“Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), a film-noirish comedy, was the first Hollywood film to show live actors and animated characters interacting in ways that looked seamlessly real. … Mr. Williams received a special Oscar for animation direction and for creating new characters for the film, which featured many well-established cartoon characters, and shared a visual effects Oscar.” – The New York Times
How’s The Six-Year-Old Who Got Thrown Off The Tate Modern Viewing Deck? Awful, But Stable
The parents of the boy, who had brought him from France to London on holiday, say that the full extent of his injuries is still uncertain, but that he suffered broken bones in the back, arms, and legs as well as a brain bleed. “Our son has already undergone two long and difficult operations … But he is alive, struggling with all his strength, and we remain hopeful.” – The Guardian
Herbie Hancock In Words (It’s A Bit Disappointing)
He’s led the sort of life that generates fascinating stories, which is perhaps what makes his much-anticipated memoir, “Possibilities,” such an occasionally frustrating read. – Los Angeles Times
Pittsburgh Opera: Our Audience Is Growing, But…
“Here there’s a problem where even when the community values this, they think it’ll be supported by wealthy industrialists. But those days are over, and we need to say we’ve got a lot of wealth in this community. How can we get people to support the diversity of arts and communities? We need you to ante up.” – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Busting Convention: Boomers Had Almost Nothing To Do With The 1960s
Louis Menand: “There are many canards about that generation, but the most persistent is that the boomers were central to the social and cultural events of the nineteen-sixties. Apart from being alive, baby boomers had almost nothing to do with the nineteen-sixties.” – The New Yorker
Native Hawaiians Protest Plans To Build Telescope Atop The Islands’ Highest Mountain
Native Hawaiians agree that Mauna Kea connects humanity to the universe — as an umbilical cord between Earth and space. The peak at Mauna Kea is the “highest point where land touches the sky — where the two deities, Sky Father and Earth Mother, meet,” said Noe Noe Wong-Wilson, 68 , a retired cultural studies professor and elder in the fight against the telescope. To Native Hawaiians, putting a giant telescope on their sacred mountain is a desecration. – Los Angeles Times
San Francisco Mural Controversy Is An Example Of Public Responsibility For Art
Charles Desmarais: “As important as the Arnautoff murals are, as art and as American history, the issues raised by the attempt to destroy or obscure them are larger than this single controversy. They have to do with what I think of as a kind of cultural duty of care — with the avoidance of negligence or harm to works of art maintained by an organization for the public good. – San Francisco Chronicle
Facial Recognition Tech Is Being Used Everywhere. What Does It Mean For Us?
“We are just as ignorant about what has been happening to our faces when they’re scanned by the property developers, shopping centres, museums, conference centres and casinos that have also been secretly using facial recognition technology on us, according to the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch.” – The Guardian
Facial Recognition Software Doesn’t Just Identify You, It Can Tell How You’re Feeling
Amazon’s new use case takes Rekognition to a new level. Now you can now use the software to take a pretty good guess at what a person in an image or a video is feeling. What could possibly go wrong? – Shelly Palmer
The Forgotten New York Photographer Finally Getting (Some Of) The Attention He Deserves
Alvin Baltrop only had a few shows while he was alive, one of which was at a gay nightclub. Now that he’s getting more attention, we can see some of the “real” New York of the 1970s and 1980s – the impoverished city that couldn’t rebuild a collapsed West Side highway, the piers where the Whitney Museum now stands, the cruising that happened under those piers, the time between Stonewall and the AIDS crisis. (Oh, and they tell a lot of architectural history, too.) – The Guardian (UK)
The World Seems To Be In Love With Long – Really, Really Long – Audiobooks And Book Theatre
War and Peace? Bring it! Every single word of Silas Marner? Amateurs! What about 72 hours of Sherlock Holmes? Bliss! “‘There is an appetite for the epic that has simply surpassed our expectations,’ says Celia De Wolff, who has produced and directed a marathon adaptation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, to be broadcast over three days” in Britain. “Event radio like this gives the audience a sense of achievement.” – The Observer (UK)
The Nashville Symphony Is ‘Taking A Break’ From Its Free Day Of Music
The claim: The event takes up an incredible amount of time and money, and the symphony says “our understanding of our role in the community has begun to change.” Therefore, “the staff is evaluating [Free Music Day] and a lot of other programs to determine if they are the best offerings for listeners and performers.” – The Tennessean
The Dutch, Overwhelmed With Tourists, Have Been Fighting Back
Here’s the deal: “Some 19 million tourists visited the Netherlands last year, more people than live there. For a country half the size of South Carolina, with one of the world’s highest population densities, that’s a lot.” – The Atlantic
Work Is Now Scheduled To Begin On Reconstructing Notre Dame In 2020 – But Has The Lead Danger Truly Gone?
Work stopped entirely on July 25 to ensure that tests were done and the workers were safe, because many tons of lead burned or melted when the spire fell in the fire in April. But work will resume Monday, and “after reassuring measurements on air quality, the debate focused on the concentration of lead on soils around Notre-Dame and in some schools on the left bank.” – Le Monde (France)
Now That HBO Has Rid George R.R. Martin Of That Damned TV Show, He Says He Can Get On With Writing
Martin, famously far, far behind on his books in The Song of Ice and Fire series (which became The Game of Thrones on HBO), says, “Having the show finish is freeing, because I’m at my own pace now. I have good days and I have bad days and the stress is far less, although it’s still there… I’m sure that when I finish A Dream of Spring you’ll have to tether me to the Earth.” – The Observer (UK)
Art Spiegelman Had To Withdraw From Marvel For Likening The US President To A Fascist Comic Book Villain
This week in comics news: “Cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel Maus, withdrew his introduction to a new Marvel comics collection after its publisher insisted he remove a description of Donald Trump as ‘Orange Skull,’ drawing a comparison between the president and Captain America’s fascist enemy, the Red Skull.” – Newsweek
Moving Art Out Of The Galleries
In Brisbane, the Trace show is taking art to bakeries, luggage repair shops, and mechanic shops. The point? To “democratize” the art. – The Guardian (UK)