Archive for June, 2011
Homesteading the Performing Arts
by Adam Leipzig
“I don’t think I can support myself as a playwright at this point,” Tony Kushner recently told a reporter.
Tony Kushner has written more than 20 plays, including Angels in America, and Homebody/Kabul. He’s won two Tony awards and the Pulitzer. If he can’t support himself in theatre, no one can.
What is it about American theatre More...
The World’s First Photograph
by John Bailey
He took his middle name from the ninth century Patriarch of Constantinople. He and his brother, Claude, invented the world’s first combustion engine, receiving a patent from Napoleon Bonaparte in July of 1807. A lunar crater is named after him. He was an independently wealthy farmer who raised a plebian crop of sugar beets. He coined the term v More...
In a Dark Room. Intoxicated.
by Edward Goldman | Art Talk
My recent trip to Europe ended up in Barcelona, sneaking from one dark room to another in the hotel where I was staying. But let me assure you, I was doing this for all the right reasons. About fifty art dealers from around the world gathered there for Loop, an annual video art fair. Each dealer, in his or her room, was allowed to show only one v More...
Here’s a Poem
by Jack Grapes
Here's a poem that has not been revised or rewritten or read aloud or cut or extended or given to a lover. Here's a poem that has no code word, no name for something else, no intended meaning, no axe to grind. Here's a poem inconsequential as a thumbtack. Give me a penny for it and you've overpaid. L More...A White Dwarf of Meaning
by William Deresiewicz | The American Scholar
Words are memories. What we’ve forgotten, they still know. Consider the following: amazing, awesome, fabulous, fantastic, great, marvelous, terrific, wonderful. Today they may be synonyms, but each bespeaks a vanished form of experience, a lost feeling or idea. Awesome comes from awe: dread and veneration at the presence of the royal or divine. More...
“Isfahan is Half the World”
by Aram Yardumian | Times Quotidian
Of Isfahan in the mid-seventeenth century, French traveler Jean Chardin wrote, “It is the grandest and the most beautiful town in the whole of the east” and its surrounding countryside “incomparable for its beauty and fertility.” Situated on the central Iranian Plain, at the vertex of trade routes, Chardin found the city a bus More...
Foetus Talks
by Daniel Rolnik | Argot and Ochre
JG Thirlwell is an artist and composer known by many names including Foetus, Manorexia, and Steroid Maximus. When he isn’t writing the score to the animated series The Venture Bros on Cartoon Network, he’s creating compositions for the Kronos Quartet as well as his own albums. Never one for a nostalgia trip, JG Thirlwell is all about progress More...
Woody and Gertie
by Chloe Veltman
People have been talking about how much they like the new Woody Allen flick, Midnight in Paris.
I think people seeing the film in San Francisco are going to appreciate Allen's movie about the powerful hold that nostalgia has on our lives (a near-constant theme in Allen's canon) more than other audiences in cities around the world.
The reaso More...
Creativity Econ 3
by Andrew Taylor | The Artful Manager
One of the oddities of nonprofit accounting practice is the way it bundles all kinds of money into a single blob. Earned income, annual contributed income, and incoming capital money all show up in the Income Statement in a way that can cloud analysis of financial health, and distract us from a frank assessment of financial balance. The resul More...
