Accessing Universal Intelligence.
Human Ingenuity and Creativity. Our Cultural Heritage.
Favourite things. Music and Movies. Nature. Items that interest me on any topic.
Another great piece from Lindsey Stirling. I really like it. She is a very talented musician!
This piece somehow evokes a mini-series I have been watching recently:"Outlander". This miniseries is a mixture of fantasy and history.Fascinating show.
Pre-Order the new deluxe version of my album Shatter Me
coming out 11/28! It includes an acoustic version of Shatter Me, a full-color
48-page magazine with exclusive interviews and photos, plus word
magnets! Amazon:http://bit.ly/shattermedeluxe Barnes and Noble: http://bit.ly/bnshattermedeluxe
Made in EVERDREAM Directed by •
JOE SILL Executive Produced by • JAMES KHABUSHANI & RJ
COLLINS Produced by • NICK ERICKSON http://www.everdream.com Special
thanks to Everdream, EA, & Dragon Age!
And here's another great Lindsey Stirling piece - Roundtable Rival.
Lindsey Stirling To Tour Australia and New Zealand In February
28-year old classic violinist Lindsey
Stirling will tour Australia and New Zealand in 2015 performing in venues
generally reserved for rock concerts. Stirling was last in Australia in 2013 and her
Auckland show in February will be her first time in New Zealand. Lindsey’s debut album ‘Lindsey Stirling’ has been
one of the biggest sellers of 2014 on the US classical chart and peaked at no 23
on the Billboard chart. Her new album ‘Shatter Me’ debuted at no 2 in the
USA. Lindsey was noticed after appearing on the 2010
edition of ‘America’s Got Talent’ where she was introduced as a ‘hip-hop’
violinist. She has described the experience as “humiliating” after both Sharon
Osbourne and Piers Morgan told her she was “not good enough”. Lindsey Stirling will tour for Live
Nation.
Lindsey Stirling dates
February 14, Auckland, The Powerstation February 16, Adelaide, Fowlers Live February
17, Melbourne, The Forum February 20, Brisbane, The Tivoli February 21,
Sydney, Enmore Theatre February 23, Perth, Astor Theatre Tickets will go on sale at 10am Monday December
15. By Paul Cashmere With thanks to Noise
11
When this movie was screened in 1987 it wasn't a case of "have you seen it?" It was more a case of "how many times have you seen it?" It was, and still is, an inspiring and uplifting story with a great cast and a terrific soundtrack.
‘THE room for error is quite great,”
dancer Kurt Phelan says, with a nervous smile. “If you’re a centimetre over or
under you’re screwed.” His co-star Kirby Burgess nods. “It is an incredibly
demanding moment. It is not just getting up there; it is holding it.”
It’s Wednesday, 10.30am, and we are holed up in
the bowels of Sydney’s Capitol Theatre with the cast of Dirty Dancing
under the promise of learning the alchemy behind one of the most enduring
pop-cultural moments of the 20th century: we are here to learn the lift.
That memorable moment when Jennifer Grey leaps into the arms of Patrick Swayze
at the dramatic denouement to Emile Ardolino’s 1987 film; the moment that would
see Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes’s (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life win
an Academy Award and secure its future as a karaoke classic; the moment that
inspired a generation of would-be Johnnys and girls who just wanted to be his
Baby. The time of my life has arrived. Or has it?
The film may famously tell us nobody puts Baby in
a corner, but it turns out some are willing to put her on the floor. A penchant
for peanut butter and a fitness regimen that barely extends beyond vacuuming
means I lack the core strength needed to keep myself in the plank position
supported by my male companion. As for Phelan, it’s early days in rehearsals and
he’s still struggling to hold aloft a professional dancer. He isn’t going to
risk carrying a journalist. Undeterred, we resolve to practise the lift on terra
firma.
Phelan lies on his back and creates a perch with
his hands, anchoring his palms into my waist. I blush as I think about how
excited I’ve been about this moment and hope no one realises I’m wearing a
leotard beneath my clothes.
DIRTY Dancing opens in Sydney next
week, a decade after the adaptation of the classic film premiered on stage in
the same city. It has since toured globally. The production — the Sydney show is
directed by James Powell, with choreography by Michele Lynch — was adapted for
stage by Eleanor Bergstein, who also wrote the screenplay. Bergstein had a close
relationship with the film’s star, Swayze, and while she acknowledges the
actor’s death from pancreatic cancer five years ago gives the show’s return to
the stage extra resonance, she is reticent to speak about him, concerned his
memory will be exploited to sell the live show.
“The most important thing about Patrick was that
he was a very good person. He wanted to be a good person and he was certainly a
loving and loyal friend to me,” Bergstein says of the actor who was a relative
unknown until he was cast in Dirty Dancing, a role for which he received
a Golden Globe nomination.
Although the film was released in 1987, the story
unfolds over the summer of 1963. Before Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles
overtook America. “It was the last summer of liberalism” Bergstein says. “It was
a time when you did feel that anything was possible and that you could reach out
your hand and if your heart was pure you could change the world.” We all know the story. A shy and ungainly good
girl falls for a handsome bad boy. It’s hardly a revolutionary tale, so what
made the dance movie a cult classic and earned it a cool $US214 million at the
box office?
Bergstein believes it was that feeling of
expectancy, of being on the brink of something special, of discovering the
“upstairs” (conservative American society) and the “downstairs” (debauchery,
dirty dancing and botched backstreet abortions) of the era that pulled so many
people into the cinema.
Set at a resort in the Catskill Mountains in New
York State, the film script was inspired by snippets of Bergstein’s life. “There
is actually much more of Johnny than Baby in me. I was called Baby since I was
21 and I went to the Catskills with my parents, but I’m a dirty dancer,”
Bergstein says.
The film’s iconic dance choreography was all her
work.
“I’ve got dancing trophies that’ll turn your hands
green!” the 76 year old exclaims. “I was quite a little dirty dancer when I was
a kid.
“We did a combination of things based on the old
dirty dancing steps of my childhood, which basically came from both rhythm and
blues.”
Incredibly, the film was a tough sell for
Bergstein, who spent the early 1980s peddling it to countless
filmmakers.
“I had written 62 pages of dance description into
the script and no one could quite grasp what I was imagining,” she
says.
Eventually, Bergstein realised there was only one
way she was going to sell the script. “I’d have to get up on a table — this was a time
of very short skirts remember — and I guess you just do what you have to do,”
she recalls, laughing.
Bergstein would perform a risque movement in which
the female dancer pulls her leg up around the neck of her partner. “That’s the Eleanor signature step and I did that
for group of male executives after group of male executives.”
Eventually Bergstein’s vision came to life with
the help of a new studio, Great American Films Limited Partnership, and became a
box office hit. It was the first film to sell more than a million copies on home
video and now sits at No 1, above Grease and Pretty Woman, on Sky
Movies’ “Women’s Most Watched Films” list.
Bergstein had been approached for 25 years to
adapt the film for stage but she resisted, unwilling to trade off her project’s
loyal cult following. “Then the TV stations started running it in a loop
… and these statistics came out that instead of people dipping in and out they
were stopping their lives and some were sitting for 18 hours to watch it over
and over again,” she remembers.
“I realised people wanted to be there while the
story was happening again and if that was the case then we needed to look at
live theatre. But we knew it wasn’t something that could truthfully be a live
musical — the artificiality of that form would be very off-putting to our
particular audience.”
Intriguingly, it was a Bruce Springsteen concert
and his inspired use of video on stage that changed Bergstein’s mind about the
potential of a stage show. “I wanted to put together a live show with very
precise storytelling and the enormous kinetic excitement of a brilliant rock
concert,” she says.
Australia has a place in the writer’s heart. She
had wanted her “Johnny” in the stage production to be an Australian and says she
was attracted to our “masculine” dancers. In the early noughties, she sought to
find the best male dancer in the country and ended up begging to meet the lead
dancer of the Sydney Dance Company, Josef Brown.
“He came to breakfast on his motorcycle and I knew
it was him with his hooded eyes; he was a wild boy I could tell,” Bergstein
remembers. She knew she had only one shot to convince him to
leave his prestigious position. “Have you by any chance seen the film Dirty
Dancing?” she asked him. “And he said to me, ‘Yes that is the reason I
became a dancer,’ and we had him. He became the toast of the West End,” she
says.
Phelan, for his part, is also a big fan of the
film. “Swayze was a huge influence on me as a young male dancer,” he
says.
Australia has had its own love affair with the
film — with an unlikely audience, Bergstein says. She recalls being in the
country to do a live radio interview, during which she said hello on air to her
taxi driver from that morning. The show was quickly inundated with calls from
Australian truck drivers.
“This one (driver) said he was driving in his semi
outside of Melbourne and he watched the movie on a mini-computer on the seat
next to him as he drove. He knew the movie off by heart because he had watched
it over a thousand times,” Bergstein recalls. “The people on the computers taking the calls just
stared at me because while I had been talking they had got calls from 65 other
truck drivers who travelled with their Dirty Dancing DVDs.”
BACK in the studio, Phelan stretches out to take
my body weight. Even at ground level it takes trust, but I don’t look into his
eyes; I’m sizing up his muscles. Up we go. Like a toddler playing airplane, I
stretch my arms out like wings for balance, suddenly conscious of the effort it
is taking to keep my legs from swinging down. I make an awkward joke about how
my middle name is Grace. Phelan grimaces but the move is done. There’s no music
playing.
There’s no Swayze pushing his hand into the small of my back and
pressing his forehead intimately to mine. There’s no crowd of resort-goers
dancing gleefully around me. This is one for the professionals. This Baby, at
least, is happy to stay in the corner.
Dirty Dancing opens on November 28
at the Capitol Theatre, Sydney.
"This video covers some tips and tricks involving YouTube that help
enhance user experience. For a list of all of the links used in this
video, and to ask questions regarding this video, please visit the link
below:
The clip I posted above has some very useful hacks on it. I am interested in audio and video hacks in particular.I have often downloaded You Tube clips and made compilations that can be burned to a DVD and watched on a bigger screen. You can do likewise with some hard-to-get movies.If you have a Blu-Ray player on your computer you can use a double-sided DVD for the longer ones. You can make these compilations in Windows by using Windows Movie Maker. I don't know if Apple has an equivalent program, it probably does, but I do know that QuickTime is not an editing program. Windows Movie Maker allows you to burn the DVD in either PAL or NTSC format which is useful if you don't have a multi-region DVD player.I have found that in Windows 7 the menu function doesn't work very well: the FreeMake one does. I suppose the Windows 8 system may have improved on this feature. FreeMake is also a very useful program. In fact it was recommended to me by the local Apple help desk because I had used my iPhone to take a video clip and at that time I wasn't aware that the lens had to be in the top left corner. QuickTime no longer allows you to change the orientation of the clips but FreeMake does. Both FreeMake and Windows Movie Maker have editing abilities, unlike Quick Time. At this point it is useful to know that all clips downloaded from You Tube are Apple-compatible. By this I mean you can copy and paste them into your iTunes program under 'Movies', watch them there, and on your iPad or iPhone once you have synced them. You can also choose which ones you want to sync. If you are using Firefox, and it seems many people are, then you also have the option of getting add-ons that cover audio and video downloading. This is just as easy as Freemake, if not more so.Here is a link for audio and video and there are several others. I haven't tried this one but we all have our favourite music and it could be very handy. I just get annoyed that You Tube puts 'Watched' on everyone you have watched! You can get rid of this by scrolling down to the 'history' button and clearing it.
I haven't tried this as yet but if it is true I guess it is pretty easy also.
There are a few ways to watch blocked You Tube clips as well as the one I have posted in the side bar: This and this. As far as music-clip compilations are concerned I haven't as yet found a way to get the volume of the songs I have used to be even throughout. Then again, one has a similar problem with iTunes, especially annoying if you are using a docking station, or headphones. Like with your custom-made DVD's you need to have your finger near the volume control. I guess I will have to go back to You Tube and see if there is a clip that can help me out - there usually is!
A globe on a
two-dimensional screen seems pretty dull compared to map projections that look
like armadillos,
butterflies,
or deconstructed polygons. The
azimuthal orthographic (as it’s formally known) is hardly more than a snapshot
of Earth from some distant point in space, right?
Sure, except it was invented
thousands of years before we had anything capable of flying into space to send
back eyewitness accounts of our planet’s shape. Before then, the only way to see
Earth from an interstellar point of view was by combining math with crap-load of
imagination.
Most map projections bend and stretch the
globe until it’s flat enough to show the whole world at once. In other words,
most map projections show you so much that they lose their perspective.
The azimuthal orthographic is all
about perspective. It also has geometric distortions, but only for tricking your
brain into believing that the continents really are wrapping themselves
realistically around the horizon. It is so good at doing this that it makes us
see the world as if we were hundreds of thousands of miles away in space, and
write the experience off as mundane.
Or maybe the experience is
mundane because it is so familiar. The azimuthal orthographic is thousands of
years old. In the first century, Ptolemy described how a geographer named
Hipparchus used the projection, which he called the analemma, to map the
globe. (Thanks to the jerks who burned down the Library of Alexandria, we don’t
have Hipparchus’ original maps.)
Over the years, geographers toyed
with the projection, but it was always overshadowed by other methods. It didn’t
get much attention until 1613, when a Belgian cartographer named Francois
d’Aiguilon reintroduced the projection, and gave it the overwrought moniker we
know it by today.
D’Aiguilon was obsessed
with the behavior of light. In his six
volume treatise on optics, he presented
the azimuthal orthographic as an extreme exercise in point of view. Imagining
the azimuthal orthographic as looking down at Earth from a floating eye,
d’Aiguilon figured that moving the eye up or down would change the distance to
the horizon. In other words, the further you pull back, the more of the earth
behind the horizon’s curve you can see, to a maximum of exactly half of the
planet (even d’Aiguilon couldn’t see around corners, mon ami). This was
an extension of his work coming up with equations to measure how much a person
could see from a given viewpoint.
Carlos Furuti, a Brazilian
cartographer whose website is an awesome
resource for projections, shows how azimuthal orthographic projections can
be used to calculate how
much of Earth you can see at any altitude. For example, looking down from an airplane at 32,000
feet, you would be able to see about 221 miles in any direction. If you head up
to the International Space Station, your view is increased to 1,250 miles.
Impressive, but this is still only about 5 percent of Earth’s total surface at a
time. In order to get anywhere close to an entire hemisphere, our camera eye
must retreat past the moon, over 230,000 miles away. But remember, Hipparchus,
Ptolemy, and d’Aiguilon didn’t need to know about airplanes, space stations, or
even the distance to the moon in order to imagine how Earth’s visible horizon
would grow according to altitude. This is because they had imagination (ok,
trigonometry too). And their imaginations weren’t limited to flying into the
depths of space. The azimuthal orthographic has two sister projections that look
at the earth in ways nature never intended.
The first, called the
gnomonic, has the imaginary viewing eye looking outward from the center of the
earth. It has some cool navigational properties, but is perhaps most useful if
you’re trying to explain what the world looks like after smoking salvia.
The second, called the azimuthal
stereographic, also looks at the planet, but from an eye placed on the far side
of the globe looking through it. Where the orthographic causes the
continents to fall away, and the gnomonic stretches them into infinity, the
stereographic moderately stretches them towards the edges. Their sizes are
slightly off, but their shapes and arrangement stay true to life. As such, it’s
the most practical of the three, and is useful for teaching geography or
plotting sea voyages. Not only does it make a pretty classy looking world map,
Hipparchus also used it to map the stars.
Nowadays, we tend to think of
maps as tools for flattening the world and making its dimensions manageable. The
azimuthal orthographic looked at the earth another way, by giving dimensions to
the world’s perceived flatness. The map might not tell us much about Earth that
we don’t already know, but it’s an important reminder that only a few hundred
people in all of history have every seen the earth’s shape to confirm that it
is, in fact, a globe.
Picture above: Joan Blaeu’s 1664
shows how the azimuthal stereographic makes a fairly accurate world map, even
when made with incomplete knowledge of geography. Joop
Rotte/Wikipedia
"How marvellous that they are
still here for us. No rock band had ever grown old before." How true! Obviously I am a bit of a fan.
It’s the perfect name right? In
50BC, the Roman writer Publilius Syrus, a freed slave from Syria, wrote “Saxum
volutum non obducitur musco”, or “a boulder that rolls is not covered with
moss”. People have known this for a long time. When The Rolling Stones chose
their name, they chose international significance and universal
resonance.
Not, of course, that they did it
on purpose. These were wild things from the fringes of London and the pleasant
pastures of middle-class England. When these boys started chasing girls, smoking
and listening to Muddy Waters, the last thing on their minds was pancontinental
significance. They were after the action and, as lots of people know in lots of
languages, tumbling boulders cannot be tamed, or stopped, or told what to
do.
The story goes that it was Brian
Jones who christened them. Brian took his inspiration from a record that was
being played continuously in a Chelsea flat he shared with Mick and Keith, The
Best of Muddy Waters. Track five on side one of this fine disc was a song that
growled and wailed its way through a steamy confession about catfish and women
and husbands who were away. It was called Rollin’ Stone, and the way Muddy sang
it was the way the Devil might have sung it: slow, snaky and wicked.
Most of the Stones were actually
born in the 1940s, another kind of decade altogether.
The 1940s were full of
war. Apart from Bill Wyman, the others were born during the London Blitz. And
even if they didn’t remember it, its impact was in them: the destruction, the
blackness. Keith once told an interviewer that whenever he hears a siren in a
documentary about the war, his hair stands on end.
He was just a baby, but the
darkness got in. All this seeped into their sound, and even today, when they
tour the world as happy survivors, the thunder of the night-time bombing raids
can still be heard in Keith’s guitar and in the darkly destructive brilliance of
Mick’s lyrics: “I wanna see the sun, blotted out from the sky. I wanna see it
painted, painted, painted, painted black.” Who in popular music had ever thought
like that before?
Out of
time Until the Stones appeared,
British groups had sweet and innocuous names like Cliff Richard, below, and The Shadows,
or Joe Brown and The Bruvvers. Those nice boys from Liverpool, The Beatles, who
had also turned up in London in the summer of 1962 to record their first single,
Love Me Do, had a fun name. They wanted to “hold your hand”. The Rolling Stones
wanted to hold a whole lot more than that. They wanted to spend the night
together.
And they certainly knew how to
dress for the occasion. Has there ever been a more alluring or irresistible
musical presence than Michael Philip Jagger? When Mick Jagger strutted across
Hyde Park in 1969 in that dress, and said goodbye to Brian in those
unforgettably uncomfortable circumstances, he wasn’t just blurring the divide
between yin and yang, between male and female. Mick was completing the
instruction book on how a rock star should look.
Where The Beatles looked sweet in
their matching suits and buttoned-up empire jackets, the Stones never pulled off
the ‘we-all-look-the-same’ shtick. When Keith put on a suit, he messed it up,
like a schoolboy messing up his uniform. Whatever they wore, they looked unruly,
but always cool.
Look at the way each of them
makes a tangible and unique contribution to the whole: the way the different
pieces lock together to form a band. We’re used to it nowadays: the flamboyant
lead singer who throws the moves; the stony bass-player who never shifts; the
rhythm guitarist on the edge of chaos; the other guitarist who does the frilly
bits. And then, right at the back, lurking in the shadows and keeping it solid
the drummer who doesn’t say much. It’s the classic rock line-up, and the Stones
created it.
Let your hair
down The big thing about The Rolling
Stones when they appeared was their long hair. The divide between longhairs and
shorthairs runs through English history like a Grand Canyon. Britain has only
ever had one genuinely cultured monarch: Charles I, who wore pearl earrings,
floppy white silks and long hair that fell to his shoulders in beautiful
cascades. Mick and Brian, around the time of Their Satanic Majesties Request,
adopted a kind of 1960s variation on it.
Charles’s followers, the
Cavaliers, were notoriously glamorous. But the Roundheads, as they were called
then, the puritan followers of Oliver Cromwell, loathed Charles I. They loathed
his silk tunics, his satin doublets, his art, his wife. But most of all, they
loathed his hair. When the Stones arrived on the doorstep of the 1960s, with
their cuffs a-popping and their locks a-flouncing, that prejudice was still
there. Long hair wasn’t just considered effeminate or impractical: it was
dangerous.
How marvellous that they are
still here for us. No rock band had ever grown old before. So how the hell do
you do it? While all the others fell away – split up, gave up, died or went
part-time – the Stones stayed on the job and saw it through, heroically. The
tumbling boulders just keep tumbling – it’s what they do.
By Waldemar Januszczak
Adapted from an essay
by Waldemar Januszczak in the new book The Rolling Stones, which will be published in December by
TASCHEN.
