Category: Culture

Historians Imagine What Paris Sounded Like in the 18th Century

Imagine the sounds coming out of a busy blacksmith shop in an alleyway in Paris sometime back in the 18th century: the hammering of wrought iron, the rhythmic whoosh of air as the blacksmith uses a bellows to stoke a fire.

We have no recordings of the actual sounds of Paris in those early days, so to try and make those 18th-century streets and alleys of Paris come to life takes a bit of careful historical research and a little imagination. Continue reading “Historians Imagine What Paris Sounded Like in the 18th Century” →

Fake News Is Not the Real Media Threat We’re Facing

From all the recent hand-wringing about “fake news,” you would think that the hand-wringers had never stood in a supermarket checkout line, surrounded by 72-point headlines about alien abductions and miracle cures.

Fake news has been around as long as real news, as any historian of early modern Europe can tell you (Renaissance readers gobbled up stories about women giving birth to rabbits, and men from Africa with faces in their chests). Social media has certainly transformed how fake news circulates, speeding up its circulation and extending its reach and impact. The temptation to blame many of our current ills on it—and by extension, on Mark Zuckerberg—is understandable. But the hand-wringing has in fact distracted attention from a much more important problem involving the American media. That problem is not fake news but the continuing delegitimization of real news by American conservatives. This delegitimization has been taking place for a long time (as The Nation’s Eric Alterman has meticulously reported, and as even some conservative media figures have admitted), but during the past year it has taken a frightening new turn. If the mainstream American news media are to have any hope of avoiding potentially catastrophic results—both for themselves and for American democracy—they need to change how they report on American politics, and on the ideological apparatchiks they continue to describe, misleadingly, as “journalists.” [ . . . ]

Read Full Story at: Fake News Is Not the Real Media Threat We’re Facing | The Nation

The Voice of a Different Generation

Héloïse Letissier discussed her music, identity and the faith in this generation

It can be difficult to know where Héloïse Letissier ends and her on-stage persona Christine and the Queens begins. She’s happy to clarify. “It’s really the same thing,” she says. “Christine is just me, Héloïse, without the boundaries.”

The Nantes-born performer, 28, is part of a new genre of musicians eschewing the explicit femininity often associated with pop music and instead embracing fluid notions of gender through performance, lyrics and attire; Letissier’s go-to outfit is an androgynous two-piece tailored suit.

The release of her catchy synth-pop debut album Chaleur Humaine (‘Human Warmth’) has made her a star in Europe, where she has performed alongside such luminaries as Madonna and Elton John. In October she begins her first, much-anticipated U.S. headline tour, accompanied by male dancers, her ‘Queens’.

Watch the video interview with Héloïse Letissier

It’s a lot of attention for someone who says she was a loner as a child. Letissier remembers unsuccessfully trying to fit in with her peers, being far more comfortable reading than socialising. She was bullied, but found solace in a love of words. “Because I was always writing, people would ask me to help them write love letters, like Cyrano de Bergerac.” [ . . . ]

Full Story: The Voice of a Different Generation | TIME

Jean-Michel Jarre Live In Paris

 

30 years ago, a Jean-Michel Jarre gig would have been all about extravaganza on a Brobdingnagian scale, an unashamedly Debordian hymn to distraction, with compliant spectators exceeding the visual peripheries and spilling over the horizon. It would probably be in the outdoors, at the invitation of the municipalities of the world’s finest squares, panoramically vast and accommodating millions of sets of eyes with dazzling lasers soundtracked by sheer sonic bombast. These spectacles were the bread and circuses and the loaves and the fishes all rolled into one, during a decade where more always meant more.

For a lone Frenchmen who doesn’t sing, Jean-Michel Jarre has sold an extraordinary amount of records. 80 million is the estimate, which is probably about 10 million more than an era-defining group like Duran Duran. Oxygène on its own has sold somewhere in the region of 15 million to date. Although still popular of course, it’s difficult to reimagine the kind of adoration that Continue reading “Jean-Michel Jarre Live In Paris” →

Rockette Speaks Out About Donald Trump Inauguration Performance

An exclusive look inside the turmoil backstage.

The dancer next to Mary was crying. Tears streamed down her face through all 90 minutes of their world-famous Christmas Spectacular as they kicked and pirouetted and hit mark after mark on the glittering Radio City Music Hall stage. This was Thursday, three days before Christmas, the day the Rockettes discovered they’d been booked to perform at the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump.

“She felt she was being forced to perform for this monster,” Mary told MarieClaire.com in an exclusive interview. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable standing near a man like that in our costumes,” said another dancer in an email to her colleagues. [ . . . ]

Full Story: Rockette Speaks Out About Donald Trump Inauguration Performance