Lives Lived at a Monk’s Pace, Allowing Time for the Spirit to Flourish
Topic: Arts
7:10 pm EST, Mar 2, 2007
I hesitate, given the early date and the project’s modesty, to call “Into Great Silence” one of the best films of the year. I prefer to think of it as the antidote to all of the others.
No matter how much films may improve, their prospects are not likely to — which suggests that something has fundamentally changed in our relationship to the movies. The long, long romance may finally be losing its bloom, and that is why Hollywood should be concerned.
Movies were the barometers of the American psyche. More than any other form, they defined us, and to this day, the rest of the world knows us as much for our films as for any other export.
Today, movies just don't seem to matter in the same way — not to the general public and not to the high culture either, where a Pauline Kael review in the New Yorker could once ignite an intellectual firestorm. There aren't any firestorms now.
To the extent that the Internet is a niche machine, dividing its users into tiny, self-defined categories, it is providing a challenge to the movies that not even television did, because the Internet addresses a change in consciousness while television simply addressed a change in delivery of content.
The Internet ... plays to [a] powerful force in modern America and one that undermines the movies: narcissism.
Gary Bredow's documentary High Tech Soul: The Creation of Techno Music, a labor of love that chronicles techno's genesis via nuanced interviews and smart cultural context.
The film features: Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, Eddie (Flashin) Fowlkes, Richie Hawtin, Jeff Mills, John Acquaviva, Carl Cox, Carl Craig, Blake Baxter, Stacey Pullen, Thomas Barnett, Matthew Dear, Anthony "Shake" Shakir, Keith Tucker, Delano Smith, Mike Archer, Derrick Thompson, Mike Clark, Alan Oldham, Laura Gavoor, Himawari, Scan 7, Kenny Larkin, Stacey "Hotwax" Hale, Claus Bachor, Electrifying Mojo, Niko Marks, Barbara Deyo, Dan Sordyl, Sam Valenti, Ron Murphy, George Baker, and Kwame Kilpatrick.
Why a physicist dropped everything for paper folding | The New Yorker
Topic: Arts
8:53 am EST, Feb 25, 2007
Not all career changes involve huge debts, but they are no less of a challenge (*) to those undertaking them.
Robert Lang kept folding while earning a master’s in electrical engineering at Stanford and a Ph.D. in applied physics at Caltech. As he worked on his dissertation —— "Semiconductor Lasers: New Geometries and Spectral Properties" —— he designed an origami hermit crab, a mouse in a mousetrap, an ant, a skunk, and more than fifty other pieces. They were dense and crisp and precise but also full of character: his mouse conveys something fundamentally mouse-ish, his ant has an essential ant-ness. His insects were especially beautiful. While in Germany for postdoctoral work, he and Diane were taken with Black Forest cuckoo clocks; the carved casings, pinecone-shaped weights, pendulums, and pop-out birds wouldn’t seem to be a natural for origami, but Lang thought otherwise. He started a job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, in 1988, shortly after he had finished folding a life-sized cuckoo clock. It had taken him three months to design, and six hours to fold, and it made Lang a sensation in the origami world.
iConcertCal is a free iTunes plug-in that monitors your music library and generates a personalized calendar of upcoming concerts in your city. It is available for both Windows and Mac OS X and supports worldwide searches.
pick any artist, we'll build you a custom playlist featuring music by your artist and related artists. you can also click on one of the playlists featured below.
the mix tape evolved. you pick the songs. put your playlist on your blog with our player widget, it's the soundtrack for your life and anyone can tune in.
our community members are building new playlists everyday. the best way to discover new music is to have it recommended by a friend.
... 10 years from now the model for the music business will resemble the patron-artist relationship of the 17th century renaissance ...
In order to ensure that the works they commissioned were of the highest quality, patrons frequently stipulated that artists use only the finest pigments. Rich colors signaled to the viewer that no expense had been spared and reflected the patron's generosity. Artists, on the other hand, tended to place a greater premium on the skill involved in the creation of a work than on the richness of the materials. According to Leonardo, "... colors honor only those who manufacture them, for in them there is no cause for wonder except their beauty, and their beauty is not to the credit of the painter...." The Florentine writer Anton Francesco Doni was even harsher in his criticism of bright colors, arguing that they "deceive, and dazzle the minds of common men who do not have good judgment."
paid placement: ... cold-e-mailed YouTube executives and then worked out a deal to get the "treadmill" video on the front page ...
If "treadmill" is the future of music, you'd best stock up now, and then dive into the back-catalog.
