“How does one grow old gracefully in hip-hop? Truth be told, I’d rather talk about hip-hop’s aging than my own, and since I have watched hip-hop from its infancy, I’ve been thinking about the relevant and parallel question: How does a culture like hip-hop, so invested in its youth, experience its own aging process?”
Blog
The Man Who Made A Movie Without Leaving His Room
Kerry Conran has spent 10 years working on making a movie on his computer. “Conran has not constructed a single set or miniature. Rather, they are computer images, built and animated in a virtual 3-D environment, or stitched together from photographs, which are then draped around the flesh-and-blood actors, who have been shot separately on an empty set in front of a blank ”blue-screen” background, along with those few minimal props with which they actually interact (a ray gun, a robot blueprint, a bottle of milk of magnesia). The film, in other words, is one long special effect with Jude-Law-size holes in it.”
WTC – Contemplating The “Safest Building In The World”
For a variety of oh-so-obvious reasons, project managers of the new tower to rise above the site of the World Trade Center say they’re building the “safest building in the world.” “In an attempt to live up to that very public promise — to overcome public fear, and reassure prospective tenants — the designers of the tower are carrying out a most unusual exercise that is in equal parts brainstorming, forensic analysis and Götterdämmerung-style what-iffing.”
The Self-Effacing Diva
Alexandra Ansanelli is a young star ballerina at New York City Ballet. But she’s so unassuming and self-effacing….can you be a prima star without the ego?
Where The Art Is: Miami
Miami is now home to some major contemporary art collectors. Some collectors have been so successful in their hording that they’ve even built personal museums for their collections. “When we arrived here Miami was acultural. Now there are all these energies coming together that give it the excitement of a frontier.”
The Growing Divide: Europe And The US
International politics over the past few years have magnified the cultural differences between Europe and the United States. “These growing divisions — over war, peace, religion, sex, life and death — amount to a philosophical dispute about the common origins of European and American civilization. Both children of the Enlightenment, the United States and Europe clearly differ about the nature of this inheritance and about who is its better custodian.”
Tower Records To Come Out Of Bankruptcy Stronger
Tower Records has been in financial difficulty for a while. So there was considerable concern that when the chain declared bankruptcy last year, the end was near. Not so. “Wrapping up a fast-track case that’s been mostly a formality, Tower is poised to emerge from bankruptcy protection Monday with its debt load $80 million lighter and its business intact.”
Preaching To The Choir?
Politiucal books are hot. But who reads them, and do they change anyone’s political opinions? A researcher tracked buyers and discovered there is little overlapping of political ideologies among readers. In other words, conservatives buy conservative books and liberals buy liberal books…
Pop Critic Departs NYT
Neil Strauss, longtime pop music critic for the New York Times, has resigned after signing a deal to “ghostwrite porn star Jenna Jameson’s memoirs without telling his superiors first.”
Face Off – Learning To Love Portaits
“The arts editor had a brilliant idea. He thought. A weekly series on portraits? I wasn’t so sure. The National Portrait Gallery is my idea of hell. Hard-faced Tudors and luxuriantly eccentric Victorians are great. But the 20th-century galleries make your flesh crawl with their bad paintings, trite photographs, and affirmation that the interest of a portrait lies in its subject rather than creator. The NPG classifies portraits by the person, with the artist’s name second. This is why portraits can seem the opposite of serious art.” And yet…