“Perhaps due to the rise of cultural anthropology or, more recently, to a variety of postmodern schools of social construction, it is now often accepted that the lives of Socrates, Euripides, and Pericles were not similar to our own, but so far different as to be almost unfathomable. Shelley’s truism that “We are all Greeks” has now become, as we say, inoperative.”
Tag: 05.04
Attack Of The Alien Atonality
Why is it, all these many years after atonality was introduced into music, that it still seems to shock listeners? And what is it about tonality that makes it seem familiar and easy to like?
Gehry vs. The TechnoGeeks
MIT’s new computer science building is a thing of beauty, “a gleaming 440,000-square-foot foundry for genius created by the world’s most famous designer of buildings. The Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences is the latest CAD-spun, holy-shit wonder from Frank Gehry. So all systems go? Ready for liftoff? Not exactly.” The technicians, engineers, and other tech geeks who will inhabit the place seem totally nonplussed by the whole building, labeling it “silly.” After all, to the technical mind, there is no real reason for a building to look the way that Gehry’s mind-bending structures inevitably do. Can logic and art coexist at MIT?