Latest news with #MobyDick
Wall Street Journal
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Face With Tears of Joy' Review: Smartphone Hieroglyphics
'Emoji Dick,' a line-by-line translation into emoji of Herman Melville's 1851 novel, 'Moby-Dick,' was published in 2010. Five years later, the Oxford English Dictionary chose the 'face with tears of joy' emoji as its word of the year. Today there are north of 3,500 accepted emoji characters, many of which have become inescapable in digital communication. Is this increasingly widespread visual lexicon a language of its own? Linguists and language pedants generally say no. In 'Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji,' Keith Houston, weighing the evidence, concurs. He asserts, however, that there is 'a richness of emoji usage that rivals any language.' That, too, might rankle the pedants, but the author, an emoji aficionado, mounts an energetic case. Mr. Houston opens with a brisk history that identifies distant ancestors of the emojis you find on your phone, forebears that can include symbols found on ancient scrolls and 18th-century Buddhist texts. The term 'emoji' derives from combining the Japanese words for 'picture' and 'written character.' Shigetaka Kurita, a software engineer, is often credited with creating the first set of emojis, which the Japanese cellular provider Docomo launched in 1999, but researchers have found emoji-like characters, including precursors to today's familiar smiley faces and hearts, on Japanese word processors dating back to the 1980s. An emoji relative, the emoticon, which combines keyboard characters to make simple pictorial symbols, first appeared in 1982: A Carnegie Mellon computer scientist proposed to colleagues on an electronic bulletin board that they type three punctuation marks in sequence— ':-)'—to indicate when they were being facetious. Google and Apple helped the system go global with smartphone operating systems that used emojis liberally. Doing so required the support of the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organization that ensures that digitized characters and symbols are compatible across networks and devices.
New York Post
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
‘Call Me Izzy' review: Jean Smart's good, but this Broadway play is a hack job
Theater review CALL ME IZZY 85 minutes with no intermission. At Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St. Jean Smart is at the height of her career. She's won three Emmy Awards in the last four years for her widely acclaimed performance as stand-up comic Deborah Vance on 'Hacks.' The wonderful actress with a newfound prestige following could have her pick of plays, you would think. So, why, why, why has she chosen to return to Broadway in the anemic, copy-and-paste 'Call Me Izzy,' a star vehicle fit for the junkyard? Smart is funnier, deeper and, well, smarter than anything in playwright Jamie Wax's mummified one-woman show that opened Thursday night at Studio 54. Yet she's relegated to cracking 'Moby Dick' jokes next to a toilet. This Wax work, a musty quilt of cliches, is about a Louisiana woman who lives in a trailer with her abusive, deadbeat, hard-drinking husband. Essentially alone, Izzy writes poetry on two-ply as an escape. She then hides it away in a Tampax box that no one dare open. How old is Izzy? At what point in her life is she recalling this traumatic past? Who knows? Wax has a poetic license to kill. Izzy begins, with Sunday mass somberness, by pretentiously describing the dissolving bowl tablet she's just dropped in the John: 'Blue, azure, sapphire, cerulean!' And then, channeling the worst solo show tendencies, she adds: 'My husband, Ferd, he hates the blue cleaner I put in the toilet almost as much as he hates my writin'.' Unlike the tank after a flush, the material of 'Call Me Izzy' stays right at that same eye-rolling level for the entire 85 minutes. 3 Jean Smart stars in 'Call Me Izzy' on Broadway. Emilio Madrid The play is dull and unchallenging. Outside of a surprise run-in with a professor — the show's one hearty laugh that then gets overused — the story unfurls in the most obvious, stay-on-the-runner way possible. Wouldn't you know Izzy's poems are discovered by tastemakers in New York, and that puts a scary wedge between her and Ferd. Her mind quickly wanders north. It's like 'Waitress' without the songs, set at a coffee shop's open-mic night. Much of 'Call Me Izzy' relies on old southern stereotypes. She's the sole educated, sensitive woman in a sea of boors; a trailer is a hotbed of drunkenness and abuse; everybody speaks colorfully like they're on a porch rocking chair. There's a mocking tone to it all. Later, in an attempt to course-correct, Wax has a wealthy New York philanthropist couple come to visit Izzy and Ferd. It turns out city folk can have the same dark marital problems. The scene makes the ideas of 'Call Me Izzy' no less hackneyed or rudimentary. 3 The story of 'Izzy' is cliched, but Jean Smart is a pleasure to watch. Emilio Madrid At least there's Smart. She doesn't pop in and out of distinct characters like Sarah Snook is in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' or Jodie Comer did in 'Prima Facie.' Rather she regales the crowd in the way a person does at a dinner table. The actress is a pleasure to watch, as ever. A best friend, a cool aunt. 'Designing Women' fans will especially enjoy the return of her Southern lilt after her last few years of Las Vegas and LA attitude. Smart's Izzy is alive with openness and joy, in spite of the pain, although she occasionally swallows her words TV-style. 3 Much of the play takes place in a bathroom. Emilio Madrid Dead on arrival is Sarna Lapine's in-the-toilet direction. 'Hacks' is a great word to describe her butchered scenic transitions. We spend most of the play staring at a bathroom, even when the characters aren't in it. Even the most basic staging that this sort of show requires is bungled. Back in the first scene, Izzy, talking to herself, says, 'Call me Isabelle! Call me Ishmael! Well that's not terribly original.' True. Nothing here is.
Economist
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Economist
Xiaolu Guo on love, art and how the Chinese psyche has changed
One of the Chinese diaspora's most celebrated artists grew up poor but surrounded by literature and art. After a string of books in her native language Xiaolu Guo found her creativity constrained. In London she began writing and making films in English —most recently a reworking of 'Moby Dick'. After half a life inside China and half outside, she has illuminating views on art, love, youth and womanhood. Rosie Blau, a former China correspondent for The Economist and a co-host of 'The Intelligence', our daily news podcast, visits Ms Guo at her home. They explore the author's formative years, her bewildering move to the West and her thoughts on Chinese art and society today.
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
50th anniversary of 'Jaws': How the film impacted public perception of sharks
A theme song consisting of a simple two-note motif has kept swimmers terrified of open water for decades. John Williams' iconic score for the movie "Jaws," which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its release later this month, is instantly recognizable -- the sound of which is enough to prompt people to look around for a monster of the sea to emerge from the surface, even if they are no where near the ocean, shark experts told ABC News. The movie, one of the first feature films directed by Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg and based on the book of the same name by Peter Benchley, shifted the collective consciousness surrounding sharks and the danger they present for the past 50 years, some experts said. Based in a coastal town in New England, residents are terrified after a woman is killed by a great white shark that seems to want to continue raising its number of human kills as it stalks boats and swimmers. "Jaws" is almost synonymous with the American summer -- similar to Fourth of July and apple pie, Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at California State University Long Beach, told ABC News. The film tapped into humans' primal fear and became a social phenomenon in the U.S. and abroad, grossing over $470 million at the box office, adjusted for inflation. Shot at water level, which is where humans see the water, "Jaws" instilled a fear of the unknown -- which is why it is still relevant today, Ross Williams, founder of The Daily Jaws, an online community dedicated to celebrating the movie, told ABC News. "It villainized sharks and people became absolutely terrified of any species that was in the ocean," James Wilkowski, director of the Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station at Oregon State University, told ABC News. 'Jaws' transformed sharks into the new marine villain When "Jaws" was released on June 20, 1975, it transformed the apex predator into an underwater villain whose presence made water unsafe, Wilkowski said. Whales were the most feared marine animal in the generations before "Jaws," said Lowe, who grew up in Martha's Vineyard, where the movie was shot. Lowe's grandfather was a commercial fisherman, and his grandfather's uncles were commercial whalers, who passed down the terror of whales to the subsequent generations, Lowe said. The fear was based on stories of sailors coming back from whaling expeditions where friends and family had died, Lowe added. "Moby Dick," the 1851 novel by Herman Melville about a whaling ship captain named Ahab and his quest to get revenged on the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg, likely contributed to the trepidation as well, Lowe said. But the anti-shark propaganda had been brewing long before the movie was released, Williams said. Horror stories published during World War II and films that preceded "Jaws" did not paint sharks in a nice light, Williams said. Chapple, who started his career in Cape Cod, knew people who saw the movie as a kid and still refused to enter ocean waters as an adult. "It was really in the psyche of the community," he said. Misconceptions about sharks due to 'Jaws' Like many fictional films, there were several exaggerations or dramatizations about sharks included in "Jaws" for cinematic effect. The most glaring inaccuracy is that sharks want to attack or eat people, the experts said. The notion that sharks are some "mindless killer" that are going to kill anyone who is swimming in the water or on a boat is inaccurate to the nature of the predator, Taylor Chapel, co-lead of Oregon State University's Big Fish Lab, told ABC News. "We're not on a shark's menu," Wilkowski said. "They don't want to eat us, and if they did, we'd be easy pickings. It'd be a buffet." Shark research began in the 1970s, so at the time, scientists -- and especially the public -- didn't know a lot about them, Chapple said. There are also anatomical inaccuracies in the shark animatronic itself -- including bigger teeth, larger "dark, black" eyes and an unrealistic 25-foot body, Wilkowski said. Technology at the time made it difficult for the filmmakers to get actual footage of the sharks, so there are barely any glimpses of real sharks in the movie and filmmakers largely relied on the animatronic as well, Lowe said. "When the movie came out, it was probably the most deceptively but brilliantly marketed movie ever," Williams said. The biggest misconception that still reverberates among public fear is that a shark sighting is a "bad thing." But the presence of sharks is actually a sign of a healthy ecosystem, Wilkowski said. "To see sharks in an environment is a good thing," he said. "...we just have to learn how to coexist with them." After the movie was released and permeated society's awareness of the dangers that lurk beneath the surface of the water, there was a direct correlation of shark population declines due to trophy hunting, Wilkowski said. "Because people's perceptions of sharks were negative, it made it easier for them to allow and justify overfishing of sharks, regardless of the species," Lowe said. Both Spielberg and Benchley have expressed regret in the past over how "Jaws" impacted the public perception of sharks. But Chapple has noticed a shift in the past two decades, where sharks have transformed from a "terrifying" creature to one people are fascinated by, instead, he said. "The fascination has outlasted and outpaced the fear," Williams said. Humans are actually a much bigger threat to sharks, killing up to 100 million sharks per year as a result of overfishing, according to the Shark Research Institute. Climate change and shifting food sources are also causing species-wide population declines, the experts said. Sharks are crucial for a healthy ocean ecosystem. The apex predators maintain balance in the food web and control prey populations. "If we lost sharks, our marine ecosystem would collapse," Wilkowski said.
Chicago Tribune
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Column: Thar she blows! Chicago artist and writer Dmitry Samarov brings ‘Moby-Dick' back to life
Moby Dick was a whale, a very big whale. It is also a book, a very big book, written by Herman Melville and published in 1851. It was initially a commercial failure, this tale of Captain Ahab on a whaling ship named the Pequod on his mad quest for vengeance on the giant white sperm whale of the title that had chomped off Ahab's leg on a previous encounter. The story's narrator, a seaman along for the journey, opens with what is arguably the most famous first line in English literary history, 'Call me Ishmael.' 'Moby-Dick,' the book, entered the life of artist and writer Dmitry Samarov two decades ago when he was 33. 'I was going through a divorce and came upon a cheap paperback copy of the book,' he says. 'It was a crazy time for me and I was grasping at anything that might help me. This novel was a life raft and I felt lucky to be among the few who had not been assigned to read it in high school, so I wasn't spoiled by having to do it for homework.' And so he was helped and life moved on. But in the days following the bloody events of Nov. 4, 2024, in Gaza that rattled this world, Samarov was particularly affected. He set about trying to 'forget the news.' He canceled his subscriptions to newspapers. Never a tech aficionado, he severed his remaining internet ties so there was 'no headline-blaring app (following) me out the door.' Samarov came to the United States from his native Russia in 1978 when he was 7. He lived first in Boston and then came here. He went to the School of the Art Institute. He started driving a cab. He wrote. He made art. In 2006, he started writing an illustrated blog about his behind-the-wheel experiences. This attracted the folks at the University of Chicago Press, and that led to 'Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab' (2011) and 'Where To? A Hack Memoir' (2014). His next book arrived in 2019, 'Music to My Eyes,' a gathering of drawings and writing handsomely published by the local Tortoise Books. 'For more than 30 years, I have been bringing my sketchbook to concerts and drawing the performers on stage,' he said. I wrote of it: 'His writing has matured over the years and in wonderfully compelling ways his new book can be read as a memoir, for in it he shares stories that help explain why and how music has, as he put it, 'haunted my entire life.'' He lives in Bridgeport and makes his living by working some fill-in bar shifts at the Rainbo Club and a couple of shifts at Tangible Books, near his apartment. 'My life is all freelance and flexible,' he told me some time ago. 'The goal is total unemployment.' Now, on to the latest book, seeded by an article Samarov read about, as he puts it, 'tech hucksters claiming to make millions publishing new versions of classics from the public domain.' He was not at all interested in 'tricking anyone into paying me $15.99 for a cut-and-paste reprint of some dusty tome.' He discovered Project Gutenberg, the internet site that allows people to download books or read them online at no cost. It offers some of the world's great literature, focused on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Near the top of its most-downloaded list, Samarov found his old friend, 'Moby-Dick.' And so he got to work. In his short but lively 'Designers Note' at the book's end, he gives some of the details, and he tells me one of his goals with this project is 'to introduce it to younger people.' He writes that he feels the novel is 'as relevant as any news story.' The book is handsomely published by Samarov's friends at local publisher Maudlin House and is available there and elsewhere for $25, not at all bad for a 650-page book. Melville dedicated 'Moby-Dick' to his great friend, novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. Samarov dedicates this new edition to Harry Synder, the late manager of a theater in Boston about whom Samarov writes elsewhere, 'Harry and I didn't talk much about art over the 35-plus years of our friendship but he showed me how to carry myself in the world without neurotically making sure anyone who crossed my path knew of my 'true calling.' He was a fully-rounded person first but an artist to the core.' The whale is on the cover of this new edition, striking in black and white, though to me, he appears to be smiling. 'I was inspired by scrimshaw art,' says Samarov, then explaining that art form that is created by engraving or carving on such whale parts as bones and teeth. There are nearly 100 drawings of people, boats, buildings, implements, ropes in knots and other items. There is a Samarov self-portrait and a drawing of Melville, accompanied by Samarov's writing, 'I wonder what (Melville) would make of there now being over 7,000 versions of his masterpiece. … I'd like to believe he'd judge the version you hold in your hands worthwhile and not a cheap cash grab.' Far be it from me to dip into Melville's mind, but I think Samarov's right.
