Nun

• Las Vegas is getting ready to party like it’s 1977 with Spiegelworld announcing its much-anticipated DISCOSHOW opening its door to guests on Saturday, July 27 at 3535 Las Vegas Boulevard – the address that is going to become synonymous with the greatest entertainment in Vegas.
• They were a wild extension of the childhood parties the nuns used to throw at his orphanage, complete with colored balloons, punch and a simple record player.
• Spiegelworld’s Impresario Extraordinaire Ross Mollison said, “I believe what the people want is to feel the love.
• A soundtrack of Le Freak, Good Times, We Are Family, Disco Inferno, and Everybody Dance are just the beginning.

• Technicolor Creative Studios Q3 2023 revenues decreased by -48.1% at current rate (-44.8% at constant rate) to €111.7 million.
• At MPC, Q3 2023 revenues were down -56.8% year-on-year to €44.8 million, while 9-month 2023 revenues amounted to €167.5 million, down -47.1% at current rate (-44.6% at constant rate).
• IFRS net debt amounted to €678 million as of September 30, 2023, compared with €610 million as of June 30, 2023.
• The projected delisting of the Company along with these new financing arrangements attest to the strength of Technicolor Creative Studios’ shareholder support.

• “This isn’t a prison,” a nun in the new BBC drama The Woman in the Wall says.
• Established in the 18th century, the laundries catered for so-called “fallen women” who had engaged in sex work or had a child outside of wedlock.
• Laundries were just one of many mechanisms by which the Catholic Church and the Irish state regulated behaviour that was perceived as deviant.
• The Magdalene Oral History Project and Waterford Memories Project address not only what it meant to experience these institutions, but also “what it meant to survive the laundries”.

Dramatising the laundries

• The state’s initial response to the laundries was to claim that they were private institutions and the state was not involved.
• An interdepartmental committee was established and its 2013 report found “evidence of direct state involvement” in the laundries.
• A formal state apology was offered in February 2013 by taoiseach Enda Kenny, who described the laundries as the “nation’s shame”.
• A redress scheme was established with women given ex gratia payments based on how long they were in the laundries.

Other depictions of the laundries

• Films such as The Magdalene Sisters (2002) and Philomena (2013) have also explored this powerful subject matter.
• References are made to a banshee (a female spirit in Irish folklore whose wailing foretold impending death).
• The Woman in the Wall exposes the horrors of the Magdalene Laundries and in doing so seeks to ensure that such horrors will not be repeated in the future.

• The quiet Welsh painter Gwen John was not like any other artist, male or female – she was genuinely unique.
• She did not paint loud, macho work that took up a whole wall, nor sexy, objectified nudes, nor abstract forms, like many male modernists.
• She was fiercely herself, making small, intimate, idiosyncratic paintings that share a definite style and palette over the course of her career.
• They did not have the ascetic, saint-like drive John had to be an artist at all costs.

Romantic life of an artist

• Whistler’s teaching, which focused on establishing a full palette before beginning a painting, was something John carried with her all her life.
• She was, in many ways, living the romanticised life of a starving artist.
• John’s Catholicism in the second half of her life crystalised what was essentially a sacred calling for her to work as an artist.
• She was obsessed with recently canonised saints and strove to live her life in a saintlike way.

A quiet but powerful legacy

• This show resolutely makes the claim that John’s life is its own work of art, and engages with the nuances of a woman who eschewed the norms of both sexes to make her own way.
• It also made me fully recognise for the first time the real ruthlessness with which John lived her life.
• The recluse narrative she has been reduced to suggests that she was somehow held back in some way by shyness or poverty.