Worldwide media sensation JENNA JAMESON and Nightmare on Elm Street’s ROBERT ENGLUND star in ZOMBIE STRIPPERS. When a secret government agency lets out a deadly chemo virus causing the reanimation of the dead, the first place to get hit is Rhino’s, a hot underground strip club. As one of the strippers gets the virus, she turns into a supernatural, flesh-eating zombie stripper, making her the hit of the club. Do the rest of the girls fight the temptation to be like the star stripper, even if there is no turning back? Also featuring ROXY SAINT (of the Goth band Roxy Saint and the Blackouts) and Ultimate Fighting Champion TITO ORTIZ, ZOMBIE STRIPPERS is a sexy, bloody, hilarious good time!
Musicians have always had to struggle and make sacrifices for their art. In previous times, commercial and political pressures helped to create a climate of insecurity in the world of music. Today the problem is a little different. Outwardly, music and art are celebrated as never before - but they also face relentless pressure to serve causes that have little to do with their inner meaning. As former UK prime minister Tony Blair said last year, part of his project was to make ‘the arts and culture part of our “core script”’. Music that is composed and played to someone else’s script is unlikely to inspire the kind of inarticulate revelation of Truth that so stirred Browning.
Indeed, the current focus on who sits in the audience and on the therapeutic value of music represents a demotion of music’s status and its truth. That is why the current trend for subordinating music to someone else’s script should be loudly challenged. And that can be done only if we have more confidence in people than those populist snobs do, who imagine that children must make do with second-rate ‘music-making opportunities’. Classical insights into the status of art - beauty is truth and truth is beauty - have long roused the human imagination. They will do so yet again, especially if we have the courage to confront the current obsession with the composition of the audience and instead allow the sound of music to speak for itself.
“Like at the end of the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties, we are going the other way,” Mr. Gross said. “We are clearly in a period of excess, and we have to swing back to the middle or the center cannot hold."
Current TV presents an exclusive premiere of British trip-hop phenomenon Portishead's studio performance as they unveil seven songs from their new album "Third" in Portishead, England.
Proust and the Squid is an inspiring celebration of the science of reading. In evolutionary terms, reading is a recently acquired cultural invention that uses existing brain structures for a radically new skill. Unlike vision or speech, there is no direct genetic programme passing reading on to future generations. It is an unnatural process that has to be learnt by each individual. As director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in Boston, Wolf works with readers of all ages, but particularly those with dyslexia, a condition that proves "our brains were never wired to read". Wolf therefore has much of practical value to say about why some people have difficulty reading and how to overcome this. Reading stories to pre-school children is crucial, she says, as it encourages the formation of circuits in the brain, as well as imparting essential information about fighting dragons and marrying princes.
Strange Horizons Fiction: Ki Do (The Way of the Trees), by Sarah Thomas
Topic: Arts
7:40 am EDT, Apr 16, 2008
I have always believed one should date a poem by the year it is started, not the lifespan of the poet. This is the ko-sakka-sensu, or Old Style of Poems; while not, perhaps, as rooted in the disciplines of high, or courtly, Ki Do, there is something in its stateliness that I find moving. Gobanu-sama permits me this deviation; symmetry is the enemy of excellence, after all.
Besides, I have not yet finished this poem. It is still too long. When I first composed it, it had one hundred and thirty words. Think of that! One hundred and thirty words. All the secrets of the universe could probably nest in the soil of one hundred and thirty words and still have space to breathe. Ido, Gobanu-sama's predecessor, was indulgent in his great age. He listened to the entire poem, from start to finish. He told me that there were one hundred and twenty four unnecessary words in my poem; and then he died.
After seventy-one years of work, it is now down to seventeen.
ON JANUARY 29, 2008, an e-mail began making the rounds of the art world. Originally sent by artist Nancy Holt to a small group of friends and colleagues, and rapidly forwarded on, the message contained an urgent appeal: Holt had been alerted, just the day before, to the existence of plans to drill for oil in the Great Salt Lake, near Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 1970, and she was asking people to contact the Utah state government to express their opposition before a rapidly approaching deadline for public comment.
'I Don't Think Of Short Stories As A Secondary Option, Ever'
Topic: Arts
6:57 am EDT, Apr 14, 2008
Sheela Reddy interviews Jhumpa Lahiri:
The Pulitzer winner talks about the two great loves of her life: her children and her writing. 'With young children, the days can be rather mercurial.'
