Category: issues

Is it worth the headache of cramming into an overstuffed Metra train with well-lubricated Lyle Lovett obsessives?.. And, of course, is it worth the cost? Can I still justify paying $15 to $30 for a ticket to a concert where I can’t even see the stage? Not “obstructed view.” No view.

Last year the Sydney-based Australia Council cut its staff by 20 per cent, from 150 to 122, to meet the Rudd government’s 2 per cent efficiency dividend. “The feedback we’ve had from staff is that since the cuts they’ve been working unsustainable hours and on weekends.”

“City Council yesterday approved two measures that could boldly affect the way the city looks, by establishing a vision for waterfront development and protecting historic buildings’ interiors.”

“On television, the Italian penchant for adorning soundstages with skimpily clad, surgically enhanced showgirls has radically metastasized, spilling over from game shows to all forms of entertainment, including the nightly news. But feminist grumblings only exploded into public debate in recent weeks after reports emerged that [media magnate and Italian president Silvio] Berlusconi … was grooming a stable of TV starlets for the political arena.”

The recent 10-day Muslim Voices festival in New York aimed to expand understanding of Muslim culture. “Yet nothing in the festival could ultimately fulfill the organizers’ agenda, because they presented as examples of Muslim-culture artforms that mostly Western or Westernized Muslims consume. How many Americans will believe — and why should they? — that any of this reveals the prevailing culture of the vast majority of today’s practicing Muslims?”

“The master plan calls for the Memorial Arts Building, which opened in 1968, to be dismantled or have its space reconfigured or renovated, and be replaced by four free-standing, but connected, buildings surrounding an expansive pedestrian plaza that would extend to the Peachtree sidewalk. Those structures are the new Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert hall, the Alliance [Theatre] expansion, the Alliance auditorium and the current Symphony Hall, to be renovated and used for arts and education functions or rental.”

“Female actors, especially those over 40, are still under-represented on TV, film and in theatre and when they do get a break it is often in a stereotypical role, a conference on the subject heard today. Hundreds of women, from actors to directors to writers, gathered at the National Theatre to hear depressing statistics reeled off: 17% of playwrights are women; 38% of stage roles are for women; 35% of TV roles are for women; of the top 250 films last year only 9% were directed by women.”

Tory MP Ed Vaizey, the shadow arts minister, seems to be on a charm offensive, which he explains this way: “One of the goals I have set ­myself is, if the Tories win on a Thursday, there will be far fewer people in the arts world waking up in a cold sweat on a Friday.” Whether they’d be right to be fearful is another question, which could only be answered by the party’s actions.

In making his latest documentary-by-ambush, Sacha Baron Cohen – in character as a flamboyantly queeny fashion designer – was threatened with guns “when Bruno danced around [a Deep South] campsite naked … In one scene Bruno sparks a riot at a cage fighting contest when the competitors start kissing. In another scene Bruno appears on an American chat show, telling the studio audience that he adopted his baby in Africa by swapping him for an iPod.”

“Ultimately the tension surrounding Brüno boils down to the worry that certain viewers won’t understand that the joke is on them and will leave the multiplex with their homophobia validated. ‘Some people in our community may like this movie, but many are not going to be O.K. with it’, said … [an official with] the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.”