Tag: 06.13.04

Bloomsday Without Blooms?

Bloomsday, the annual June celebration of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses, is always a big occasion in Dublin, where the novel takes place. This year, the 100th anniversary of the day detailed in the book, is expected to be a massive party. But a central theme of Leopold Bloom’s character is his Jewishness, and one can’t help but notice that the number of Jews in Dublin has been dwindling for decades. In fact, there are less than 2,000 left in the entire city.

A Newly Relevant Dance About Torture

Choreographer Ping Chong’s latest work is guaranteed to provoke thoughts about the recent Abu Ghraib torture scandal, but it wasn’t designed that way. The actual subject of “Blind Ness: The Irresistable Light of Encounter,” which premiered this spring in Ohio and moves to New York this week, is the brutal but century-old maiming and killing of Africans in the Congo by an occupying force of Belgians. But Chong has a history of creating provocative works, and the apparent American policy of torture and intimidation in Iraq makes the performance resonate like a national gut punch.

A Computer With An Eye For Fakes

Authenticating great works of art is a tricky business, and despite the phenomenal advances in technology over the last century, the process of spotting fake art is still more or less a matter of casting a practiced eye over the piece in question. But a team of Dutch researchers has “developed a computer system that quickly examines hundreds of paintings for telltale patterns. The results, they say, can lend credence to existing attributions or help dismiss them.”