How does the station Bravo keep people addicted to its reality TV shows? A composer says that he and others make the station sound like candy: “midcentury spy film vibraphones. Tchaikovskian pizzicato — that is, finger-plucked — violin strings. The melodious wooden tock-tock-tock of a struck marimba. Egg shakers. Cymbals which, when struck in succession, vibrate with an ephemeral sound halfway between a wish and a sparkle.”
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The Myth Of Artist Agnes Martin, Recluse, Dissolves Into The Reality Of Agnes Martin, Connected And Committed To Her Community
She lived in community wherever she was, but truly found a home in Taos. “As a poor, queer female artist who suffered from schizophrenia, Martin existed on the margins of society for most of her life. After spending the 1950s living in poverty, she achieved critical success in the 1960s and commercial success thereafter. In the 1990s she had made millions off her art and was eager to repay the kindness her community had showed her during her own years of struggle.”
Evelyn Anthony, Writer Of Spy Stories, Has Died At 92
She entered a field dominated by men like John Le Carré and Ian Fleming, and found fertile ground in the rivalries among Britain’s intelligence services. Getting to know actual WWII spies changed her writing, her life, and the genre.
Telling The Story Of A Kingdom Through Textiles
In the Kuba Kingdom of the 17th and 18th centuries, before European colonialism, “royal ceremonies and parties sometimes had the feel of a runway showdown, with elites competing to see whose patterns were most unique and impressive. … Designs needed to scream and to be heard from a distance. They were engineered to capture the eye and not allow it to rest. “
A Second-Generation Playwright Who Took Her Mother’s Advice
Or rather, she took her mother’s story and melded it into a new play. Playwright Jaclyn Backhaus on why her new play includes pirates: “It’s a pirate attitude that got my mom to where she is. … t’s a pirate attitude that lot of people with dreams face when they’re trying to attain them.”
What Life’s Like For A Multitasking Creator
Alicia Jo Rabins, on pulling together discussions among writer/musicians about serving two different disciplines: “It’s not that unusual to work in multiple disciplines, but sometimes I feel a bit lonely about it. For so many of us, there’s no single word to describe our practice, no easy answer to the question ‘what do you do?'”
The Instagram Account That Started As A Lark And Became An Art Exhibit
Guadalupe Rosales started with some 1990s photos of friends, photos called “star shots” from mall photography studios. From there, her work became an Instagram archive to catalogue the history of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. “‘I’ve gotten so many emails, people thanking me, saying, ‘I’m so glad that there is something out there that is representing a part of our culture,’ Rosales says of her Instagram accounts. ‘It’s nice to hear that. It validates that there was something missing — part of history.'”
The True Power Of Katniss Everdeen Goes Way Beyond The ‘Hunger Games’ Rebellion Sign
The author of Belles echoes the author of An Ember in the Ashes in her appreciation for the protagonist of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series (and they say we need a little more Katniss right now): “I needed to read girls like her; girls who weren’t so nice; girls so angry that their rage could topple anything in their path; girls that could face the dark; girls who could never be contained.”
The Cover Song Makes A Comeback
The status of the cover song has shape-shifted throughout pop-music history. Well into the 1950s, it barely even needed a name: It was just the routine way of doing business. During the rock era, covers became suspect as inauthentic, the stuff of the hack bar band, unless an artist “made the song their own.” With the rise of hip-hop, covers were displaced by sampling and remixes, but then samples themselves became more concealed and layered, for reasons of both art and copyright. In the 2000s and earlier this decade, the practice migrated to YouTube, where concert clips or home videos of one-off covers, rearrangements, and parodies might show off the skills and wit of amateurs and pros alike but still seldom troubled the charts—unless they also made it to soundtracks or TV ads, where acoustic remakes of once-upon-a-time hits (either twee or glum or both) have become a staple.
Why We Needed A New History Of The United States
Jill Lepore has surmised, is that too much historical writing—and perhaps too much nonfiction in general—proceeds without many of the qualities that readers recognize as essential to experience: “humor, and art, and passion, and love, and tenderness, and sex… and fear, and terror, and the sublime, and cruelty.” Things that she calls “organic to the period, and yet lost to us.” Lepore’s training as a historian, she’s said, tried to teach her that these things did not contain worthy explanations. In graduate school her interest in them “looked like a liability, and I took note.”