An Animated David Lynch Explains Where He Gets His Ideas
Renée Zellweger on Returning to Film After a Six-Year Absence
“I needed to grow as a person in ways that didn’t revolve around my work”
Zellweger explains that playing Jones again twelve years after Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reasonwas both familiar and challenging. She says, “Familiar because the process is similar, and I feel like I know her pretty well, and a different kind of challenge because I’ve never had to show the ways in which a person evolves in her life and the ways in which she doesn’t.”
In order to decide where the character stands now, Zellweger spoke with the direct about how Jones had changed. She reveals, “There were interesting conversations with Sharon Maguire, the director, about how [Bridget] might have gotten her life together — she’s a little bit more mature, she’s progressed professionally, moved into property ownership in London and has achieved her ideal weight. And still her life is a relative mess. I like the message in that: that we can tick off the boxes, and yet we still don’t quite have it together. And that’s pretty much the truth of growing up, isn’t it?”
(via)
The 3 Stages Of A Successful Music Launch
Music Launch Phase #1: Intrigue
The Intrigue phase is the longest phase of the launch and it begins before your fanbase even know about your new project.
Its goal is to take back the curtain and give your community a sneak peek at what you’re working on.
You could do this by using video on Facebook Live and Periscope or even by sharing images and visual stories on Snapchat and Instagram.
Music Launch Phase #2: Launch
During our interview, Steve made a very interesting point: “Even though this is where many indie artists spend a lot of time on, Launch is actually a relatively short phase.”
Up until now, you may have thought that you’d need to spend months and months in the Launch phase…
Have you ever heard of the “blitz marketing campaign” concept?
It’s a strategy where you focus on pre–arranging press coverage, digital marketing campaigns, etc. and launch everything over a short period of time.
Music Launch Phase #3: Support
Think about it: your community knows what you’ve been working on, they’ve given you feedback, and they feel like they’ve been active participants in the music creation process.
What do you think will happen when your EP is finally ready to be launched and you’re looking for support?
Your community – which has been EMOTIONALLY involved in the whole process – will help you out.
(via)
Dancing and Empathy – Does dance Training Make You ‘Feel’ More?
A paper published last month in the Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that dancers, with their finely honed control over their bodies through which they can express emotion, are more sensitive than most in perceiving such emotion in others. Or, as The Washington Post summed it up: dancers are more emotionally sensitive than the rest of us.
The study’s abstract puts it in a somewhat more technical way:
Results showed that motor expertise in affective body movement specifically modulated both behavioural and physiological sensitivity to others’ affective body movement.
One of the researchers was Julia F Christensen, a research fellow in the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit at City University London. She told the Post,
The very cool thing about this study is that the dancers not only recognized the emotions better, but their bodies would also respond more sensitively to the displayed emotional movements. Dancers’ bodies differentiated between different emotions that were expressed in the clips, where the controls didn’t.
(via)
Così Fan Tutte: What Can The Online Dating Generation Can Learn From Mozart’s ‘School for Lovers’?
‘The School for Lovers’. That was Mozart and Da Ponte’s alternative title for Così fan tutte – an opera as much celebrated for its nuanced depiction of love as for its glorious music. But in a world where apps like Tinder and Grindr amass millions of users each day, it’s hard to imagine how a classical idea of a lovers’ academy could bear any similarities to the seemingly shallow world of modern dating.
It’s within this world – and, you’d be forgiven for having missed this story back in 2008 – you’d find Amy Taylor of Newquay, and her husband Dave Pollard. They had married after initially meeting online in the virtual-reality forum Second Life, but then divorced three years later after Amy discovered that Dave’s avatar had been cyber-cheating with someone else’s avatar back on the web. (Do keep up at the back). The story was accompanied by profiles of the real Dave, who bore little resemblance to his chosen online avatar, a 13 stone, six-foot-four hunk with long streaked hair and improbably huge pectoral muscles, living in a ‘sprawling three-bedroom detached villa.’
Anyone who has ever told a white lie to impress someone, or bigged themselves up in front of a potential date, or posted an ‘enhanced’ picture on a dating website, should pause before they cast any stones at poor Dave and his optimistic online double.
(via)
Review: The Merchant Of Venice
André Tchaikowsky’s lifestory is almost worthy of opera, the end necessarily tragic. So it’s perhaps not surprising that, in his hands, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice should emerge as more tragedy than comedy, withTchaikowsky painting something of himself – depressive, gay and Jewish – into the characters of both merchant Antonio, manifestly in love with Bassanio, and the money-lending Shylock.
In Keith Warner’s production – first seen at Bregenz in 2013 and now getting its UK premiere in Welsh National Opera’s Shakespeare-themed season – Antonio is not alone in his blatant anti-semitism, and casting of the African American, Lester Lynch, as Shylock gives a further racist edge. For some, this treatment will only fuel the perception of a problematic play, better avoided, yet the baiting and the venom to which Warner subjects Shylock carry a deliberately shocking contemporary resonance.
Tchaikowsky’s music presents a curious mixture of styles, primarily nervily Bergian but with Brittenesque passages too, notably in the brass writing; recorder and lute feature in cod-Renaissance music from a stage band accompanying a Marlene Dietrich singer in white top and tails. Britten’s acuity of word-setting is lacking, though, and Tchaikowsky’s tendency to use the spoken word at points of high tension diminishes rather than heightens their impact.
(via)
Jonas Kaufmann ~ “Una furtiva lagrima”/L’elisir d’amore