Category Archives: New Utopia

HARVARD Nestled in the woods of Harvard is a message waiting to be discovered: Hope is the watchword now.

These words of Bronson Alcott flutter on a printed banner near the entrance to Fruitlands Museum. Flapping in the wind on large banners throughout the grounds are the words of other transcendentalists, too, utopians and some contemporary philosophers.

Jane Marsching, the 2020 artist-in-residence at Fruitlands Museum, is creating outdoors her interpretation of the newest exhibit indoors.

Recruiting for Utopia: Print and the Imagination, which opened Sept. 5, is an exhibit in two distinct parts. There is a historical collection and a contemporary collection of visual artifacts.

Shana Dumont Garr, curator at Fruitlands, explained the overall premise of the exhibit: To look at New England in two specific time periods: the 1840s and 2019-2020. And to explore how print and design helped express peoples worries and their desires to make the world a better place.

When we think of utopia in this way it was peoples imaginings of what was good, said Dumont Garr. Utopia has meant different things to different people.

In the1840s there were various ideologies competing for the attention of New Englanders. Since there was no internet to share memes, visual representations of complex ideas and concepts were created to spread particular beliefs.

For a little background, 1843 is the year that Bronson Alcott, educator, reformer and father of "Little Women" author Louisa May Alcott, tried unsuccessfully to establish Fruitlands, the experimental utopian community.

About that same time William Miller, a farmer turned preacher, who was born in Pittsfield, prophesied the return of Christ, the end of the world and the 1843 ascension of the true believers to heaven utopia. Miller was a charismatic speaker who gained followers across many social sectors. The Millerites were aligned with the temperance and abolitionist movements and they were encouraged to help others prepare to be worthy to ascend into heaven.

At large outdoor gatherings called tent revivals, Miller would preach to hundreds of people. To help spread the word, large-scale banners printed on linen were hung from the tent depicting timelines of real historical events, blended with scripture from the Old Testament. There were also frightening images of mythical beasts and lots of mathematical calculations. Instilling fear of an apocalypse was an important aspect of Millers proselytizing.

Miller successfully recruited many followers with his persuasive speaking and his didactic visuals. Flyers and pamphlets were printed and distributed and newspapers were sold to further promote his teachings.

The Millerites were only one of many Protestant organizations during this time of resurgent religious fervor. The Shakers in nearby Harvard believed that living a life of simplicity and perfection in all their endeavors would produce a utopia on Earth. They are known for their fine craftsmanship and innovation, but on display in this exhibit are writings devoted to their spirituality.

Shaker Sister Sarah Bates secretly documented in ink on paper her spiritual communications using detailed biblical symbols and text. It was kept secret, rolled up in a drawer, because creating two dimensional art was forbidden in the Shaker faith.

Also on display are handmade and printed ephemera from the Freemasons, the Phrenologists (practitioners of a pseudoscience who claimed they could discern a persons character from the shape of the skull), and various flyers concerned with the urgent issues of the times.

I am hoping that it will be reassuring for people to see that in 1840s New England, it wasnt just farmers who all got along and lived a simple life. There were conflicting ideas and life was just as complicated then, said Dumont Garr.

Today, even with the internet to digitally spread content, there is still a place for the printed word. Think about the signs we have all seen for the Black Lives Matter and Hate Has No Home Here movements, or Greta Thurnbergs Skolstrejk fr klimatet (School Strike for Climate). These powerful messages have spread organically with simply printed yard signs.

The contemporary part of the exhibit is an eclectic collection of printed materials, pamphlets, street signs, posters, zines and a comic book, all created within the past few years by diverse artists. These physical documents highlight issues as varied as the slave market at Faneuil Hall, saving the U.S. Postal Service, the repatriation of sensitive objects belonging to indigenous peoples, and the interface of beekeeping and environmental injustice.

This is not the singular, precious, one-of-a-kind type of artwork destined to hang on the wall of a museum, viewed only by people who have the privilege of visiting that place. These works were intended to be distributed, to convey a message and to recruit others who support the message, building a community in the process.

Paige Johnston, an art historian and co-curator for the contemporary portion of Recruiting for Utopia, explained the value of making art to be distributed. It is a very democratic art form. You can make it out of inexpensive materials, whether that is by photocopying or by hand stitching on paper you have made yourself out of old clothes. There is a level of economic and monetary accessibility.

And Marsching, the artist-in-residence, is creating banners that flutter in the breeze at Fruitlands just as the Millerite banners would have done in the mid-1800s. Marsching is a visual multidisciplinary artist, a professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and a climate change activist. For her project, Utopian Press, she uses bark and acorns foraged on the grounds of Fruitlands to make the ink for the 3-by-30-foot banners hung from trees.

Her ink is steeped in a passive solar oven that she made herself. Marsching designed and built a portable backpack letterpress that can be carried out onto the trails at Fruitlands for groups to collaboratively create the banners onsite and hang them from the trees. Marschings banners visually recreate the words and ideas of the utopians.

"Recruiting for Utopia" runs through March 21, 2021. While visiting Fruitlands, do not miss the exquisite work of Boston painter Polly Thayer Starr. Also on view are some of Starrs personal items and journals.

See the rest here:

Recruiting for Utopia exhibit at Fruitlands looks to the past and the present - Worcester Telegram

If theres one thing that film and TV history teaches us, its that strangers visiting remote communities is not a good idea. The Wicker Man, Netflixs Apostle, Midsommar there are no happy endings here. Sky-HBO co-production The Third Day, starring Jude Law and Naomie Harris, is the next big-budget project to adopt the premise and the results are mixed.

Split into three separate parts Summer (three episodes), Autumn (an immersive theatre event broadcast live from London) and Winter (three episodes) The Third Day is at the very least inventive. In the first part, Summer, Law plays bereaved husband Sam an episodic psychosis sufferer who happens upon the mysterious Osea Island during festival season. Reachable only at low tide via a causeway, this chunk of British land off the coast of Essex is populated by the likes of Paddy Considines Mr Martin and Emily Watsons foul-mouthed Mrs Martin (How c**ting lovely! she remarks during one scene), whose inn plays host to off-kilter shenanigans involving the locals. While staying there, Sam meets Jess (Fantastic Beasts Katherine Waterston) and the linebetween fantasy and reality begins to blur.

The Third Day stars Jude Law as Sam, in the midst of a nervous breakdown. Credit: Sky

In the middle of a breakdown, Sams fever-dream state is captured via intense close-ups by director Marc Munden. Aided by a cryptic script from Dennis Kelly and Cristobal Tapia de Veers disturbing score, the former-Utopia triumvirate have succeeded in crafting a haunting and colourful mystery drama that deals with weighty themes like faith and grief.

Skipping Autumn (the immersive theatre event hasnt been filmed yet),The Third Day arrives at Winter, which belongs to Naomie Harris character Helen. Driving to Osea with her two young daughters she explains that the island is a great archaeological treasure to her studious eldest the familys idyllic weekend away quickly spirals into a nightmare. Go home, believe me its for the best! a local hotelier says before shutting the door in Helens face. Does the Booking.com star rating mean nothing to these people?

Naomie Harris plays Helen, a mother who takes her children to a mysterious island off the coast of Essex. Credit: Sky

As Helen and her squabbling kids roam the freezing terrain, encountering weirdo after weirdo and the odd mutilated animal, Harris imbues Helen with an affable determination. This time we know what shes up against, so its a relief to find were in the company of someone a bit more attentive than Laws Sam. When the customs of the islanders manage to rattle our new protagonist, the atmosphere in The Third Day morphs into a low-key kind of horror la Ben Wheatleys Kill List. This is the shows best form and itll be fascinating to see which way Autumn goes when it airs in October.

Four months after it was originally scheduled to premiere COVID-19 pushed back post-production The Third Day arrives with two standout episodes (five were available for review, not including the live-streamed, mid-season Autumn and October 19s last episode). It might not blow anybodys socks off but for those who choose to stick by it, next months finale promises a mouthwatering if, likely ill-fated climax.

The Third Day premieres September 15 on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV

Continued here:

The Third Day review: Jude Laws inventive mystery drama from the team behind Utopia - NME.com

AGENT SONYAMoscows Most Daring Wartime SpyBy Ben Macintyre

We have at last, in Ben Macintyres Agent Sonya, the tale of a fully fleshed-out female spy. Not a femme fatale with a tiny pistol in her purse, Sonya was a spy who loved her kids and was racked by guilt for neglecting them, who had serious babysitter problems, a woman whose heart was broken by Mr. Wrong a woman very much like the rest of us. Except not quite. Macintyre, the author of numerous books on spies and espionage, has found a real-life heroine worthy of his gifts as John le Carrs nonfiction counterpart.

Le Carr, however, could not have invented Ursula Kuczynski, a.k.a. Agent Sonya. For this panoramic account of espionage from Weimar Germany through the Cold War is, above all, a womans story. Macintyre draws on Sonyas own journals, which capture the stressful balancing act of spymaster, mother and lover of several men during the most dangerous decades of the 20th century. Like many supremely successful women, Sonya benefited from men underestimating her.

Her journey began in the lawless streets of Berlin in the 1920s, as Communists and Nazis brawled and the Weimar Republic unraveled. A blow from a policemans rubber truncheon during her first street demonstration set the 16-year-old on the road to revolution. Although born to a prosperous, secular Jewish family from Berlins bourgeois Zehlendorf district, she signed up with the Communists, who seemed to be the only ones prepared to shed blood to fight the Nazis. And once she was seduced by their promise of a workers utopia, Sonya never swerved from the cause.

[ Read an excerpt from Agent Sonya. ]

From Shanghai, where Sonya was caught up in the struggle between Chiang Kai-sheks Nationalists and Mao Zedongs Communists, to Japanese-occupied Manchuria, to the placid Cotswold hamlet where she spent part of the war, Sonya managed to elude German, British and American secret services. It boggles the mind how a woman with so many domestic responsibilities a husband and two children could find time for spy drops and transmitting coded messages. But Sonya was the consummate multitasker, now cooking dinner, now cooking up explosives to blow up railways. Domesticity was the perfect cover.

Read more from the original source:

The Housewife Who Was a Spy - The New York Times

Heidi Schreck in performance. Photo: Joan Marcus

Heidi Schrecks play What the Constitution Means to Me has a knack for always seeming of the moment, so of course its coming from Broadway to streaming in the October before a general election. The production announced today that a taped version of Schrecks performance will premiere on Amazon Prime Video on October 16. Marielle Heller, director of Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, filmed the show in its last week on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theater in 2019. Amazon also announced that it has signed a new overall deal with Schreck to create content exclusively for the platform.

In What the Constitution Means to Me, Schreck recreates the speeches and debates about the Constitution she performed at American Legion halls as a teenager in order to raise money for college, while commenting on her experience from her current perspective, and weaving in the ways the document affected her family history. The play won acclaim on and off Broadway, earning Best Play and Best Actress Tony nominations, becoming a Pulitzer finalist, and most importantly, getting a lot of enthusiastic coverage from us at this publication. Oliver Butler directed the stage production. In addition to Schreck, the productions cast includes Mike Iveson, Rosdely Ciprian, and Thursday Williams. Im delighted with how beautifully Mari Heller has translated Constitution to the screen and Im thankful to Big Beach and Amazon Studios for making it possible to share the show with more people especially right now when we cant gather together in theaters, Schreck said in a statement. In light of the moment we are living through, I am donating part of my proceeds from this film to the Broadway Cares COVID Relief Fund and to the NAACP Legal Defense Funds Voting Rights 2020 initiative.

The news that What the Constitution Means to Me is coming to Amazon continues the trend of streaming services becoming a second home for theatrical productions, even while theater itself is shuttered due to COVID. Hamilton recently premiered on Disney+. American Utopia is going to HBO. Netflix has adapted The Boys in the Band and The Prom into feature films, while it also plans to film the musical Diana before audiences return to Broadway.

Go here to read the rest:

What the Constitution Means to Me Film Coming to Amazon in October - Vulture

We have also sound-houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies, which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have, together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear do further the hearing greatly. We also have divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as it were tossing it, and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances. New Atlantis by Francis Bacon

Daphne Oram resigned from the BBC in November 1958, mere months after her petitions for an electronic music studio were finally granted with the opening of the Radiophonic Workshop, in April of that year. It seems her disillusionment with the new studio started to set in almost as soon as it opened. By August of 58, Oram was writing to her parents to complain, I never thought the new Workshop could have so many teething troubles. She speaks of tussles with the equipment and regular interruptions from various high ups getting in the way of her experiments. There is no time to concentrate on the real work!

A few months later, in October, she was sent by the BBC to the Exposition Universelle in Brussels. While she was there, she attended the Journes internationales de musique exprimentale where she saw concerts by Pierre Henry and Luciano Berio, attended lectures given by Stockhausen and Schaeffer. Was this the real work she lamented being kept from at the Workshop?

Its hard to say. A report on the Expo that she wrote for BBC management is somewhat equivocal, beginning with expectations stirred only to be baffled by Berios Mutations and left finding Schaeffers musique concrte studies all rather blatant. Here in England, she concluded we use electronic and concrete sounds only where their use is shaped by an architecture outside the music itself for instance, as incidental music to a play, or wedded to a poem to make a radiophonic composition. We find it most useful in creating a mood which will be built upon by the spoken drama itself. Of course, such a statement might be interpreted in the light of who it was addressed to: the BBCs management. Perhaps she was simply writing what she thought was expected of her, more than her true feelings on the matter. What is sure is that just three weeks after returning to England, she handed in her resignation to the director-general, Ian Jacob.

Upon her departure from the BBC, Oram set up her own electronic music studio in a converted oast house near Wrotham in Kent. She made her own headed notepaper and took to corresponding with other composers around the world: Henk Badings in the Netherlands, Pietro Grossi in Italy, and Lejaren Hiller in the United States, among others. Despite a number of significant commissions from the Royal Academy to James Bond Oram struggled to make ends meet as a freelance composer. She supplemented her income through public speaking, maintaining a steady volley of talks on the history of electronic music during the 60s and 70s. Bacons text on sound-houses from the New Atlantis was a recurring presence throughout these lectures.

In the Daphne Oram archive maintained at Goldsmiths College in South London, there are more than half a dozen typed copies of Bacons sound-houses passage amongst her personal effects and many, many more references to it in her handwritten notes and correspondence. When did electronic music begin? she asked a Westminster audience in 1974. Before the war? After the war? 350 years ago. At this point, having answered her own rhetorical question, she would brandish her copy of the New Atlantis and read out her favourite passage.

By this stage, she was following an established routine. Practically every lecture she gave for which some form of notes survive has Francis Bacon as the first bullet point on a list that then proceeded through Schaeffer and Stockhausen to her own music.

By the end of the 60s, its clear that she had a recording on tape of someone (perhaps herself) reading the sound-houses passage that she would open her talks with, before drawing out the links between each line in Bacons text and more recent developments. One typed copy of the text is marked up in pencil, with, for instance, Bacons reference to all sounds and their generation circled and lassoed to a note in the margin indicating Henk Badings (1958) electronic work, Genese. Then harmonies which you have not is linked to Stockhausens early Studie II from 1954, and so on. From other scattered notes and loose pages in the archive, it seems clear that she frequently used the same device as a way of structuring her lectures. In Orams telling, the whole history of electronic music had been played to a score written by Bacon more than three centuries before the fact.

In his own time, Bacon himself was fascinated by music. As a child he dabbled with the lute. At Cambridge in his teens, he took courses in music. His already enquiring mind must have been alive to the vast gulf which separated these two practices.

Music studies at Cambridge in those days placed the subject within the medieval quadrivium, together with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. The arts of measure. Its object was the monochord and the divisions of its single string. And the calculations of those proportions were devised with a mind less to please the ear than to please God. Music, as a scholastic discipline, had almost zero communication with music as played by musicians or as engineered by instrument-builders. It was less an art form, as we would understand such today; more a branch of mathematics.

Another significant early experience: whilst staying in France as a young man at the residence of the English ambassador, ostensibly to further his legal studies but actually to act as information-gatherer to his uncle, the secretary of state Lord Burghley, Bacon travelled one day to Charenton, to the south-east of Paris. He went there with a specific purpose: to hear, in the nave of a small church, a famous echo said to return the voice sixteen times (Bacon himself, when calling out, could only make out thirteen distinct echoes). The trip would spark or perhaps merely confirm an early interest in acoustic phenomena. He mentioned it several times in his later published writing. It made sound feel real to him, thing-like, as the tossing of a ball, to and fro.

Sound was a topic Bacon returned to often as a writer, from his first mention of an acoustique art (a term which seems to be his own coinage) in The Advancement of Learning in 1605 to the very last writing projects of his final months where it was given pride of place. It clearly occupied his thoughts for a long time. And throughout, we can sense a continuing attempt to hew together these two formerly quite distinct aspects practical music-making and the speculations of its academic discipline in such a way that it could make sense of the kind of strange acoustic effects Bacon had heard in Charenton. In Bacons lifetime, the understanding of such effects was primarily the domain of magic.

Magic, in Jacobean England, was a thing at once more commonplace and more feared than it is now. If today the word conjures up images of cloaks and broomsticks and illicit rituals performed at midnight, it is necessary to readjust ones frame of reference to picture something like a kind of paleo-science encompassing such relatively mundane pursuits as jam-making, perfumery, and the production of lenses for reading glasses. Distinct from such potentially dangerous practices as ceremonial magic and demonology, what sixteenth- and seventeenth-century savants knew as natural magic was simply an experimental practice concerned with the exploitation of material properties towards effective ends. It was proscribed by the church but employed nonetheless by many statesmen, pharmacists, and even priests. For the most part, it dealt with what today would be called science only it did so mostly in secret, behind closed doors and cloaked in sigils and passwords, led by some rather strange ideas about cause and effect.

Certainly it was not the part of any academic natural philosopher to conduct experiments any more than a university music student would be expected to whip out a guitar and strum through Greensleeves. It would be beneath their dignity. Upon Francis Bacons shoulders fell the task of bringing together what had seemed like opposed and irreconcilable disciplines to produce a new kind of experimental science combining rational speculation over causes with a desire for useful, tangible results. As he wrote in the New Organum of 1620, The true and lawful goal of the sciences is none other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers. What use theory if it didnt lead to practice? In this sense, his approach to acoustics was typical of his work as a whole. And the text in which he laid out his lab notes for the new science in the most detail was published at the same time, even in the same volume, as the New Atlantis.

This work was titled Sylva Sylvarum. The name itself sounds mysterious to modern ears. In Latin, sylva can mean forest, but also timber or even material. When the French belletrist Antoine Mizault published his Arcanorum Naturae Sylvula seventy years earlier, he employed the diminutive sylvula to mean something like a small heap, a little collection of useful things, like its his iPhone notes, basically. For Bacon on the other hand, there was nothing little about his collection. It was more like a forest of forests, a collection of all the collections.

The book is divided not into chapters but centuries, of which there are ten each one a hundred numbered paragraphs offering hypotheses, observations, and experiments, grouped thematically. There are centuries devoted to physics, to botany, to taste and smell, and so on. Century two and most of three deal with music and sound. They do so in a manner which is characteristically eclectic.

Unusually for Bacon, the basic theory is Aristotelian. Like Aristotle, Bacon regards sound as a sensuous phenomenon, received by the ear of the listener where it mingles with the spirit, forming affinities and correspondences which play directly upon the passions. But Bacon combines this with practical experiments in things like throwing the voice and eavesdropping cribbed from the book Magia Naturalis by the Neapolitan intellectual Giambattista della Porta, along with notes on various kinds of automatic musical instruments and other like marvels built by regular visitors to the British court like the Dutch engineer Cornelis Drebbel and the French architect and polymath Salomon de Caus. What it represents is a stab at gathering together all the knowledge and ideas related to sound available at that time from whatever source. In that sense, the tone is lofty but also reserved, even tentative. This was a knowledge base that was expected to grow. It spoke of everything from the basic essence of sound to suggestions of new microtonal scales, drawn from de Causs recently published Institution Harmonique; techniques, pilfered from Porta, for amplifying and transmitting the voice with tubes and cones; descriptions of new instruments and automatons by Drebbel everything, in fact, from the the voices and notes of beasts and birds to the strange and artificial echoes that Bacons wayward seafarers are told of in the sound-houses of the New Atlantis. There is almost nothing in the utopian prophecy of Bensalem that does not find its counterpart in this catalogue of contemporary observations and experiments.

Upon publication, the two texts New Atlantis and Sylva Sylvarum came bundled together, registered as one volume with the printer mere months after Bacons death and published within the year. The book was put together by Bacons former chaplain turned executor, William Rawley, who claimed his Lordship had always insisted the two works were designed for this place, i.e., together, inseparable. The one was designed to illustrate the promise of the other, to show what wonders it made possible, the kind of world it implied. But the two texts would have markedly different fates.

The Sylva Sylvarum was reprinted more times than any of Bacons other scientific works in the seventeenth century. Its suggested experiments were the bread and butter of the new Royal Society formed in 1660, partly in Bacons image. Later on, as the specifics of its science grew outdated, interest in the Sylva withered. In its place, enthusiasm for New Atlantis, relatively neglected in its own time, has only grown. It is now one of Bacons most popular texts, everywhere feted for its visionary glimpse of modern technology. But far from foreseeing the future of science, the Sylva Sylvarum and New Atlantis together merely drew together and placed side by side the available knowledge of their own time. In the process, they brought something new into existence. The sound-houses of the New Atlantis did not so much predict electronic music as lay the ground for its development. The acoustic science they inaugurated was the condition of electronic music even happening.

New Atlantis by Francis Bacon with a new introduction by Robert Barry is published by Repeater Books

Go here to read the rest:

Features | Tome On The Range | We Have Also Sound Houses: How A 17th C. Utopia Foresaw Electronic Music - The Quietus

Keanue Reeves and Alex Winter are back for a new Bill and Ted journey (Picture: Rex)

No way?! Yes way! After long 30 years, those bodacious dudes Mr William S Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and his best friend Ted Theodore Logan (Keanu Reeves) are finally back in cinemas. As Bill And Ted Face The Music is released,, heres Larushka Ivan-Zadehs refresher course on all you need to know about the cult sci-fi comedy franchise.

1983Bill and Ted are conceived in an improv workshop by UCLA students Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson. One day, we decided to do a couple of guys who knew nothing about history, talking about history Solomon told Cinemafantastique, while Teds father kept coming up to ask them to turn their music down.There was a third guy, called Bob, but Bob dropped out.

1984Solomon and Matheson write the first script, by hand, in just four days in a coffee shop. Originally called Bill & Teds Time Van, it saw two nice but dim teenagers borrow a van (later judged a bit too close to Back To The Futures DeLorean) and somehow end up in Nazi Germany where they get up to high jinks with Adolf Hitler (later switched to Napoleon as being less problematic).

1987Though Bill and Ted were originally conceived as weedy 14-year-olds, the rather older and cooler Alex Winter (fresh off The Lost Boys) and Keanu Reeves (in his breakthrough role) and are cast and the film comes in to time and budget ($8.5m). A most egregious disaster occurs when the distributor files for bankruptcy. However Bill and Ted are saved from the direct-to-DVD dustbin by a small video company called Nelson Entertainment, who snap the movie up for a song and make millions.

1989Bill & Teds Excellent Adventure is released! [Cue air guitar riff!] It sees two loveable metal heads in danger of flunking most heinously (Ted) out of their Californian high school unless they can score A+ final history report. Given they only know Julius Caesar as the salad dressing dude, failure seems assured. That means Ted will be sent to a military academy and their atrocious rock group, Wyld Stallyns, will be disbanded.

Enter Rufus (the late George Carlin) and his time-travelling phone booth from the year 2688, who tells Bill and Ted that that their philosophy and music will eventually inspire new utopia, but only if Wyld Stallyns stays together.The goofy pair Ping-Pong through time, collecting historical personages like Socrates (pronounced so crates) and Joan of Arc to ace their project and ensure world peace.

1990Excellent Adventure is such a hit, it spawns a TV cartoon series, an entire youth slang lexicon and a breakfast cereal which Alex Winter cheerfully admits was disgusting.

1991Bill& Teds Bogus Journey is released! [Cue air guitar riff!] This bonkers movie sequel adventure cast a reluctant Joss Ackland (who later said he regretted doing it) as a baddie from the future, who dispatches evil robot replicants of Bill and Ted back to the past to kill our heroes. Events take a surreal turn as our heroes challenge Death (William Sadler) to a game of Twister, find the meaning of life in a Poison lyric, finally learn to actually play their guitars and both produce beards and babies. They sign off to us with Be excellent to each other and party on.

1991Bill and Ted is spun-off into a videogame, a live action TV series and a comic book. In a case of life imitating art, Keanu Reeves forms an ill-received garage band called Dogstar. Reeves also makes Point Break which, followed up by Speed and The Matrix trilogy, transforms him into one of the biggest stars on the planet. Making Bill and Ted 3 is no longer top of his To Do list.

2010A sad Keanu meme, of Reeves looking sad, circulates online. As if to cheer him up, a first draft of Bill and Ted 3 is created. Hollywood, however, doesnt want it. Alex Winter directs the kids TV cartoon series Ben 10, then turns his hand to feature documentaries.

2018The script is still locked in bogus development hell. The studios want to reboot the franchise with a younger cast, but writer Ed Solomon tells Digital Spy that We love these characters, theyve been with us for our whole lives and we wanted to visit them again as middle-aged men. We thought it would be really fun, and funny, and sweet.

2020Bill & Ted Face The Music is released! [cue air guitar riff!] It sees a now middle-aged and married (not to each other) Bill and Ted settled in the suburbs, but yet to fulfil their rock and roll destiny. With time ticking, they must write the best song ever to save life as we know it. This time theyre helped by their own teenage daughters (Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine). Released in the UK this Friday, it has enjoyed most excellent reviews in the US, with a 81% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes. A Bill & Ted 4 is already being rumoured. Catch you later, Bill and Ted!

Kid Cudi as himselfThe US rapper shows another side of himself (as himself) as the movies go-to expert regarding epistemological reality and quantum looping.

Holland Taylor as The Great LeaderThe Emmy-winning TV veteran (Two And A Half Men, Hollywood) camps it up in a glittery cape as the most powerful person in the universe.

Kristen Schaal as KellyIn a tribute to the late George Carlin, who played Bill and Teds kindly guide, Rufus, Schaals character is named after his daughter, Kelly Carlin.

Brigette Lundy-Paine as Wilhelmina Billie LoganA most excellent turn as Little Bill (ie the daughter of Keanu Reeves character) should prove a breakout role for this non-binary rising star.

Samara Weaving as Theodora Thea PrestonShe may portray Bills daughter but the real life niece of Hugo Elrond Weaving looks more like Margot Robbies cousin, dont you think?

Bill & Ted Face The Music is out now.

MORE: Keanu Reeves claims Alex Winter almost died while filming for Bill and Ted 3 in a muscular bodysuit

MORE: Bill & Ted Face The Music reviews are out is it an excellent adventure or just bogus?

Read more:

Bill and Ted 3: Here's what you need to know - Metro.co.uk

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TALKS and OPPORTUNITIES

Delivered virtually over four days, the Know My Name Conference celebrates women (cis and trans) as artists, activists, researchers, intellectuals and mentors, now and into the future. Foregrounding diverse voices and with First Nations perspectives embedded across the program, the event will bring together leading and emerging Australian and international voices from arts and academia.

Presented by National Gallery of Australia from Tue 10Fri 13 November. Registrations essential.

AOC Initiative Scholarship Panelists. Image supplied.

To qualify for the AOC Initiative, applicants must identify as Bla(c)k, Indigenous or as People of Colour; be pursuing a career in musical theatre; be aged between 17 and 30 at the time of submission; be an Australian citizen or resident; not have previously secured a leading or supporting role in a mainstage musical theatre production, and not be engaged in or scheduled for performance-related work in a leading or supporting role at the time of submission.

Donations are being raised via GoFundMe with 100% of the prize money being awarded to the six finalists. So far, the AOC has raised over $10,000 with the winner receiving 50% of the donations; the runner up receiving 20% of the donations and the final four receiving 7.5% of the donations each. All donations support a step forward in the dialogue of inclusivity and social awareness.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has released new dates and funding for the UK/Australia Season 2021-2022.

The Season is a joint initiative by the British Council and the Australian Governments Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to strengthen and build cultural connections. Australia-based arts organisations and individuals are invited to submit project proposals for inclusion in the UK/Australia Season 2021-22.

The application deadline for Australian applications to present work in the UK has been extended. The new closing date is Monday 5 October 2pm AEST. More information relating to the Australian Cultural Diplomacy Grants Program (ACDGP)for the Season is now available on the DFAT website.

Australian individuals and organisations can apply for grants of up to $60,000 AUD. A reminder that organisations are also eligible to bid for up to $40,000 AUD as part of the UK/Australia Season Grant.

This will be the first time the Australian Government and the British Council have collaborated on a reciprocal Season, which will take place from August 2021 to March 2022.

DFAT recently hosted a webinar for Australia-based arts organisations and individuals looking to find out more about the Season. The panel included representatives from the Australian High Commission in the UK, DFAT and British Council Australia, who shared key information around the Season concept, funding opportunities and eligibility criteria. There was also an extensive Q&A session for live participants. Listen on Youtube.

Utopia Art Centre is a community-led initiative. The artists, with the help of Urapuntja Aboriginal Corporation (UAC) have lobbied, saved and put their own resources into getting started. Two years ago, UAC approached Desart for support and direction in finally establishing an art centre.

Were all really excited for the artists and their community. People might think that a region like Utopia has had lots of art services and an art centre set up for years, but it hasnt; the artists have fared for themselves, making this a really important project, said Philip Watkins, CEO of Desart.

With over 100 artists in the region, there is strong demand for access to the benefits of an Aboriginal owned and managed enterprise. The Utopia artists have long seen the success and services a strong art centre brings to other communities and have long advocated for such a model for their homelands.

The nationwide search for the Utopia Art Centres foundation Manager has started. Recruitment is led by Desart, with a competitive package for the right person. The new Manager will be crucial to the start-up of Utopia Art Centre, in equal parts exciting and problem-solving.

Learn more about the position. Applications close Monday 21 September 2020.

FESTIVAL UPDATES

On the eve of wrapping up this weekend, Parrtjima has announced 2021 dates off back of this years success. Parrtjima - A Festival in Light will return to Australias Red Centre and Alice Springs from 9-18 April 2021.

Parrtjima is the only event of its kind in the world, celebrating Aboriginal arts, culture and storytelling through extraordinary light, art and sound installations.

ON STAGE

The City of Ballarat has created what appears to be a world first a 1300 hotline where residents can dial in to express their emotions and have those feelings transformed into a specially composed piece of music.

1300 ROAR is a project of the Creative City Strategy of the City of Ballarat and has been developed as part of the Citys ongoing commitment to supporting the arts and culture sector, as well as integrating creativity into the Citys response to recovery from the pandemic.

Mayor, Cr Ben Taylor said: We understand that our community needs to have an avenue to voice their emotions whether they are feeling frustration, sadness, grief, hope or joy. The 1300 ROAR project gives everyone an outlet to express their emotions in a healthy and productive way.

Residents will be able to call the hotline on 1300 728 760 from now until mid-October. The service also has the capacity to connect residents to Lifeline.

Residents will be able to dial an answering machine and have three minutes to voice their feelings. Everyones submission is anonymous. The files are not listened to instead they are compressed into a single file. The total compressed files are supplied to a local digital sound engineer and composer to craft a soundscape or a piece of music designed to lift spirits and encapsulate this important time.

Ballarat has proven to be ahead of the curve in both managing community wellbeing and injecting much-needed funds into the vulnerable creative sector during lockdown times. This lockdown is no different, added Taylor.

Queensland Symphony Under the Stars 2019. Image supplied.

Symphony Under the Stars is set for 24 and 25 September, when Queensland Symphony Orchestra will return to Gladstone for the eighth consecutive year. For the first time, two concerts will be held in Gladstones picturesque Marina on Thursday 24 and Friday 25 September 2020 at 7pm.

The spectacular event is part of the Gladstone Enrichment through Music (GEM) initiative. Fifty-nine musicians will take the trip north of Gladstone for the two performances.

The program features a movie music repertoire, with works from blockbusters such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, E.T., and Cinema Paradiso under the baton of conductor Dane Lam.

While the event is free, bookings are essential, and must be made via Gladstone Entertainment Convention Centres website.

arTour and Flipside Circusare rolling their first large-scale arts and entertainment tour since COVID-19 hit.

arTour Producer Laura Bonner said they were excited to once again hit the road to bring arts and entertainment to regional and remote Queensland. This trailblazing tour with Flipside Circus is a positive indicator of Queenslands post-COVID recovery and a hopeful sign of more regional tours and performances to come, said Bonner.

arTour has teamed up with Flipside Circus, Queenslands largest youth arts company, to present their community youth engagement program from 12 September to 16 November. They have tailored a program of youth workshops to present a unique two-day training residency in 10 western Queensland communities.

Eugene Choi, Rainbow Chan, Marcus Whale will present a new song cycle inspired by Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love. Photo: Daniel Boud

The Sydney Opera House has commissioned a new work by Sydney artists Rainbow Chan, Eugene Choi and Marcus Whale to be presented as part of its free weekly digital program,From Our House to Yours.

In the Mood, A Love Letter to Wong Kar-Wai and Hong Kongwill feature a theatrical set, 60s style costumes, and sax-drenched renditions of the films romantic soundtrack. New music by Chinese-Australian artists Rainbow Chan and Marcus Whale against a backdrop of narration by Eugene Choi will present an audiovisual journey that guides the audience through a heartbreaking cycle of longing, intimacy and forbidden love.

The performance will celebrate the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wais landmark film In the Mood for Love, with a new song cycle performed on the Joan Sutherland Theatre stage with visuals evoking Wongs iconic romance through the lens of 2020.

The event will be livestreamed at 9pm AEST on Saturday 26 September and will be available to watch on demand thereafter. Free to watch live online

AROUND THE GALLERIES

Award winning artist Michael Zavros will have his first Sydney exhibition in more than a decade, with a new body of work, A Guy Like Me, to be presented at Sullivan+Strumpf Sydney October 15 to November 14.

Melbourne Art Fair has announced the cancellation of the 2021 edition. With ongoing uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, both in Australia and overseas, Melbourne Art Foundation has made the choice to focus on delivering an exceptional art fair to mark the start of the Australasian cultural season in 2022 from 17-20 February at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Stage 4 is a new online gallery launched 20 September, and exhibiting work created during the COVID-19 pandemic by Australian artists.Exhibited works will be rotated every two weeks. Artists will be able to sell their works through a connected online Shopify store, currently under development.

Stage 4 is currently taking submissions of painting, drawing, digital art, dance, performance, spoken word, and written works. Work must be created after 1 March. Stage 4 was created by Ronan MacEwan, a digital communications specialist for contemporary art galleries and organisations, based in Hobart.

The team at Sydney Contemporary have been busy creating a bespoke online platform that is more than just an online viewing room.Sydney Contemporary presents 2020features over 450new artworks from Australasia's leading galleries, created by contemporaryartists from around the globe. Sydney Contemporary presents 2020will launch on1st Octoberand will run until the end of the month, with new works added weekly.The new digital initiative showcases 450+ new artworks by more than 380 artists, created during - and in response to 2020.

Imaginary Territories - A Feminist Surrealist Visual Art Exhibition features new works by five accomplished Western Australian artists. Presented by Dark Swan Exhibitions for PS Art Space, Fremantle, it runs from 17 October to 14 November.

The works include film projection, sound, installation, photomedia, and visual art by Jo Darbyshire, Lucille Martin, Rebecca Patterson (33 POETS), Dr Toni Wilkinson, and Dr Kelsey Ashe (pictured top), who is also the curator.

Explaining the inspiration behind the exhibition, Ashe said: In an era of environmental/world crisis and political divisiveness, to conceive new realities has become critically important.The exhibition explores the concept of a "territory" as a domain of the inner world a representation that expresses an "internal truth". Through this Surrealist lens, the artists territories are simultaneously real and imagined, explored into being; a place where both conscious and subconscious realities are envisioned.

Kawita Vatanajyankur becomes a traditional beam scale in The Scale of Justice, holding baskets which fill up with luscious green vegetables, as her balance and composure are increasingly tested.

Part of the artists Mechanized series, in which Vatanajyankur acts as a moving part of a machine, she transforms herself into food production equipment in performance videos that restage everyday processes.

A Horsham Regional Art Gallery digital exhibition touring with NETS Victoria. Curated by Olivia Poloni.

Jonny Niesche,Public Intimacy, 2020. Photo credit: Kate Collingwood.

oOh!media has launched a campaign exclusive to Melbourne, showcasing works from contemporary commercial gallery STATION across its street furniture and rail sites. As Melbournes lockdown continues, the campaign highlights meaningful art that reflects on the current conditions in Victoria, reaching the citys commuters and essential workers at multiple points throughout the day.

Artworks created for the campaign focus on COVID, the artists interpretations of emotions felt during lockdown, and some of the possibilities and positives to come out of Victorias isolation.

Neil Ackland, Chief Content Marketing and Creative Officer at oOh!, said the campaign was a small gesture to help Melburnians through difficult times.

The campaign features works from Adam Lee, Dane Lovett, David Griggs, Jason Phu, Jonny Niesche, and Nell, and will run throughout September.

When COVID 19 forced the cancellation of Design Eye Creative paper on skins live gala event, Burnie Arts Council made an instant decision to shift to a digital format.

Design Eye Creative paper on skin connects Burnies papermaking heritage to a community of Australian and international artists. Their challenge is to design a wearable garment made from at least 80% paper. Filming took place in Burnie over a ten-day period in late June. The film features 31 works from 7 countries and is free online.

Boroondara Arts final exhibition for 2020 is A Family Album. Through painting, photography, textiles and video works, the featured artists illustrate the myriad experiences that bring families together and pull them apart, creating a collage of contemporary Australian communities.

The exhibiting artists include: Donna Bailey, Julie Dowling, Hannah Gartside, Pia Johnson, Hoang Tran Nguyen and Selina Ou. Showing Saturday 31 October Sunday 13 December 2020 at Town Hall Gallery and online.

More arts news you may have missed.

Read more:

ICYMI: The week's top news in the arts - ArtsHub

When people think about the things that could bring about the end of humanity, the short list tends to include global thermonuclear war, asteroid impacts or deadly pandemics (sounds familiar). Of course, these are not the only existential threats faced by humanity. The people of some developing nations are sadly more familiar with other issues: drought, famine and socio-political collapse. Yet there is one threat that humanity faces that is far more insidious than the others, as it is right in our faces: uncontrolled Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Im not the only one sounding the alarm about the potential dangers of AI; Elon Musk, world renowned engineer-entrepreneur, has repeatedly done the same. At the National Governors Conference in 2017, Musk said, AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization in a way that car accidents, airplane crashes, faulty drugs or bad food were [sic] not.

For Musk and others, like Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, proactive measures to prevent a disaster are better than reactive measures after one. In fact, Musk founded his nonprofit OpenAI for the purpose of ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work benefits all of humanity.

But what exactly is AI? What is AGI? Whats the difference? Simply put, AI is used in reference to machines that can perform tasks that mimic those of the human mind, like solving problems or learning new information. Self-driving cars are a great example of AIs potential use in daily life; Tesla, Google and Uber are all expanding their reach into this new market.

While this artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) can be used to streamline a specific process and thus improve quality of life for both businesses and individuals, artificial general intelligence (AGI) has the potential to do much more, both good and bad. Artificial general intelligence is any AI that would have the capability to learn, interpret and apply knowledge about the world in a manner exactly akin to, or even better than, a human being. It is important to note that AGI does not currently exist. It is, however, the aspiration of many AI developers, and many organizations have dedicated themselves to the task (the most high-profile of these being Googles DeepMind AI project).

With the added advantages of instantaneous calculation and perfect memory, AGI would be able to replace almost any human task. While AGI-operated machines would initially be extremely expensive, as a matter of course the technology would become cheaper and cheaper over time, eventually allowing AGI to completely replace human labor. This is where things could get interesting.

At this crossroads, one path leads to utopia and the other to dystopia, or even Armageddon. In the utopian vision, AI acts to benefit humanity, freeing human labor and time across nations and cultures. With human labor almost completely freed up and leveraging the power of advanced AI, technological breakthroughs would occur at an exponential rate and the global standard of living would follow suit. Many of the worlds largest problems would cease to exist as new technologies and means of employing them are developed.

The dystopian road is quite the opposite; AGI could develop to the point where its own level of intelligence increases exponentially. The AI gathers information, using it to create more and more knowledge. It is not hard to see how AGI could quickly become more intelligent than humanity; this is a phenomenon referred to as the singularity. A particular problem at this point is ensuring that the new super intelligent AI remains friendly to humanity by means of ensuring that the AIs goal structures do not change; a rapidly developing AI could easily change its goals from the original, beneficial set to a new set of goals that may be dismissive of or even detrimental to man. Even with these and other precautions, there exists a multitude of ways that humanity could easily lose control over a super intelligent AI, and beyond that point, the future is unclear.

So when, exactly, might we expect such super intelligent AI, given the current rate of technological development? Well, that is anyones guess. Elon Musk has said that he believes AI could become more intelligent than humanity by 2025. Others, including Ray Kurzweil, believe it could happen closer to 2045. In a series of polls conducted by AI researchers Nick Bostrom and Vincent Mller, the median prediction fell between 2040 and 2050.

The point of all of this is to recognize that AI, while being an immensely promising emergent technology, also poses extreme (read: existential) risks at the far end of the development horizon. I do not intend to come across as a luddite, trying to dissuade further development for fear of one of many possible outcomes. However, it is necessary to note that the risks are real and that it would serve us well as a society to temper our obsession with whether we can with a consideration of whether we should.

Read the rest here:

AI: The Massive Problem No One is Talking About - Villanovan

Our guest for this show is Dr. Jasmine Mitchell. Dr. Mitchell is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Media Communication at SUNY Old Westbury.

Dr. Mitchell will talk about her book, Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U.S. and Brazilian Media.

Brazil markets itself as a racially mixed utopia. The United States prefers the term melting pot. Both nations have long used the image of the mulatta to push skewed cultural narratives. Highlighting the prevalence of mixed race women of African and European descent, the two countries claim to have perfected racial representationall the while ignoring the racialization, hypersexualization, and white supremacy that the mulatta narrative creates.

Jasmine Mitchell investigates the development and exploitation of the mulatta figure in Brazilian and U.S. popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, she analyzes policy debates and reveals the use of mixed-Black female celebrities as subjects of racial and gendered discussions. Mitchell also unveils the ways the media moralizes about the mulatta figure and uses her as an example of an acceptable version of blackness that at once dreams of erasing undesirable blackness while maintaining the qualities that serve as outlets for interracial desire.

Send comments about the show to Brother Warren at nolawakeup@gmail.com

Original post:

Blackness in US and Brazilian Media 09/17 by New Orleans Wake Up | Current Events - BlogTalkRadio

September 16, 2020 During a virtual Q&A session hosted by the Broadband Bunch on Tuesday, a panel of open access enthusiasts discussed whether or not the United States is ready to embrace open access networks.

While the panelists tried to remain hopeful about the knowledge level the public has about open access news, audience participation during the webinar revealed that many do not fully understand the concept.

Open access networks are those that revert traditional vertically-integrated broadband networks by creating a layer of separation between ownership and service delivery.

Open access networks break up the model of incumbent internet providers. Instead, the open access model allows one entity to own a network, another to operate it, and even more to provide internet and other advanced services over the network.

A survey question posed to the audience, asking participants to define open access networks, received 30 percent incorrect answers. And this was on an already niche group of viewers!

The panelists did not expect the public to understand the model, or even recognize the name, indicating that explaining open access is full time job in itself.

While many internet service providers use open access middle-mile networks, last-mile open access networks are relatively new, said Heather Gold, CEO of HBG Strategies.

Kyle Glaeser, director of Emerging Networks, indicated that one of the barriers to completing open access projects is the lack of existing knowledge. Were competing against long-standing infrastructure projects, which have more existing evidence on how to de-risk them, he said.

More misconceptions that audience members held were revealed when the Broadband Bunch posed the survey question, What are the biggest barriers to open access? The majority of viewers choose the incorrect answer, selecting regulatory hurdles.

State regulations arent prohibiting open access, said Brian Snider, CEO of Lit Communities, arguing that there are less regulatory hurdles than people may think.

The regulations dont hurt, but they dont help, said Kim McKinley, UTOPIA Fiber's chief marketing officer.

The panelists said that funding is actually one of the biggest hurdles to deploying open access networks.

FCC funding is not designed for open access networks, said McKinley. She said that the exclusion from applying for state and federal funding, due to network design, has hindered potential growth.

She questioned why, as of yet, no government dollars have been spent on open access networks.

Why are we funding incumbent providers that are not delivering? said McKinley, the demand is there, right now we need political assistance.

Read the original post:

What's the Biggest Hurdle to Open Access Networks? Misconceptions About Open Access Networks - BroadbandBreakfast.com