8305. wabbit - 10/13/2006 12:54:42 AMSpamland!
8306. thoughtful - 10/27/2006 7:38:43 PM I had an opportunity to visit the corcoran gallery recently. I'm not one much for modern art. This despite the fact that my threshold for calling it art is pretty low....it should look like something that required more effort and talent than a 3-yr old would put forth. Granted, that eliminates a lot of art.
I find it most frustrating when looking at a piece of 'art' for which i have not a clue as to what the artist could possibly be thinking only to find it's labeled, "Untitled". Thanks.
Of course, that may be more sensible than the one labeled "rectangle" on which there wasn't a single right angle, let alone a 'rectangle'...unless the artist was punning me "wreck tangle", I've not a clue.
To me art should trigger more than just an emotion or sense in me...it should help communicate something of what's on the artist's mind. But I find a lot of contemporary art fails to do that.
So after walking the gallery and finding a few pieces that were at least colorful or clever or very creative, I decided that the only way to approach it is with a sense of humor....the laugh being on the gallery who shelled out $$$ for this crap.
Always remember the time john & yoko put a store-bought apple on display in an art gallery as commentary on the whole thing.... 8307. wonkers2 - 11/2/2006 3:21:34 AM R.I.P. William Styron 8308. judithathome - 11/2/2006 5:43:41 AM Ahh, poor guy...I hope he's out of the dark now and at peace. 8309. wonkers2 - 11/3/2006 2:00:48 AM Me too! He wasn't a happy guy. 8310. wonkers2 - 11/17/2006 2:22:37 AM View Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib Paintings 8311. judithathome - 12/3/2006 4:34:46 PM Who is Nino Rota?
He wrote the soundtrack music to War and Peace, Romeo and Juliet, The Leopard, The Godfather, Waterloo, Death On The Nile, Hurricane and literally hundreds of other film soundtracks.
At the age of 12, he conducted a 250 piece orchestra in a production of his own oratorio, The Childhood of St. John the Baptist. He composed hundreds of compositions for orchestra, ballet and the stage. He was friends with and a student of the legendary conductor, Toscanini.
The New York Times anointed him, the Mozart of the 20th Century, in 1923.
But he is most remembered for composing the scores for 19 Fellini films from 1951 until his death in 1979. If you love Fellini films, how can you not adore the melodies of Nino Rota.
For 30 years he shared a piano bench with Maestro Fellini who would describe a vague idea and, voila! - Nino would miraculously find the notes that Fellini wanted, almost as if they already existed!
In Fellini's own words, Nino was gifted with a limitless inventiveness and inexhaustible musical wealth and at the same time a scholarly humility.
One has only to recall the haunting themes of
La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Juliet of the Spirits, Roma and Amarcord
to understand why Fellini felt this way.
His late in life compositions for Casanova, Orchestra Rehearsal and, the Oscar winning, Godfather themes are among his most enchanting.
Nino Rota was born on December 3, 1911, making 2006 the 95th anniversary of his birth. I urge you to seek out the many wonderful recordings of the Milanese, musical maestro that played such an integral part of Fellinišs films.
Here's a toast to the memory and music of Nino Rota!
Don Young: Felliniana Archive 8312. tmesis - 1/2/2007 7:09:48 PM Classical music fans -
Has anyone watched Leonard Bernstein's The Unanswered Question? It's a DVD set of Bernstein's 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard, six in all. I've been watching rented discs of the lecture series from Netflix; I seem to have struck gold. Pretty electrifying stuff - in the first lecture he draws analogies between the then new theories of Chomsky's universal grammar, and aspects of music. There's a certain dilettantism to this that is made palatable by Bernstein's musical erudition, wit, and charisma. He also doesn't condescend to his audience -- in the first or second of his Young People's Concerts series, he plays a Webern piece for an audience of mostly children, respecting them and trusting their ability to perceive his point. A memorable segment from the first lecture illustrates the why and how of the melodic line of the classic children's taunt "Neener neener neeeener" (eg "sakonige has hairy balls!"). The lectures are delivered with lay people in mind. I'm looking forward to finishing the series. 8313. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 1/2/2007 9:01:00 PM Oooohhh! A beautiful enticement, tmesis; it sounds delightful. 8314. wabbit - 1/2/2007 9:24:19 PM It does indeed. The DVDs are available at Amazon and get wonderful reviews. 8315. dandillon - 1/4/2007 9:24:20 PM According to the AP, Malaysia will levy fines on people incorrectly using the national language and will set up a specialized division to weed out offenders who mix Malay with English.
Culture, Arts and Heritage Minister Rais Yatim said fines of up to 1,000 ringgit ($271US) can be imposed on displays with any wrong form of Malay. Fines will be imposed after a first warning.
The move was to ensure "the national language was not sidelined in any way," Rais said.
Most Malaysians speak Malay, also known as Bahasa Malaysia, while English is widely spoken. Manglish -- a pidgin of English, Malay and other local dialects -- is widely used in the Southeast Asian nation.
The government will try to swap commonly used English language words with Malay substitutes.
Critics have said Malaysia's decision to sideline English in favor of Malay is hurting its global competitiveness level.
I say this sort of thing never works. 8316. alistairConnor - 1/4/2007 10:15:45 PM Hi Dan... I beg to differ.
Europe in particular is littered with languages which have been standardized, or even invented, and imposed on the population. It may well be that this can no longer work in the electronic age, but to say it "never works" is an exaggeration. 8317. wonkers2 - 1/4/2007 11:29:16 PM The French have tried it, but foreign words creep in anyway. 8318. Dubai Vol - 1/4/2007 11:35:30 PM I know that the campaign against "Franglais" is decades old and backed by legislation. In my limited experience, it seems to be effective, but frankly I find the notion counterproductive. The sooner we all speak one language, the better off the world will be. The internet has pretty much sealed the deal that English will be the one language we all speak. Lucky us. The sooner everyone gets on board the better off they will be. Legislating against English today is just asking to be marginalised. TR I speak several languages passably well, but I can read the writing on the wall and it's in English. 8319. wonkers2 - 1/5/2007 12:08:37 AM I envy your ability to speak several languages. I used to be fairly fluent in Spanish, but I don't get the opportunity to use it very often, and the words don't come to me as well as they used to. 8320. alistairConnor - 1/5/2007 12:39:31 AM Germans speak High German, Italians speak Tuscan, Norwegians speak some damn dialect invented by academics with whiskers, France speaks Francian, a dialect of the Loire valley. All were imposed through their use as official language, and in the education system, to the exclusion of all others. This was an essential component of nation-building, consolidating or even creating out of whole cloth "national" characteristics that the inhabitants shared, and which differentiated them from their neighbours across the borders, often in a completely artificial way.
And it worked. Whether it was a good thing is another question, but it's what they are trying to do in Malaysia.
And, from my limited personal experience, it seems to be working. 8321. alistairConnor - 1/5/2007 12:48:47 AM Dubai : I will start believing that English will be the only world language, when I see signs of it becoming the only language in the USA... funnily enough, things seem to be going in the opposite direction.
Sure, on paper at least, it would be in the economic self-interest of everyone in the world to drop their own language and communicate in English. But guess what, people don't always act according to their best economic interests. Cultural elements intervene. To put it mildly.
And if you re-examine the question in a couple of decades, you might well still think that there will be only one surviving language... but the writing on the wall will be Chinese. I think it's all bullshit, the number of languages spoken on earth will gradually diminish, they might eventually merge but that will take millenia of globalised culture and communication, rather than centuries.
And we will be much the poorer for it. 8322. Ms. No - 1/6/2007 1:55:41 AM Irving Norman
Just got back from the Dark Metropolis exhibit at the Crocker. If you live in or within easy travel distance of D.C. you really should check it out. The tour won't reach D.C. until November so there's time to plan. I'm a little overwhelmed at the moment and don't know what to say. The website has a lot of images but they're greatly diminished by the format. These works are huge and to be fully appreciated you really need to see them live.
I'm bummed because the exhibit leaves Sacramento on Sunday and I don't know that I'll have a chance to get back and see it again before it's gone. It's a lot to take in all at one go, but I'm very glad I got to see it. I'd never even heard of Norman before but the billboard ad they had up for the exhibit caught my eye. Stunning work. 8323. Ms. No - 1/6/2007 7:44:41 PM Turns out almost no one had heard of him before because he was Black Listed back in the day due to his Communism. I called an artist friend of mine from the gallery when I got done to tell her she had to come down and see the exhibit sometime this weekend before it left. She made the 40 minute drive the minute we hung up the phone.
I can't tell you how nervous I was to have gotten her that excited -- what if she thought it was crap and I was nuts for calling in such a lather?
No worries. She called me when she and her husband got home from the exhibit and we chatted for about an hour. She was amazed she'd never heard of the guy. Norman's works are unique and powerful and amazing to look at and the fact that he's been essentially eliminated from the canon of modern art due to McCarthyism is shameful.
Even now, the exhibit is going strange places. Sacramento (rather than San Francisco), Pasadena, Utah?? and D.C.
And that's it.
I have a feeling there'll be much bigger tours later on. I just hope that at least the artist's widow gets a chance to bask in the appreciation Norman should've had himself. 8324. judithathome - 1/6/2007 11:22:50 PM Where and when in Utah? We might be able to go see it in combination with seeing Keoni's daughter...
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