What’s New?
A New Music Cinema Piece, by JR Wilson
” New Music Cinema” – a new genre
Virtual Performance
The COVID pandemic has altered the way artists and performers reach their audience. Large gatherings like concerts, art shows, and stage performances were not only discouraged, but more often than not, illegal! Although we can expect some return to normalcy as the infection rate drops, we are most likely faced with a “new normal” in the arts. Many opera companies, for example, especially those that maintained expensive brick-and-mortar offices and stage, went under. Venues have been forced to close their doors, many permanently. Virtual performance, such as virtual opera, may be the answer!
Iain McGilchrist has a New Book Out!
Jonathan Gaisman provides a REVIEW of “The Matter With Things”
EXCERPT:
“The world only exists for us inasmuch as we perceive it. We do so as embodied human beings, in particular through our minds. But clinical evidence shows that our divided brains offer two completely different ways of experiencing the world. The left hemisphere analyses lifeless parts; the right synthesises the living Gestalt whole. The right perceives the real landscape; the left constructs an artificial map. The right encounters the new, and is the hemisphere of music, poetry, humour and irony. The left is comfortable with categories, labels, the literal and the familiar. The two hemispheres constantly intercommunicate; however, since many aspects of language preferentially engage the left hemisphere, our modern, overwhelmingly verbalised existence promotes left-brain dominance. Yet countless studies demonstrate that in many areas the left hemisphere is obtuse, overconfident, fantastical and wrong. The right hemisphere, once misnamed the silent hemisphere, is better at understanding the world, whereas the left seeks to manipulate it. Self-validating left-brain modes of thought continually push us in the wrong direction, towards the hall of mirrors in which we now exist.”