“Last November, actress Liang Danni filed a complaint in Beijing’s Xicheng District Court against the National Ballet of China on behalf of her 87-year-old father, claiming 550,000 yuan ($86,968) in compensation and demanding a public apology. The elder Liang wrote the script for the original, film version of The Red Detachment of Women, from which the iconic Cultural Revolution ballet was adapted.
Month: May 2012
Vandals Deface Satirical Portrait Of South African President
“One man painted a red cross across [Jacob] Zuma’s face and penis while a younger man spread black paint over the image. The younger man was reportedly assaulted by security guards [in the Johannesburg gallery]. The 1.85-metre-high painting, entitled The Spear, has bitterly divided South Africans,” with Zuma and the ANC party suing to have the painting taken down.
Orange Prize No Longer: Sponsor Withdraws From Award For Fiction By Women
“In one of the biggest upsets in literary prize history, the mobile services company Orange has announced this morning that it will not be renewing its sponsorship of the prize for women’s fiction that has borne its name since the award’s inception 17 years ago.”
Theatre Artists, Don’t Under-Price Yourselves When Applying For Funding
Lyn Gardner: “[The] current belt-tightening climate… means that, when they are applying for money, many companies feel under pressure to prove just how cheaply they can make a piece of work. The risk is that they end up selling themselves and the show short.”
Envisioning Australia As An Arts Utopia
“Arts Minister Simon Crean … [now] has a suite of reviews of the cultural sector that may shape the [National Cultural Policy] … The federal government has yet to respond formally to any of these reports and recommendations; but in the event they are adopted in full, what would this cultural utopia look like?”
Eugene Polley, 96, Inventor Of The TV Remote
“[His] best-known creation has fostered blissful sloth, caused decades of domestic discord and forever altered the way consumers watch television.”
This Cyrano Has A Normal-Sized Nose; The Problem Is His Ears
Deaf West Theatre, the company that in 2003 brought its spoken-and-signed production of the musical Big River to Broadway, has created an Internet-age adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac in which the hero, who is deaf, must court his beloved on behalf of his brother, an aging rocker.
Spoilers Just Make You Enjoy The Story More (According To Research)
“[In] a controlled experiment, ‘subjects significantly preferred spoiled over unspoiled stories in the case of both … ironic twist stories and … mysteries.’ In fact, it seems ‘that giving away … surprises makes readers like stories better.’ perhaps because of the ‘pleasurable tension caused by the disparity in knowledge between the omniscient reader and the character’.”
Ken Loach On UK Film Rating Body: ‘British Middle-Class Is Obsessed By Bad Language’
The director, attacking the British Board of Film Classification over its restrictions on a certain term in Loach’s The Angels’ Share (set in working-class Glasgow): “We were allowed seven c**ts … but only two of them could be aggressive c**ts.”
Philip K. Dick, Gnostic Philosopher
“[His] vision is not quite Christian in the traditional sense; it is Gnostical: it is the mystical intellection, at its highest moment a fusion with a transmundane or alien God who is identified with logos and who can communicate with human beings in the form of a ray of light or, in Dick’s case, hallucinatory visions.” (All this from a dose of sodium pentothal …)