that zoom in and out with an almost borderline obsessiveness in their quest for near-perfect, everything-just-so symmetry.”
A New Use For Virtual Reality: Dance Lessons
Whoa. “Creative developers are proving that Apple’s AR tech can actually be useful, too. The latest: two salsa-dancing programmers are putting Apple’s ARKit to a clever new use with augmented reality dance lessons.”
Let The Floods In, Or, How Design Can Help Cities Deal With Climate Change
Basically, design the cities so that it’s OK for many areas to get wet. “The challenge is to create city spaces that ‘prepare for routine-but-inconsistent flooding. … We know it’s going to happen, but it’s unpredictable. Planners don’t like that idea. It freaks us out.'”
The Many Attempts It Took To Get A Totally Free Theatre Ed Program For Young Women Into Gear
Why was it so hard? Teachers are busy, the offer sounded too good to be true, students are overscheduled … and maybe uninterested. “We as artists want students to be exposed to art, but do students want to be exposed to art? I think sometimes, yes. As a high schooler at a school that offered no drama classes, I would have stabbed someone for an after-school improv club. But would I have showed up alone to meet a lady I didn’t know so she could make me pretend to be a chicken or something? Probably not.”
Margaret Atwood Addresses The ‘Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again’ Thing In An Interview With Junot Diaz
Also, Diaz gives Atwood the idea to get Drake to cameo in Season 2 of Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu. But on an unfunny note, she says, “The real question is, if the United States were going to have a totalitarianism, what kind of totalitarianism would it be? We’ve had all kinds in the world, including atheist ones. But if the U.S. were ever going to go down that path, what would be the device under which they would do it?”
The Latest Spider-Man Is Doing Well, And Perpetuating Hollywood’s Dude Director Problem
Excuse me, what the Wonder Woman? “The Marvel Cinematic Universe won’t have a woman in the director’s chair until 2019’s Captain Marvel. … For context, Captain Marvel is the MCU’s nineteenth film. However dire that ratio sounds, the MCU will actually be outperforming the rest of Big-Budget Hollywood.”
The Lowrider Pinata That Made Its Way Into LA’s Auto Museum
Artist Justin Favela “likes the idea of rendering powerful objects in cheap tissue paper. ‘The lowrider, it’s always perceived as this very masculine thing and I like to play with that,’ says Favela. ‘It is hyper masculine. But in this case, it’s also feminine, because of paper and craft.'”
The Quasi-Feminist French Science Fiction Comic That Affected Everything From The Fifth Element To Star Wars
Laureline, the badass heroine of a 50-year-old French bande dessinée, has her roots partly in feminist texts including Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. “She was, from the start, a radically impressive figure who set the bar high for women in science fiction. No mere beautiful figure, Laureline has a piercing intellect, a near-indomitable pride in herself, an endearing but acid wit, and formidable fighting skills. And yet she resists being an archetype of female perfection.”
The Live Music Scene In Hong Kong Could Be Superb – If The Rules Didn’t Get In The Way
The regulations are a problem, stifling creative growth, but so is expensive real estate. “Hong Kong’s indie bands are forever searching for places to perform — a further indignity for working-class musicians and fans in a financial hub where the night life caters largely to people on corporate salaries..”