“The idea that Hollywood’s hometown couldn’t sustain a smallish, 40-year-old film series just blocks from Charlie Chaplin’s old studio was shocking and depressing.” So it’s “a victory for a homegrown local protest movement as well as for the cultural life of the city” that “the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has backed off a plan to shut down its weekend film screening program. … Now comes the hard part.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
In Qaddafi Anniversary Celebration, Echoes Of ENO’s Opera
English National Opera’s Gaddafi: A Living Myth, three years ago, was “one of the most risible nights I’ve ever spent in the theatre.” Life imitates art “in the photographs this week of Gaddafi’s celebrations of 40 years since the revolution. The shots of actors recreating a mass hanging, enveloped by a strange green light, or dancers shaking it in front of a model Sphinx with red-laser eyes could have come straight out of ENO’s ill-fated stage designs. There are dramatic parallels, too.”
Separating The Artist From The Art
“Artists are at least as flawed as anyone else; we’ve had murderers, pedophiles, philanderers, anti-Semites, homophobes, xenophobes, Satanists, and more writing books and poems, composing music, directing films, painting and sculpting… If we remove all the art by artists of bad character from our lives, who are we hurting?”
With A Poet As Guide, A Bronx Tour Is Mobile Theatre
“The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue is sightseeing tour-cum-performance piece that captures a neighborhood in flux. The project’s stage is literally the South Bronx streets; its seats, a moving bus. An audio guide is pumped through headphones, and features a narrator (who performs live at the front of the bus) and two prerecorded characters.”
At Philly Live Arts, Money Is The Theme (Onstage And Off)
“Money, the root of much current brooding, can also be a spark plug for artistic thought, and our relationship with it turns out to be a persistent thread running through this year’s Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe.” That’s true of the the art and also of “the festival, whose budget is tighter this year, given the general economic picture.”
Why The Ikea Font Controversy Matters
Ikea’s catalogue typeface switch, from the venerable Futura to Microsoft’s omnipresent Verdana, has design people fuming. The “new look has been defined not by a company proudly parading its 66-year heritage, but by something driven by the clarity of the digital age. Nothing wrong with that – it’s a business. … But what would happen to our appreciation of the world if all our decisions were governed by commerce alone?”
The Most-Listened-To Public Radio Station In America?
It’s southern California’s KUSC which says “that it has been ranked as the most listened to public radio station in the nation for the spring quarter by Arbitron.”
Sam Wanamaker, Communist Threat — Or So MI5 Believed
“Secret MI5 files released today show that the secret services intended [in the 1950s] to imprison Wanamaker in an internment camp ‘in the event of an emergency with Russia’, because of his communist sympathies. The Chicago-born theatre director and actor” — who’d “moved to Britain after he was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee” — “went on to raise millions of pounds to rebuild Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London….”
Never Mind The Kindle. How ‘Bout Reading On Your Phone?
“The full-colour, touch-sensitive screens of the latest handsets are winning over those who doubted whether screens could ever match the convenience of the traditional paperback, and setting off a race between publishers to get their authors into a new market.”
A Homeless Hostel With A Rare Amenity: Beautiful Design
“A long, low building snaking around three sides of a garden, the hostel’s clean lines and white walls hark back to the work of early modernists such as Le Corbusier or JJP Oud. But then what should a homeless hostel look like anyway? Before Spring Gardens, the first purpose-built homeless hostel in Britain, it was a question no one needed to ask.”