Author: Laura Collins Hughes

The Secret To One Self-Published Title’s Success

“Writer Colleen Dunn Bates … thought she had a good idea: to put together an upscale guidebook about her city — a kind of travel book for people who live there. And given the intensely local focus of the project, rather than dealing with a big New York publisher, she decided to publish it herself…. Almost a year later, ‘Hometown Pasadena’ has not only sold 10,000 copies, it has also turned into a small empire….”

50 Years On, Kerouac’s Joy Looks Like Disillusion

“A few decades ago, before TV commercials became obsessively concerned with prostate problems, Jack Kerouac wrote a book called ‘On the Road.’ It was greeted rapturously by many as a burst of rollicking, joyous American energy. … ‘On the Road’ turned 50 last month, and over the past few weeks a line of critics have taken another look at the book, and this time their descriptions of it, whether they like it or not, are very different.”

Here’s The Album. The Price Is Up To You.

“Radiohead, the respected British rock act, said that the band would sell its new album, at least initially, exclusively as a digital download and allow fans to decide how much to pay for it, if anything.” The album, “In Rainbows,” is to “be sold as a download without copy restriction software, known as digital-rights management. In effect, the band is asking fans to establish a monetary value for music, even when widespread piracy means that it would be available free.”

In Dance, Even Recent History Can Be Mythology

“The ephemeral nature of dance often leads to clichés about its being the art of the present. Would that it were. In some ways, the very fact that dance is fleeting makes it the least fully present of all the arts. Whether immediate or distant, the past intrudes, filtered through a most unreliable sieve: memory, which simultaneously augments and distorts every performance we see.”

Block This: Getting Physical With Virtual Reality

“Shakespeare had it easy. He lived in inherently stageable times: people lived in communities; were largely illiterate and so communicated through speech. … But the world has changed. People are spending more and more time online, some living virtual Second Lives or interacting in chatrooms. If one duty of the theatre is to depict contemporary society, how are its writers, directors and designers to approach virtual reality?”

Explicit Sex In Dramas Has A Name: Hard-Core Art

“In the last few years, two American filmmakers, Vincent Gallo and John Cameron Mitchell, have depicted actual sex in their films — and have not been shy about admitting it. Recently, the Oscar-winning director Ang Lee earned an NC-17 rating for his ‘Lust, Caution.’ These films and (HBO show ‘Tell Me You Love Me’) fall under ‘hard-core art,’ said Linda Williams, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of books on both pornography and cinema.”

Is “Cana” Facsimile A Miracle Or A Monster?

“Can — and should — technology right a historical wrong? That’s a question Italians have been asking since a facsimile of Veronese’s 16th-century ‘Wedding at Cana’ was installed on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore a few weeks ago. At the heart of the debate is the digital re-creation of this vast 1563 painting, which Napoleon’s forces removed from the refectory in the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore 210 years ago and took back to France as war booty.”