Arts and Culture

What would the host and panelists of the classic primetime television game show  What’s My Line?  have made of  The Masked Singer ,  a more recent offering in which panelists attempt to identify celebrity contestants who are concealed by elaborate head-to-toe costumes and electronically altered voiceovers. One expects such shenanigans might have struck them as a bit uncouth. Host  John Charles Daly  was willing to keep the ball up in the air by answering the panel’s initial questions for a  Mystery Guest  with a widely recognizable voice, but it’s hard to imagine anyone stuffing former First Lady  Eleanor Roosevel t into  the full body steampunk bee suit  the (SPOILER)  Empress of Soul  wore on The Masked Singer ’s first season. Mrs. Roosevelt’s Oct 18, 1953 appearance is a delight, especially her pantomimed disgust at the 17:29 mark, above, when blindfolded panelist  Arlene Francis  asks if she’s asso...

Pete Townshend played one. Jimmy Page famously brandished one. John McLaughlin basically started his own post-Miles Davis jazz group based around one. But the double-neck guitar played by Don Felder on The Eagles “Hotel California” may be the best known to all the children of the 1970s. The white guitar went on display in 2019 for the exhibition “Play It Loud” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art , which also featured such historical instruments as the humble Martin acoustic that Elvis Presley played on the Sun Sessions, to Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstein guitar. (And in a bit of DADA sculpture, the Met also displayed the remains of a drum set that Keith Moon destroyed during a live gig.) As part of the exhibit’s promotional tour, Don Felder, long since out of the Eagles and with a lawsuit behind him, picked up the guitar for a few minutes on CBS This Morning and played both the intro acoustic picking part and the famous solo from “Hotel California.’ Even though he isn’t mi...

“Wife Dies as She Watches,” announced a Daily Express headline after the broadcast of Nineteen Eighty-Four , a BBC adaptation of George Orwell’s novel . The article seems to have attributed the sudden collapse and death of a 42-year-old Herne Bay Woman to the production’s shocking content. That was the most dramatic of the many accusations leveled against the BBC of inflicting distress on the viewing public with Orwell’s bleak and harrowing vision of a totalitarian future. Yet that same public also wanted more, demanding a second broadcast that drew seven million viewers, the largest television audience in Britain since the Coronation of Elizabeth II, which had happened the previous year; Orwell’s book had been published just four years before that. This was the mid-1950s, a time when standards of televisual decency remained almost wholly up for debate — and when most of what aired on television was broadcast live, not produced in advance. Daring not just in its content b...

He would be a very simple person, and quite a stranger to the oracles of Thamus or Ammon, who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain. — Socrates The transmission of truth was at one time a face-to-face business that took place directly between teacher and student. We find ancient sages around the world who discouraged writing and privileged spoken dialogue as the best way to communicate. Why is that? Socrates himself explained it in Plato’s Phaedrus , with a myth about the origin of writing. In his story, the Egyptian god Thoth devises the various means of communication by signs and presents them to the Egyptian god-king Thamus, also known as Ammon. Thamus examines them, praising or disparaging each in turn. When he gets to writing, he is especially put out. “O most ingenious Theuth,” says Thamus (in Benjamin Jowett’s translation ), “you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of...

Far be it from me, or anyone, to know the future, but several signs point toward another season or two of staying indoors — and maybe putting travel plans on hold again. If, like me, you find yourself itching to get away, maybe to finally make the journey to see the art you’ve only seen in small-scale reproductions, don’t despair just yet. The art is coming to you, in ultra-high resolution, gigapixel images from Google Cultural Institute. See extraordinary levels of detail in famous works of art like Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring and Van Gogh’s Starry Night . “So much of the beauty and power of art lives in the details,” writes Google Cultural Institute Engineer Ben St. John. “You can only fully appreciate the genius of artists like Monet or Van Gogh when you stand so close to a masterpiece that your nose almost touches it.” This kind of intimacy is nearly impossible to achieve in a crowded gallery. Google’s enormous art photographs are, in some ways, superior ...

There are those of us who, when presented with dueling starships in a movie or television show, always make the same objection: there’s no sound in outer space. In the short film above, this valid if aggravatingly pedantic charge is confirmed by Lori Glaze, Director of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate’s Planetary Science Division. “Sound requires molecules,” she says. “You have to be able to move molecules with the sound waves, and without the molecules, the sound just doesn’t move.” Space has as few as ten atoms per cubic meter; our atmosphere, by contrast, has more ten trillion trillion — that’s “trillion trillion” with two Ts. No wonder Earth can be such an infernal racket. But as every schoolchild knows, the rest of solar system as a whole is hardly empty. In twenty minutes, the The Sounds of Space takes us on a tour of the planets from Mercury out to Pluto and even Saturn’s moon of Titan, not just visualizing their sights but, if you like, auralizing their sounds. ...