“[Peggy] Fogelman, who currently serves as the director of collections at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum, has broad experience on both the curatorial and educational sides of museums – knowledge that could well position her to expand the Gardner’s audience and further its multidisciplinary programming.”
Archives for October 2015
Beirut’s Art Scene Remains Lively Despite The City’s Never-Ending Tumult
“The creative ferment is happening even as unrest in the region and domestic political instability have ground the economy and tourism to a near halt and threaten to embroil Lebanon in new conflicts. Beirut is also a city where luxury towers are redrawing the skyline while the arrival in recent years of an estimated 1.5 million refugees from neighboring Syria has strained the infrastructure of a country of 4 million. A crisis over garbage collection recently plagued the city, but seems to have subsided.”
What’s Up With The Lowline, The World’s First Underground Park
Meant in part as a counterpoint to New York’s wildly popular High Line, and conceived by architect and “urban archaeologist” James Ramsey, the Lowline (if it really does get built) will be a landscaped public space reclaimed out of a derelict three-block-long underground trolley terminal on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
What Libraries Can Still Do, Even As The World Becomes Digitalized
“The library has no future as yet another Internet node, but neither will it relax into retirement as an antiquarian warehouse. Until our digital souls depart our bodies for good and float away into the cloud, we retain part citizenship in the physical world … In the midst of an information explosion, librarians are still the most versatile information specialists we have. And the purest.”
The Birth Of ‘The New Yorker Story’ As A Genre
Jonathan Franzen: “What made a story New Yorker was its carefully wrought, many-comma’d prose; its long passages of physical description, the precision and the sobriety of which created a kind of negative emotional space, a suggestion of feeling without the naming of it; its well-educated white characters, who could be found experiencing the melancholies of affluence, the doldrums of suburban marriage, or the thrill or the desolation of adultery; and, above all, its signature style of ending, which was either elegantly oblique or frustratingly coy, depending on your taste.”
Pianist’s Blasphemy Conviction Annulled By Turkish High Court
“The 8th Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Appeals ruled by a majority vote that [Fazil] Say’s Twitter posts, which had led to his sentence on grounds of ‘insulting religious beliefs held by a section of society,’ should be regarded as freedom of thought and expression and thus should not be punished.”
ISIS Has Found A Way To Make Its Destruction Of Ancient Sites And Artifacts Even Worse
“According to reports from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the extremist militant group tied at least three prisoners to Roman pillars in the Syrian desert city of Palmyra, rigged the structures with dynamite, and blew them up Monday afternoon.”
The Complex Reasons We Comply With Authority (Stanley Milgram is Back)
“The controversial psychologist, whose famous 1960s experiments concluded that most people will obey unethical orders, is the subject of a critically acclaimed new movie. … Not surprisingly, Milgram’s name is prominently mentioned in a recent study that takes a new look at an old question: What does it take to get us to comply with instructions, even when we know doing so could harm others?
The study’s conclusion: A gentle nudge will generally do it.”
Why Video-Game Culture Is Stuck Between Leftism And Libertarians
“There’s a hypocrisy of claiming to do both, creating meaningful work worthy of the protection of free speech, ignoring the fact that there are very few efforts working to push discourse on any subject in a direction that would be uncomfortable … That’s when you know you’re saying something that matters, when people start getting bothered by it. … You don’t see furniture-makers talk about how they need free speech to protect the integrity of their appliances.”
Where Does All Our Time Go? This Lab Knows
The holdings of the Centre for Time Use Research at the University of Oxford “have been gathered from nearly 30 countries, span more than 50 years and cover some 850,000 person-days in total. They offer the most detailed portrait ever created of when people work, sleep, play and socialize – and of how those patterns have changed over time.”
Jazz Vocalist Mark Murphy, 83
“Celebrated for his interpretations of songs by Cole Porter, Antônio Carlos Jobim and other great songwriters, … he ranged from bebop to ballads, torch songs to scat singing, from vocalizing Kerouac’s poetry to experimenting with rhythms inspired by the whistle that summoned his neighbors in upstate New York to the local wool mill.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 10.27.15
Walid Raad’s Blurred Lines at MoMA: Does Truth Matter?
The Museum of Modern Art’s bewildering Walid Raad exhibition (to Jan. 31) “investigates distinctions between fact and fiction,” according to its press release. In truth, it blurs those distinctions in a ways that sometimes feel … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-10-27
Pat Graney and Colleen Thomas Explore Difference (Differently)
The 1960s weren’t all about Beatles, sit-ins, marches, pot, and communes. For many women, the post-war 1940s and the 1950s lingered on in spirit. Some of these women may have worn go-go boots and very short dresses, but they belonged to the unspoken club of wives who … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2015-10-27
Enough of this
This summer came a CD release which – with all respect to the major classical music forces involved – is the kind of project I wish we wouldn’t do. This was a Deutsche Grammophon recording … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2015-10-27
I Love Lieder, Don’t You?
It’s rare for my wife and me to feel that we are among the younger members of the audience, but this happened at the Oxford Lieder Festival 2015, “Singing Words: Poets and Their Songs.” … read more
AJBlog: Plain English Published 2015-10-27
Lookback: could Victor Borge really play piano?
From 2005: Borge’s act resembled a straight piano recital gone wrong. He’d start to play a familiar piece like Clair de lune or the “Moonlight” Sonata, then swerve off in some improbable-sounding direction, never getting around to finishing what he started. Yet he was clearly an accomplished pianist, though few of his latter-day fans had any idea how good he’d been … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-10-27
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Billions Of Views – Online Video Is HUGE (But Not Entirely)
“I am not saying YouTube isn’t a huge, game-changing deal. It is. I am not saying YouTube sensations aren’t real sensations. They are. But we can’t even have a conversation about what is really happening with people’s attention, or relative value, if we aren’t talking in the same terms.”
New Project To Use Technology To Map Inside Of Pyramids
“Among the tools used will be infrared thermography to detect temperature variations on the monuments’ exteriors, which could reveal previously unseen cavities, chambers or corridors close to the surface. With the help of drones, the team will use photogrammetry and laser scanning to make accurate 3D models of the pyramids, other monuments nearby and their general surroundings.”
Why Contemporary Music Musicians Aren’t Unionized
“The AFM and other unions play a significant role in the realm of larger, more traditional music making—orchestras, musicals, film recording, opera, et cetera—but they are far less visible when it comes to performances of new music.”
Canada’s New Government Promises Big New Investment In Culture. What Might That Look Like?
“If the newly elected Liberals honour all their campaign promises – a big “if” with any political party – the Government of Canada will now invest an extra $1.35-billion in arts and culture by 2020. But do the Liberals understand that what Canada really needs is coherent cultural policy?”
Hobby Lobby’s “Christian Values” Owners Investigated For Theft Of Ancient Iraqi Artifacts
“The tablets were described on their FedEx shipping label as samples of “hand-crafted clay tiles.” This description may have been technically accurate, but the monetary value assigned to them—around $300, we’re told—vastly underestimates their true worth, and, just as important, obscures their identification as the cultural heritage of Iraq.”
Classical Music Losing Its Audience? It’s A Matter Of Relevance
“Might there be a concert a few decades hence in which – God willing – my trio is still performing, but only to an audience of one? And if that listener were to perish mid performance, would we keep playing?”
Shakespeare In Translation: To Be, Or, You Know, To Kill Myself…
In the end, any new production of Shakespeare—on Broadway, TV or movies—is a kind of translation, a gambit for clarity and relevance amidst mystery. Maybe it’s the literal-mindedness of Play on! that has drawn such outrage and mockery.
Philip French, 82 – Was The Observer Film Critic For 50 Years
“During his five decades as a critic, French watched more than 2,500 movies, published several books and received an OBE for his services to film in 2013.”
Theatre Critic Frank Rizzo Takes Buyout After 30 Years At Hartford Courant
Rizzo has written for the Courant for over thirty years. He has also contributed to such publications as Variety, American Theatre magazine, the Sondheim Review and The New York Times.
The History Industry – Americans Are Buying It
Americans’ ignorance about their own country’s history has been called an “epidemic,” and yet they seem as enthusiastic as ever to consume books, TV shows, movies, and musicals with a historical slant.
How Did “NPR Voice” Become The Default Audio Media Way Of Speaking?
“In addition to looser language, the speaker generously employs pauses and, particularly at the end of sentences, emphatic inflection. A result is the suggestion of spontaneous speech and unadulterated emotion. The irony is that such presentations are highly rehearsed, with each caesura calculated and every syllable stressed in advance.”
Is There Still Any Value In Big International Music Competitions?
There is something to be said for weathering the rigour of these competitions without ever actually placing, as victories can take on a pyrrhic quality. “Life is squeezed out of the winner, as he has to keep touring and play his winning pieces.”
Disrupting the Cycle of Urban Violence With Arts and Culture
“Hip-hop dialed down street violence in the Bronx. New Orleans’ Mardi Gras Indian gangs made peace through craft. Why is culture such an underrated civic tool?”