Author: Douglas McLennan

STUDIO-BOUND

  • What influence does an artist’s studio have on his or her work? “For many, the studio is a sensitive issue; Tracey Emin also didn’t want to talk about hers let alone allow a stranger near such a ‘private place’. Lucian Freud has painted his studio with its sagging sofa and pile of paint rags into his pictures for years. Picasso once referred to his workplace as the ‘scaffold’, hinting that each time he approached the canvas it was like meeting the hangman; that any public execution of him as an artist would begin at the canvas.” – The Observer (UK)

DEEP DOME DOO-DOO

London’s Millennium Dome managers have been covering up the scale of the facility’s disaster. Managers knew only 4-5 million people would attend this year while public estimates were 12 million. Public anger over the mismanagement of the dome intensified last week when the commission said it had given £47m to the NMEC to prevent it from going bankrupt. The grant followed a £43m donation only last month after public assurances in July that it would be ‘extremely difficult’ to give the dome more money.” – The Sunday Times (UK)

ROCK ON

An archeologist posits that the first musical instrument wasn’t a flute, but a blade being hit by another piece of flint. The rocks date from about 40,000 years ago. “What you get is actually three or four tones from each of the blades, once you’ve practised a little bit.” – CBC

BIG RETAILERS TO POLICE ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT

This week Congress is due to release a report on violence and the entertainment industry and accompany the report’s release with hearings. In advance, retailers are clamping down. “Kmart said Thursday that it will refuse sale of mature-rated games to anyone under age 17, using a bar-code scanner that will prompt cashiers to ask for identification from young people. After Kmart’s news conference in Washington, Wal-Mart said it will enact the same policy, and in a letter last month, Toys R Us officials said the practice is in place at their stores.” – Chicago Sun-Times 09/10/00

THE NEW COLOR OF ENGLAND

A new report says that in a few decades whites will be a minority in Britain. “Colonial pomposity and imperial cruelty have been severely undermined to the point of oblivion. There is no economic basis for this phenomenon. National capital has been dissolved into global capital, drawing into its wake an international population now at ease in England.” – The Observer (UK) 09/10/00

AWASH IN MASS CULTURE

“Faced, then, with a public that craves variety while it is governed by the familiar, the choice of what cultural products and symbols to produce and reproduce – and what cultural meanings to represent – becomes increasingly a marketing decision of how many ticket sales, book sales, symphony subscriptions, etc., will be generated. In this corporatized, profit-motivated environment, all culture is mass culture, since mass consumption of the highest levels possible is the ultimate goal. Judgments of quality and taste are replaced by a marketing distinction between mainstream and nonmainstream, based primarily on sales figures, what’s hot and what’s not, and who’s ‘into’ it.”  – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 09/10/00

THE SEASONS BRING…

“According to the literary critic Northrop Frye, each of the four seasons of the Northern Hemisphere has given rise to a correlative genre: satire belongs to winter, comedy to spring, romance to summer and tragedy to fall. Our present civilization has little appetite for tragedy, but a wispy shadow of Frye’s theory persists, as the coming of autumn sends children back to school and putatively serious movies back into the multiplexes.” – New York Times 09/10/00 

SHERLOCK HOLMES, KILLER?

Did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle conspire to deny Fletcher Robinson recognition for devising the plot and supplying much of the local detail for “Hound of the Baskervilles,” one of Sherlock Holmes’ greatest adventures? A new book makes the charge and also “claims to have found circumstantial evidence that Conan Doyle may have murdered his former friend when he became worried that the deception might be exposed.” – Sunday Times (UK)

EGGERS SUED BY FORMER AGENT

Author Dave Eggers, author of the bestselling memoir “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” is being sued by his former agent. The suit contends that Eggers “broke his contract to pay a 15 percent commission on sales of the book and any future sale of movie rights. (Eggers has been maintaining that he is not interested in a movie deal.)” – Inside.com