Jack Vettriano’s paintings are wildly popular with the public, and his work fetches huge prices. But he takes a workman’s attitude to art: “It’s wall decoration for me, I don’t regard it as this big meaningful thing. My subjects are men and women getting off, that’s all. Mind you, some people don’t think sex is serious, but I happen to think it’s terribly serious.”
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Do You YouTube?
“Thousands of amateur video clips, rare footage of music concerts and home-made film spoofs are now being uploaded every day to the video-sharing website YouTube for the enjoyment of millions of web users around the world. Allowing the public to watch and share clips for free, it has become an unprecedented platform for amateur film-makers to show off their home movies. But music labels, film studios and television bosses are now cracking down on the site.”
Plays Fresh As The News
Plays ripped from the headlines can give us a different perspective on those stories. “Ultimately, theater is mostly about being pulled into stories — familiar ones, new ones. And as polarizing or perplexing as our present-day stories can be, they come to us from a different angle in the theater than from our TV sets or computer screens.”
Just What, Is The Virginia Quarterly Review?
“To the astonishment of glossy magazine types everywhere, a small journal in Virginia garnered not one nomination, as is sometimes politely handed down to such journals, but six. This made the Virginia Quarterly Review the second-most-nominated magazine, behind the Atlantic, which received eight, and ahead of The New Yorker, Harper’s, New York, and National Geographic, all of which received five. It was as if a scrappy farm team had demolished the Yankees in an exhibition game.”
Hispanic Society Moves Downtown
New York’s Hispanic Society is moving from its obscure upper Manhattan location to downtown. The Society is “probably the most unknown major museum in the US. Its holdings of Spanish art, decorative arts, photographs, rare books and manuscripts are the most extensive outside of Spain, and worth billions of dollars.”
London Bombs Scared Off Museum-Goers
Last summer’s bombs in London caused a big drop in museum attendance. “Total UK museum visitor numbers were down by almost two million in 2005. Visits to the capital’s museums in August 2005 were down 24% on the same month the previous year, according to government figures. But attendance numbers are now rising again, the Department for Media, Culture and Sport has said.”
The New NPR – Money And Ambition
What has national Public Radio done with its gift of $230 million from Joan Kroc’s estate? For one thing, “NPR has created nearly 70 new jobs in its newsroom, many of them for reporters on newly created beats like police and prisons, labor, international economics, the environment, technology and the media. And all this as other news organizations have been paring their staffs and scaling back their ambitions as consumers and advertisers drift away.”
Tivo Glitch Irritates Fans
“Because of a software glitch in some machines, TiVo customers have been discovering over the last few months that some of the shows they had set to record were cut off before the programs ended.”
Art Of Conversation
“Conversation is one of those acts that require subtle forms of social imagination: an ability to listen and interpret and imagine, an attentiveness to someone whose perspective is always essentially different, a responsiveness that both makes oneself known and allows the other to feel known — or else does none of this, but just keeps up appearances. It may be, then, one of the most fundamental political and social acts, indispensable to negotiating allegiances, establishing common ground, clearing tangled paths. Conversation may reflect not just the state of our selves, but the state of society.”
“Rings” – Aiming For Three-Plus Hours
Lord of the Rings, the musical, is long. Very long. “As the March 23 opening night bears down on the cast and crew of the most expensive theatrical show of all time, several issues still need attention. Some scenes and characters don’t work quite right. The music must be tweaked. Actors are still working on their characters. And the show’s producers must fix these things while making it all go faster — far faster than the nearly five hours the show ran at its first night of previews Feb. 4.”