“The name of the pub is the Flying Duck. The name of the night is All The Young Nudes. It is a life-drawing club. Every Tuesday, for two hours, around 50 people gather here in a back room down a back lane with sketchpads and cans of cider. This is, perhaps, the only bar in Glasgow where a Stanley knife taken out and laid on the table implies not a threat of violence but an intention to sharpen one’s pencils.”
Author: ArtsJournal2
Protesting Students Halt Filming Of Egyptian TV Show
“The students had objected to the ‘indecent’ clothing … and ‘categorically refused’ to let the filming continue unless the wardrobe was changed.”
If You Think Chick-Lit Insults Women, Maybe That’s Your Problem
Sophie Kinsella, author of the Shopaholic books: “You can be highly intelligent, and also ditzy and klutzy. You can be unable to cook, you can like lipstick. And I think it’s more realistic to represent women having all these facets, than to say, OK, you’re intelligent, so I’ve got to write you as all competent, which I think is an unfair ideal.”
Finishing An Unfinished Symphony (Not *The* Unfinished Symphony, But Still A Schubert)
The BBC’s Radio 3, during a an eight-day stretch entirely devoted to Schubert, will “finish” one of the several symphonies the composer left unfinished at his death.
Oh, Let’s Just Move Outside – The Bristol Old Vic Renovates And Innovates
“The Bristol Old Vic is finally getting a much-needed £19.28m refurbishment and refit. With the main auditorium out of action, the team at BOV had to come up with ingenious ways of keeping the theatre alive during the works.”
Kodak’s Glorious History, And Sad End
“If any company should have recognized what 2012 would be like in, say, 1988, Kodak should have. After all, it pretty much invented 2012 in 1888. That was the year that company founder George Eastman introduced the Kodak No. 1, catalyzing a new way of looking at the world, a new mode of existence.”
Booker Prize-winning Author Strikes Back At Editor Who Claimed To Rewrite His Work
Novelist and short story writer Ben Okri says an editor who claimed to have rewritten dialogue in one Okri book “has a tendency to exaggerate his own importance.”
Who Won At The British Film Awards? They’re Not Talking
The Guardian‘s Xan Brooks live-blogged the BAFTAs from the top rows of the Opera House at Covent Garden. “Up steps Stephen Fry to welcome us all: ‘lords and Iron Ladies and media scum’. Fry, it transpires, is deeply proud of British cinema, whether it be represented by James Bond or little Harry Potter.”
Pirate Bay Founder Tells Content Companies ‘Innovate Or Die’
Peter Sunde: “We all know how evolution works, except one industry that refuses to evolve: the entertainment industry. Instead of looking at evolution as something inevitable, the industry has made it their business to refuse and/or sue change, by any necessary means.”
To Write A Convincing Setting, Don’t Think ‘Landscape’
The author of The Descendants: “Setting shouldn’t just consist of describing nature or a landscape, or of saying where something takes place. It is the world of specific people. It’s not enough for it to feel vivid or credible; it should feel necessary.”