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Related:
- Zambone on the Wright Brothers in B&C
- The New York Times special section on the Wrights and flight
- The New Yorker on the rise and fall of Boeing
- More on the Wired piece in my personal notebook
- More about O'Hare at OHare.com
From the BBC:
A group of shepherds from Lesotho are making an impact in the musical world with their creation of 'Junk funk'—songs performed on instruments made from rubbish. With recycled material including disused oil cans, car tires, twigs and a kitchen sink, the band has managed to put together two fiddles, a bass guitar of sorts—and a drum. The band members are shepherds from Malealea village on Lesotho's Maluti Mountains. They are self-taught musicians, reminiscent of what East Africans call jua kali—informal artisans who earn their living by working in the open under the hot sun. The seven have now formed Sotho Sounds, composing music and making instruments in between looking after animals. South African Risenga Makondo became the group's producer and with the help of Womad Foundation put out their debut CD, Sotho Sounds Malealea, in July. Full story
From the Washington Post:
LOS ANGELES — Oblivious to the cars whizzing by a few feet from him on a downtown freeway, Kuva Zakheim cleaned a cement wall, picking away at years of grit and grime that mar one of this city's humble art treasures: a public mural. As he peeled away layers of gang writing with the precision of a surgeon, the flesh tones of a man's cheek slowly started to appear. The mural, titled "7th Street Altarpiece," was coming back to life. Zakheim is at the forefront of a campaign by city and state officials to resurrect the public art that lines the freeway walls and overpasses around Los Angeles, and preserve a colorful urban museum that never closes its doors. Murals are everywhere here. … More than 1,500 works of art whisper the city's darkest secrets and trumpet its proudest accomplishments. But many of these pieces of the city's soul have been forgotten, left to suffer the decades-long effects of pollution and sunlight, and the late-night whims of graffiti artists, called "taggers." Full story
SCRAPBOOK: STEPHEN KING ON FEAROn the occasion of Stephen King's lifetime achievement medal at the National Book Awards, National Public Radio's Terry Gross re-aired her interviews with King, including his comments on why he enjoyed horror stories as a child.
I liked the total surrender of emotional control. … I'd been raised in a family where emotional control was a really important thing. You weren't supposed to show you were afraid. You weren't supposed to show that you were in pain or frightened … Emotional control was sort of a requirement. And for me the terror was what really appealed to something that I think is probably just inside people … I loved it and I loved giving up that control. …
Basically all I'm doing is saying things that other people are afraid to say. The job's not much different than being a comedy writer. You say, What is the one thing that nobody wants to talk about, that everybody will sort of raise their hands in horror? What can I say that will be the literary equivalent of taking a fork and scraping it across a blackboard or making someone bite in on a lemon?
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