“Architecture is also the stuff of construction, engineering, maths and science. Of philosophy, sociology, Le Corbusier and who knows what else. It is also, I can’t help feeling, harder to create great buildings now than it was in the past. When Eridu or the palaces and piazzas of Renaissance Italy were shaped, architecture was the most expensive and prestigious of all cultural endeavours. Today we spread our wealth more thinly.”
Month: February 2012
Is The Time Of Gay Literature Over – Thanks To The Internet And TV?
Novelist Christopher Bram: “Even when gay books were the only game in town, there were plenty of gay people who didn’t read. For them being gay was about sex and going to bars and dancing. There’s still gay culture around and it takes different shapes and forms. Gay bars don’t play the same role in gay life they once did 10-15 years ago. The Internet has changed that too. I miss the gay bookstores, but I like the difference and the variety.”
Drunk Drawing, Not A Problem In Glasgow
“The name of the pub is the Flying Duck. The name of the night is All The Young Nudes. It is a life-drawing club. Every Tuesday, for two hours, around 50 people gather here in a back room down a back lane with sketchpads and cans of cider. This is, perhaps, the only bar in Glasgow where a Stanley knife taken out and laid on the table implies not a threat of violence but an intention to sharpen one’s pencils.”
Protesting Students Halt Filming Of Egyptian TV Show
“The students had objected to the ‘indecent’ clothing … and ‘categorically refused’ to let the filming continue unless the wardrobe was changed.”
If You Think Chick-Lit Insults Women, Maybe That’s Your Problem
Sophie Kinsella, author of the Shopaholic books: “You can be highly intelligent, and also ditzy and klutzy. You can be unable to cook, you can like lipstick. And I think it’s more realistic to represent women having all these facets, than to say, OK, you’re intelligent, so I’ve got to write you as all competent, which I think is an unfair ideal.”
Finishing An Unfinished Symphony (Not *The* Unfinished Symphony, But Still A Schubert)
The BBC’s Radio 3, during a an eight-day stretch entirely devoted to Schubert, will “finish” one of the several symphonies the composer left unfinished at his death.
Oh, Let’s Just Move Outside – The Bristol Old Vic Renovates And Innovates
“The Bristol Old Vic is finally getting a much-needed £19.28m refurbishment and refit. With the main auditorium out of action, the team at BOV had to come up with ingenious ways of keeping the theatre alive during the works.”
Kodak’s Glorious History, And Sad End
“If any company should have recognized what 2012 would be like in, say, 1988, Kodak should have. After all, it pretty much invented 2012 in 1888. That was the year that company founder George Eastman introduced the Kodak No. 1, catalyzing a new way of looking at the world, a new mode of existence.”
Booker Prize-winning Author Strikes Back At Editor Who Claimed To Rewrite His Work
Novelist and short story writer Ben Okri says an editor who claimed to have rewritten dialogue in one Okri book “has a tendency to exaggerate his own importance.”
Who Won At The British Film Awards? They’re Not Talking
The Guardian‘s Xan Brooks live-blogged the BAFTAs from the top rows of the Opera House at Covent Garden. “Up steps Stephen Fry to welcome us all: ‘lords and Iron Ladies and media scum’. Fry, it transpires, is deeply proud of British cinema, whether it be represented by James Bond or little Harry Potter.”