A British director's remix of Leonardo's Last Supper. I suppose you'd have to see it to really judge, but it sounds (ah, metaphor) fascinating.

art, europe, leonardo da vinci, movies, remixes, renaissance

Nate

:

To the strains of modern opera, he used cutting-edge technical trickery to make Leonardo’s Christ appear like a three-dimensional hologram while a radiant sun rose and fell over his head. He turned the original colourful image red, grey and black before the artist’s gentle brush strokes were replaced with a chalk outline of the 13 figures, as if Leonardo had drawn a crime scene. Dawn broke, dusk fell and by the end the disciples had been dramatically cast into the shadow of prison-like bars.

To at least one of the world’s experts on Da Vinci, Greenaway’s work amounted to cultural vandalism. But to others it may have saved The Last Supper’s reputation from The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel, which frustrated many experts by reducing the painting’s hidden meanings to a plot device.

“It has reconsecrated the painting after Dan Brown deconsecrated it,” said Vittorio Sgarbi, a leading art critic and former head of arts for the Milan local government.

A Hollywood take on aftercare—and a pretty inspring one at that.

children, ngos, trafficking

Nate

:

Even today, there are only a handful of other shelters in the United States that cater specifically to former prostitutes, despite the growing number of children in the trade (estimates say there are 250,000 at any given time in the States). GEMS, opened in New York in 2001, and another, Angela’s House, opened in Atlanta in 2003. Children of the Night was the prototype for both, but both are newer, smaller, and don’t have the capacity to house their charges indefinitely or to provide services to former residents. Another difference: COTN isn’t funded with government grants. It is supported entirely by private donations, which means that Lee can spend the money pretty much as she chooses.

What she chooses is to provide the kids at her shelter with the closest thing to a comfortable middle-class childhood that they have ever had. All of their needs are met, and many of their desires as well. They are flown into Los Angeles from all over the country, and delivered to the shelter in a cab. Upon their arrival, kids are assigned a semi-private bedroom, and issued either a CD player or a DVD player.

First, Children of the Night takes care of the basics: each girl is assigned a caseworker. She is sent to a doctor for a full physical, to an off-site therapist, to a dentist. She is also enrolled in school, which is right on-site, and fully accredited. Residents at COTN get haircuts and manicures at high-end salons that volunteer their services. They attend workshops, where professionals drop in to teach them photography, yoga, meditation, acting, screenwriting, and dance.

The "Here's why Pixar is so amazing, and why their movia-a-year is consistently so good" article is a bit of a cliché now. Doesn't make such investigations much less fascinating, though. I can't wait to see Wall-E. Though of course I will ...

cultivation and creation, grace, movies, pixar, stories

Nate

:

Pixar is also unique because of its origins. Today’s studios are four generations removed from their original immigrant entrepreneurs. They’re more like banks than movie companies, made up of employees all surrounded by constant reminders that they work for a mega-conglomerate always worried about making back its investment. Though owned by Disney, Pixar is still, creatively, the construct of Steve Jobs, a first-generation technological entrepreneur and visionary.

“We’re a studio of pioneers who, if you look at it technically, were the ones who invented much of computer animation” says Lasseter. “Everything we’ve done no one had done before—it was all new. So that creates a group of people who strive to break new ground. It’s addicting. When someone comes in and says, ‘This is something no one has ever done before,’ we all get excited. We have a company culture that celebrates being pioneers.”

He adds: “Because we’re a culture of inventors, nothing is standard operating procedure for us. We constantly reevaluate and reexamine everything we do. We go back and study what works and what didn’t work and we get excited about what didn’t work because, for us, that’s a challenging new problem to solve.”

The Pacific Islands affinity for processed, canned meats dates, in large part, to World War II, which brought Spam and Marines to the region, though bio-anthropologists suggest that cultures built around long ocean voyages favor those with genetic predisposition to building ample fat reserves.

consumption, ethnicity, food and drink, health, horizons of the possible, islands, obesity, oceana

Nate

:

While the report said Australia had overtaken the United States as the fattest nation on the planet, recent U.S. studies show around 34 percent of Americans are overweight or obese.

And small Pacific nations top World Health Organization lists, with 94.5 percent of people in tiny Nauru classed as overweight, leading to chronic diabetes problems on the island.

The Federated States of Micronesia (91.1 percent), the Cook Islands (90.9 percent), Tonga (90.8 percent) and Niue (81.7 percent) rounded out the WHO top five, while the United States came in at number nine, with 74.1 percent overweight or obese.

I wonder which children's books they wind up having translated into local languages for their libraries ...

asia, books, children, community, horizons of the possible, libraries, ngos, reading

Nate

:

For our readers who are unfamiliar with Room to Read, can you explain what it is?
We do three things: We build schools. We establish multilingual libraries and fill them with thousands of books. And we provide long term scholarships for girls because girls are often left out of the education system. Basically, we’re a group that is committed to reaching 10 million kids across the world with the life-long gift of education. In education lies the key to self sufficiency—and the best long term ticket out of poverty.

What does a $20 Donation do for Room to Read?
This is a perfect price point. Twenty dollars is sufficient to sponsor a girl’s scholarship for one month. We can also print 20 local-language children books in languages that have never really had children’s books before. It’s one of the reasons there’s such an illiteracy problem in the developing world—there’s just no children’s book industry.

You gotta love the sort of patience required for endeavors like this.

anthropology, central america, cultural worlds, music, sound

Nate

:

Sounds still play an important role in Mexican society. A cow bell announces the arrival of the garbage truck outside Mexico City homes. A trilling, tuneless flute heralds the knife sharpener’s arrival. A whistle emitting cat meows says the lottery ticket seller is here.

But pre-Columbian instruments often end up in a warehouse, Velazquez said, “and I’m talking about museums around the world doing this, not just here.”

That’s changing, said Tomas Barrientos, director of the archaeology department at Del Valle University of Guatemala.

“Ten years ago, nothing was known about this,” he said. “But with the opening up of museum collections and people’s private collections, it’s an area of research that is growing in importance.”

Velazquez meticulously researches each noisemaker before replicating it. He travels across Mexico to examine newly unearthed wind instruments, some dating back to 400 B.C. and shaped like animals or deities. He studies reliefs and scans 500-year-old Spanish chronicles.

But making replicas is only part of the work. Then he has to figure out how to play them. He’ll blow into some holes and plug others, or press the instrument to his lips and flutter his tongue. Sometimes he puts the noisemaker inside his mouth and blows, fluctuating the air from his lungs.

He experimented with one frog-shaped whistle for a year before discovering its inner croak.

One of the most vexing things about being an experimental scientist is the possibility of your discoveries—as with all cultural goods—having horrific unintended consequences, as this obituary of the inventor of a precursor of Agent Orange reminds us.

bioethics, science, war

Andy

:

He once thought, he said, that the way to be a moral scientist was to avoid projects with bad applications. But he had changed his mind. The vital thing was to stay involved; to speak, write, testify, and make sure that research was turned not to evil, but to good. For more than 20 years he taught bioethics at Yale, a course he had started and which, by his last year, was one of the most popular in the college. His country forgot, but he did not, the mangrove ghosts.

Judith Thurman's remarkable article on the 32,000-year-old art of southern France is unfortunately not available on line. It gives us a glimpse into both the culture making of our earliest ancestors, and the ongoing effort to interpret what they made. But for my money this paragraph is the most intriguing . . .

art, europe, history, horizons of the possible, painting

Andy

:

[The cave at] Chauvet was a bombshell. . . . Its earliest paintings are at least thirty-two thousand years old, yet they are just as sophisticated as much later compositions. What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, [author George] Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a “classical civilization.” For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been “deeply satisfying”—and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.

A nice parable of a creation far outpacing its creator.

asia, colonialism, cultivation and creation, food and drink, horizons of the possible, migration, trends

Nate

:

Curry’s conquest of the world began with the conquest of India by the East India Company. Madras curry in its various forms (the word deriving from the Tamil kari and the Telugu kara, as also from similar sounding terms in Kannada and Malayalam), became the most hybrid and ubiquitous of all India’s spicy (masala) sauces and stews. Normally this was served with rice in the south and with soft wheat breads such as chapattis, parathas, puris, or simple nan in the north. The author is not quite correct when she says that the British invented curry: there is not a respectable household anywhere in the countryside that does not produce its own unique curries, with secrets handed down from mother to daughter. But it is true that, starting in Madras, a hybrid Anglo-Indian cuisine spread and became ubiquitous, not only throughout all of the subcontinent (including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka), but gradually throughout the rest of Asia and Africa, and finally to Europe and the Americas.

This article (though not without its political slant) is a master class in how culture sets the horizons of the possible, in one of the most fundamental aspects of life: fertility and reproduction. There's also an intriguing section on what it means to shrink a city in an era of declining population.

children, cities, europe, family, horizons of the possible

Andy

:

There would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. Aassve put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”

I wonder how well these new parental nicknames will age? Also ... it's not clear from the article whether there's any racial diversity in their interview pool, or whether everyone's white. African American and many Latino/a cultures have long had a much more fluid sense of names, nicknames, diminutives, etc. so I doubt they'd be as surprised by this new "trend".

children, family, names, parents, primordial stories, scale

Nate

:

The change in the way these children address their parents probably stems from baby boomers’ less authoritarian child-raising practices. Technology is a factor, too, given the offhand style that people use in instant messages and cellphone texts. The Internet has made people comfortable using names that are not their own - in particular, the frequent use of screen names online has made naming a bit more elastic, said Cleveland Evans, a psychology professor at Bellevue University in Nebraska who is a former president of the American Name Society, a group that studies the cultural significance of names. Screen names, he said, “might have made people freer to think of the same person addressed by multiple names, and that’s what nicknaming is.”

Pity the plight of vulnerable European letters! Really, though, one thing I love about the web in recent years is how, more and more, non-latin alphabets are rendering correctly, without fuss or extra downloads, in my browser window. May the increase continue!

alphabets, europe, government, horizons of the possible, internet, language, orthography, typography

Nate

:

In practical terms the ISO ruling now means that in future it should be easier to find the Eszett on computer keyboards and in programmes. But it remains to be seen how keyboard manufacturers will react. Other vulnerable European letters have come under threat in the internet era, such as the Scandinavian vowels æ, ø and å. However, official recognition for the Eszett should mean that it is protected, at least for the time being, and cannot be scrapped as it has been in Swiss German.

Kerstin Güthert, managing director of the Council for German Spelling Reform, said: “It’s up to the people to decide whether or not they will use it.”

Germany’s typographers, at least, are predicting its comeback and celebrating the Eszett’s new-found status.