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Showing posts from April, 2018

Crash Course

Nicholas Lemann writes about the about the dangers of undoing Dodd-Frank in “Crash Course.” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2rcdHAg

Cambridge University lays bare the secrets of its library tower

Exhibition to reveal truth about books hidden in 17-storey tower said to include pornography To avoid disappointment, an exhibition opening this week at the Cambridge University library should carry the warning sign: “These books contain no pornography”. Despite undergraduate folklore there is no secret stash of pornography among the 200,000 books in the 17 floors of the tower, which rises 157 feet above the library. The building, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, was completed in 1934 to mixed reviews, with the former prime minister Neville Chamberlain calling it “a magnificent erection”. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HEczjm

Time's Up's Women of Color demand investigation into allegations of abuse by R Kelly

The group have thrown their support behind the existing #MuteRKelly campaign The Women of Color (WOC) group within the Time’s Up movement has published an open letter in support of a campaign that seeks justice for the alleged victims of R&B singer R Kelly, Billboard reports . Citing the recent trial of Bill Cosby , who on 27 April was convicted of drugging and molesting a woman in 2004 , WOC write: “We call on people everywhere to join with us to insist on a world in which women of all kinds can pursue their dreams free from sexual assault, abuse and predatory behavior. To this end, today we join an existing online campaign called #MuteRKelly.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HEqd1L

Mosul library recreated in Norfolk country house installation

Recreation forms part of immersive six-month project at National Trust’s Blickling Estate exploring importance of books In the cellars of one of England’s grandest country houses will be a recreation of a university library destroyed by militants in Mosul, Iraq. In a nearby corridor are copies of a bestseller censored by the Pentagon. Upstairs a book banned in China has been inserted in a bookcase of innocuous 19th century volumes. The displays are at the National Trust’s Blickling Estate , part of an immersive six-month art project exploring the importance of books, which opens to the public on Tuesday. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2vYmcUt

Ambrose Akinmusire review – thrillingly high-end level fun

Ronnie Scott’s, London The young American trumpeter led a set of scalding jazz improv that veered between lyrical delicacy and fierce drama There was a wilder edginess to Ambrose Akinmusire ’s opening set at Ronnie Scott’s than formerly on the astonishing young American musician’s UK live shows – and not just from him, but from the partners who have been at his side since his widely hailed emergence as one of jazz’s all-time trumpet originals seven years ago. Akinmusire has lately been composing more and working with string quartets and genre-bending singers such as Theo Bleckmann and Cold Specks . But this gig with regulars Sam Harris (piano), Harish Raghavan (bass) and Justin Brown (drums) was the kind of scalding real-time fusion of haunting themes and collective jazz improv only possible for players who can read each other like books, and anticipate the coming pages, too. Alternations of low-volume lyrical delicacy and fierce drama characterised the show, with the undemonstrati

Love, Labour and 80s indie: the personal gets political for Luke Wright

Delivered entirely in verse, Wright’s coming-of-age tale Frankie Vah is set in Thatcher’s Britain but the debate is as relevant as ever What happens if you love your parents but loathe their politics? In Frankie Vah, the second verse play written and performed by Luke Wright , Frankie struggles to reconcile his father’s “Christian empathy” as a vicar with the fact that he puts a cross next to Margaret Thatcher’s name at the ballot box. Frankie abandons the vicarage for a life on the road as a radical left punk poet. The dog collar is traded in for a pair of DMs. Before the show begins, a spool of TV footage from the 1980s unfurls on the wall: flitting images of Spitting Image, Neil Kinnock falling into the sea and a post-Falklands Thatcher triumphant atop a tank . Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2jj607b

'I want something magical': Russia's banned Eurovision singer is back

As she prepares for this year’s contest, Julia Samoylova talks about being at the centre of a diplomatic crisis and bringing a big power ballad to Lisbon Talking with Julia Samoylova, Russia’s Eurovision entry, it’s easy to forget that a year ago she was at the centre of a diplomatic crisis . The 29-year-old chats away, all smiles and nervous laughter, like any other entrant, as she covers everything from her childhood in Ukhta, an industrial town in Russia’s north, to her first singing gig in a restaurant (she belted out the likes of I Will Always Love You until the owner said he wanted something less dramatic). She wants to “bring light to the people” at next month’s event in Lisbon, and laughs about her dog, Tima – a fluffy Pomeranian Spitz who makes regular appearances in her vlogs. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HClAcC

Michelle Wolf: the unstoppable rise of America's provocative political comic

Her caustic White House correspondents’ dinner speech will be no shock for fans of the former Daily Show contributor When Michelle Wolf arrived at the Edinburgh festival in 2016 she was the latest in a long line of bubbling-under US standups to use the fringe to hone their craft and build an international audience. She returned home with a nomination for best newcomer, and a reputation firmly established for smart, sly, social commentary – laughing in the gaps between political principle and personal weakness. Suffice it to say that, in the last 48 hours, that reputation has extended its reach thanks to her caustic routines about senior figures in the Trump administration at the White House correspondents’ dinner. I saw her perform twice at Edinburgh – in her own show So Brave , and then supporting Louis CK during his short run. What marked Wolf out, at a festival where more and more comics trade in storytelling or emotional intimacy, was the leanness and efficiency of her comedy.

Golden State Killer: how Patton Oswalt’s true-crime writer wife helped renew focus on case, and why he aims to visit jailed suspect

True-crime writer Michelle McNamara didn’t live to see April 25, 2018, the day police arrested a suspect in the decades-old investigation into the Golden State Killer, a serial murder-rape case she obsessed over in her book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer. But her husband and greatest cheerleader, Emmy-winning actor-comedian Patton Oswalt, who saw her book through to completion and publication in February, did. Though he was... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2HICimr

When good TV turns bad: how Weeds made a right hash of things

By season three, the satire about a suburban LA mum and dealer had been through so many time jumps and location changes it had left its audience feeling dazed and confused Given the recent legalisation of marijuana in California, and the popularity of programmes such as Breaking Bad and Narcos, the premise of Weeds seems antiquated. But when it started in 2005, the satire about a suburban Los Angeles mother who risked jail by dealing the green stuff after her husband’s early death felt revolutionary. Central to the show’s success was lead actor Mary-Louise Parker, who infused the frustrating, often selfish character of Nancy Botwin with such warmth and intelligence that you couldn’t help rooting for her, even as her motivation flipped from trying not to disrupt her children’s lives to doing anything for an adrenaline rush. Weeds was at its best in the first three seasons, which poked fun at the claustrophobia and hypocrisy of suburbia, with theme song Little Boxes emphasising the sti

Bicep review – muscular, head-rushing tech house

Roundhouse, London The Northern Irish dance duo showcase their skill for ping-ponging melody and beautifully tooled drum programming, paired with magnificent visuals Bicep cut a relatively rare shape in today’s live music scene – no longer mere DJs, they’re one of the few dance artists (alongside Eric Prydz and a handful more) to have built up a strong live show from their own work. The duo stand fairly statically behind hardware and a laptop as their symbol emerges behind them – a trefoil of three clenched biceps – and it is an apt one, hinting at the macho homosexuality of disco, the Celtic roots of their native Northern Ireland, and the sheer elemental punch of a kick drum. The crowd is predominantly young twentysomethings from the “sesh” generation, all in Champion tees, with Ketflix and Pills on their phones and a propensity to get on each other’s shoulders. They cheer in recognition as familiar licks eke their way into the flowing mix, turning to festival pandemonium as the In

Watch Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk age from kids to tech titans in seconds

Watch Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Musk age in seconds They grow up so fast 30 Apr 2018 News from Life & Culture https://ift.tt/2w7HKyf

Star Wars: why the desert in Tunisia was the perfect location for original film, and how to visit the area

There’s a reason the original Star Wars film was filmed in the deserts of southern Tunisia. This stark, remote landscape looks like another planet. One of Tunisia’s vast desert regions is even called Tataouine, like Luke Skywalker’s home planet, Tattoine. And the underground home where Luke Skywalker first appeared living with his uncle and aunt is a real hotel in the town of Matmata, one of various desert locations used in the films. “It looks just like the film,... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2Ft43O1

Five Jake Bugg songs to get you ready for his Hong Kong debut

British singer-songwriter Jake Bugg was described as a “baby Bob Dylan” when he first exploded onto the UK music scene in 2012 aged just 17. His gritty folk songs told stories of hurt and anguish that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the album of a blues singer five times his age. Catchy and instantly memorable, they dealt with lost love and alienation, drawing heavily from his fractured upbringing on a typically grim public housing estate in the English Midlands. Chinese... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2HzrIlM

Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art review – an experimental masterclass

Tate Modern, London This epic exhibition shows how masters from Man Ray and Mondrian to Maya Rochat transformed reality in their laboratory-like darkrooms and studios In 1916, when Alvin Langdon Coburn met fellow American Ezra Pound in London, he was already a celebrated photographer, having made his name with striking monochrome portraits of leading literary and artistic figures such as Rodin, WB Yeats and George Bernard Shaw. It was Pound who introduced him to vorticism , the short-lived British avant garde modernist movement created by artist and writer Wyndham Lewis as a reaction to the dominance of landscape and figurative art. Equally frustrated by the representative nature of photography, Langdon Coburn immediately sensed the liberating potential of the vorticist dynamic of geometric shapes and cubist fragmentation. In the Shape of Light, Langdon Coburn’s “vortographs”, blurred geometric arrangements of light and shadow, made using a set of mirrors to fragment the subject

Does Human Planet have to be as accurate as the news?

The nature show has been pulled by the broadcaster after questions were raised over the veracity of some scenes. But some argue that even if film-makers cheated, it is still far from fake news On Friday morning, at 9.30am, I bought and watched the fourth episode of the 2011 BBC natural history series Human Planet on Amazon Prime. Just over an hour later, the show was no longer for sale. This digital extinction seemed to be part of the BBC’s attempt to remove, for the moment, any trace in any place of the eight-part series. The move follows the BBC’s announcement on Thursday that Human Planet will be subjected to a “ full editorial review ” after allegations that some sequences misrepresented their content. The BBC said on Friday afternoon that all online and high-street stores have been asked to stop selling the DVDs immediately. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2r9a5hG

Avengers: Infinity War blasts Star Wars: The Force Awakens' first-weekend record at US box office

Marvel’s superhero film earns $250m in the US, $2m ahead of The Force Awakens in 2015, while also smashing opening-weekend records across the world • Sign up for Film Today and get our film team’s highlights of the day Marvel’s new superhero movie Avengers: Infinity War has overhauled Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ opening-weekend record at the US box office, earning an estimated total of $250m since its release on Friday, $2m ahead of The Force Awakens’ total in 2015. Related: Avengers: Infinity War review – colossal Marvel showdown revels in apocalyptic mayhem Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2JDqEtH

Woman with Asperger's ejected from cinema for laughing at western

Disgust expressed at incident at BFI screening of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in London Staff at the British Film Institute have been accused of forcibly removing a woman with Asperger’s from the cinema in what onlookers described as a “disgusting” sign of “naked intolerance”. The 25-year-old woman was watching a screening at the BFI’s cinema on London’s South Bank of her favourite film – the spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly directed by Sergio Leone – with her sister. Witnesses claim she was asked to leave for laughing too loudly. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Ft62Ss

Daniel Antopolsky: the drifter who swapped country music for chickens

Once just a mysterious figure pictured alongside Townes Van Zandt, the ‘outlaw country’ musician has been holed up writing hundreds of songs on a Bordeaux farm – and they’re only just being heard Daniel Antopolsky wasn’t afraid of drugs. “We had this great psilocybin mushroom that was growing in Athens,” he recalls of his time at the University of Georgia, 50 years ago. He would snort anything, swallow anything, smoke anything, but he was afraid of needles, so he wouldn’t inject anything. That saved his life, he thinks. Back in the early 70s, Antopolsky was a longhair, floating around the fringes of the deep south’s singer-songwriter scene. There’s a famous picture, taken on Guy Clark ’s front porch, that shows Townes Van Zandt playing a fiddle, Clark playing guitar, his wife Susanna singing, and on the far right a young man, the only one paying attention to the camera. That’s Antopolsky, the picture taken during a short period in 1972 – “it wasn’t that long, maybe five or six weeks

Amber Rudd is gone — but what does Sajid Javid as home secretary mean for tech?

What does Sajid Javid as home secretary mean for tech? Rudderless 30 Apr 2018 News from Life & Culture https://ift.tt/2HASCd4

This inflatable skyscraper could provide shelter in disaster zones

This inflatable skyscraper could provide emergency shelter Skyshelter.zip uses a helium balloon to support accommodation for up to 1,000 people 30 Apr 2018 News from Life & Culture https://ift.tt/2HBugzY

“Hair”

Poetry by Clarence Major: “In the old days / hair was magical.” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2I0PoPq

Abstinence-Only Porn

Shouts & Murmurs by Bruce Handy: I’ve only played chess with a man and another woman once, in college.  from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2I34FPG

Michelle Wolf has nothing to apologise for. Her critics do, though | Arwa Mahdawi

Urging the comedian who performed at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to apologize for an uncontroversial joke sends an incredibly dangerous message Let me tell you a few deplorable things that happened in America this weekend. Nearly 43 million people woke up in poverty in the richest country in the world. And 3.2 million Americans woke up without health insurance. A further 36 people died because of gun violence , bringing the total number of gun deaths in the US this year to 4,627. All of that is deplorable. What is in absolutely no way deplorable or shocking or outrageous or unacceptable is a joke about eye shadow. You probably know what I mean, it was headline news on Sunday. But if you missed the controversy, the summary is that a comedian called Michelle Wolf made a gag about Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner in DC. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2JAfrKz

Alan Rudolph: 'People just don't surrender to my movies, ever'

The former protege of Robert Altman has made a string of quietly appreciated films that have struggled to break out and after a 16 year hiatus, he’s back with another unlikely project “People just don’t surrender to my movies, ever,” says director Alan Rudolph, on the phone from his home on an island near Seattle. “They keep waiting for a regular movie to break out, and when it doesn’t they just hate them! I don’t know any other way.” Related: William Friedkin: 'You don’t know a damn thing, and neither do I' Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Kp62Xi

JS Mill scribbles reveal he was far from a chilly Victorian intellectual

Project to digitise and publish his marginalia online will allow scholars to see his cutting remarks on Ralph Waldo Emerson Despite writing a shelf-full of books, including his own autobiography, the great Victorian intellectual John Stuart Mill remains a man of mystery to scholars. However, a new side of Mill has now come to light, hidden in the margins of his library. It turns out that Mill was an inveterate annotator, scribbling comments, observations and in some cases graffiti throughout his library. More than 140 years after his death, those notes are being collected and published for the first time. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Ko1JLO

Google Doodle honours Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss - "one of the greatest mathematicians of all time"

Google Doodle honours Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss "Prince of Mathematicians" Johann Carl Friedrich Gauß would have celebrated his 241st birthday today 30 Apr 2018 News from Life & Culture https://ift.tt/2JElAoS

Star Wars: the forces behind films’ alien languages

Unless you’ve been living in a galaxy far, far away, you’ll know that May 4th is celebrated as Star Wars Day, playing on the catchphrase “may the force be with you”, where the change of a single sound segment gives a different word (known in linguistics as a minimal pair). Language matters in the Star Wars universe, where interspecies communication is addressed by droids such as C-3PO that are fluent in more than six million forms of communication, and by an... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2I3y7oP

‘Infinity War’ opens with US$630m, smashing global box-office record – and that’s without China

Avengers: Infinity War took in US$630 million in its first weekend, the highest global opening of all time, industry estimates showed on Sunday. “The latest Marvel juggernaut … opened with US$630 million worldwide, making it the largest global weekend tally in the history of film, and this was done without China,” which has a later opening, industry tracker Exhibitor Relations said. The film opened in Hong Kong last week, shattering records, but not mainland China, where it... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2vXnMWO

The racists won. So are they happy now? | Stewart Lee

Bigots have been stoking a hate volcano. And now it has exploded all over their front garden I feel sorry for Theresa May. And that Rudd one, who looks like she is wearing a rubber Halloween mask based on her own face. What if, because you were all going on about how great Ukip were, and how Nigel Farage was only saying what people had been thinking all along, and all these people coming over here, May and Rudd thought you wanted them to be racist too, like you are? And so back in 2013, to please you, they did some racism, and wrote racist stuff on racist vans and drove them around laughing. And in so doing, May furthered the creation of The Hostile Environment, which sounds like an irradiated wasteland where teenage amazons get sent to die in The Hunger Games . May probably wasn’t really all that racist herself, and only did the racism because she thought you wanted it, you racists. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2r9WXtx

‘It’s soulless here’: why West Ham fans are in revolt

When a football club moves from its historic home to a shiny new stadium, it leaves more than memories behind – as West Ham supporters are discovering at the London Stadium It’s a mild Monday evening in April and 56,795 people, officially at least, have come along to London Stadium at the Olympic Park in Stratford to watch West Ham United play Stoke City in a bottom-of-the-table Premier League match. That’s a large crowd, by any standards, but judging by the fans milling around the huge concourse outside the ground, it’s not a happy one. Of course, football fans are not renowned for their cheery optimism. By and large, it’s a grim business being a supporter, a forlorn struggle between daydreams and despair. As Nick Hornby wrote in Fever Pitch : “The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2JCxhwq

Canadian erhu master on his love of China’s stringed instruments and how ditching the violin made him a better musician

Performing recently in a Shanghai park, a musician gingerly glides his bow across the strings of his erhu before tightening them to bring the instrument back into tune. Soon he is immersed in the haunting sounds of his composition, Snow Legend, with little but the calling of birds in the park for accompaniment. Across China, it is common to see elderly people in parks playing the two-stringed instrument often referred to in English as a “spike fiddle”. But what makes this... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2KlZuJf

Westworld’s stars on how season 2 reflects #MeToo movement and the US political climate

A surprising thing happened in the year and a half since the first season of Westworld confounded and attracted viewers with its knotted story of a futuristic android uprising at a patriarchal Western theme park. At the centre of the revolt on different fronts were “hosts” Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve (Thandie Newton), both of whom suffered horrific abuse and menace in carrying out their duties catering to the park’s wealthy, pleasure-seeking male patrons. Westworld... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2ra0JSZ

Sunday Reading: The Nineties

An exploration of nineties culture, with pieces about Chloe Sevigny, MTV, Missy Elliott, Quentin Tarantino, “GoodFellas,” Kurt Cobain, and more. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2jgcK5L

Facebook’s global monopoly poses a deadly threat in developing nations | John Naughton

The social network has played a key role in enabling the spread of fake news in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, studies show, and fuelling murderous violence The most significant moment in the US Senate’s interrogation of Mark Zuckerberg came when Senator Lindsey Graham asked the Facebook boss: “Who’s your biggest competitor?” It was one of the few moments in his five-hour testimony when Zuckerberg seemed genuinely discombobulated. The video of the exchange is worth watching. First, he smirks. Then he waffles about Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft “overlapping” with Facebook in various ways. It’s doesn’t look like he believes what he’s saying. Eventually, Senator Graham cuts to the chase and asks Zuckerberg if he thinks Facebook is a monopoly. “It certainly doesn’t feel like that to me,” the lad replies. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HFZemE

On my radar: Win Butler’s cultural highlights

The Arcade Fire singer on his love of the Caribbean, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, and the student-led gun control movement taking hold in the US Born in California and raised in Texas, Win Butler is the frontman of Canadian rock band Arcade Fire. Their debut album, Funeral (2004), was a critical and commercial success , ranking 151st on Rolling Stone ’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. Their third, The Suburbs (2010) , won two Brit awards and a Grammy. Butler has been married to bandmate Régine Chassagne since 2003. Last year the band released their fifth studio album Everything Now and are currently touring Europe. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HzAAb9

Architecture biennale 2018: all hail the new queens of Venice

The appointment of Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara as curators of the great architecture biennale is striking – but no one who knows their work should be surprised “I’m a rock person and she’s a bog person,” says Shelley McNamara of herself and Yvonne Farrell, her partner in Grafton Architects . She’s referring to their respective birthplaces in the stony west and the soggy middle of Ireland. Or perhaps it was Farrell speaking, in which case the pronouns need to be switched – my notes unpardonably fail to keep track of the badinage between them. Either way, the line nicely captures the preoccupations with place and physicality that inform their architecture. Their friendly interplay also reveals a working relationship that goes back to the early 70s when they were students together at University College Dublin. Next month the 2018 Venice architecture biennale opens , under McNamara’s and Farrell’s curatorship. Theirs was a striking appointment for what is the world’s greatest exhi

Observational films are outshone by a blend of fact and fiction

Traditional dividing lines are being blurred, as progressive film-makers blend the truth with myth, fantasy and imagination Travelling on a Eurostar train recently, I noticed that their film service had two categories of what to watch: Entertainment, for fiction films and TV series, however grim and serious; and Documentaries, for nonfiction. As with the in-flight service on planes, the assumption is that there are “proper” films and programmes with made-up stories, and they shouldn’t be confused with the films about reality, which inevitably are not going to be entertaining. The People v OJ Simpson gets to cruise with the flashy, made-up tales; OJ: Made in America has to stay in the slow lane with the boring old bangers, even though they’re telling almost exactly the same story at the same, extended length. This ignores two facts: that documentaries are sometimes fun to watch, and that the rigid boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in films don’t make sense. Observational foo

The Wound review – lust in a taboo climate

A tribal coming-of-age ritual is the setting for this tough but sensual gay romance John Trengove’s tough, beguiling debut looks at what happens when queerness throws a wrench in the rusty machinery of traditional masculinity. Set in the mountains of South Africa’s Eastern Cape, it centres on the Xhosa tribe’s circumcision ritual of Ukwaluka, in which young men come of age under the careful watch of their “caregivers”. Co-written with Thando Mgqolozana (whose 2009 novel A Man Who Is Not a Man visits the same subject), it embeds itself in a community of scythe-swinging, dick-slinging machismo. Xolani or “X” ( Nakhane Touré ) is a young, closeted factory worker in Queenstown who is assigned as caregiver to a young initiate from the city: sensitive, pouty Kwanda (Niza Jay Ncoyini). “They trust you with the softies,” says a colleague. Kwanda could indeed be called a softie (or certainly, a snowflake); teased for his expensive shoes, and prone to politically charged monologues, he is mar

Beast review – a dangerous liaison to get your teeth into

Fairytale meets psycho thriller as rising British stars Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn find that opposites attract After the whimsy of last week’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and the real-life dramas of 2017’s Another Mother’s Son , the Channel Islands become home to something altogether more eerie in this Jersey-set debut feature from writer-director Michael Pearce. Charting a turbulent relationship between a cloistered young woman and the vagabond man who turns her world upside down, Pearce’s increasingly intense psychological thriller deftly overturns expectations as it dances between timeless fable, modern romance and murder mystery. Superb central performances from rising stars Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn provide the visceral spark that fires the story – a game of psychological cat and mouse in which desire and danger, innocence and guilt, are intriguingly intertwined. Buckley is on phosphorescent form as flame-haired islander Moll, a twentysomething

She’s Gotta Have It: why Spike Lee's sex-positive debut is a coming-of-age classic

The radical film was closer to French new wave than anything that had passed as ‘black’ cinema before – and it still resonates today Read the rest of our coming of age films series “I consider myself normal, whatever that means,” says Nola Darling, but she really isn’t. For one thing, she’s happily juggling three lovers. For another, she’s an African-American woman telling her own story in a movie. What’s more, the heroine of Lee’s feature debut, played by Tracy Camilla Johns, is a confident, beautiful, independent, sex-positive woman. She seems to live the dream. She makes political collages in her loft apartment in pre-gentrification Brooklyn. Her candlelit bedchamber resembles a church altar, which is appropriate. It looks as if she’s got it all figured out. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HBaqF1

David Shrigley: ‘Self-delusion is quite important if you want to be an artist’

Artist David Shrigley, master of all things darkly comic, has a new book out is curating this year’s Brighton festival. Here he answers questions from our readers and famous fans “I actually almost always have a nap at 2.30pm,” says David Shrigley, as we sit down in an upstairs room, a jug of water and a plate of chocolate digestives between us, at Graphica gallery in Brighton. I check my watch: it’s five to two. “It’s not going to work today,” he sighs. “But this isn’t really work, this is just blah blah blah, it’s easy. The hard thing is writing things in the studio and thinking of stuff that’s interesting.” An afternoon nap might sound indulgent, but it is hard to fault 49-year-old Shrigley’s work ethic. An excellent new book is imminent: Fully Coherent Plan for a New and Better Society features 254 new illustrations, all drawn in his distinctive thick black pen on stark white paper, the naivety of the image offset by the scabrous, surreal or darkly comic text. He’s also the guest

Françoise Hardy: ‘I sing about death in a symbolic, even positive way’

Françoise Hardy was the face of 1960s French pop, with the likes of Dylan and Jagger falling for her enigmatic allure. Now 74, the style icon talks about her new album and why she always sings from the heart Françoise Hardy is reciting the first lines of Serge Gainsbourg’s song La Javanaise for my benefit. We are sitting at a small table in the middle of an otherwise empty room in a stylish Paris hotel. Eyes closed, her hand tracing a repeated arc in the air, she enunciates every word as if teaching a hapless pupil – “ J’avoue j’en ai bavé, pas vous …” she intones softly, “ Avant d’avoir eu vent de vous …” These seductive lines, she says, are the perfect example of the “sonority” of a song lyric, the elusive element she values above almost all else in her music. “For me, everything begins with the melody,” she says, growing animated. “Without the melody, there can be no words, but I also need this sonority, this poetic sound that the words make when they combine with the melody. This

Jon Hopkins: ‘Psychedelic experiences inspired this album’

The musician on film scores, technological developments and the natural highs behind his new album, Singularity Born in Kingston upon Thames in 1979, the musician and producer Jon Hopkins studied piano at the Royal College of Music before turning his hand to electronic music. He has released four studio albums, including the 2013 critical smash Immunity , and has collaborated with artists as diverse as Brian Eno, King Creosote and Coldplay. Hopkins’s mind-bending fifth album, Singularity , is out this Friday on Domino. He plays London’s Village Underground on 10 May . You said on Instagram recently that you knew you’d make this record 15 years ago but only figured out how to make it in the past couple of years. What twigged? I knew a few things in advance, including the title and the idea of the album starting and ending with a really simple tone. I also wanted there to be a symbiotic relationship between all the sounds, so that everything would seem to grow out of everything else.

The week in TV: The Split; The Woman in White; The Terror; Westworld

Abi Morgan’s new divorce drama is a delightful family affair, The Terror – if you can get it – is tremendous, and Westworld is back on track The Split (BBC One) | iPlayer The Woman in White (BBC One) | iPlayer The Terror ( AMC ) Westworld ( Sky Atlantic ) Several grand offerings last week, but without doubt the most human-sized was The Split . Being about a strong female dynasty of divorce lawyers in relatively humdrum London, it doesn’t (or not yet anyway) feature renegade robots, spectral waifs or Arctic monsters and is thus something of a catharsis. Bite-size problems, such as most humans face daily, of thwarted love and thwarted laughter, and niggling jealousies and seething grudges, and every morning’s dozen other greetings to our blearied souls. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2r7ATQn

Avengers: Infinity War review – surprisingly nimble Marvel franchise fantasy

Anthony and Joe Russo juggle a galaxy of superheroes in interesting and dramatic ways Technically speaking, Avengers: Infinity War is the third in a series of four planned Avengers films, and part of an ever-expanding universe of Marvel films that’s seemingly… infinite. Call it the Marvel industrial complex. It’s easy to be cynical about the mechanics of the cash-cow franchise , which trades on cliffhangers – and the knowledge that its ticket-buying (and merchandise-buying) audience is guaranteed, even if the quality of its films isn’t. This chaotic but surprisingly nimble instalment, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, brings together an eye-popping ensemble cast of A-listers (imagine the table read!) and pushes them into playful new configurations. Tony Stark, AKA Iron Man ( Robert Downey Jr ), is paired with Dr Strange ( Benedict Cumberbatch ) and Spider-Man (Tom Holland); Thor ( Chris Hemsworth ) buddies up with the Guardians of the Galaxy (including a teenage Groot); Steve Roge

Blossoms: Cool Like You review – sleek and sweet Mancunian pop rock

(Virgin EMI) What if the Killers hadn’t grown beards after Hot Fuss , and had instead set about writing 11 new versions of Mr Brightside? Mancunian pop-rockers Blossoms ’ second album is your answer. The quasi-indie quintet may harbour none of the euphoric spite and savagery of countrymen Oasis and the Stone Roses, and rarely summon New Order’s wistful truculence, but their occasionally derivative songs come bolstered with as many hooks as a Peter Pan audition.  Lead singer-songwriter Tom Ogden’s decision to write with synths instead of guitars delivers a set that’s sleeker and stronger than their promising 2016 debut , if sadly sheared of the squalling solos and spacey psych that gussied up old tunes such as Honey Sweet and Smashed Pianos . Similar to long-forgotten second-stage acts the Mock Turtles or the Railway Children, Ogden’s band rarely feel like lasting stars. Yet with his dependable ability to spin candyfloss melodies around new-wave grooves, he might still stellify Bloss

How queer film collective thrives under the radar in Shanghai, and its soft power

Public awareness of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community in China is higher than ever thanks to an abortive attempt this month by Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter, to bar homosexual content. An outcry from internet users sympathetic to the LGBT cause forced a U-turn. Shanghai-based queer film collective Cinemq hopes to ride that wave of support as it launches its first documentary, Extravaganza, which explores Shanghai’s booming drag scene. Since launching in... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2vQkwMG

One to watch: Snail Mail

Eighteen-year-old Maryland singer-songwriter Lindsey Jordan makes melodic, lo-fi indie rock that’s got the critics swooning From the age of five, Lindsey Jordan started having “really intense” classical guitar lessons , practising two hours a day. Over the following decade she played for her local church (in Ellicott City, Maryland), a jazz band, and in school plays, as well as being in the boys’ ice hockey team. After getting involved with the DIY punk scene in nearby Baltimore, she started making music as Snail Mail . By 15 she had written her first EP, Habit , which attracted more than a dozen label offers , with its melodic, lo-fi charm and Jordan’s powerfully evocative voice. Now, less than a year after she graduated from high school, and on the verge of releasing her debut album, Lush , Snail Mail has been described as a “prodigy” by Billboard , and as “ the wisest teenage indie rocker we know ” by Pitchfork ; her single Pristine was dubbed “an indie rock masterpiece” and a “tru

Can Instagram keep its nose clean?

The photo-sharing app has avoided the scandal that has engulfed its owner, Facebook. But can it stay unscathed? It has been a rough few weeks for Facebook since the Observer reported the Cambridge Analytica data breach. The scandal revealed how the political consulting firm might have raked up the personal information of at least 87 million Facebook users in order to influence them with tailored political ads, sent the social network’s stocks into a tailspin, triggered the #DeleteFacebook movement – and regaled the planet with the cringefest that was CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the US Senate. But if Facebook’s reputation has seen better days, one of the company’s most valuable assets has come out of the kerfuffle practically unscathed. Instagram , the photo-sharing platform Facebook acquired in 2012 for $715m, has not yet come up in the debate over Facebook’s cavalier attitude to user data protection, despite being of a piece with the longer-running social network (and

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘This could be the beginning of a revolution’

She’s on school reading lists and counts Hillary, Oprah and Beyoncé as fans. The author talks about motherhood, #MeToo – and causing controversy At a PEN lecture in Manhattan last weekend, the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie took Hillary Clinton to task for beginning her Twitter bio with “Wife, mom, grandma”. Her husband’s account, it will surprise no one to know, does not begin with the word “husband”. “When you put it like that, I’m going to change it,” promised the 2016 presidential candidate. Adichie is an international bestseller and about as starry as a writer can be (when we meet she chats casually about recently meeting Oprah Winfrey, who made a little bow to her). Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus , published when she was only 26, was longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker; she won the 2006 Orange prize for Half of a Yellow Sun ; was awarded a MacArthur fellowship – the so-called genius grant – and her work is now a fixture on American school reading lists. Following her sensa

K-pop star D.O. from EXO shows why he’s more than just a singer in one of South Korea’s most popular boy bands

With the rapid global rise of K-pop bands such as BTS over the past year, fans have been left wondering who will be the next big thing to come out of South Korea. Many observers have put their money on popular boy band EXO to be the next K-pop act to break through internationally – and with the outfit boasting more than 100,000 followers on their US Twitter fan account, they could be right.  Since their debut in 2012, the Chinese-Korean boy bandhas been one of the most influential... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2r4dX4y

Janelle Monáe: Dirty Computer review – from dystopian android to R&B party girl

A pitch for the pop mainstream sees the Prince collaborator ditch the tech for a sexy, personal angle The title of Janelle Monáe ’s third full-length outing – a frontrunner for album of the year – suggests compromised hardware, the gunk in the machine. And really, a tech fetish would have come as little surprise for Monáe’s return to music. Machines have long been her thing. Well before her performances in the films Moonlight and Hidden Figures , and before her features on records by Grimes and fun. , the singer-turned-actor came to renown with her own stylish, sci-fi concept album. Set in a futuristic dystopia, The ArchAndroid (2010) starred a saviour robot, Cindi Mayweather, and disdained easy categorisations, combining R&B, pop and rock with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and southern states sass. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HB318s

Dean Burnett: ‘Happiness shouldn’t be the default state in the human brain’

The neuroscientist and author of The Idiot Brain on the difficulty of trying to explain happiness and what he learned from Charlotte Church Dean Burnett, 35, is a Cardiff-based neuroscientist, blogger and occasional standup comedian who writes the Guardian ’s science blog Brain Flapping . His bestselling book The Idiot Brain , published in 2016 , portrayed the human brain as an extraordinary organ that is also messy, fallible and disorganised. In his follow-up, The Happy Brain , Burnett delves into our grey matter once more to explore the slippery notion of happiness, asking: what causes it, and why? What makes our brain like certain things so much, but not others? Can eternal happiness actually exist – and would it be desirable anyway? How did the book come about? The publishers kept saying: “What’s your next book about then? We need another one.” I didn’t have any ideas, so I started asking friends and colleagues and got lots of suggestions, all very different and generally all

The week in classical: 4.48 Psychosis; London Symphony Orchestra/Rattle – review

Lyric Hammersmith; Barbican, London The bleak brilliance of Philip Venables’s opera 4.48 Psychosis hits home. Plus, magnificent Mahler from the LSO and Simon Rattle Shorn of joy, matted with despair, Philip Venables’s 4.48 Psychosis shot to near classic status after its world premiere in 2016. It might have been a damp squib on second encounter. On the contrary, this intense, 90-minute opera, for six women, a dozen instrumentalists and pre-recorded material, was yet more spiky, cogent, witty and elegiac in its first revival, at the Lyric Hammersmith. It is based on Sarah Kane’s play about the unending labyrinth of clinical depression, finished in 1999 shortly before her suicide at the age of 28. Venables (b1979), the Royal Opera’s first composer in residence, has said he chose to make an opera from 4.48 Psychosis in part because of his response to the musicality of the text. With so much else to take in when the work was new, from fragmented narrative and unidentifiable character

Sunshine on Leith review – Proclaimers musical goes the distance

West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds Featuring 18 tracks by the Scottish duo, this spirited show is a thing of joy. By the time I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) comes on, resistance is futile Whisper it, but West Yorkshire Playhouse might just be making a case for the much-maligned jukebox musical. Knotting together 18 Proclaimers songs, Sunshine on Leith is refreshingly uncynical, resisting the easy wins and clunky contrivances that characterise most shows banking on a recognisable soundtrack. Even remounted after its success on the big screen in 2013 , it feels like a thing of real joy, not a ploy to cash in. For James Brining, this revival of his original 2007 production is a return and an ending. It’s an opportunity to revisit the greatest hit of his time as artistic director of Dundee Rep, while concluding one chapter of the Playhouse’s story before it closes for refurbishment. In coming back to the show, he marries the strengths of the piece with the strengths of the space. In this versi

David Almond on Felling: ‘I didn't want to be a northern writer’

The Skellig novelist remembers the din of the shipyards and how he discovered the strangeness and exoticism of Tyneside I recall a morning in my Felling childhood. I say to my best friend, Tex, that I want to be a writer. We’ve been serving on St Patrick’s altar. Bread and wine’s been turned to flesh and blood. I still taste the Host on my tongue. We’re on the High Street outside Myers pork shop. A severed pig’s head grins out from its window. There’s the distant din of caulkers from the shipyards far below. It’s a hot day and the sky above is eggshell blue. “A writer?” says Tex. “But you’re just you, Davie. And this is just the Felling. What the hell ye ganna write about?” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2vW4Jfi

John Prescott: ‘My most unappealing habit? Always looking glum’

The life peer on buying Jaguars, being quick to anger and failing the 11-plus Born in Prestatyn, north Wales, John Prescott , 79, left school at 15 and joined the merchant navy. He later gained a degree from the University of Hull and, in 1970, became MP for Hull East. In 1994 he was made deputy leader of the Labour party, and was deputy prime minister from 1997 to 2007. He is married with two sons and holds a life peerage. He presents the Channel 5 documentary series Made In Yorkshire . What is your greatest fear? Finding nothing to do. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HXiIWV

‘I was reunited with my long-lost family on Oprah’

Clemantine Wamariya was separated from her family in the Rwandan genocide; 12 years later she was invited to appear on the Oprah Winfrey show... I t was an event that could easily have passed in an emotional blur: the moment Clemantine Wamariya was reunited with the family she’d last seen 12 years earlier, and had for a long time feared were dead. Instead, she can recall every second: the moment she threw herself into her father’s arms, before clinging to her mother and, in a gesture of disbelief and gratitude, raising an arm to the heavens. The reason everything is still so clear 12 years on is because the reunion took place on television, and she has rewatched it many times. “I thought in that moment I’d died,” Clemantine says. “You hear about how you’re united with the people you love in heaven, and I thought, this must be heaven. I was so happy, but I was also scared: had I died?” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2r4jHdC

After six months of #MeToo, the burning question is: how soon can these guys come back?

Months are like dog years for men, so four months on the sidelines for a man is definitely the same as decades of groping for a woman Gosh, remember the #MeToo movement? That was exciting, wasn’t it? All that talk about how nothing was ever going to be the same again. No longer would men get away with sexually exploiting women, and powerful men who once seemed untopplable were duly toppled. Red lines, everyone said, had been drawn. And six months on from the beginning of this movement, there’s only one question, really, that is being asked: how soon can these guys come back? “Several powerful men, in several industries, have had their worlds kicked out from under them as the #MeToo movement has gathered momentum… Is a comeback possible?” an article in the New York Times recently asked about the American chef Mario Batali. Yes, the poor men! Those accusations really came out of nowhere for them. It might be worth interjecting at this point that Batali, a popular and powerful media fi

F1 driver Daniel Ricciardo: ‘I take around 100 flights a year, so I need stamina’

The Red Bull racer on constant time-zone changes, a low-carb diet and unwinding at music festivals The older I get, the earlier I go to bed. It’s probably down to the constant climate and time-zone changes, but I’m content with seven hours, so 10pm is normal. Weirdly, I’ve performed very well off little sleep, too, so I don’t let it bug me. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2KhWlKa

This week’s best home entertainment: from Dunkirk to Taskmaster

Christopher Nolan’s pounding war epic arrives on the small screen, while Alex Horne’s gloriously offbeat gameshow returns with a new batch of contenders Hear Here: sign up and we’ll help you find your next favourite podcast As a rapper, writer, activist and graphic novelist, Akala is every inch the modern renaissance man. This performance piece showcases several of his skill sets at once as he examines the rise and fall of empires in his customarily trenchant fashion. Mala and Paul Gladstone-Reid provide the soundtrack. Saturday 28 April, 10pm, BBC Two Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2r9tLTF

Nicaragua on the Brink, Once Again

Jon Lee Anderson on protests in Nicaragua over proposed social-security reforms that are threatening the stability of the government of President Daniel Ortega. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2r5XJHj

Olivia Laing: 'There's no book I love more than Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature'

Wild, honest, riotous, the film-maker’s diary showed me what it meant to be an artist, to be political – and how to plant a garden There’s no book I love more than Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature . There’s nothing I’ve read as often, or that has shaped me so deeply. I first came to it a year or two after its publication in 1991, certainly before Jarman’s death in 1994. It was my sister Kitty who introduced me to his work. She was 10 or 11 then and I was 12, maybe 13. Strange kids. My mother was gay, and we lived on an ugly new development in a village near Portsmouth, where all the culs-de-sac were named after the fields they had destroyed. We were happy together, but the world outside felt flimsy, inhospitable, permanently grey. I hated my girls’ school, with its prying teachers. This was the era of section 28 (of the 1988 Local Government Act ), which banned local authorities from “promoting” homosexuality and schools from teaching its acceptability “as a pretended family relationship

Five books a Bookazine director couldn’t live without – Shonee Mirchandani’s must-reads for a desert island

Shonee Mirchandani, director of Hong Kong bookstore chain Bookazine, grew up in Hong Kong. She went to Island School, studied law at the University of Hong Kong and later did an MBA at Durham University in the UK. Five books a local food champion couldn’t live without: Todd Darling’s must-reads for a desert island Since 2002 she has run the family business with her sister, Arti. Here are the five books she would take to a desert island, in her own words. Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2jfc9kC

Here they go again! Disco group ABBA reunites for two more songs more than 35 years after splitting

“Mamma Mia! Here we go again”: Members of Sweden’s legendary disco group ABBA announced on Friday that they have reunited to record two new songs, 35 years after their last single, sparking joy and surprise among fans.  “We all four felt that, after some 35 years, it could be fun to join forces again and go into the recording studio. So we did,” the group said in a statement after repeatedly vowing they would never reunite.  The new songs, I Still Have... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2HwnMCp

25,000 people buy a Picasso painting together from a Swiss bargain site

It will not hang on the wall in their living rooms, but they own it nonetheless: 25,000 internet users banded together to buy a Picasso painting, which went on display in Geneva on Friday. Visitors to Swiss bargain site Qoqa usually end up buying a new drill, a luggage set or a cheap trip to Marrakesh. But last December, the website created in 2005 with the motto: “We do anything, but it’s all for you”, proposed a painting by artist superstar Pablo Picasso.  The 1968... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2I5SPC3

Present Laughter review – vulgar Coward revival is an orgy of exaggeration

Chichester festival theatre Played as a broad farce, Sean Foley’s revival starring Rufus Hound ignores Noël Coward’s faultless verbal stylings Rufus Hound, whose recent roles include Mr Toad and Sancho Panza , has been cast as the debonair, if ageing, matinee idol Garry Essendine in Noël Coward’s imperishable comedy. That says a lot about Sean Foley’s dismal production, which treats this verbally impeccable play as if it were broad farce, complete with bellowed lines, slammed doors and uncontrollable soda-siphons. You get the idea in the first few seconds when Daphne, who has spent the night in Garry’s apartment, punctuates every sentence with a grating “hee-haw” simply because she is upper-class. Miss Erikson, a Scandinavian housemaid, is likewise played as a grotesque caricature who looks as if she presides over the ministry of silly walks . Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FlOnfA

The Assassination of Katie Hopkins review – a musical savaging of social media

Theatr Clwyd, Mold An inventive score and an intelligent script combine in this smart satire with nods to Jerry Springer: The Opera The most provocative thing about this show is the title. Chris Bush and Matt Winkworth ’s musical is definitely not a call for the murder of a self-styled hate figure. Rather, it’s an intelligent, thoughtful and often wryly enjoyable look at the polarisation of public debate in the age of social media, and what happens when it ceases to be a discourse and becomes a mere echo chamber. Lucy Osborne’s design of stairs, platforms and movable screens features the lights of thousands of endlessly winking mobile phones. Related: Why provocateur Katie Hopkins is the perfect symbol for our tribal age | Kenan Malik Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2r4gcUt

Judi, Maggie, Joan and Eileen: all hail British theatre's great dames | Michael Billington

Roger Michell’s film Nothing Like a Dame brings four legends together – and evokes decades of brilliant performances Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest. The wheeze of bringing together four of Britain’s distinguished theatrical dames – Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith – and letting them reminisce has yielded an extraordinary film which opens in cinemas next week before being shown on BBC TV under the Arena banner. Called, inevitably, Nothing Like a Dame , and directed by Roger Michell, it is both hilarious and, in its mix of present-day recollection and past footage, extremely touching. It also reminds me of the truth of David Hare’s observation that acting is ultimately “a judgment of character”. The four dames have known each other a long time and have much in common. Between them they have played all the great roles: Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Saint Joan, the Duchess of Malfi. They have lived through radical changes in the approach to verse-speaking.