Audio companion to Alex Ross’s charming New Yorker piece about Marlboro Music [available here behind a pay-wall, alas]. Included is a live recording from last summer of the slow movement of Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat Major, with Mitsuko Uchida, piano; Soovin Kim, violin; and David Soyer, cello. Well worth a listen.
My favorite random musical film interlude of the 1960s: Fran Jeffries performing “Meglio Stasera” in The Pink Panther (dir. Blake Edwards).
According to Wikipedia, the song — composed by Henry Mancini — “is a candombe, a genre of popular dance music from Montevideo, Uruguay.” The candombe’s requisite drummers — the cuerda — can be seen in the background, along with Peter Sellers, David Niven, and the rest of the film’s cast.
Now a standard, the song has been performed in English (“It Had Better Be Tonight”, lyric by Johnny Mercer) by everyone from Lena Horne and Michael Bublé to John Barrowman(!) of Torchwood. But then there’s this rarity from Donna Summer, singing in the original Italian, long before “Con Te Partirò”.
An ironworker and bike racer, Mr. Marmo, 26, spent much of his teens and early 20s in and out of jail for vandalism, drugs and bar fights.
NYTimes.com: “One in 8 Million”
Danceteria Flyers 1982-1986
The fantastic Gallery of Danceteria flyers 82-86, complete with a clip of owner Rudolph on Nickelodian’s Livewire; n the pantheon of NYC nightclubs, Danceteria was known for dominating the early 80s downtown scene with a unique brand of performance and multimedia experimentation and was frequented by post-punks, poets, rockers, rapppers, Rastas, art stars, drags, suits, and more. Viva Haoui Montaug and No Entiendes!
Legendary club. And what an image: memories flood back.
My club-going started around 1985, so I only went to Danceteria a couple of times. The first was to see a performance by The Fabulous Pop Tarts — Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, who still work together as World Of Wonder, a production company with many successful TV and film credits under their belt. The rumor was that Madonna was somewhere in the club that night, which made sense to us because M. did a lot of her earliest performances there.
The club’s graphics were striking. Rudolf knew what he was doing.
via manaramaHulk no like money shot
@mejoe: “It has become increasingly common for websites and computer media to provide computer generated visual images, called avatars, to represent users and bots during online interactions. In this study, participants (N=255) evaluated a series of avatars in a static context in terms of their androgyny, anthropomorphism, credibility, homophily, attraction, and the likelihood they would choose them during an interaction. The responses to the images were consistent with what would be predicted by uncertainty reduction theory. The results show that the masculinity or femininity (lack of androgyny) of an avatar, as well as anthropomorphism, significantly influence perceptions of avatars. Further, more anthropomorphic avatars were perceived to be more attractive and credible, and people were more likely to choose to be represented by them. Participants reported masculine avatars as less attractive than feminine avatars, and most people reported a preference for human avatars that matched their gender. Practical and theoretical implications of these results for users, designers, and researchers of avatars are discussed.”
