Arts and Culture

Even COVID-19 can't stop NPR's series of Tiny Desk Concerts, which has previously featured Yo-Yo Ma , Adele, Wilco, The Pixies , and many, many other talented musicians. As NPR explains below, the performance involved a little bit of technology and some magic. Enjoy: It didn't take long for Billie Eilish to become one of the biggest pop stars in the world, sweep the Grammy Awards' major categories and release the latest James Bond theme. And today, at just 18, she and her brother, Finneas, have accomplished what no one has been able to do for five and a half months: perform a Tiny Desk concert in what certainly appears to be the NPR Music offices. Of course, due to safety concerns, even the NPR Music staff can't set foot in the building that houses Bob Boilen's desk. But if you look over Eilish's shoulder, there's no mistaking the signs that she's appearing at the Tiny Desk in its present-day form: On the last day before staff began working...

We can spend a lifetime reading histories of ancient Rome without knowing what any of its emperors looked like. Or rather, without knowing exactly what they looked like: being the leaders of the mightiest political entity in the Western world, they had their likenesses stamped onto coins and carved into busts as a matter of course. But such artist's renderings inevitably come with a certain degree of artistic license, a tendency to mold features into slightly more imperial shapes. Seeing the faces of the Roman Emperors as we would if we were passing them on the street is an experience made possible only by high technology, and high technology developed sixteen centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire at that. "Using the neural-net tool Artbreeder , Photoshop and historical references, I have created photoreal portraits of Roman Emperors," writes designer Daniel Voshart . "For this project, I have transformed, or restored (cracks, noses, ears etc.) 800 images o...

People do not tend to answer the question, “do you like Phish?” with, “yeah, I guess they’re okay.” Those who like Phish, love Phish, devotedly and without reservation. And those who don’t like Phish, well…. For the purposes of maintaining objectivity, I shall pretend to remain agnostic on the question, but I do happen to think this kind of polarization is a mark of greatness, wherever one lands. Great art provokes. What could be more provocative than awesome riffs, 20-minute jams, and obscure in-jokes ? There is, admittedly, a significant you-had-to-have-been-there quality to Phish fandom.... Phish, and The Grateful Dead before them, have been instrumental in keeping live music—played at length and with abandon—relevant, not only through their constant touring but through the number of bands in their orbit who inspire their own devoted followings. Now the pandemic has made it impossible for fans of Phish, the String Cheese Incident, the Dave Matthews Band, Widespread P...

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_058_8-15-20.mp3 Prompted by the release of new album Folklore and the 2020 documentary Miss Americana , your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt speak with guest Amber Padgett about her love of Taylor, ranking the albums/eras, Taylor as songwriter/puppetmaster, why the hate, weird levels of fan engagement, double standards in expectations for female artists, and more. Like all of our discussions, this one is should be interesting to fans, haters, and folks who're just curious as to what all the fuss is about. A few of the sources we scanned to prepare:  " Taylor Swift: Every Single Album Ranked and Rated " by Hannah Myrlea " All of Taylor Swift's Albums, Ranked from Least to Most Iconic " by Abigail Abesamis " Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’ Is The Fastest Album Of 2020 To Sell 1 Million Units In The U.S. " by Bryan Rolli " Taylor Swift...

A couple years ago, obituaries began appearing online for the department store Sears after the 130-year-old American company announced its bankruptcy. Many of the tributes focused on Sears, Roebuck & Co’s catalog, and for good reason. Their massive mail-order business, the Amazon of its day, transformed the U.S., selling guitars to Delta blues and rock and roll musicians and shipping thousands of build-it-yourself houses to rural homesteaders and suburbanites. The sheer reach and scope of the Sears’ catalog can seem overwhelming…. That is, until we turn to the 1912 Harrods for Everything . This 1,525-page catalogue from London’s world-famous department store, Harrods, does seem to mean everything , with over 15,000 products available for purchase at the store’s location, by mail, or by phone (“anything, at any time, day or night”). You can see the enormous monument to commerce for yourself at Project Gutenberg . The catalogue took 13 years to scan. “Some idea of the vast qua...

Revisiting Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast a couple of decades after I read it last, I notice a few things right away: I am still moved by the prose and think it’s as impressive as ever; I am less moved by the machismo and alcoholism and more interested in characters like Sylvia Beach , founder of Shakespeare and Company , the bookstore that served as a base of operations for the famed Lost Generation of writers in Paris. “Sylvia had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were as alive as a small animal’s and as gay as a young girl’s,” Hemingway wrote of her in his memoir . “She was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.” Indeed, Hemingway also “recounts being given access to the whole of Sylvia Beach’s library at Shakespeare and Company for free after his first visit,” notes writer RJ Smith . Beach founded the shop in 1919, encouraged (and funded) by her partner Adrienne Monnier , who owned...