Where are the successors to “This Side of Paradise,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “On the Road,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “Bright Lights, Big City,” “Generation X” and “Infinite Jest”? Time’s Lev Grossman blames our increasingly “multicultural, transcontinental, hyphenated identities and our globalized, displaced, deracinated lives” for why any consensus about a single voice now seems impossible. I’d go even further and argue that the “voice of a generation” novel never existed to begin with.
Tag: 12.07.16
Who Will Perform At Trump Inaugural? Supposedly The Team Is Getting Desperate
“They are willing to pay anything,” one of the insiders told TheWrap. “They told me, ‘We’ll pay their fees.’ Most of these artists’ fees are in the six to seven figures.” The insider said the Trump negotiator also offered to pay him for delivering top talent, saying, “Name your price.”
The Two Buddies Who Changed The Way We Think About The Ways We Think
A look at the Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose work became the basis for the entire field of behavioral economics.
When Tango Was Nearly Snuffed Out By The Juntas (And Rock)
“In the 1940s, Argentina was tango and tango was Argentina. … Then, two disparate but hugely impactful things arrived: a series of military dictatorships and rock ‘n’ roll. While in opposition in every other respect, the [juntas] and the new music genre inadvertently collaborated in dethroning tango and driving it to near-oblivion.”
Information Overload? New Survey Finds Most People Don’t Feel Overwhelmed
“A new Pew Research Center survey finds that, for the most part, the large majority of Americans do not feel that information overload is a problem for them. Some 20% say they feel overloaded by information, a decline from the 27% figure from a decade ago, while 77% say they like having so much information at their fingertips. Two-thirds (67%) say that having more information at their disposals actually helps to simplify their lives.”
The Soft Power Of Art
What do artists do when civilization seems to be unraveling? “We need a visual language that speaks to the hearts and minds of people. … No market, no institutional power, no media can stop the soft power of art.”
Will The Academy Ever Recognize The Skills Of Those Who Cast Movies?
Sure, casting geniuses get “special Oscars” sometimes, including this year, but “an Oscar category honoring casting alongside acting, directing, and the other long-recognized areas has yet to take hold.”
Have A Listen To The World’s Oldest Surviving Piano
It’s a 1720 instrument by the inventor himself, Bartolomeo Cristofori, and Dongshok Shin plays one of the earliest pieces written for it. As long as you don’t expect the timbre of a Steinway grand (or the equal-temperament tuning Steinways typically use), the Cristofori sounds pretty good. (video)
We Have A Winner In The Competition To Light Up London’s Bridges
And he’s an American – in fact, he’s the guy who lit up the new San Francisco Bay Bridge. The £20m project, which covers 17 bridges along a six-mile stretch of the Thames, is one of the largest public art commissions in British history.
When Jazz Was Cool It Was A Different World
“TV is now enjoying a vogue of being cool, but the great era of TV cool was the 1950s. You could catch Miles and John Coltrane on TV, and jazz was all over its soundtracks. That and the movies were the mediums with the broadest and deepest reach in popular culture, and they brought jazz to millions in America and around the world. It wasn’t that they had to convert audiences into thinking jazz was cool, it was that jazz was inherently cool and hip, and movies and television used that to signify their own place on a spectrum of style, and even rebellion.”