“The BBC should reduce its output and the television licence fee should eventually be scrapped, a parliamentary committee has said after considering the role of the publicly funded broadcaster in the wake of a string of scandals and industry changes.”
Archives for February 2015
Stop The Licence Fee? Shut Down The BBC Trust? Drop A TV Channel? What-All Is In This Committee’s Report, Anyway?
“The Guardian read the 164-page House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee report on the future of the BBC so you don’t have to.”
Toronto’s Massey Hall Begins $135M Renovation
“For all its past glories, the hall has a shopworn feel, with those odd reclining seats and scuffed brass railings. The goal of the expensive facelift, paid for largely by corporate and government cash, is to do some sprucing up without sanding away the antique beauty of the place.”
The Designer Who Became Apple’s Biggest Asset
Jonathan Ive “establish[ed] the build and the finish of the iMac, the MacBook, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. He is now one of the two most powerful people in the world’s most valuable company” – on whom 100,000 employees and a not-insignificant chunk of the stock market depend. Says Steve jobs’s widow, “Jony’s an artist with an artist’s temperament, and he’d be the first to tell you artists aren’t supposed to be responsible for this kind of thing.”
Artifical Intelligence Conquers The Video Game Arcade (This Is Actually A Big Deal)
“Whipping humanity’s ass at Fishing Derby may not seem like a particularly noteworthy achievement for artificial intelligence” – think of Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov at chess and Watson walloping Ken Jennings on Jeopardy! – “but according to Zachary Mason, a novelist and computer scientist, it actually is.”
Why British Political Satire On TV Stops Being Satirical When It’s Adapted By Americans
“Failure is a wellspring of British comedy, but its American counterpart rewards ‘optimism [and] a refusal to see oneself in a bad light’.” Christopher Orr looks at how Game of Thrones changed from savage political parody to dramatic thriller as it crossed the Atlantic, and how The Thick of It morphed into the farce of Veep.
Is This The Banksy Of Iran? Or The Shepard Fairey?
“[Mehdi] Ghadyanloo has more in common with the metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico than he does with Banksy. Yet in terms of success as a street artist, he is undoubtedly the Banksy of Tehran. Astonishingly, there are over 100 walls in Iran’s capital decorated by Ghadyanloo. … His paintings are not illegal. On the contrary, he was commissioned by the city government to paint them.” (So he’s definitely not like Banksy.)
The Great Dissident Soviet Choreographer You’ve Never Heard Of
“How miraculous that amid all that suffocating tulle, a ballet flame-thrower named Leonid Yakobson emerged. … Dancers hungry for a challenge loved the odd body shapes, sexiness and wit of his choreography. Among his disciples were the young Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov” as well as Maya Plisetskaya. Even Richard Nixon was a fan.
New Website Monitors Ballet Dancers’ Pay And Conditions Worldwide
“Former dancer and ballet teacher Ian Knowles created the site – balletposition.com – which he claims is the first of its type, to compare useful data for dancers looking to join ballet companies in the UK, Western and Eastern Europe and the US.”
Who Should Decide How Students Learn About America’s Past?
“This school year, the fury is over the new U.S. History Advanced Placement course – in particular, whether its perspective is overly cynical about the country’s past. The controversy raises significant questions about the role of revisionism in education: How should students learn about oppression and exploitation alongside the great achievements of their country? And who decides which events become part of the national narrative as more information comes to light?”
A 21st-Century “Pictures At An Exhibition” (But This Exhibition Is One Of The World’s Greatest)
“Four contemporary classical composers walk into an art museum. No punch line. But after walking in, this quartet of composers eventually walked away having penned four new compositions, which Network for New Music will premiere Friday at the Barnes Foundation – amid the art and spaces that inspired them.”
Louis Jourdan, 93, Suave French Film Star
“Lithe, debonair and exceedingly handsome, with a tide of dark, wavy hair, Louis Jourdan became Hollywood’s ideal of Gallic charm and seduction in the late 1940s and 1950s. His peak came in the Oscar-winning musical Gigi (1958), which cemented him in the popular imagination as a debonair playboy.”
Richard Linklater Considering Sequel To “Boyhood”
“I wake up in the morning thinking, ‘The twenties are pretty formative, you know?’ That’s where you really become who you’re going to be. It’s one thing to grow up and go to college, but it’s another thing to … So, I will admit my mind has drifted towards [this sequel idea].”
Henry VIII’s Arguments For Divorcing Catherine Of Aragon Found In Old Mansion
“A book which helped changed the course of English history, part of the evidence Henry VIII and his lawyers gathered in the 1530s to help win an annulment from Catherine of Aragon and ultimately to break with Rome, has turned up on the shelves of the magnificent library at Lanhydrock, a National Trust mansion in Cornwall.”
New York City Ballet Uses Art To Draw Younger Audience – And It’s Working
“There seemed to be an explosion of young men in knit caps and young women in leather pants watching as New York City Ballet recently performed a trio of Balanchine classics. In fact, the average age in the David H. Koch Theater seemed to have dropped by years, if not decades.”
How Ballet Dancers Learn Their Steps: Music, Muscle Memory And Mystery
Jenifer Ringer, late of New York City Ballet, explains the process and the factors that affect it.
Dutch Restorers Offer To Repair Roman Fountain Damaged By Soccer Hooligans
“A Dutch restoration firm has offered to repair a 400-year-old fountain that was damaged last week when supporters of Rotterdam soccer team Feyenoord went on a drunken rampage in Rome’s historic center.” The Dutch government has rejected any responsibility to pay for restoration, though it says it supports private efforts.
Hard Feelings: Science’s Struggle To Define Emotions
“The debate over the nature of emotion has been reinvigorated in recent years. While it would be easy to paint the argument as two-sided – pro-universality versus anti-universality, or Ekman’s cronies versus his critics – I found that everyone I spoke to for this article thinks about emotion a little differently.”
Early To Bed And Early To Rise Does Not Make You More Moral (Take That, Ben Franklin!)
“Early birds aren’t ethically superior. And, to the extent that other research suggests that they are, it may just be that they are luckier: modern society, for the most part, is built around their preferences.”
The Man Who Saved Impressionism
The story of Paul Durand-Ruel, who repeatedly risked bankruptcy to support Monet, Degas, Manet, Pissarro, and their fellows – and created a market for their work, especially in the United States.
Unknown Harold Pinter Script To Premiere, 33 Years After It Was Written
“The work, discarded by Pinter when plans to make it into a film fell through, has been adapted for radio by the film and stage director Sir Richard Eyre.”
Ancient Frescoes In Roman Catacombs May Undermine Church Teaching About Women Priests – Or May Not
The wall paintings in the Catacombs of Santa Priscilla “have sparked controversy over the role of women in the Church, and helped scholars re-evaluate the importance of the Virgin Mary in early Christian history.” Some claim that one fresco even provides evidence that female priests served the Eucharist, though others are skeptical.
Thai Actors Jailed For Insulting Monarchy With Student Play
“Student Patiwat Saraiyaem, 23, and activist Porntip Mankong, 26, had pleaded guilty to defamation” under Thailand’s lèse-majesté law, the world’s strictest, “following their arrests last August, nearly a year after The Wolf Bride – a satire set in a fictional kingdom – was performed.”
“Amadeus” The Movie At 30 – And Everything It Got Wrong About Mozart And Salieri
BBC Radio 3 presenter Clemency Burton-Hill reviews the liberties writer Peter Shaffer and director Milos Forman took with the historical record (and the device they used to get away with it) – and nevertheless finds that Amadeus is “arguably the finest movie ever made about the process of artistic creation and the unbridgeable gap between human genius and mediocrity.” (text-only)
“Not Useful For Creating Original Work”: Why John Cameron Mitchell Avoids Social Media, Even For “Hedwig”
“It’s hard to keep up with that; it takes a lot of energy and recently [there was] some study that overusing social media can make you depressed and jealous, so I actually chose not to go there. … User comments-culture is not useful for creating original work, I think. I’m all for information diets, which are helpful for the mood and for the art.”