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Culturally Speaking

By Sarah Stodola

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First, a down note: singer Elliot Smith committed suicide yesterday. This is really unfortunate, and in a sick way it isn’t surprising to anyone who has ever listened to his albums. The guy never sang a happy tune in his life. And the sadness in his music isn’t tinged with bitterness. It’s just sad, in a resigned, hopeless kind of way.

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A couple of blocks away from my apartment building in Fort Greene there is a large building that initially never caught my attention. But a few weeks ago I was walking past it and I noticed some other passersby staring up at it. So of course, I followed their gazes and found that there were a number of life-sized puppets emerging from the third-story windows. I immediately thought of that clock in downtown Prague. I watched for a few minutes, and now every time I walk by I look to see if the puppets are there.  I've never seen them again, but it turns out the whole thing is an installation based on an Arthur Miller play. I learned this quite incidentally, during a routine Google search that, like so many Google searches, lead to something really interesting that had nothing to do with the intended results of the search.

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The United States now contains only two of the tallest ten, and 41 of the tallest 100 buildings in the world. Asia has 44 of the tallest 100. Europe has two (both in Frankfurt).

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The New York Times ran an article on Monday about the impressive economic progress India has made over the past ten years. The middle class now makes up roughly a quarter of the entire Indian population. But this still means that 75% of the population is either really rich or really poor. The article mentions briefly that the gap between rich and poor is widening. Just like the US, India has embraced capitalism, and once again we are seeing that this is what unregulated capitalism does when it comes to class polarization.

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I saw my first segway the other day approaching Fifth Avenue in midtown!!

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I don't know if this will necessarily qualify as culture, but it's something I've been thinking about. So...Why is it that old people smell like old people? I used to think that this was just the way my grandfather smelled. But that was just because he was the only old person I knew.

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Click here for hard evidence that it's a bad idea to watch Fox News.

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I've heard rumors and speculation recently that there is going to be a backlash against the current trend of literature that is irony-laden, sarcastic, humorous in a biting and ostensibly socially interpretive, self-deprecating but actually arrogant, way. Please make it so! I'm ready for some serious, pessimistic, heavy, humble, introspective reading.

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As someone who really loves classical music, this is a sad article. But it also seem like an important one because, let's face it, classical music just isn't what it once was.  It must be true; classical music does need to catch up to the times; just not in the way you might think.

Click here for last week's column.

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Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three.  She can be contacted at [email protected].

© 2003 Me Three