Author: Laura Collins Hughes

Saudi Clerics Press Minister To Ban Women From Media

“A group of hardline Saudi clerics have issued a statement urging the conservative kingdom’s new information minister to ban women from appearing in TV or in newspapers and magazines.” The statement reads, in part: “We have noticed how well-rooted perversity is in the Ministry of Information and Culture, in television, radio, press, culture clubs and the book fair.”

Why Music Ought To Percolate Up, Not Trickle Down

John Mellencamp: “Now that the carnage in this industry is so deep you can hardly wade through it, it’s open season for criticizing artists, present company included, for making a misstep or trying to create new opportunities to reach an audience…. If we have any hope for survival of the music that we all love, compassion must replace name-calling, fairness must replace greed and we need to come together as a musical community and try to understand each other’s problems.”

Alpha-Male Fantasy No. 4,632: A Hottie To Play My Mum!

“It is all too easy for a female actor to find herself cast as the mother of someone who once played her boyfriend as soon as she blows out the candles on her 35th birthday cake. This has long been an accepted fact of Hollywood life…. But last weekend, Hope Davis finally broke ranks to admit she was somewhat ‘peeved’ when she was recently offered a role playing the mother of Johnny Depp,” who was born in 1963 — the year before Davis.

A $10M Deficit Threatening, AGO Has Decisions To Make

Corporate and private rentals, budgeted as a significant source of income for Toronto’s recently renovated Art Gallery of Ontario, took a dive with the economy. So did gift-shop and restaurant receipts. “That is why within the next month or two the AGO, like most other museums in North America, will likely have to cut costs, including laying off up to 10 per cent of its 600 employees, reducing hours and other penny-pinching measures.”

The 1970s: An Architectural Decade Worth Preserving?

In architecture, some might see the 1970s “as the lost decade – a hiatus between the fag end of postwar modernism and the Day-Glo joviality of 1980s postmodernism. The Twentieth Century Society, though, is bucking the trend, starting a campaign to raise awareness of the decade’s architecture…, and good for them. My childhood needs saving!”

Palladio, Transcendent Embracer Of The Ordinary

“It is probably fair to say that Andrea Palladio, who died in 1580, is the patron saint of every McMansion that has ever cluttered the American landscape, because it was he who brought architectural aspiration to the houses of the moderately wealthy.” And yet: “If modern developers have used his treatise ‘The Four Books of Architecture’ as a mere catalogue of columns and cupolas for the upwardly mobile, Palladio isn’t to blame.”

Letter Writing, One Of Beckett’s Dirty Habits

“For a man of few words, Beckett wrote an awful lot of them. To date, some fifteen thousand letters have been found, and, from that trove, the more pertinent have now been plucked. The question is, to what do they pertain?” Here’s a snippet: “When I’ve posted this I’ll go & have a Turkish bath & stupefy my nerves in sweaty duration. My person is developing dirty habits.”

When Child’s Play Leaves Nothing To The Imagination

“I spent my youth in galaxies far, far away, and not just that one. In fact, my physical environment — I can only remember it hazily, but I think this is right — seemed to be designed to provide the maximum number of escape hatches from the real world. There were TVs in the basement, living room and my bedroom. We had one of the first Atari video game consoles. … But compared to kids growing up today, of course, I was Amish.”