Kirk Maynard’s puppets, “including a bucktoothed squirrel, a lime-green lawyer and an obese man with a removable beard, … are covering one of the biggest corruption trials in Ohio history – delivering their reports of real testimony and wiretapped conversations from a yearslong investigation of Jimmy Dimora, [a] Democratic kingpin.”
Tag: 02.28.12
Tales Of Ferocious Literary Heirs
The passing of Dmitri Nabokov last week inspires Laura Miller to recall the zeal (if that’s the right word) with which he and some of his more notorious counterparts – Stephen Joyce, Ted and Olwyn Hughes (the widower and sister-in-law of Sylvia Plath), Sonia Orwell – defended their territory.
Occupy Wall Street Demands End To Whitney Biennial
“We object to the biennial in its current form because it upholds a system that benefits collectors, trustees, and corporations at the expense of art workers,” the letter states. The correspondence is signed by the Arts & Labor group of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Should Oscar-Winning Movies Charge Higher Ticket Prices?
“There’s an argument that filmgoers are willing to pay more for new bells and whistles. Ticket prices for 3-D films, for instance, average 8% higher than their 2-D counterparts. Since winning an Oscar differentiates a film, there’s rationale to charge more.”
Study: Does Wearing A Lab Coat Make You More Creative?
“The main conclusion that we can draw from the studies is that the influence of wearing a piece of clothing depends on both its symbolic meaning and the physical experience of wearing the clothes. There seems to be something special about the physical experience of wearing a piece of clothing.”
Artist Stopped From Killing Chickens
“Officials have banned an artist from publicly slaughtering chickens in eastern Kansas, saying the proposed art installation would amount to animal cruelty.”
Cinema’s Problem With Old People
“Once marginalised and therefore cut down in screen-time, older characters have had to be stereotyped, with often unbecoming results. There have been a good few kindly old grandmas, but more often the elderly have been shown as [string of nineteen unflattering adjectives]. However, with the coming of our own millennium, cinema determined to do better. It was now in pursuit of the increasingly valuable grey dollar.”
America’s First Black Female Symphonist
Florence B. Price (1887-1953), raised in Arkansas and trained in Boston and Chicago, went on “to write some 300 works and become the first black woman in the U.S. to be recognized as a symphonic composer,” with her Symphony in E minor premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933.
When Writers Censor Work They’ve Already Written
“The easiest form of self-suppression is to have an idea and not write it, and we may well wish that more authors would exercise this prerogative. It gets more complicated once the book exists, however – even in unpublished manuscript form.” Consider Kafka, Gogol, Gerard Manley Hopkins …
So, Valley Girls Are, Like, Totally Linguistic Trendsetters
“Girls and women in their teens and 20s deserve credit for pioneering vocal trends and popular slang, [linguists] say, adding that young women use these embellishments in much more sophisticated ways than people tend to realize.”