“The Scottish crime writer Val McDermid has re-ignited a row about violence in detective fiction written by women. Speaking at the Edinburgh books festival, she attacked bestselling local author Ian Rankin for suggesting that ‘the people writing the most graphic violence today are women … they are mostly lesbians as well’. McDermid, who is a lesbian, rejected Rankin’s remarks – made in an interview with the Independent last year – as ‘arrant rubbish’.”
Tag: 08.16.07
Female Crime Writers Are No Gorier Than The Guys
“Ian Rankin is talking a ‘wheen o’ blethers’ with his contention that women crime writers, and lesbians in particular, are more bloodthirsty than men. … Firstly, the notion that a malevolent coven of hardboiled dykes is threatening men’s supremacy over the genre, or polluting it with their hardcore imaginings, seems to me marginally paranoid.” But there is this, too: “Women are simply more used to living with fear than men.”
Jazz Adventurer Max Roach Dies At 83
“Max Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming in the 1940’s and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and defying listeners’ expectations, died early today at his home in New York.”
Phillips Collection Gets $1 Million Gift To Cover Repairs
“An anonymous donor has given the Phillips Collection a $1 million gift to cover repairs needed at its original building, which houses the work of some of the world’s best-known artists. … The most pressing problems are roof replacement, upgrading heating and air-conditioning systems and repairing the exterior red brick. Few private museums have extra money to cover such maintenance expenses, and donors usually are reluctant to underwrite the nuts-and-bolts repairs.”
Blocking Acropolis View, Athens Homes May Be Razed
“It’s a hot day in Athens and a builder working on the new $178 million Acropolis Museum pauses to wipe his brow and stare up at the 2,500-year-old Parthenon. At the same time, Elly Kouremenos looks out of the apartment she’s lived in for 72 years and wonders why the view from the museum means her home must be razed. … The future of her block, once declared a work of art by the Greek Ministry of Culture, and its neoclassical neighbor … has caused a furore, pitting architects against archaeologists.”
West End Theatres Are Full, With Reality TV To Thank
“Just how much reality can the theater bear? If you’re talking West End musicals, as much as possible: reality TV increasingly seems the only way to have a sold out show.”
Orange Co. PAC Sues Pelli, Builder Over Flaws, Cost
“The Orange County Performing Arts Center sued star architect Cesar Pelli and construction giant Fluor Corp., blaming them and subcontractors for more than $30 million in cost overruns and irremediable design flaws in the new Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa.” Filed Friday, the suit “questions costs that ballooned from a planned $200 million to an estimated $240 million, and design flaws that resulted in obstructed sight lines, cramped quarters and a lack of legroom in certain seats.”
Art & Auction’s Bruce Wolmer Dies At 59
“Bruce Wolmer, the longtime editor and publisher of Art & Auction magazine and an expert on the heavily moneyed byways of the international art world, died in New York on Saturday.”
Great Sheet Music. Can We Hear The Songs? No.
“(I)n a strange booklet of sheet music that was mailed out last week to more than 1,000 people by the Daniel Reich Gallery in Chelsea,” Dionne Warwick and Philip K. Dick “take the stage together in a kind of forced virtual duet, somewhere in the ether between a real and an imagined past,” with the sci-fi writer’s words set to a Warwick hit. The gallery called artist Sean Dack’s project “a ‘non event’ or a mail exhibition.”
Hillary Play Is A Dramatic Addition To The Iconography
A play about Hillary Clinton at the New York International Fringe Festival is “the latest provocative entry in the Hillary Canon, the continuing mapping of Mrs. Clinton across the cultural landscape, from her ludicrous depiction in a recent ‘South Park’ episode to her cameo in Michael Moore’s ‘Sicko’ to her dissection in a steady stream of biographies.”