Category: issues

“The Scottish government has announced details of a £5 million package of funds aimed at helping the arts and cultural sector through the current economic downturn.” The package includes a new £1.5m Digital Media Fund, a “new £1m Odd Fellows scheme … to support collaborations of artists from across different sectors,” and support for “entrepreneurs” and “rural innovation.”

Christopher Hawthorne: “Like many first-time visitors, I expected to find in Dubai a messy, vital hybrid of architectural and urban strategies, reflecting the city’s history as a regional crossroads and trading center. I could hardly have been more wrong. …
It is, instead, carved into a series of separate, perfectly ordered miniature cities, each performing a remarkably persuasive imitation of the place that inspired it.”

“College students, many of whom spend the little extra cash they have on pizza and laundry, don’t fit the typical profile of a wealthy benefactor. But in a growing national movement, students enrolled in newly created philanthropy courses are steering thousands of dollars to local charities. … The goal, say professors and donors, is to build upon surging interest in social responsibility among college students and make philanthropy part of the mainstream curriculum.”

The complex, which was up for auction earlier this month after the church that owned it went bankrupt, was purchased by the government of the L.A. County beach town for $15 million. “The center will house the new City Hall, but the city plans to retain its cash-generating performing arts venue and recording studios.”

“Real hip-hop heads know that Islam and hip-hop have been longtime friends, feeding off each other’s energy. Muslim ideals of self-respect and social change have inspired some of the greatest emcees, and hip-hop is giving voice to the dreams and daily struggles of a generation of Muslims.” The new documentary New Muslim Cool looks at the phenomenon through a Puerto Rican-American drug dealer-turned-Muslim family man.

“Construction on Carmel’s ailing Performing Arts Center will be halted for about three weeks. Workers will begin repairing cracked steel in the building’s support columns next week, the city [,which is just north of Indianapolis,] announced in a press release today. … The $118 million project is supposed to be finished next fall.”

“Some fanciful souls are convinced that Judy Garland was responsible for the Stonewall Rebellion. Gay grief, they say, occasioned by saturation coverage of her overflowing two-day Madison Avenue funeral (June 26 and 27, 1969) set the stage for the history-making riot at a Greenwich Village bar that very weekend.” Is it true? But then, is it totally untrue?

“The landing marked the end, not the beginning, of our dreams of space exploration. The prospects of creating permanent lunar bases, sending manned missions to Mars and blasting astronauts round the solar system died the moment Armstrong set foot on the moon. America had got there before the Russians and the nation could now forget the place.”

“The $100,000 no-strings-attached awards are distributed over a period of three to five years and are intended to recognize artists’ work over a period of at least 25 years and to encourage them, in the words of Bush Foundation president Peter Hutchinson, to continue “planting the seeds of change and growth, to serving as catalysts in their communities and to preserving and expanding our cultural traditions.”

“When movies came along we still read books and went to live performance and got something out of it we could not get any other way. It’s the same today. No matter how prevalent the computer has become, there is something in human beings that seeks out a shared experience, an element of surprise.”