“During the 1990s, Mr. Nabay took the speedy beat of music that had been heard for centuries in parades and celebrations and transferred it to Western instruments. His songs became hits as civil war tore Sierra Leone apart and were claimed by both sides, although his music increasingly held direct antiwar messages.”
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Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.03.18
Post-Racial? Puhleeze!
I recently attended a production of Our Town presented by Triad Stage, a professional theater company based in Greensboro, NC. It had been decades since I had seen the play but I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for it. I thought it was very well done, but this is not a review. What this is … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2018-04-03
Morbid Fascination: The Undead Haunt the Met Breuer’s “Like Life” (with video)
“Ewww, gross!” exclaimed a seasoned critic (not me), disconcerted by one of many creepy, gruesome works that affront delicate sensibilities in the Met Breuer’s Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now), … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2018-04-03
April 3 Birthdays, Scott LaFaro’s Among Them
The Jazz West Coast listserve often begins its posts with the names of jazz people born on the current date. The April 3 list is a profusion of such names. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2018-04-03
Do “Roseanne’s” Big Ratings Mean Anything About The Future Of TV Comedy?
Much of the analysis that followed focused on the show’s politics: Star Roseanne Barr is an eager champion of debunked right-wing conspiracies, and the premiere’s storyline hinged on her character’s support for President Donald Trump. And since the 2016 presidential election, television programmers have been working to find ways to reach working-class whites who voted for Trump. The success of “Roseanne” only reaffirmed those efforts. But looking ahead to 2018-19, “Roseanne” may be a harbinger of a less titillating, more significant programming shift — the revitalization of the broadcast comedy after years of emphasis on drama.
How Does Dance Work Its Magic In a Verbal World?
What is it about dance, a non-verbal art, that allows it to do what words cannot? Is it that it is physical/gestural rather than verbal, or instead that it is characteristically artistic experience rather than everyday discourse? To answer this, we must also consider for comparison the two other possibilities: non-verbal non-art and verbal art (literature/poetry).
Far-Right Italian Party Wants To Turn Former Fascist HQ Into Major Museum
Italy’s far-right Lega party, which won almost 18% of the vote in the general election on 4 March and could form part of the next coalition government, wants to turn a former Fascist party headquarters in Como, in the Lombardy region, into northern Italy’s biggest museum of Modern art, architecture and design.
Absolute Truths: The Lie Detector In The Age Of Alternative Facts
Geoffrey C. Bunn argues that the history of the lie detector doubles as the history of an attempt to contend with the rise of mass culture: the machine, as a manifestation of a widespread desire for order in an age of tumult. The device, Bunn suggests, is in many ways a work of science fiction that lurks, awkwardly, in the present reality—a machine that has been, from the beginning, in dialogue with pop culture and its myths.
Why Orchestras Should Be More Like Humanities Institutions
The vital signs of classical music all tend in the wrong direction, says Joseph Horowitz. The conductors fly in and leave. The musicianship is superior but dull. The composer is long dead, and, on stage and off, people know little about him anyway. The shrinking audience only wants to hear the most pedigreed and canonical of music. The orchestra is not a tastemaker; it’s a follower. Marketing and fund-raising efforts predominate. The financials drive everything, and everything is expensive: the musicians, the guest soloists, the fly-by conductors, the tickets. Horowitz complains a lot, and one of his bigger, more enveloping criticisms is what brings him to the humanities.
The Nude Art Created By Artificial Intelligence
AI researcher Robbie Barrat decided to see what would happen when he fed a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) thousands of nude portraits from a dataset and then trained it to create its own bizarre artworks.
Why Is Human Thought So Much More Complex Than Animal Thought? Tools
“The difference is due, [neuro-philosopher Andy Clark] believes, to our heightened ability to incorporate props and tools into our thinking, to use them to think thoughts we could never have otherwise. If we do not see this, he writes, it is only because we are in the grip of a prejudice – ‘that whatever matters about my mind must depend solely on what goes on inside my own biological skin-bag, inside the ancient fortress of skin and skull.'”
The Battle For How We Define Ourselves – The Virtual Versus Physical
“Virtual reality confounds the idea of the ‘mind-body problem,’ the relationship between the conscious mind and physical body that’s remained a staple of the philosophy of mind since Aristotle and Plato. Mind-body dualism dictates that the mental being is “in here” while the physical self is “out there.” But questions of neurobiology make that whole proposition more complicated.”