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High modernism is us. Today. The incomprehensible is our reality. For the past two decades plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter — which once upon a time bewildered their audiences and gave critics apoplexy — have become big West End hits. The avant-garde is now commercial. How so? By casting celebrity stars in the main roles, and emphasizing the humour. So the current revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for …

From A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancière by Jacques Rancière. A method means a path: not the path that a thinker follows but the path that he/she constructs, that you have to construct to know where you are, to figure out the characteristics of the territory you are going through, the places it allows you to go, the way it obliges you to move, the markers that …

Mojtaba Taghvaei (aka “Moshtaba”)’s art “Twins” provides a vibrant exploration of closeness and wakefulness. Here he shares just one thing about the piece:“David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti have a music piece titled ‘The Black Dog Runs at Night.’ I’ve always appreciated one-line Lynchian ideas, and many of my paintings are based on one-line concepts with no beginning, ending, or clear arc. This piece was inspired by the idea: "What if …

Happy DjangoCon US 2024 to you. Whilst I am not there, I have adopted the spirit of the season and got to work hacking together a new tool. Djade is a formatter for Django templates. It applies rules based on the template style guide in Django’s contribution documentation, plus some more. Ryan Cheley put together this section back in February (forum discussion). I enjoyed contributing to this discussion and wrote …

Hey, I hope you’re keeping safe and well wherever you are. Apart from the weird Toronto weather, it is definitely FALL here with the kids back in school and days of seemingly endless pre-sales calls and shortlists. It is also the time of year for “big” books of course, and there are more covers from the conglomerate publishers in this month’s post than I would generally like. My sense is …

The great Bert Lahr was performing right until the end. Here is a print ad that Bert did for Lays potato chips in early 1967. He would pass away later that year on December 4, 1967...

IntroductionToday, TLS certificates in the Web public key infrastructure (PKI) have long validity: almost all remain valid for at least three months! An attacker compromising a certificate early enough in its lifetimenote 1 keeps it compromised for months. Certificate revocation addresses this problem: a client must know to distrust a certain key for a domain, even if the valid key hasn’t expired yet.The issue? Billions of clients use the Web …

In early August of this year, Metro Transit officials reported that crime was trending downwards by 17.5% in the second quarter of 2024, while overall ridership trended upwards by 9% in the first half of 2024 — with August seeing the highest number of riders so far this year. This good sign shows that the system is improving as implementation of the Safety & Security Action Plan continues. I, too, …

What’s going on, Internet? This week me and others across the web noticed the Launch of Social Web Foundation. This is from the camp who’ve developed ActivityPub. ActivityPub is the protocol that enable social media clones like Mastodon, and Pixelfed to operate. Up until now, this has been known as the ‘Fediverse’ but now they want to rebrand this as “the social web”. Over on the team profiles under Evan …

Or why old cameras are like old guitar pedals. It started with a piece by CJ Chilvers about those very guitar pedals. He described how good music has been made with limited resources, and how the competition to acquire a copy of that suddenly fashionable pedal like the artist used has raised prices. Items that are just old become precious as people hope to absorb their special magic to make …

RECORD TURNOVER 80s HITS #217 One of the great 80s albums that have yet to be reissued on vinyl is the 1984 record by Rainy Day. It came out on The Rain Parade’s label Llama Records and on Rough Trade in Europe and Japan. It was a loosely assembled cast of musicians from the so-called paisley underground scene of the Bay Area, with David Roback and other members of The …

The hit production of Cole Porter’s classic Kiss Me, Kate at London’s Barbican Theatre has been captured on film for a cinema release later this year Captured live at the Barbican Theatre, the film of Bartlett Sher’s acclaimed production which took its final bow on 14 September will be released by Trafalgar Releasing into cinemas across the UK, the US, Australia and selected international territories from 17 November 2024. The …

A man who “believed in nothing, not even himself”, Henri Rochefort is now a minor footnote in the annals of modern journalism. However, at the height of his notoriety, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, his writings, political activities, imprisonments, and escapes were the stuff of newspaper gossip around the world. How did a self-described “errant journalist and literary poacher” rise to power on the wings of sarcasm and …

The way this works is simple: use a notebook and a pen when you need to work through a problem of any kind. Not a tablet with a stylus. Not a notetaking app. Not a pencil. Paper and pen. Give me a blank page of my notebook and my pen — I shall fill that page in no time. I’ve been doing this for years now. It doesn’t matter the …

Part of Lewisham shopping centre could be demolished early to create a “food, culture and music hub” to replace the old Model Market, which could be open as early as next summer. The developer LandSec U+I plans to demolish the whole centre, which dates back to the 1970s, and replace it with new shops, 1,700 […] The post ‘New Model Market’ food and music hub could come to Lewisham next …