PRI Arts

The PRI Arts Tumblr is a collection of beguiling items created by our producers or found by our curators. PRI produces and distributes news, current events, arts and music content for radio, web and on-demand.

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10,000 glowing books

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An installation by Spanish intervention artists Luzinterruptus, who covered a large strip of Federation Square in Melbourne with 10,000 books outfitted with little light bulbs.

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Pop music getting sadder. Why?

A study just published in the Journal of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts tracked the mood of pop songs over five decades of Billboard charts, and it confirms that pop has changed in substantial ways. Far more of today’s hits are now in minor keys (which most of us hear as sadder or more complex) — more than half, as compared to just 15% in the 1960s.

View chart.

[laphamsquarterly]

Teenage Emily Dickinson, meet adult Emily Dickinson….maybe.

A new photograph has surfaced in Amherst that reportedly shows Emily Dickinson in her mid-twenties. Her dress is apparently out of fashion for the time,1859, but that’s in keeping with her personality: “I’m so old fashioned, Darling, that all your friends would stare.”

“Emily Dickinson gets a new look in recovered photograph” [The Guardian]

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Margaret Atwood’s 10 Rules for Writing Fiction

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils. 2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type. 3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do. 4 If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick. 5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting. 6 Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B. 7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ¬essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine. 8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up. 9 Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page. 10 Prayer might work. Or reading something else. Or a constant visualization of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

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Presidential campaign playlists: what the songs say about the candidates. Mitt Romney's all about Kid Rock's "Born Free" while Barack Obama is going with Al Green's "Let's Stay Together."

The right songs can project patriotism or hope, and helps people connect with a candidate. But the choices of music have become more contentious. Recently, Rage Against the Machine lead singer Tom Morello’s wrote a tirade against his big fan Paul Ryan.

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Ha Schult - Love Letters (2001): hundreds of thousands of love letters sent in from throughout the world and enlarged to cover the old Berlin Postfuhramt (post office)

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"Chicken with Plums," currently in theaters, is based on a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, the creator of "Persepolis." The movie is visually stunning, with its intricately detailed set and costume design -- and absolutely no CGI. "I come from illustration and I love to do things with the hand," Satrapi says, “When I make a movie, every detail, from the color of the brick to the skirt of a woman, the laces of the shoes, everything is of a major importance to me.” Satrapi combined live action, animation, and even puppets to construct a magic-realist 1950s Iran in "Chicken with Plums," which tells the story of a virtuoso violinist living in Tehran. More.

(Photo: Still from "Chicken with Plums." ©Patricia Khan, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.)

[theparisreview]

Word inspiration: Edgar Degas, Marina Sunset (1869).

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Movie wars: "Avengers" director Joss Whedon explains why he has a problem with Ira Glass' new movie, "Sleepwalk with Me." Hilarious. More about Ira's movie here.

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The Rivera Court at the Detroit Institute of Arts. (Courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts)

Residents of Macomb, Oakland, and Wayne counties in Michigan voted to raise their own property taxes a fraction of a percent to help fund the Detroit Institute of Arts. The 127-year-old museum, which is home to work by Vincent Van Gogh and Diego Rivera, has struggled for years to sustain itself with diminishing government funding. More.

[theparisreview]

A Partial Inventory of Gustave Flaubert’s Personal Effects

As Catalogued by M. Lemoel on May 20, 1880, Twelve Days after the Writer’s Death.

In the bedroom on the first floor:

panama hat top hat red silk cravat 5 pairs of gloves 19 shirts 2 dressing gowns 5 waistcoasts 7 walking sticks tobacco jar two pairs of boots

[industrialist]

FreelandBuck’s Slipstream installation at the Bridge Gallery in New York - a physical structure that confronts that leap directly, translating a 2-dimensional digital line drawing into 3-dimensional space.

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A very interesting representation of space, the full installation can be found at the Bridge Gallery. 

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Winners of the National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest 2012

You won’t learn much about life on this living planet if you don’t stop to look around every once in a while. 

Above is a Japanese maple, captured in Portland, OR by Fred An. Check out the rest of the winners ar The Atlantic.

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Marina Abramovic, “The Artist is Present,” made people hate their snuggies

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Hilarious.

If it makes you curious about Abramovic's "The Artist is Present," we have info here.

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The HBO series "Game of Thrones" transports audiences to a fantasy world in which the politics and violence are as brutally real as our own. The Dothraki are a nomadic warrior tribe that figure heavily in the series. When the show's creators were looking for someone to invent a language for the Dothraki people, they needed something that sounded as believable as the bloody battles looked.

The Berkeley-trained linguist and Language Creation Society member David Peterson got the job when he submitted a 300-page book of Dothraki vocabulary and grammar. More.

(Photo: Jason Momoa as Khal Drogo in the HBO series "Game of Thrones" / CC Dothraki language)

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McKayla is not impressed with upbeat breakup songs.

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The Definitive Meryl Streep Matrix

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Love it! "Heartburn" with Streep and Jack Nicholson was on this weekend -- we still can't get that Carly Simon song out of our heads!