Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
More Telegraph readers' photos of the snow and icy weather in Britain.
In the current cold snap, Britain feels more like Siberia, and - it seems - it looks like it, too, judging from Ian Wylie's picture of a snow-capped Russian Orthodox Church in Chiswick, west London.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
FROM THE C+D VAULT: ARETHA FRANKLIN PERFORMS “TOUCH MY BODY”
C&D.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Monday, February 6, 2012
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Lights Out.
Lights Out: Ayy mocks the Cinnamon Challenge, decides to try something a bit more “manly.”
[thanks steve!]
Gemma Arterton: I'll never do a sexy photoshoot again.
Gemma Arterton says she has posed for her last 'sexy' men's magazine shoot as she takes control of her career.
The star of Tamara Drewe and Tess of the D’Urbervilles has been approached to star in a film adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder after appearing in a London stage version last year.
It is a long way from the early days of her career, when she made her breakthrough as Bond girl Strawberry Fields in Quantum of Solace.
Arterton told Vogue magazine that she has mixed feelings about being a sex symbol and will not be posing in her underwear again.
"I did this photoshoot for a men’s magazine a couple of years ago that was quite sexy, I suppose, but I don’t think I’d do anything like that again,” she said.
“When it came out, I felt awkward, like I’d done something dirty. My mum was quite upset when she saw it.”
Arterton, 26, said that her early roles "served their purpose" but she is now choosy about film roles and determined to portray strong women on screen.
"When I read the script, I'm like, 'Hmph! No.'
"I think it happens in most jobs where women aren't equal. You have to fight through that barrier and when you do, you feel emancipated and you can do your thing."
Arterton won critical acclaim for her role in independent film The Disappearance of Alice Creed and her next role is in Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, a Hollywood production which she describes as "a cross between Pan's Labyrinth and Kill Bill".
Also to come is Byzantium, which promises to be a "neo-feminist vampire movie".
The actress's refusal to conform to Hollywood's size zero ideal has led to some rude comments. She recalled: "There was one reporter on the red carpet who said, 'How does it feel to know the press think you're fat?' And I said, 'How does it feel to know you're ugly and unintelligent?'
"It was the equivalent of me giving him a wallop. I nearly did, actually."
Arterton believes that her acting career is being guided by a guardian angel.
She said that white feathers appear wherever she goes - proof, in her mind, that an angel is watching over her.
“My mum is very psychic and believes in angels. I suppose it sounds quite twee when you describe it that way. But I have these feathers that follow me everwhere,” she explained.
“My mum told me that whenever there’s a white feather, it’s your guardian angel. I think my guardian angel is my nan. When I arrived in Berlin [to shoot Hansel and Gretel], I opened my suitcase and there was this big white feather on top. And I thought, ‘How did that get there?’ This happens a lot.”
On another occasion she went to audition for a film about which she had mixed feelings, and found a white feather in her pocket. “I decided not to do the movie. It just wasn’t right. It’s weird, isn’t it?”
:: The full interview is in the March issue of Vogue, on sale now.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
DID ALAN LOMAX INVENT PANDORA?
Decades before you surfed the musical waves on Pandora and Spotify, ethnomusicologist Alan Lomaxenvisioned a "global jukebox" that could publicly circulate the wealth of musical recordings he collected over years of fieldwork.
Who is Alan Lomax you ask? He was the preeminent musical folklorist in the United States whose 1930s field recordings in the American South introduced blues and folk music to a larger audience. He was the first to record Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, and he is arguably responsible for the folk boom of the 1960s that delivered us among others, Bob Dylan. To put it mildly, he was paramount to that era's powder-keg of pop-music revolution.
Who is Alan Lomax you ask? He was the preeminent musical folklorist in the United States whose 1930s field recordings in the American South introduced blues and folk music to a larger audience. He was the first to record Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, and he is arguably responsible for the folk boom of the 1960s that delivered us among others, Bob Dylan. To put it mildly, he was paramount to that era's powder-keg of pop-music revolution.
And now Lomax's dream of a global jukebox is closer to fruition than ever with word that his vast archive -- 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts -- is being digitized so it can be made available online. By the end of February, 17,000 tracks of Lomax's recordings will be released for free streaming online.
Most interesting -- from a tech standpoint -- is that when personal computers became available, Lomax used them to develop methods for classifying music. In his quest to identify similarities among musical styles from around the world, Lomax's systems were quite similar to the algorithms used today by music streaming sites like Pandora.
"Alan was doubly utopian, in that he was imagining something like the Internet based on the fact he had all this data and a set of parameters he thought of as predictive,” Columbia University music professor, John Szwed told the New York Times. Swed in also the author of “Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World.”
“But" Lomax "was also saying that the whole world can have all this data too," Szwed added, "and it can be done in such a way that you can take it home."
Helping spearhead the global jukebox project is the Association for Cultural Equity. On Tuesday, on what would have been Lomax's 97th birthday, the Global Jukebox label released a sampler of 16 digital downloads called "The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center."
[Via New York Times]
Credit: Shirley Collins
Friday, February 3, 2012
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
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