Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I object to the hegemony of form in contemporary architecture. We have very advanced technological tools, but ultimately, we create buildings exactly like we used to before: We send the drawings to an engineer and let him struggle with figuring out how to build it.
There's a lot of cool stuff going on in independent film. But obviously, yeah - all the comic-book-franchise stuff is deeply boring. But these comic-book characters are the pagan pantheon of gods in today's contemporary culture. It's so important to so many people.
The thing is, we live in a contemporary world, and being able to make yourself the best person you can possible be can be difficult. But as long as you're trying to figure it out, and you're really looking in the right direction, everything's going to be all right.
When I go to galleries in New York, I feel like I'm in school. I know that there's good contemporary conceptual art, but I have a really hard time caring about it. I'd rather look at images of people and things I can relate to. Then again, I didn't go to art school.
Well, I'm not sure, but of one thing I am certain: History judges one differently than contemporary observers, and so I think that as time passes, I hope that not me personally so much, but our administration will be seen for some of the things that we accomplished.
Now I'm writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing.
I don't usually like teen novels written in the present tense, particularly those told from a first-person viewpoint. Too many writers seem to believe that using either or both devices automatically imbues their stories with deep seriousness and a contemporary feel.
My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care.
In high school, during lunchtime I would go in the room where the wrestling mats were and try different flips and different moves. Like windmills. I just started mixing martial arts with jazz and contemporary stuff and it would get mashed together and became my style.
Kids are smart: don't underestimate their bull detector. Contemporary kids have access to a lot of information, so don't even try to fool them. I have never been more nervous about my research than when writing for young adults because they pick up every single error.
I went to school at Juilliard, and most of our training there is the classics, and as much as I thrive in contemporary, weird, experimental work, I really am excited about finding a pioneer woman or something from a different era that I could really sink my teeth into.
I always thought 'chick lit' meant third-person contemporary funny novels, dealing with issues of the day. I mean, it's not the ideal term; when I'm asked to describe what I do, I say I write romantic comedies, cause that's what I feel they are. But I'm quite pragmatic.
Contemporary families can be made in many ways. You might step up when relatives or friends are unable to meet their obligation to their children. You might marry someone who is already a parent. Or you might, as in my case, yearn to create a family and decide to adopt.
One of the reasons we all still read Jane Austen is because her books are about universal things which still matter today - love, money, family. They haven't gone out of fashion, so it's not throwing the baby out with the bathwater to rework her in a contemporary style.
'Death Sentence' really is a throwback to the '70s style revenge drama with moments of action. It's like a contemporary 'Death Wish' with a much more thriller style storyline, but the action scenes I shot very much in the style of '70s films like 'The French Connection.'
I know I'm as comfortable doing period as I am contemporary. I suppose we grow up with it in a sense, in the theater. We get to put on costumes and play a lot of period dramas or plays so we're exposed to it a little bit more I think because of our theatrical background.
I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to healing and redemption.
But, in the end, even a song that's as politically bland as Blowin in the Wind, you probably wouldn't get up and sing that now, whereas some of Bob Dylan's love songs that were contemporary with that, like say Girl from the North Country, you can still get up an play now.
I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse. The art world is filled with vibrancy.
I have always loved contemporary dance, but it has always been a bit of a mystery to me. But choreography is very much like what I do when you are putting characters in frame on the page. It's so impressive what they do with their bodies. It's like painting: an abstraction.
I enjoy listening to contemporary rock on the college stations while I'm taking long walks, love gospel and soul music, am fascinated by hip-hop and rap as the new kind of urban 'beat' poetry and, come to think of it, find something interesting about just any kind of music.
In my contemporary stories, I write about today's quilters, inventive techniques they use, and how technology has influenced their art. Novels set in the past let me have fun researching patterns that were popular and fabrics and tools available to quilters through history.
Look at her in 'Tevar.' Sonakshi has never looked more stunning. She lost oodles of weight especially to shoot the song 'Radha Nachegi.' Look at how gracefully she has performed the song. Very few contemporary leading ladies can carry off a semi-classical number so fluently.
I still do all my developing and printing in my darkroom. Being in New York, you get tremendous exposure to great arts. In my student years, I saw exhibitions of August Sander and Diane Arbus. I still go back to their pictures. I don't really go for contemporary photo shows.
Slipstream fiction is usually defined as fiction with a contemporary setting in which story elements are mimetic (that is, seem real) - except for one or two eerie strangenesses. Unlike outright fantasy, these are not explained or integrated into an alternate-reality setting.
I wrote 'Don't Look Back' in November 2011, and when I wrote the novel, it wasn't contracted, so there was a freedom in that - no expectations or anything like that. It was also my first contemporary novel I'd written and sold, which was to Disney/Hyperion in January of 2012.
I started writing songs for youth theater and stuff, and so it's really writing music for the stage that started me out, but then I eventually went to music college and did a two-year course in contemporary music and then just played in endless bands, cover bands, jazz bands.
I'm certainly very influenced by what you would call 'contemporary headline horror,' stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I'm always influenced by weird anecdotes and news.
Delphine Lucielle's paintings are profound, unique, and moving. It is rare to find contemporary art that combines both beauty, innovation, and creates a new style of painting by fusing technology and nature. Delphine Lucielle is pushing the boundaries of what art is capable of.
Currently under FCC policy, indecency determinations hinge on two factors. First, material must describe or depict sexual or excretory organs or activities. Second, the material must be patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium.
There are no categories in contemporary art. There are no rules. Artists are given the freedom to make and create whatever they please and call it whatever they please. I identify with that system, or lack of system, much more than I do the landscape of contemporary publishing.
Contemporary paganism gives me a subjective lens through which the world in which I live can be interpreted on an aesthetic and an ethical basis. I'm interested in narrative, myth, and story, in folklore and the way we connect to the turning of the seasons and the natural world.
The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it's beginning to happen.
Post-minimalism implies music that's genre-less. Minimalism was very important because it came at a time when contemporary music had become so complex, so experimental and detached that people turned away from it. Minimalism broke that trend and brought music back to the people.
With 'Bright Star' and with 'The Piano,' too, I felt a kind of sadness about it being in such a different era, because of my lack of experience with the era. And one of the ways I'd get over it is to remind myself that every film, even if it's contemporary, creates its own world.
My contemporary art collection began with just needing to put things on the wall. I was looking around my Victorian house thinking, 'What would be the coolest is contemporary art - it will make me look young and interesting.' I'm more than 80 percent skeptical of the whole thing.
While I appreciate horror movies, I'd love the opportunity to do something transformative, especially because people see me as contemporary. There's a lot to explore in my career that could take me back to another time. A period piece would be an incredible game of dress-up, too.
I've not been an admirer of contemporary music since punk rock went off the boil in 1977, but once a year I'll listen to 'Spiral Scratch' by the Buzzcocks, or 'Hippy Hippy Shake' by the Swinging Blue Jeans. Otherwise, I can put up with Chopin or shakuhachi flute in the background.
It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our contemporary reality. Conversely, it just takes skilful storytelling to recharge that connection to make the past come alive in our present.
There's no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I've happily joined in many discussions about 'the contemporary novel' where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appeared recently or may appear soon.
People try to pigeonhole comics by saying they're just for kids. So is The Odyssey. So is the Labors of Hercules, the story of Fa Mulan. The advantage of those stories over the contemporary ones is that they've had 2,000 years of editing. All the crap has been weeded out over time.
'Extraordinary' is an original fairy tale, a contemporary story. But like a traditional fairy tale, it heads quickly into frightening, bloody territory. I am afraid for my book, as it goes out alone into the world, just as I was frightened for Phoebe as I wrote and rewrote her story.
Before I started LimoLand, I mainly bought my clothes in Harlem, where I found clothing my size in fun colors. I still like to go there and see the vibrancy and colors of the neighborhood. I am also very influenced by the colors of my contemporary African and Japanese art collections.
Roberto Cavalli is a great designer. The Just Cavalli brand is very sexy, young and cool. Each collection is very contemporary and colourful; it is clearly for the younger generation who wants to have a trendy look. It's the first fragrance that I have ever done, so it's a huge honour!
I have learned to interface - what I think would be the contemporary term - with various different lexicons, and people speak very different languages. I've learned to speak in a lot of tongues, and I can live with the bellicose language of some fervent, fire-breathing Christians, sure.
Most of my writer friends are women, and they're all extremely talented, so of course I think the state of contemporary fiction for women is pretty great. Which is to say there is a ton of amazing work out there. These women are writing hard. There's much to be said. We're on it, chief.
We put too much on contemporary dancers. A lot of them cannot change styles; a lot of them can't do anything else other than run around the stage reaching and stretching in anguish to somebody off camera that I never understand who it is. But it's the teenage angst they have to live with.
I was always the kid down the street who got the other kids to put on a show. But it was only when I was 19, and discovered ballet and contemporary dance, that I got interested in the fact that you could have a whole evening of dance - rather than just waiting for the dancers in a musical.
I never want to make a film. I don't wake up in the morning going, 'Ooh, I'd really love to be on set making a film today'. I'm aware that other contemporary film directors perceive film-making as what they do, as what they have to do. But I would hope that I am more catholic in my tastes.
For many years, when people described how the Internet worked - whether they were talking about shopping, communicating, or starting a business there - they inevitably invoked a single metaphor. The Internet, said just about everybody, was a contemporary incarnation of the wild, wild West.