Nothing is more spiritual than words: Editing is a vastly under-recognised link in the film food chain, partly because, if the job is done well, the audience isn't supposed to notice it Nobody Knows: I am a Runaway Master
Helen Mirren's nude scenes in a 1968 Aussie film were too hot for most Beyond the age of consent
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Frightened Kangaroo: The critic of art
A new book questions whether Mozart is better for us than Kylie:
If you are reading this page, you believe that the arts are of value, or at least that they can offer a respite from what the writer Jeanette Winterson calls "the 24/7 emergency zone we call real life". In her view, art makes us better because it offers an alternative value system. Even the making of it is an affront to capitalism - you can't give it a deadline, cost it, predict it, or bank on it. But if you believe that life has an inside as well as an outside, then art is what you need.
Ach, how membership, even of this nomadic alternative society of circus, is not a possibility: How Life and Art Were Transformed in a Century of Revolution, Innovation, and Radical Change - Russell Crowe odds-on favourite for the 2005 Customer From Artistic Hell Award
• The critic becomes an artful dodger [he world has never seen such idiots. They gave away our God-given resources at lightning speed - oil, non-ferrous metals, coal, production. They fully robbed Russia. From scratch, from nothing, we bred billionaires who have done nothing for Russia Russia ripe for a people's uprising, Solzhenitsyn says ; From underreporting violence to inflating graduation rates to fudging testscores, educators are lying to the American public How Amerikan Schools Cheat ; Fiction and social gap In Fiction, a Long History of Fixation on the Social Gap ]
• · More sex and drugs: there, that's got your attention:
Pictures of men with women drive male viewers to produce better-swimming sperm ... Mixed-gender pornography boosts sperm: Men facing images of sexual competition may be more fertile Mixed-gender; I shop New York ; Take two couples trying to find a business opportunity, three of them professional management types, and you wouldn't immediately think sex toy parties. But imagine Sex And The City meets Tupperware and you have Pash Sex and the party plan ; As quickly as they rose, metrosexuals are disappearing Metrosexuals join dinosaurs
• · · Where is James Bond and what do women want? A completely unanswerable question ; One British sociologist said that lesbians are runaway slaves. I am a runaway master. A sexual attraction of opposites ; Edmund White on learning how to love women. From my mother I learned just how violent and unquenchable a woman’s loneliness can be When a woman falls in love with me, I fee guilt; It's a battle of sex, life and death in Italy Does Life Begin at Conception? ; Spanking Jessica Cutler: Capitol Hill attorney sues Washingtonienne for exposing his kinks. Spanking Jessica Cutler ; Only 20 years ago "flats" were regarded as the poor man's option - cheap, pokey and a last resort Young embrace the high life
• · · · When people cease to complain, they cease to think The Words on Words Challenge: Once you have the cap and gown all you need do is open your mouth. Whatever nonsense you talk becomes wisdom and all the rubbish, good sense. My fellow Americans, we need to embrace a new punctuation mark—one that embraces the irony and edge of contemporary conversation and clarifies rather than condenses or confuses Introducing the long-awaited sarcasm point
• · · · · Fortune cookies must present ten-word sentences that are both precise and vague at the same time. Someone has to write them Lau never expected to become a fortune-cookie writer ; How people do better because they are somehow better connected with other people: “weak and inoffensive”); pests (“poisoning the general atmosphere”); and loafers (“their only aim is to do as little as possible” Wise enough to play the fool? ; The rumour mill is intent on making Schapelle Corby's family a joke Black humour, those who pass them on would say; a tradition since the Lindy Chamberlain trial sparked endless dingo jokes
• · · · · · How to make a book Making of One Book ; Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but a new website has taken networking to Darwinian extremes by banning ugly people The Big Brother beauty contest