Author: Laura Collins Hughes

Grant Funds An Alt-Rock Station For NYC

“In what could be an exciting new development in New York radio, the listener-supported station WFUV (90.7 FM) will use a $500,000 grant to run an alternative rock station targeted at young listeners in their 20s and 30s,” and featuring local bands. “New York has long been a radio anomaly. It’s home to one of the world’s biggest and most influential music scenes, yet no major radio stations exist to support it.”

At 50, “On The Road” Remains Culturally Relevant

Still selling briskly at 50, “On the Road” “has far outlasted many other cult classics. Part of the reason for the novel’s staying power is that popular artists keep referencing it. (A new movie version, directed by Walter Salles, who made ‘The Motorcycle Diaries,’ is scheduled to go into production early next year.) Everyone from Bob Dylan to the Beastie Boys has been inspired by Kerouac. … But keeping it on hand can be difficult: among book-world insiders, ‘On the Road’ is known to be a heavily shoplifted work….”

Train’s Late Again? Our Poet Will Help You Through It.

“Britain’s worst-performing train company has hired a poet to soothe the tempers of its frustrated customers. First Great Western, which operates services from Paddington to South Wales and the West Country, insisted yesterday that its decision to engage Sally Crabtree, a Cornish poet, to perform at selected stations over the next four days had nothing to do with its poor punctuality record, disclosed in The Times yesterday.”

In This Corner, Representing The USA: Norman Mailer

After seeing both Alan Bennett and Norman Mailer at public events in Edinburgh (Mailer attending by video link), Sarah Crompton posits that “if you were searching for writers to represent their countries at some kind of authorial Olympics, Bennett and Mailer would be the perfect choice of contestants. … Both will be remembered and revered as long as people love books; but there could never be any mistaking which man was British and which American.”

S.F. Tower Finalists Emphasize Their Green Appeal

“No matter which team gets chosen and what actually gets built, the Transbay competition already demonstrates how environmental awareness has entered the development mainstream. Competition rules required an emphasis on green design, to be sure. But each proposal seems designed to woo Al Gore…. Another nice twist: Projects of this size are mandated to have large budgets for art, so the Pelli team brought an artist in from the start….”

Wiesel’s Accused Stalker Blurts A Courtroom Apology

“The man accused of accosting Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in a San Francisco hotel apologized to the Nobel Peace Prize winner in court Monday as Wiesel recounted what he described as his most harrowing ordeal since World War II. ‘I’m terribly sorry about what happened,’ Eric Hunt, 23, blurted out as the 78-year-old Wiesel was on the witness stand in San Francisco Superior Court at the defendant’s preliminary hearing.”

Is It All Right For True Art To Crack A Smile?

“(I)s there a place for humour in art? … Is it even morally justifiable, in the current climate, to be anything less than furious? We are trained, both as viewers and as consumers, to accept only the grave and magisterial as great. And while Romantic sturm und drang has fallen from favour … the respect accorded the playful, the determinedly slight, has dropped even further.”

At Last, Hit Iraq War Play To Get A London Stage

“After a year of frustration searching for a suitable space, Black Watch, last year’s Edinburgh festival hit play about the Scottish regiment and the lives of its soldiers in Iraq, is finally to be shown in England. It will be staged at the Barbican in London next June, nearly two years after its Edinburgh festival premiere.” Audiences in Los Angeles and New York will see it first, this fall….