Prospero

THE Arirang mass games in Pyongyang, North Korea, are the largest and most bombastic exercise of state propaganda in the world. Few foreigners are permitted to watch this summertime spectacle extolling the founding myths of the communist state.

With the death of the “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il in 2011, however, the show has been slowly wound down. Under Kim Jong Un, his son and successor, Arirang (which takes its name from a Korean folk song symbolic of the divided peninsula) will no longer run in its current form. Jeremy Hunter, a British photojournalist, managed to attend the penultimate performance at Pyongyang’s massive May Day stadium in August 2011. In his hands, an ordinary tourist camera is a unique window on the world’s last hereditary Stalinist regime.

IN THE dark rooftop viewing space of the Khalil Al Sakakini Cultural Centre in Ramallah, the air was heavy with sighs. Occasionally the faint sound of a whimper could be heard. The screen flickered with images of Palestinians forced out of their homes in the 1948 war. On camera, refugees recounted their ordeals and lamented the loss of something precious: their books. 

This was the Ramallah debut of "The Great Book Robbery", a 2012 documentary about the looting of some 70,000 books from private Palestinian libraries during the 1948 war. It vividly chronicles the large-scale cultural pillage and dispossession of Palestinian literary archives. Directed by Benny Brunner, a Dutch-Israeli immigrant and self-described former Zionist, the film left the 40 or so attendees in awe. Adding to the poignance, the audience was gathered in a centre named for a famous Palestinian poet and scholar whose own book collection had been looted.

SOME sage once quipped that writing about music is about as edifying—and evocative—as dancing about architecture. Certainly most music criticism has a lifeless quality, packed with adjectives yet tuneless on the page. Yet Alex Ross, a music critic for the New Yorker, manages to stand out. His gifts as a writer are all the more impressive given that his subject tends to be the most difficult music composed in the last century, from Gustav Mahler to Steve Reich.

"The Rest is Noise", his best-selling 2007 book on the history of the 20th century through its music, is now being re-worked as a year-long music festival at the Southbank centre in London. Although Mr Ross was not involved in organising the festival, he will be giving four lectures on the history of 20th-century music.

Mr Ross spoke to The Economist about why he wrote this book in the first place, and why it is particularly hard to get contemporary audiences excited about modern music.

It took you ten years to write “The Rest is Noise”. What was your motivation?

It emerged really from an obsession that I had with 20th-century music going back to my teenage years. At university I immersed myself in it very heavily with a radio show that I had. I was also studying literature and history—especially late-19th century and early-20th century period—so it all coalesced.

I grew up listening to classical music in the traditional sense, from Bach to Brahms. That was the world I was completely absorbed in. I really didn’t listen to any other kind of music aside from this repertory. So it was something of a shock to slowly realise that there was more to the story, and I was shocked and fascinated when my piano teacher in high school played works by Schoenberg, Berg and Bartok. I started making my way through them at the piano, and after an initial struggle, I really fell in love with the music. I was fascinated by the music itself, by the surrounding cultural and historical context, and wanted to figure out how it all fit together. So it seemed inevitable that this would be the subject [of his first book].

AMERICANS are fascinated by financial advice, but the counsel they receive is often deeply flawed, says Helaine Olen, author of "Pound Foolish"

OF ALL the Academy Award nominations, that of Jacki Weaver for best actress in a supporting role merits particular attention. Best known until recently for her work on the Australian stage, Ms Weaver (pictured above) was first nominated for an Oscar two years ago. That was for her chilling performance as the mother of a gang of criminals in “Animal Kingdom”. Now she has been nominated for the very different motherly role of Dolores Solitano in “Silver Linings Playbook”, a film about love and mental illness in Philadelphia written and directed by David O. Russell.

Until a couple of years ago, Ms Weaver was more or less unknown outside Australia. For her to be nominated twice marks an achievement both as a performer and as a judge of projects. “Animal Kingdom”, written and directed by David Michôd, was perhaps the best crime film of recent years: beautiful, brutal and thoughtful. And the members of the Academy have clearly fallen for “Silver Linings Playbook”, a film that offers the shape and satisfactions of a romantic comedy even as it transcends the limits of that most hackneyed genre. It has been nominated for best film, and its two leads, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, are up for Oscars (pictured below). Robert de Niro, who has a supporting role as Ms Weaver’s husband, has been nominated too. Mr Russell’s screenplay (adapted from a novel by Matthew Quick) and direction both have nods, as does the editing by Jay Cassidy and Crispin Struthers. For a film to be nominated in all those categories—or even simply in all four acting categories—you have to go back more than three decades to Warren Beatty’s “Reds”, an epic about the Russian revolution stuffed with big Hollywood names. For a small, if beautifully executed, film, that’s a lot of honour. It sits well with a pretty discerning set of nominations across the board.

FOR those rock icons unlucky enough not to die young, remaining relevant and cool can be a problem. Over the years, ageing rockers have tried many strategies to overcome this. Some become esoteric and anti-commercial, with such a sneering disdain for popularity that they are worshipped by the cognoscenti (we might call this approach “The Scott Walker”). Others simply hang around doing what they have always done and wait for the zeitgeist to swing back their way (aka, “The Weller”). Another strategy is to become stingy with your output, thus avoiding the problem of turning into a sad self-parody, and ensuring that the world waits with bated breath for every new release.

The danger with this last approach is that, while the level of interest can become frenzied, so do the expectations. In the end it can be impossible for the music to outstrip the hype. On January 8th, on the morning of his 66th birthday, David Bowie released “Where Are We Now?”, his first new record for ten years. It caught everybody by surprise. He had withdrawn almost completely from public view (he was the only British artist to turn down the chance to play at the Olympics closing ceremony). Nobody, it seems, had the slightest inkling that he had been working on new material.

EXPECT the unexpected—at least when viewing Daniel Arsham’s work. This New York-based artist blurs the boundaries between dance, design, architecture and art. His current exhibition, “Reach Ruin” at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, is Mr Arsham’s largest solo show to date, spread over two floors of the museum. On the ground level, three plaster models of cameras are displayed alongside a series of monochrome gouache-on-Mylar paintings of a man on the moon. Nearby are human sculptures: a figure stands against a wall, shrouded from head to waist in what appears to be white fabric but is actually aqua resin, fibreglass and epoxy. A few metres away, a similar work gives the illusion of a human form behind a white sheet blowing in the wind (though there is nothing behind the sheet). “So much of my work is about making architecture do things that it really shouldn’t do, making it perform in unexpected ways, and collapsing the materiality of it,” says Mr Arsham. The results merge the surreal with the mundane.

Much of this show was inspired by a traumatic childhood memory. He was 12 when Hurricane Andrew swept through Florida in 1992. He hid in a reinforced closet in his Miami home while the storm destroyed nearly everything around him. The experience left him with some unforgettable images: decimated drywall, shattered glass, pink insulation turned to mush, and warped aluminium studs. “Reach Ruin” is an anagram of “hurricane”.