Volt’s first pre-production model now on the road, in testing

(Engadget)

And with that, the first bona fide pre-production Chevy Volt — its own parts and all — has hit the pavement. General Motor’s storied EV will be taken through the ropes to see what needs to be tweaked / modified before it finally goes into full production, which is expected to be at a rate [...]

Artist of the week 46: Frances Stark

(The Guardian)
By Jessica Lack

An artist and a writer, Frances Stark can transform even a dreary corporate tool into a compelling visual essay. Her PowerPoint presentation Structures That Fit My Opening and Other Parts Considered to the Whole (2006), intertwines anecdotal text with photographs of her home in Echo Park, Los Angeles. It’s a semi-autobiographical ramble [...]

A Modernizing China, A Rising Middle Class – Difficult Decisions To Be Made

In a previous post from The China Observer about Twitter in China I wrote the following:
Microblogging helps build communities centered on shared interests and keeps groups of followers and those being followed up to date with the most recent happenings in their area of interest.
 
This past weekend my belief in the power of Twitter to [...]

The End of Innocence

During a recent visit to a local Suzhou Starbucks I suffered a bit of cultural dislocation. Four local boys clad as any American lad in his energetic mid-teens would be dressed – baggy basketball shorts hanging off flat butts, down past the knees; tent-sized white T-shirts emblazoned with this or that brand name; boat-sized sneakers [...]

Photographer Martin Schreiber’s best shot

(The Guardian)
By Hannah Pool

In 1979, I was teaching nude photography at Parsons school in New York. I needed models for the course – and one day a 20-year-old called Madonna Ciccone showed up. She was just another citizen, a girl trying to make ends meet. She was quiet, taciturn. I’m not sure it was something [...]

arrah Fawcett’s onstage extremities

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/06/farrah-fawcetts-onstage-extremities.html

In all of the obituaries and appreciations about the late Farrah Fawcett hitting the news today, two fleeting details deserve special attention for her fans. Although she wasn’t a stage animal by any stretch, Fawcett took time out during her career to act in two high-profile theatrical productions. One of them would prove to be [...]

Playwright Alice Tuan to take a leading role at CalArts

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/06/alice-tuan-calarts-theater-writing-for-performance-mark-taper-forum-.html
 
More changes to report from the CalArts theater school. Alice Tuan, the award-winning L.A.-based playwright, has been appointed as the head of the Writing for Performance Program. She will begin some of her duties this summer before fully starting the job in the fall semester.
A playwright who has focused largely on the Asian American experience, [...]

Michael Jackson: King of style

http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/la-me-jackson-style26-2009jun26,0,2997599.story
The military details, red leather and black loafers made the pop singer an ’80s fashion icon.
By Booth Moore, Fashion Critic

Wearing one glove, Michael Jackson reached into the pop culture zeitgeist and influenced an entire generation, giving pieces as simple as military badges and a fedora an imprint that, for a time, was as powerful as [...]

Michael Jackson-related traffic doubled Twitter’s update frequency, tripled Facebook’s

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/06/huge-spike-in-michael-jackson-traffic-strains-web-sites.html

As the news of Michael Jackson’s fate unfolded, sites around the Web felt the strain of spiking interest.
On Twitter, the volume of Jackson-related messages – up to 5,000 per minute at peak – put such a demand on the site that it slowed considerably.
“We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the [...]

Ann Powers on Michael Jackson: A performer who kept transcending boundaries

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2009/06/michael-jackson-a-performer-who-kept-transcending-boundaries.html

Michael Jackson was not of this world. He always seemed to defy gravity, as a dancer whose signature move was so incomprehensibly graceful that it earned the extraterrestrial title “the Moonwalk,” a singer whose tenor was high but strong, a rhythmic instrument that went as sweet and tender as a clarinet on the long notes [...]