The bad news is that the glorious, if faded, Wilton’s Music Hall has been listed among the world’s most endangered monuments.
The good news is that, hopefully, this means something might be done to secure the fabric of “the world’s oldest music hall” for the future.
I’ve been to several shows there and even though it does feel slightly like it might come down around your ears any second, it is a wonderful, evocative, spooky place.
This video has provoked an interesting discussion on a women’s studies email list to which I belong – can you see in it women’s gazes gradually beoming more direct and challenging, is it just a demonstration of the limited idea of beauty (limited particularly by race) in the West, or it a demonstration of the homogenising white male gaze?
This book just went right to the top of my must-read list:
Chenciner’s study of 109 mountain women in Daghestan reveals a vast assemblage of signs, many shared with Turkic people, with Ossetians, with Hungarians and Sarmatians. Crosses, Stars of David and seven-branched trees (transposed into menorah) are seen not as the identity marks of either Judaism or Christianity but as part of an ancient Mesopotamian-derived cornucopia of protective symbolism. In Daghestan, the tattoos were made by elder women on girls, usually at the time of their coming of age….
AND …we can only be grateful for an author who does not tuck his debt to his vital local sources within a sentence or two, in “acknowledgementsâ€, but names all 109 mountain women under their nineteen different villages.
Over on My London Your London Anna has a preview of a deeply topical play by Ariel Dorfman being staged in London by Amnesty International. Definitely looks like it is worth checking out.
It might have a slightly dismissive title “decorative arts”, it might be focused on the domestic and small scale, but at least a new museum in Paris introduces a great range of female characters, and gives them what should be a permanent place on the tourist trail. I’ve provided what is probably an overly detailed account on My Paris Your Paris.
And my favourite single woman, well a Parisien courtesan, of course, Valtesse de La Bigne. This was her bed, tailor-made, of course:
Well, you do want to make your workplace just so…
You’ve probably already gathered I wasn’t greatly impressed by the new show at the Union Theatre. The review’s here.
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