Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci star in Martin Scorsese’s THE IRISHMAN, a saga of organized crime in post-war America told through the eyes of World War II veteran Frank Sheeran, a hustler and hitman who worked alongside some of the most notorious figures of the 20th century. Academy Award winning Director Martin Scorsese on his vision and the making-of THE IRISHMAN. Now playing in theaters and on Netflix.
Mike Nichols, who died in 2014, was a film and stage director of genius, and he wasted no time in showing it. The first two films he directed were “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “The Graduate.” In the new oral history “Life Isn’t Everything,” Ash Carter and Sam Kashner draw on 150 respondents to tell the story of his incredible career.
Jamie Lee Curtis comes from Hollywood royalty as the daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. She credits her mother’s role in “Psycho” for helping her land her first feature role, as the lead in “Halloween,” in 1978. “I’m never going to pretend I got that all on my own,” she tells The New Yorker’s Rachel Syme. But Curtis says she never intended to act, and never saw herself as a star: “I was not pretty,” she explains; “I was ‘cute.’ ”
Eventually, the pressure she felt to conform in order to keep working led to a surgical procedure, which led to an opiate addiction. Curtis talks with Syme about recovery, second chances, and more than forty years of films between “Halloween” and Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out.” Plus, the chef at one of Los Angeles’s best restaurants on how to build a woman-friendly kitchen.
To read more: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/tnyradiohour/articles/jamie-lee-curtis-original-scream-queen-podcast
Ever since Beethoven‘s iconic Ninth Symphony premiered May 7, 1824 at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna, it has remained arguably the most popular composition in the classical music canon, thanks largely to its final movement, the “Ode to Joy,” with a text by poet Friedrich Schiller.
But Beethoven’s music has become something much more than popular. With its expansive length, mold-busting design, and the inclusion of solo singers and chorus, he was proposing nothing less than a philosophy for humanity.
Beethoven, the composer-philosopher, was a man who suffered more than we can imagine and yet he retained optimism and a sense of hope that we can admire and even envy. He believed wholeheartedly in the goodness of humanity, the power of love, joy, unity, tolerance and peace to overcome and endure.
An iconic American designer, Klein has defined the last half century of fashion with his visionary minimalist design philosophy, characterised by a dedication to simplicity, comfort, and elegance. In this time, he has transformed his clothing line into a multi-million dollar global lifestyle empire, spanning ready-to-wear, fragrances, furniture, and more. He is now retired, and recently published a survey of his legendary career.
Website: http://www.oxford-union.org/
From a Christie’s online article:
Adams’ ‘visualisation’ strategy marked a shift away from Pictorialism, a much more manipulated photographic style, which had influenced his early work. His desire for sharper focus and deeper tone and contrast (he called it ‘an austere and blazing poetry of the real’) led to him becoming a leading figure in pure — or straight — photography.
Arguably no other photographer of his era knew more about photography than Adams. He wrote ten technical manuals on the discipline, and even advised major figures like Strand and Edward Weston, his friend and fellow West Coast photographer.
He also consulted for Polaroid and Hasselblad. Without such technical mastery he would not have been able to react with such immediacy to the quickly changing conditions of landscape.
One of his most famous works, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941, needed snap judgements of immense sophistication to capture the momentary effect of sunset light on the foreground, and establish a balanced tone and focus with the distant peaks, evanescent clouds and darkening sky.
From a Science Magazine online article:
On 13 December, Amazon Prime will air the fourth season of The Expanse, a hardboiled space drama renowned for its working-class characters and real-world space physics. Showrunner Naren Shankar is part of the reason the science checks out. The veteran writer and producer for programs such as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Farscape, and the police procedural CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, has a doctorate in applied physics and electrical engineering.
Shankar chatted with Science about why he feels it’s important to have a realistic sci-fi show, and how television work is like the scientific peer-review process.
To read full interview: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/how-real-world-science-sets-expanse-apart-other-sci-fi-shows?utm_campaign=news_weekly_2019-12-06&et_rid=600792821&et_cid=3113276
An exhibit at South Carolina’s Columbia Museum of Art shows Vincent van Gogh in a new light. “Van Gogh and His Inspirations” presents the younger, wayward artist who learned from looking hard at the world — and the work of artists around him. A private collection of his inspirations is made public for the first time and presented alongside a dozen original van Gogh works. Jeffrey Brown reports.
Food defines us as individuals, communities, and nations – we are what we eat and, equally, what we don’t eat. When, where, why, how and with whom we eat are crucial to our identity. Feast and Fast presents novel approaches to understanding the history and culture of food and eating in early modern Europe.
This richly illustrated book will showcase hidden and newly-conserved treasures from the Fitzwilliam Museum and other collections in and around Cambridge. It will tease out many contemporary and controversial issues – such as the origins of food and food security, overconsumption in times of austerity, and our relationship with animals and nature – through short research-led entries by some of the world’s leading cultural and food historians.
Feast and Fast explores food-related objects, images, and texts from the past in innovative ways and encourages us to rethink our evolving relationship with food.
To read more and purchase:
Fifty-five years after co-founding the rock band The Who, Pete Townshend is still at it. The lead lyricist and guitarist says he actually doesn’t enjoy performing but views it as an “easy” job necessary to finance his lifestyle and support his family and staff. Economics correspondent Paul Solman sits down with Townshend to discuss aging, surviving child abuse and art’s ability to inspire hope.
Boomers Daily 