NewsTrust - Arts - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

What Hemingway Would Think of the Internet

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Marty Beckerman - Jul. 02 (Opinion) - If Ernest Hemingway hadn’t killed himself 50 years ago today at age 61, he probably would have died by now anyway. (No human liver could withstand more than a century of nonstop alcoholic pummeling. Not even Papa’s.) But Newsweek can fantasize about Princess Diana cheating death, so we can imagine Hemingway walking — or staggering — among us in 2011. What would the hard-drinking, adventure-loving writer think of our modern technological lifestyle? Not bloody much. We’re obsessed with conquering the digital world — accumulation of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, LinkedIn recommendations — whereas Hemingway conquered the physical world. The thrill of a retweet from Roger Ebert or Ashton Kutcher will never compare to the thrill of running with (more like from) the bulls or fighting a pack of voracious sharks over the remains of a prize-catch marlin.

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Werner Herzog Enters 'The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams'

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

NPR - By Terri Gross, Werner Herzog - Apr. 25 (Interview) - In 1994, three French cave explorers discovered hundreds of prehistoric paintings and engravings on the walls of the Chauvet Cave in southern France. Carbon dating has since shown that the depictions of rhinoceroses, lions, cave bears, horses, bison, mammoths and other animals are between 30,000 and 32,000 years old. That doesn't mean the ancient drawings are any less sophisticated than what artists create today, says filmmaker Werner Herzog. "Art ... as it bursts on the scene 32,000 years ago, is fully accomplished. It doesn't start with 'primitive scribblings' and first attempts like children would make drawings," Herzog says. "It's absolutely and fully accomplished." The acclaimed German director, who has produced, written and directed more than 40 films, gained exclusive access to the Chauvet caves. He tells their story and the story of the world's oldest cave paintings in The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a 3-D documentary film. "Since early adolescence, I have been fascinated by cave paintings," Herzog tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "It actually was my personal intellectual awakening ... and shook me to the core — seeing an image of a horse [from the] prehistoric Stone Age. I couldn't believe it." Part of Herzog's interest in the paintings, he says, is the knowledge that tens of thousands of years ago, humans had the instinct to make art in order to represent the world around them.

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New theatre: A horse that travels well

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - Apr. 11 (Review) - FOUR years after it first opened on London’s Southbank, “War Horse” has gone stateside. Based on a children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo, the play conveys the chaos and tragedy of the first world war through the experiences of a young English boy and his horse Joey.

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Beauty, Through Pinhole or Plastic

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By David Gonzalez - Mar. 17 (Review) - Toys? Novelties? Curios? Don't tell that to the customers who line up for Randy Smith's modified Holgas and pinhole cameras.

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Which words disturb you?

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Michelle Pauli - Jul. 05 (Interview) - Following last year's brilliant "words that make you wince" project, the good folk at the Ledbury poetry festival (opening tomorrow) have come up with another challenge for their poets. This year, festivalgoers are being asked to nominate "words that disturb". To unpick the idea a little, it's disturb as in "disturb your thought process, trip up your brain", rather than unpleasant words (we had quite enough of those last year). Disappointingly, so far the Ledbury poets have failed to deliver. Poet Mary O'Donnell, for example, has suggested "poetess", "authoress", "hysterical" and "as a mother"; but to me, these are bugbear words and phrases rather than tripping-up ones – she's disturbed by the way they're used rather than confused by the act of reading them. This challenge requires words that are the literary equivalent of optical illusions. Writer Pamela Kozak, who works in the Ledbury poetry press office, has the right end of the stick. She says: "Whenever I see the word therapist I read instead, the rapist. A word that means 'somebody trained in methods of treatment and rehabilitation' becomes instead wholly aggressive."

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The house that Goldman Sachs built.

Tue, 11 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Paul Goldberger - May. 11 (Review) - New York’s great financial institutions have traditionally seen architecture as a way of attracting notice. In 1960, when the Chase Manhattan Bank built a huge glass skyscraper in lower Manhattan, its name and logo were all over the building, and, just

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A new agenda for school reform

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Diane Ravitch - Apr. 02 (Opinion) - I used to be a strong supporter of school accountability and choice. But in recent years, it became clear to me that these strategies were not working. The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program enacted in 2002 did not produce large gains in reading and math. The gains in math were larger before the law was implemented, and the most recent national tests showed that eighth-grade students have made no improvement in reading since 1998. By mandating a utopian goal of 100 percent proficiency, the law encouraged states to lower their standards and make false claims of progress. Worse, the law stigmatized schools that could not meet its unrealistic expectation.

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Mistakes in Typography Grate the Purists

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Alice Rawsthorn - Nov. 15 (Opinion) - That’s the problem with loving typography. It’s like having a heightened sense of smell. You spend much more of your time wincing at noxious stinks, than reveling in delightful aromas.

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'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die'

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Der Spiegel - By Umberto Eco, Susanne Beyer, Lothar Gorris - Nov. 12 (Interview) - Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco, who is curating a new exhibition at the Louvre in Paris, talks to SPIEGEL about the place lists hold in the history of culture, the ways we try to avoid thinking about death and why Google is dangerous for young people

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5 Things Cities Can Learn from Burning Man

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Craig Duff, Larry Harvey - Sep. 19 (Interview) - Burning Man's Larry Harvey says the city the project creates in the desert every year has done some radical things other cities should try.

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Cutting arts funding a bad investment

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Miami Herald - By Lorenzo Lebrija - Sep. 06 (Opinion) - Tough work began this week. When Miami-Dade County commissioners met for the first budget hearing Thursday, they needed to find a way to bridge a budget gap of more than $400 million. It won't be easy, and every expense should be evaluated. Among the cuts proposed by Mayor Carlos Alvarez in his budget is a slashing of $11 million to the arts in Miami-Dade. The argument being that when compared with basic social services, the arts just don't measure up. Of course they don't -- this is akin to comparing a grand piano to a house cat.

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The life lessons of Burning Man

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - By Mark Morford - Aug. 28 (Opinion) - As I've been lured back to the sweltering, dusty sexed-up madness that is Burning Man again this year -- my sixth time -- by a gaggle of delicious friends, I am hereby reminded of a few hundred truths, half-truths, outright lies and astonishing epiphanies offered up by the world-famous, Christian-feared, beautifully debauched, sensory overloaded, impossible-to-describe art-survivalist-camping-rave megaspectacle now underway in the remote Nevada desert.

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Back to My Island, With the Obamas

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Julia Rappaport - Aug. 14 (Editorial) - Ignore the skeptics -- there’s no place I’d rather be in August.

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Making It

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Elizabeth Chang - Jun. 14 (Interview) - A creator of artistic walking canes offers her customers a little support

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Pekingese dog paints abstract art - Telegraph

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Telegraph - Apr. 03 (Entertainment) - Unlike many struggling artists three-year-old Ziggy is doing a roaring trade, having no problem selling his paintings for as much as £171 each.

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`Liberty City' comes alive in one-woman show

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Miami Herald - By Christine Dolen - Feb. 26 (Review) - After a New York Theatre Workshop premiere a year ago, April Yvette Thompson and her solo show Liberty City have come home to share a rollicking, sobering look at life in her old Miami neighborhood in the late '70s. The script, which Thompson crafted with director/coauthor Jessica Blank, blends fact and imagination in its depiction of her extended family and friends, an only-in-Miami blend of African-Americans, folks from the Bahamas and people with Cuban roots.

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San Francisco Academy of Sciences Going Platinum-Green with Help of SWA Group Landscape Architecture

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

MarketWatch - By Ron Heckmann - Sep. 26 (Press Release) - The Academy's living roof is a critical component in earning a coveted Platinum designation, the highest of all standards in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Development (LEED) program sponsored by the U.S. Green Building Council.

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Lincoln's Home Away From The White House

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

NPR - By Robert Malesky - Aug. 31 (Review) - For nearly a quarter of his presidency, Abraham Lincoln lived not in the White House, but rather three miles away -- in a large, airy summer home on the 250-acre grounds of the Soldiers' Home in Northwest Washington, D.C. The Lincoln Cottage, as it's now called, was the 16th president's version of Camp David, and he used it well. Beginning in 1862, he stayed at the cottage from June until November, escaping the heat and dust of the city and enjoying some respite from the stresses of White House life. One of Lincoln's secretaries wrote in a letter that when the president was staying there, "he tended to leave the White House a little earlier and get back in the morning a little later."

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How Much Should Design Cost?

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Treehugger - By Lloyd Alter - Aug. 11 (Interview) - The architectural profession is broken in the single-family house biz; the vast majority of people live in houses that were built by developers from generic plans. The number of houses designed by architects to suit the needs of specific clients is negligible. It is also expensive; a small house can take as much time to design as a very big one, and as much time as a much more profitable commercial job that doesn't require client meetings on evenings and weekends.

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So Much for the 'Looted Sites'

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Melik Kaylan - Jul. 19 (Opinion) - No one had bothered to challenge the reports, the evidence or the logic, not least because many ancient sites were in hostile terrain and couldn't be double-checked. By implication, the U.S. had been blamed for that too: After all, the presiding authority is effectively responsible for allowing no-go areas to exist where such things can occur.

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The neuroscience delusion

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The Times - By Raymond Tallis - Apr. 13 (Review) - Not long ago A. S. Byatt published a TLS Commentary ("Observe the Neurones", September 22, 2006) in which she purported to explain why, since she discovered John Donne's poetry as a schoolgirl in the 1950s, she had found him "so very exciting". She discussed some of his most compelling love poems and in places showed the kind of sensitive attention to the writer's language and intention that we look for in a good, that is to say helpful, critic. This made it puzzling, indeed exasperating, that the primary concern of her piece was to explain the poems and their effect on her by appealing to contemporary neurophysiology. She took up this theme again in a shorter piece, on the novel, last year (November 30). The literary critic as neuroscience groupie is part of a growing trend.

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What's in a Chair?

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Penelope Green - Mar. 06 (Review) - Ann Loftin could write a textbook on the nuances of modern psychotherapeutic methods -- and the personality types of their practitioners -- based on the home office décor of the therapists who have treated her. There was the strict Freudian whose couch was covered in plastic and who barely spoke, though every once in a while a phrase like "mother's milk" might have slipped out. Another's office featured phallic African statuary and pictures of a young wife, who was herself always audible somewhere in the background. A licensed clinical social worker had lots of comfy, overstuffed furniture and encouraged patients to sit anywhere (sessions ended in long hugs that suggested much countertransference). Her last analyst, with whom she spent a fruitful decade, did not see patients in his home, but in an office building, and his room there held nothing more than two nondescript leather chairs, a bookcase lined with medical texts and a table holding a box of tissues.

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Is Your House Making You Look Fat?

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Allison Arieff - Feb. 24 (Opinion) - Contrary to popular belief, the pace and proximity of urban living can actually contribute to more healthful lifestyles, while lower-density communities tend to have a higher incidence of cardiovascular and lung diseases, including asthma in children, as well as cancer, diabetes, obesity, traffic injuries and deaths; these are exacerbated by an increase in air pollution, gridlock and traffic accidents, and by a lack of physical activity. The study recommended that people seek out cities and towns with reliable public transportation systems, bicycle lanes and pedestrian paths, ones that have schools, businesses and stores within walking distance.

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Tough Art With a Candy Center

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 04:18:44 -0700

New York Times - By Randy Kennedy - Jun. 07 (Review) - The artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS in 1996 at 38, did not exactly fit the profile of a secret agent, an infiltrator foiling lines of defense. He was a generous man with a handsome, cherubic face and wicked sense of humor. He loved cats. And some of his best-known art is made of candy, mounds of it, free for the taking and endlessly replenished, a Willy Wonka vision of Post-Minimalism.

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Riot breaks over Spring

Sat, 24 Mar 2007 08:49:24 -0700

NPR - By Scott Simon, Marin Alsop - Mar. 24 (Interview) - The alien harmonies and jagged rhythms of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring signalled the birth of modern music in 1913. Conductor Marin Alsop says the rambunctious score still sounds fresh today.

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