I also think that women are excellent social critics, basically because we have nothing to lose, anyway. It’s like we’re not in a position of power, so we don’t risk a lot by being critical of it. [Laurie Anderson, 1983]
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, “an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling [...]
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The scene evokes an abbreviated pastoral—but the birds are shackled to their perch, which is in turn connected to the hand crank.
Somewhere between nature and the mechanical, between the comic and the tragic, his birds “twitter” with a music that expresses how frail and vulnerable existence is, especially in the post-WWI modern world.
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“Birdhouse In Your [...]
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My favorite painting by Magritte is The Treachery of Images (referenced in this post). But The Art of Conversation is amazing as well.
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Michel Foucault on L’Art de la Conversation:
In a landscape of battling giants or of the beginning of the world, two tiny persons are speaking–an inaudible discourse, a murmur instantly reabsorbed into the silence [...]
This past Monday was the 50th anniversary of the first recording sessions for Miles Davis’s masterpiece Kind of Blue.
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There is a Japanese art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a special parchment, with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or [...]
The Federal Music Project was a short-lived (1935-41) US federal work project under the umbrella of Federal Project Number One. At the program’s height the project employed 16,000 musicians who gave lessons to children in rural and urban areas, transcribed/recorded folk songs for archival purposes, and performed in thousands of concerts (34 new orchestras [...]
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One for the “Great Artist, Horrible Human Being” file: Carl Orff, the composer who lived a monstrous lie
Orff is best known for the cantata Carmina Burana, a powerful choral/orchestral work noted for its bold primitivism. (Most people have at least heard the opening movement “O Fortuna,” the soundtrack to a thousand movie trailers.) It was first [...]
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“She’s Love, she loves and yet she is not loved.”
[Wm. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis]
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Ten years ago, the Magnetic Fields (a project by Stephin Merritt; the band is apparently named for Les Champs Magnetiqués, a Surrealist novel published in 1920) released 69 Love Songs, a three-part genre- (and gender-) bending collection of songs that are by [...]
This should have gone in yesterday’s post. I totally forgot that Freddie Mercury channels Nijinsky’s Faune in the video for “I Want to Break Free.” The video was banned for a long time by MTV… I only recall seeing it once or twice as a kid (but thought it was awesome, even though I hadn’t [...]
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Friedrich Nietzsche on the role/appeal of the satyr chorus in Greek tragedy:
[T]he satyr was the primordial image of man, the expression of his highest and strongest emotions, as an inspired reveller, enraptured by the approach of the god, as a sympathetic companion, in whom the suffering of the god was repeated, as a messenger bringing [...]