Archive for March 2009
If you can excuse a moment of semi-shameless self-promotion: I (Alissa, the editor of The Curator), along with five other accomplished film critics and writers, am involved with a new venture called Filmwell, a website interested in cinema off the beaten track and criticism at the margins of the great conversation. We launched today, and [...]
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The New York Times, in conjunction with the International Herald Tribune, now has a global edition. From the “about” page: Combining the international reporting of The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, the Global Edition provides readers with a 24/7 flow of geopolitical, business, sports and fashion coverage from a distinctly global perspective. [...]
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From The Guardian: The joy of anti-social media. Social media have undeniably changed the way many of us talk about books, and encouraged us to do it more. Whereas in the physical world there may be only certain contexts in which you’d dive into a deconstruction of Dostoevsky’s metaphors, the virtual world provides round-the-clock opportunity [...]
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The founders of the Vladimir Nielsen Piano Festival and Foundation hope that the students in their Festival will develop integrity, loyalty, honesty, dedication, selflessness, and – oh yeah – the highest level of competitive musicianship possible.
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I think a lot about what it means to be a reader – what reading is really worth. The truth is, I love to read but didn’t always.
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Get (Emotionally) Naked?Three Films and Nudity By J. Marcus Weekley In great art – great film, great painting, great quilting, great photography – prurience has little place. However, nudity for a great filmmaker relates to film’s sense of time: it focuses on the impermanence of the body, while at the same time reveling in the [...]
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In great (lasting, challenging, beautiful, truthful, skillful) art – great film, great painting, great quilting, great photography – prurience has little place. However, nudity for a great filmmaker relates to film’s sense of time: it focuses on the impermanence of the body, while at the same time reveling in the beauty of the same body, as in each of these films.
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From Prospect: Cut-and-paste writing. I imagine some may consider this cheating: reducing the art of writing to an elaborate game of cut-and-paste. But authors have long written quotations on index cards. My system simply makes it easier to move virtual index cards around. The old techniques of pinning cards on a cork bulletin board, or [...]
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From The Guardian: Book covers: the pictures that sell thousands of words. So the blurb must be short and punchy, and the cover must make a winning pitch. Ideally, it should display a strong, memorable image. Many of the titles in the AbeBooks selection fulfil this criterion. Associated with this data, from the Lost Book [...]
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From Wired: Beauty Affects Men’s and Women’s Brains Differently. In men, images they consider to be beautiful appear to activate brain regions responsible for locating objects in absolute terms – x- and y-coordinates on a grid. Images considered beautiful by women do the same, but they also activate regions associated with relative location: above and [...]
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