Back in 2001, a group of people decided to take the tempo direction in John Cage’s 1985 work As Slow As Possible to an extreme and began a performance (of the composer’s 1987 arrangement for organ, Organ²/ASLSP) intended to last 639 years. (Since the score opens with a rest, the first notes didn’t actually begin sounding until early 2003.) On Sept. 5, which would have been Cage’s 108th birthday, performers executed the first chord change since 2013; it was the 14th since the concert began. Catherine Hickey reports on how it was done (and yes, there was a crowd). – The New York Times
Blog
Women Directors Made Almost Half The Films At This Year’s Venice Festival
“This is an unprecedented percentile which we hope augurs well for a future cinema that is free of any sort of prejudice and discrimination.” – Toronto Star
Thank Goodness For Caremongering
Over decades and centuries, mutual aid has helped people pay rent, buy groceries, and acquire medicine; it has given workers something where there is so much nothing to be had, and it has given luckier people a way to help out in desperate times. So why weren’t we doing mutual aid before—everybody, all the time? Well, Black people were. – The Walrus
What Sources Will Historians Of The Future Use To Make Sense Of 2020?
A child today will be a historian of 2020 in the future. What sources will they turn to? How will they verify scattered memories? How will people tell the story of the tumultuous times that we’re living in today? 2020 may be a year for the history “books” but of course, the record we leave behind will be digital in manner. – The Conversation
How To Explain How New Yorkers Talk?
To an outsider, someone from, say, Toronto or Seattle or London, a conversation among New Yorkers may resemble a verbal wrestling match. Everyone seems to talk at once, butting in with questions and comments, being loud, rude and aggressive. Actually, according to the American linguist E J White, they’re just being nice. – Literary Review
Why Does Time Seem To Speed Up As We Age?
To a ten-year-old child a year is a tenth of her existence, and thus feels like something of a stretch. For someone who’s twice her age a year is only a twentieth of the time they’ve already had, and by the time you get to 60, well, I’d say it doesn’t bear thinking about were it not for the fact that thinking about it is all you do once you get to a certain age … – The Critic
How A Speech Coach Saved Janet Malcolm’s Bacon In Her Libel Trial
The first time that Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s lawsuit against Malcolm and The New Yorker went to court, she writes, the personal manner she and her colleagues at the magazine had cultivated turned out to be disastrous: the jury ruled against her, and it was amazing luck that they deadlocked on how much to award Masson and the judge declared a mistrial. So she went to see speech coach Sam Chwat, and she recounts here how the things he taught her changed everything the second time around. – The New York Review of Books
Cancel Culture? This Too Shall Pass
So what to make of the apparent growing strength of cancel culture and affiliated movements? Here is the fundamental point: With the rise of social media and low-cost communications, virtually everything that can be said, will be said. – Bloomberg
There’s One Country In The Americas Where An Indigenous Language Is Still In Constant Use
“Paraguayan Guaraní – a language descended from several indigenous tongues – remains one of the main languages of 70% of the country’s population. And unlike other widely spoken native tongues – such as Quechua, Aymara or the Mayan languages – it is overwhelmingly spoken by non-indigenous people.” – The Guardian
Could Changing Our Work Weeks Mitigate Layoffs?
One potential avenue to spare redundancies is a move to a four-day workweek. While the idea has been toyed with for decades, new and adaptable working situations ushered in by Covid-19 have sparked an entirely new conversation on the subject. So much so, in fact, that MPs in the UK are pushing for a four-day workweek to cut costs and mitigate redundancies. – Artnet