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Showing posts from September, 2018

'Banned in 46 countries' – is Faces of Death the most shocking film ever?

It is regarded as one of the most depraved films ever – a ‘shockumentary’ full of autopsies, plane crashes and executions. Why was Faces of Death so influential? And does its director have any regrets? The year is 1985 and two California schoolgirls called Diane Feese and Sherry Forget are watching uncomfortably as their teacher wheels out a TV on a stand. Lessons are meant to be over for the day but, rather than let his students go home, Mr Schwartz is insisting the teenagers watch a movie. He pops a tape into the VCR. What follows is a parade of grotesque images. Dead bodies are sliced open in an autopsy, people at an occult orgy smear themselves in human blood, a man is electrocuted, sheep writhe on meathooks and there is an awful scene at a restaurant involving a monkey. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NcPt0X

Lord of the Flies review – all-female cast tears up public school rulebook

Theatr Clwyd, Mold William Golding’s fable of desert-island anarchy is reinvented for the modern age in Emma Jordan’s brutal, bold production There’s a theory being pushed by the psychologist Michele Gelfand , of the University of Maryland. In Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, she suggests there are two types of society: the “tight” cultures, in which rules are strictly enforced, and the “loose” communities, in which things are more free and easy. She says Japan, where the trains run on time, is tight, and Brazil, where everyone arrives late, is loose. Looked at through this lens, Lord of the Flies is about a very particular threat. At risk for William Golding were the tight values of mid 20th-century Britain, a doctrine of discipline, civility and order that had seen the country through two world wars. The novelist, who took part in the D-day landings and knew all about man’s inhumanity to man, is concerned about the tribalism and savagery of his desert-island evacuees as they build a n

The Confusion Surrounding the F.B.I.’s Renewed Investigation of Brett Kavanaugh

Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow write on the F.B.I.’s renewed investigation into Brett Kavanaugh, and how several people hoping to contribute salient information about him, Christine Blasey Ford, and Deborah Ramirez are struggling to make contact with the Bureau. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2zHTS8N

Kanye West's pro-Trump remarks prompt boos in SNL studio

Rapper complains that ‘the blacks always want Democrats’ Says he is often asked: ‘How could you like Trump? He’s racist’ Kanye West followed his appearance on the 44th Saturday Night Live season premiere with rambling pro-Trump remarks that prompted boos in the studio. Related: Saturday Night Live: Kanye West controversy trumps lame sketches Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2QkDsbQ

Lou Sanders: Shame Pig review – lurid gags from the comedians' comedian

Soho theatre, London With an abundance of eyebrow-raising anecdotes about outrageous social faux pas, the standup is terrific company There was louder buzz around Lou Sanders ’ Edinburgh fringe hour this year than her work has ever previously generated – Shame Pig was voted best show by her fellow comedians. Not only is it a fine show, from a comic with just the right distance from, and closeness to, all the self-mortifying stories she’s got to tell. But it also addresses her alcoholism and newfound sobriety. Her previous work was talked about in terms of its wildness and lack of focus. Shame Pig, by contrast, is efficient and on point, a neat hour broaching the burden of shame – as opposed to embarrassment – that Sanders (and, she argues, many women) find themselves carrying through youth and early adulthood. Related: A moment that changed me: realising, aged 16, that I couldn’t handle alcohol | Lou Sanders Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2zGKZMA

Memorial review – Alice Oswald's exquisite elegy to Iliad's lost mortals

Barbican, London Helen Morse and a 200-strong chorus give a majestic ode to the everyday people whose stories are buried within Homer’s epic Alice Oswald’s 2011 poem, an excavation of Homer’s Iliad, focuses not on its gods and heroes but on the 215 ordinary mortals – tradesmen, shepherds, everymen – whose little-known names are contained within the ancient epic. In this luminous staging of Oswald’s work, they are represented by a 200-strong chorus that roves the stage and appears like a sea of humanity: men, women and children in modern dress, raised from the dead, it seems, as their stories are told. Their choreographed presence is a spectacle from the first scene, set amid the aftermath of the fall of Troy, in which a lone man raises a hand in a barren battlefield. The ground begins to move and reveals itself to be a swathe of bodies, turning, rising, coming back to life. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IrUCl1

New Chinese science fiction anthology promises to reignite the genre

The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First-Century Chinese Science Fiction edited by Mingwei Song and Theodore Huters Columbia University Press 3/5 stars Until recently, in the words of author Fei Dao, Chinese science fiction was like a “hidden, lonely army … laid low in the wilderness where nobody really cared to look at it”. But in the introduction to Chinese sci-fi anthology “The Reincarnated Giant”, modern Chinese literature expert Mingwei Song... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2QePdR8

Protest and parade on the streets of San Francisco

The 80s were a decade of demonstration for San Francisco photographer Janet Delaney. As her photos are collected in a book – and the city stirs again – she talks about her work In 1981, at the start of the Reagan years, photographer Janet Delaney decamped from the South of Market – or SoMa – neighbourhood in her beloved San Francisco, where she had lived since her teens, to a new home in the Mission district. Aged just 29, she had spent the previous few years documenting social change and gentrification in SoMa. “I was using a large format camera on a tripod, so I had to put my head under a black cloth to take a photograph, which made me feel very conspicuous,” she says. “It was kind of formal.” She wanted a more “fluid” experience of street life, and in Mission that is exactly what she got. It was a turbulent time and protests and parades were playing an increasingly important part in the daily life of the primarily Latino district, which was also home to sizeable gay and African Ame

Hogarth's Progress review – dazzling double bill charts artist's path to woe

Rose theatre, Kingston Keith Allen excels as the embittered old painter in the second of Nick Dear’s two plays following the life of William Hogarth There is a palpable irony to the umbrella title of Nick Dear’s two plays about William Hogarth. The Art of Success, originally staged by the RSC in 1986, offers a rumbustious portrait of the artist as a young man in his creative heyday. The new piece, The Taste of the Town, is a more sombre, reflective work showing Hogarth as an embittered oldster. Even though I preferred the dash and spirit of the first play, the two works offer an intriguing insight into the true nature of Hogarth’s genius. Hogarth was supremely a social painter and London was his canvas. That comes across with abundant clarity in The Art of Success, set in the 1730s. Hogarth, rejoicing in the acclaim for A Harlot’s Progress, is a wildly clubbable figure and, although newly married to Jane Thornhill, an enthusiastic patron of the city’s night workers. But Dear also hi

Stephen Rea: ‘No matter how much they enforce Brexit, British identity is dwindling’

The actor reveals deep-rooted passions as he talks about his role in Cyprus Avenue, what he learned from Samuel Beckett, Brexit and the Troubles There is a poem by Tom Paulin called An Ulster Unionist Walks the Streets of London , in which the narrator articulates the shock of not-belonging he feels as he wanders lost through the British capital “like a half-foreigner among the London-Irish”. His British identity has been shaken to the core by the sudden realisation that, amid the multiplicity of ethnic identities that make up the city’s multicultural mix, he is categorised as Irish as soon as he opens his mouth. I was reminded of the poem as I read Cyprus Avenue , David Ireland’s controversially violent play about Eric Miller, an ageing Ulster loyalist whose sectarian extremism has shaded into psychosis to the point where he thinks his infant granddaughter is Gerry Adams. In the play Miller recounts a similar, but even more confusing, crisis of identity he experienced on a business

On my radar: Geoff Dyer’s cultural highlights

The author and critic on extreme climbing films, Australian experimentalists the Necks and a visionary of Italian photography The writer and critic Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham in 1958 and educated at Oxford University. Over the past 32 years, he has published four novels as well as nonfiction works on topics including John Berger and the film Stalker . In 1992 he won the Somerset Maugham award for But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz . His latest book, Broadsword Calling Danny Boy , a scene-by-scene comic analysis of the 1968 film Where Eagles Dare , is published by Penguin on Thursday. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Qf9SV4

Boris, this Churchill fetish isn’t your finest hour... | David Mitchell

If Johnson thinks he’s the reincarnation of the great wartime leader we should really begin to worry What do you do if you think you’re like James Bond? You’re convinced of it. “I’m so handsome and strong and brave and ruthless and intelligent and good at sex – I’m sort of amazing,” you say to yourself. “I admit I haven’t always behaved well in relationships, but I’m so incredibly attractive that I totally get away with it and anyone whose heart I’ve broken would say that it was all completely worth it just to meet me. Plus, in a crisis, I will literally always save the day. Like the song says, ‘nobody does it better’. That 100% applies to me.” So, if you think that about yourself, and yet no one seems to be saying you’re like James Bond, or particularly terrific in those ways at all, what do you do? I suppose it depends how like James Bond you really are. Because if you say: “Hey everyone, I’m like James Bond! Can I get a bit of credit please?!”, you’re really being very unlike Jame

The Wife review – Glenn Close in a class of her own

Close is superb as a long-suffering literary spouse whose marriage reaches crisis point when her husband wins a Nobel prize Some of the very best screen performances only fully reveal themselves on second viewing. Take Glenn Close in The Wife , an intriguing (if occasionally contrived) tragicomic drama lifted shoulder high by the six-time Oscar nominee in one of her most deliciously complex roles. When it comes to portraying conflicting emotions, Close has always been in a class of her own, thanks to her kaleidoscopically expressive eyes and precise physical gestures. But rarely has her ability to tell two stories with a single look been more astutely employed than in this elegantly melancholy portrait of a marriage in crisis. Close plays Joan Castleman, steadfast partner of celebrated author Joseph (Jonathan Pryce), whom we first meet on the eve of his Nobel prize win in 1992. When the early morning phone call comes, Joe insists that his wife pick up the extension to share the news

Rachel Whiteread: ‘I couldn't stand Shoreditch any more… every good artist has left’

As her new sculpture is unveiled in a Yorkshire forest, the artist talks about the first world war, playing with scale, and why she’s quit east London Among Rachel Whiteread’s best-known works are House , a cast of the inside of a Victorian house which stood in Mile End Park until it was controversially demolished in 1994 , and the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna . Whiteread won the Turner prize in 1993, the first woman to do so. A retrospective of her work took place at Tate Britain last year. Nissen Hut , her first permanent public sculpture in the UK, is a commission by the Forestry Commission and 14-18 Now, the arts programme marking the centenary of the first world war. Its home will be in Dalby Forest, North Yorkshire, from 10 October. How did you come to make Nissen Hut ? Tamsin Dillon of 14-18 Now came to me and asked if I was interested in getting involved. I wasn’t sure initially what I might do, but eventually I suggested a building, one that would work well with

The exit of Instagram’s founders shows Zuckerberg’s rule is absolute | John Naughton

Facebook will always data-mine its users for the benefit of advertisers, whatever the lofty principles of the apps it buys Last week, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the co-founders of Instagram, announced that they were leaving Facebook , where they had worked since Mark Zuckerberg bought their company six years ago. “We’re planning on taking some time off to explore our curiosity and creativity again,” Systrom wrote in a statement on the Instagram blog. “Building new things requires that we step back, understand what inspires us and match that with what the world needs; that’s what we plan to do.” Quite so. It’s always refreshing when young millionaires decide to spend more time with their money. (Facebook paid $715m for their little outfit when it acquired it; Instagram had 13 employees at the time.) But to those of us who have an unhealthy interest in what goes on at Facebook, the real question about Systrom’s and Krieger’s departure was: what took them so long? Continue reading

The big picture: the party’s over, but whose party?

Anne Hardy’s 2005 staged photograph of an abandoned room suggests an intriguing variety of histories Anne Hardy’s photograph invites us to make up stories. What has kicked off here? An end-of-term physics department knees-up? An unfinished experiment into big bang theory employing party poppers and plywood? A chain-smokers’ convention? The circuit diagrams on the blackboard appear to offer some clues, but on closer inspection they seem to be mind maps for systems we can’t quite fathom. And what of the demon bunny on the shelf? For years, Hardy has created such fictional rooms in her studio in Hackney, east London, mostly out of rubbish she has found on walking tours of the streets nearby. Sometimes, she makes casts of the things she finds and uses the cast in her pictures. She has habitually spent months putting a room together and then, when it has felt complete, she has photographed it and moved on to the next set of found objects. In recent years, she has created some rooms as inst

A graphic history of the rise of the Nazis

As nationalism and antisemitism rise again, new graphic novels on prewar and wartime Germany offer salutary lessons in how quickly politics can turn to poison. We spoke to their creators In 1996, Jason Lutes , a cartoonist with just one slim graphic novel to his name, was leafing through a magazine in the house he shared in Seattle when his eye fell on an advertisement for a book of photographs about Bertolt Brecht’s Berlin. The ad briefly described the German capital in the 1920s, with its wild cabarets, seedy bars and jostling population of artists, architects, writers and philosophers, and in as long as it took him to read it, his life was changed. Lutes had never visited Berlin. He knew almost nothing about the city beyond what the copywriter at this university press had to say about it. But, no matter. Here it was in black and white: his next project. The plan – it came to him in an instant – was to write an epic comic about the end of the Weimar republic and the beginnings of N

Turner prize 2018; Space Shifters review – from the momentous to the miraculous

Naeem Mohaiemen mesmerises with a man in limbo while Forensic Architecture speaks truth to power in a terrific year for the Turner prize. Elsewhere, 20 artists conjure beauty at its most illusory By turns shattering, absorbing, beguiling, highly political, frequently momentous: this is the best Turner prize show in years. All the shortlisted works are moving images, in both senses; some filmed on stately 35mm stock, others using cameras attached to kites, or simply shot on smartphones. The uniformity of medium – no painting, sculpture, installation or anything else – is a reflection of the decisions of the four-person jury alone, as always, not a portrait of the contemporary art scene. But it would be hard to avoid the obvious intersection between these works and the maelstrom of modern times: they are like dark reflecting mirrors. Naeem Mohaiemen , London-born to Bengali parents, is showing two enthralling films, geopolitical romances in a tragic vein. One is a complex musing on th

The week in theatre: Antony and Cleopatra; Touching the Void; Poet in da Corner – review

Olivier, London; Bristol Old Vic; Royal Court, London Ralph Fiennes’s Antony grapples with a midlife crisis while Sophie Okonedo’s Cleopatra is the ultimate diva in an outstanding production at the National We first meet Ralph Fiennes’s Antony hanging out in Egypt. His face has the expression of an experienced teaser; he wears a holiday shirt and is barefoot, with hippy beads dangling on his chest. At every stage in this outstanding Antony and Cleopatra , Fiennes is more a faulty, middle-aged man – having the midlife crisis to end them all – than a conquering hero. When this Antony goes to war, claiming himself to be a “man of steel”, and is strapped into some awkward-looking leather kneepads, he seems more flustered than bellicose. Even his death is a botched affair. But it’s this faulty humanity and vulnerability, this cutting of the character down to a friendly size (his delights might not qualify as dolphin-like – more as sprat-like?), that makes Fiennes’s Antony poignant and fam

The week in classical: Das Rheingold/ Die Walküre; La Tragédie de Carmen – review

Royal Opera House; Asylum Chapel, London SE15 Keith Warner’s Royal Opera Ring cycle is back and newly pertinent – and blazing with star performances Sailing up the Thames from Greenwich in 1877, a year after the Ring cycle had its premiere in Bayreuth, Wagner told his wife, Cosima: “This is Alberich’s dream come true – Nibelheim, world dominion, activity, work, everywhere the oppressive feeling of steam and fog.” It’s not a particularly flattering view of the capital. Alberich, the dwarf of German heroic legend, is the leader of the Nibelungen race. He renounces love and steals the all-powerful gold from the Rhinemaidens. His treacherous act sets in motion the Ring: four operas, 15 or so hours of music, and properly titled Der Ring des Nibelungen . If London, and the UK, have changed since Wagner’s visit, they have also changed since 2012 when the Royal Opera last staged the Ring, and yet more radically since Keith Warner’s production was first seen, beginning in stages in 2004. It’

The first zombie movie: 10 classic horror films to celebrate Night of the Living Dead anniversary

“They’re coming to get you, Barbara …” Monday marks 50 years since director George Romero unleashed the zombie movie on the world with the low-budget horror classic Night of the Living Dead. Zombie director George Romero honoured with star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame He also threw in some social commentary, which became a hallmark of his career – and of horror films in general. Masked killers and supernatural beasts are cool and all, but they hit home a... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2xNhqre

His personality changed: Michael Hutchence’s sister on his traumatic brain injury

Everything about Michael looked different, his sister thought. He was paler, duller in the eyes, more slumped in the shoulders. Even the INXS singer’s Byronic curls seemed to have lost their bounce. It was 1996, the day before Tina Hutchence’s wedding. Earlier, in a fax to her, he’d explained the “unmitigated hell” he was going through, “with the press, the police, a fire, four burglaries, litigation … we have seven or eight writs on our hands”.... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2y3Gji2

When pop stars play pop stars…

As Lady Gaga’s silver-screen version of (almost) herself in a Star Is Born reaches cinemas, we look back at other reinventions, from Whitney as Rachel to Beyoncé as Deena ‘Having something to say is one thing; having a way to make people listen is a whole other bag.” This is what an awestruck Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) tells fledgling singer-songwriter Ally, played by Lady Gaga, in the newest and shiniest remake of A Star Is Born . Premiering last month at Venice film festival to rave reviews – and early Oscars buzz for both Cooper and Gaga – it is, as Variety ’s Owen Gleiberman put it, “a transcendent Hollywood movie”. As far as pop music is concerned, the messenger matters. Like the traditional Hollywood musical, pop star movies follow the familiar arc of an artist finding their voice – and, best of all, feature real pop stars. As a pop music superfan who struggles with musicals and the tiresome way they crowbar narrative into song and dance numbers, I’m obsessed with this movi

Mitski review – an emotional Tough Mudder of indie rock

Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London The Japanese-American singer-songwriter gives a conceptual art performance and full body workout along with her compelling laments of lust, loneliness and death Stony-faced US singer-songwriter Mitski fixes a reverent, sold out crowd with a stare. One of the most significant new talents to come out of what you might loosely call “indie rock” (there are riffing guitars, but that’s not the whole picture) the 28-year-old stands stock-still behind a mic stand. You notice with delight she is wearing a white long-sleeved shirt – Mitski has a moving song, A Burning Hill, in which she wears “a white button-down”, to appear neat and in control as an annihilating inferno is raging in-song. Behind her is arrayed a four-piece band: usually performing from behind a guitar, tonight she’s unencumbered. Then you notice the kneepads. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Iqd51f

WLTM… a colour-blind dating app

We don’t condone racism in real life, so why is it OK for online swipers to block whole ethnic groups? Sinakhone Keodara reached his breaking point last July. Loading up Grindr, the gay dating app that presents users with potential mates in close geographical proximity to them, the founder of a Los Angeles-based Asian television streaming service came across the profile of an elderly white man. He struck up a conversation, and received a three-word response: “Asian, ew gross.” He is now considering suing Grindr for racial discrimination. For black and ethnic minority singletons, dipping a toe into the water of dating apps can involve subjecting yourself to racist abuse and crass intolerance. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2N4lx7j

Good Luck Finding a Copy of Mark Judge’s “Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk”

Seth Kaufman on how Mark Judge’s memoir “Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk” has become difficult to obtain after it was mentioned during Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony in a hearing on allegations that he sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford at a high-school party, in 1982. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2OYd3jU

So is it nature not nurture after all?

In a new book likely to rekindle fierce controversy, psychologist Robert Plomin argues that genes largely shape our personalities and that the latest science is too compelling to ignore There are few areas of science more fiercely contested than the issue of what makes us who we are. Are we products of our environments or the embodiment of our genes? Is nature the governing force behind our behaviour or is it nurture? While almost everyone agrees that it’s a mixture of both, there has been no end of disagreement about which is the dominant influence. And it’s a disagreement that has been made yet more fraught by the political concerns that often underlie it. Traditionally, those on the left have tended to see the environment as the critical factor because it ties in with notions of egalitarianism. Thus inequalities, viewed from this perspective, are explained not by inherent differences but by social conditions. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Or7LAw

Leo Butler, playwright: ‘I want to take the audience on a trip’

The Sheffield-born writer tells how taking part in a clinical trial on LSD gave him the chance to relive his youth – and the subject for his new play Leo Butler was born in Sheffield in 1974. His plays have included Boy at the Almeida, London, and Lucky Dog and Faces in the Crowd at the Royal Court, where he led the Young Writers programme between 2005 and 2014. His latest, All You Need Is LSD , is being toured by the Told By an Idiot company; while writing it in 2015, Butler was invited to take part in Prof David Nutt’s LSD trials, an experience that formed the core of the play. Did you know the drugs expert David Nutt was doing LSD trials when you interviewed him for the play? I had no idea. It was literally as it is in my script: he said we’re doing these tests next Tuesday, would you like to be a part of it? My head was just exploding: I realised, this is the play. On a personal level it was great to go there again [taking LSD] after so many years. But also it brought the

Bristol Old Vic; Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown – review

Haworth Tompkins’s clever redesign of the Bristol Old Vic makes a virtue of its past and injects some drama into the foyer. And when will Denise Scott Brown get the respect she deserves? When James Saunders, carpenter to the great actor and theatre manager David Garrick, built what is now the Bristol Old Vic , he wouldn’t have expected it still to be there 250 years later, proudly proclaimed as the oldest continuously working theatre in the English-speaking world. In the 18th century an auditorium would usually be thrown up with some of the spirit and techniques of a stage set, a thing to be done and undone, and be only somewhat longer lived. What with fires, bankruptcies and other hazards, says the theatre’s artistic director, Tom Morris, an 18th-century theatre had a life expectancy of 17 years. It’s the provisional quality of theatre that a lot of architects, ever in search of a permanent personal monument, don’t understand. It helps explain why the architects of the Bristol Old V

Skate Kitchen review – half-baked tales of New York’s high rollers

Crystal Moselle’s drama about a Manhattan skateboard crew would have been better as a documentary In its opening scenes, the first narrative feature from The Wolfpack director Crystal Moselle feels like a documentary. Shooting cinema-verite style, Moselle’s camera watches as 18-year-old Latina skater Camille (Rachelle Vinberg) gets violently “credit-carded” by her board, blood pouring from between her legs. It’s visceral, almost too shocking to be made up. Related: Skate Kitchen: wheel life tales of sexism and sisterhood Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NMro6i

Shakespeare in the age of Brexit and Trump: the play’s still the thing

In his new book, Peter Conrad explains how the Bard’s plays are the perfect mirror for our troubled times Next time you go to a Shakespeare play, don’t think you can settle back into a safe invisibility when the lights go down. You will be under observation: the actors we watch are in turn watching us, examining our personal flaws and the fault lines in our fractious society. We receive fair warning of the test that is in store. Hamlet invites a troupe of itinerant players to perform at Elsinore in the hope that they will embarrass and with luck incriminate his guilty uncle. Their purpose, he tells them, is to “hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature” and expose “the very age and body of the time”. It’s our age and body, our manners and manias, that Shakespeare’s plays now probe, perhaps more pointedly than ever before. The film-maker Errol Morris, introducing American Dharma , his sulphurous documentary about Trump’s ideologue Steve Bannon, recently remarked that we are suffering t

One to watch: Ider

The London flatmates combine introspective lyrics with gorgeous harmonies and memorable melodies “I’m trying to enjoy myself, love myself/ Who the fuck is myself?” is a very Ider lyric. Lily Somerville and Megan Markwick (Ider is the “mysterious third band member” that manifests itself when they harmonise) may not have found themselves yet, but were lucky enough to find each other at university, and they’ve sung and written their way to a promising career since. Now flatmates in London, their shared setup allows constant collaboration and produces a series of thoughtful, gorgeous songs that mostly attempt to map the worlds outside and within. If you’re not a lyrics person, tracks such as Does She Even Know bring enough beautiful, indelible melodies, power synths and ghostly, funky fingerclicks to decorate all the damage and eviscerated hearts. You’ll hear everything from Haim to Frank Ocean and Portishead in Ider’s anxiety dream pop and heartbreak ballads. Their latest track, Mirror,

Sunmi, the ex-Wonder Girls star who is one of K-pop’s most famous female singers

The past year has been one of unadulterated success for Sunmi, the former member of K-pop outfit Wonder Girls. Sunmi has hit No 1 with all her latest singles, and is the face of major cosmetics and fashion brands. Her quirky appearances on popular TV variety shows have endeared her to those who have not fallen for her sexy image. K-pop giants speak at the UN with a message for the world’s youth Many were shocked and moved when Sunmi revealed she had a difficult childhood – something... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2NNfNE0

Romesh Ranganathan: ‘I’ll stop talking about race when I stop experiencing racism’

Is it OK to tell Irish jokes in a fake Sri Lankan accent? The comedian on talent shows, trolls and his right to offend My first ever gig was at a Pontins holiday camp when I was nine. It had a talent competition and I decided to enter as a standup, with a book of jokes from which I took all of my material. A lot of the jokes seemed to have no problem playing with the stereotype of Irish people being stupid. They were incredibly racist, but the bigger crime here, comedy-wise, was that my set was entirely built on stolen material. There was a joke about a man buying a Rolls-Royce who is a bit short of cash. He goes out into the street to see if someone can lend him 10p to make up the price. He bumps into an Irish man – we know he’s Irish, because his name is Paddy. Paddy says, “Here’s 20p. Buy me one as well.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2xYGVVP

Blake Morrison on Skipton: ‘I joined the village choir, as a way of seeing my mates at weekends’

The poet and author on two inspiring English teachers and the arrival of a youth club that opened up his world When asked where I grew up, I say Skipton, as there’s a chance people will have heard of it, but really it was a village several miles away, Thornton-in-Craven, to which we moved when I was six, a village so small that the primary school had only 18 pupils. We lived at the top of the hill, in what had previously been a rectory. Out front, in the distance, lay purple moor; to the left a valley that led to Skipton, gateway to the Yorkshire Dales; to the right small industrial Lancashire towns – Earby, Colne, Nelson and Burnley (the last boasted a top-flight football team, as it does again today). The village wasn’t isolated – a road ran through it, one so busy that my parents banned me from having a bicycle – and in those days there was a shop. Once a year, when not rained off, there’d be a fete. But there wasn’t much happening for children, least of all on Sunday, which is wh

Channel 4’s The Circle: pandering to the selfie generation or the coming of the apocalypse?

This new gameshow features fame-hungry nitwits sitting alone in their pants spewing small talk online. But who are the real losers, the contestants or the viewers? “Anyone can be anyone,” crows The Circle (Sunday to Friday, 10pm, Channel 4), a show in which fame-hungry nitwits sit alone in their pants spewing emoji-smothered small talk on a specially constructed social media platform. Depending on who you believe, this glossy reality confection either offers social comment on 21st-century living or, in pandering to the selfie generation, is a symptom of the coming apocalypse. Of its rivals, it has most in common with Big Brother – or it would if that show hadn’t become overrun with sociopaths and been euthanised. There are similarities to Love Island , too, though it can be hard to graft with your future soulmate when you’re separated by a fashionably exposed brick wall. To the game, then, which sees eight people setting up home in separate flats in a tower block with lightning bro

Young arts run free: the 50 best things to do in the UK for zilch

Whether you’re a social strategist or a stone-broke student, there’s a world of cultural freebies to be seized across the UK Modern Toss on banning essay-writing services To have a free day out is to beat the system. It’s the cultural equivalent of gorging yourself at an all-you-can-eat buffet, except it costs much less and you won’t go to bed praying for death because you consumed enough lukewarm spring rolls to murder an ox. Picking free entertainment is a learned skill, however. Opt for something too mainstream and your enjoyment will be dented by swarms of other people. Pick something not mainstream enough – say, the time I went to the opening of a ferry on the Isle of Sheppey as a teenager – and there’s a good chance you’ll spend your day bored, cold and eating cheese-and-pineapple cocktail sticks in a windowless indoor car park that stinks of exhaust fumes. When it is just right, however, free stuff can expand your horizons like nothing else. Let’s imagine that you’re on the

David O’Doherty: ‘Mitch Hedberg was so funny it made me need to wee’

The Irish comedian, author, musician, actor and playwright on the things that make him laugh the most I saw Mitch Hedberg in a tiny pub in Kilkenny in 1998 and it was so funny it made me need to wee. I was so afraid of missing the next joke I went with my foot holding the loo door slightly open. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2RaNNIq

Ex-IRA man's novel adds to intrigue over Northern Bank heist

Ricky O’Rawe’s book has echoes of 2004 Belfast raid, which remains unsolved On 19 December 2004, masked raiders took £26.5m in cash from the vaults of Belfast’s Northern Bank, loaded it on to a truck and vanished into the night. It was one of the most audacious heists in British criminal history, and it left an enduring riddle: did the IRA do it? Police on both sides of the Irish border suspected so, but the group denied any involvement. The robbers have not been caught and the investigation remains open . Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2OUm8tR

This week’s best home entertainment: from Sorry for Your Loss to The Cry

Facebook launches TV on demand with an Elizabeth Olsen sadcom, while The Cry attempts to fill a Bodyguard-sized hole You read that right: Facebook enters peak-era TV with this Elizabeth Olsen-starring sadcom about a woman coming bruisingly to terms with her husband’s death. As that blurb suggests, heavy stuff, but it’s tightly scripted with strong turns from Olsen and The Last Jedi’s Kelly Marie Tran as her sister. Plus, in keeping with this week’s Guide, all of it is free! Available now, Facebook Watch Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2xXyRVz

How Tracy Beaker turned out: Jacqueline Wilson on the return of her most famous creation

Tracy Beaker is back, as a single Mum living on a council estate. The bestselling author talks about ‘grit-fic’, selfie-culture – and what she won’t write about “Have you heard of my mum Tracy Beaker?… Everyone knows her,” announces narrator Jess. So begins Jacqueline Wilson’s latest book, her 108th – possibly, “I lost count around 100,” she says. A generation of (mostly) girls grew up reading the novels and watching the hit TV series about the misadventures of Wilson’s best-loved heroine battling her way through life in a children’s home – referred to as the Dumping Ground. Now, 27 years after The Story of Tracy Beaker was published, Tracy is back, a single mum in her late 20s, living on the Duke estate, between jobs and dating a former footballer. With a reunion of old friends – Tracy’s long-suffering foster mum Cam, bully boy “Football” and even “Justine Enemy-Forever Littlewood”, My Mum Tracy Beaker will appeal not only to Wilson’s devoted fans but also to their mums. But even

Out of my mind: Sarah Perry on writing under the influence of drugs

When a medical condition left her in agony, The Essex Serpent author was prescribed powerful opiates. They gave her terrifying visions - and a new insight into literary drug culture The poet Mary Robinson was, said Coleridge, a woman of undoubted Genius. She published her first book while a child bride in a debtors’ prison; she was a political radical who took the future George IV as a lover; in portraits her eyes are serious and her mouth is not. But sickness being no respecter of even the most fascinating people, she acquired an infection at the age of 26, and afterwards lived with paralysis and pain. One night in Bath, finding her suffering intolerable, she dosed herself with 80 drops of a tincture of alcohol and opium, and drowsily composed a poem called “The Maniac”, “like a person talking in her sleep”. Inspired by the memory of a vagrant, it is not a work on which to pin a reputation, but has a place in the history of letters as the first of the English Romantic opium poems. In

Brian Cox on Holst's Planets then and now

One hundred years ago Holst’s Planets suite was premiered, with the composer drawing on metaphors and myths to animate his planets. Today’s scientific realities are just as rich and powerful, writes the physicist and TV presenter. When The Planets was completed in 1916, little was known about the physical nature of the worlds represented musically by Gustav Holst, and he didn’t care. His focus was on the planets as metaphors for different facets of the psyche; War, Peace, Jollity, Old Age, Messenger, Magician and Mystic. Indeed, Holst wrote parts of the work as stand-alone pieces and co-opted them later. Today we have visited all the planets and our discoveries have replaced their ancient astrological characters. At first sight, this new knowledge might appear to jar with Holst’s work, but this would be a superficial conclusion to draw. The planets have histories far richer than Holst could have imagined and reality delivers more powerful metaphors than myth. Set against what we now

Claire Foy: ‘My anxiety was a tool to survive’

She has just won an Emmy for her role in The Crown and now takes the lead in two Oscar-tipped films. So why doesn’t the British actor believe her own hype? Claire Foy has the heebie-jeebies. The actor, who until last year played a young Elizabeth II in the Netflix drama The Crown , has spent the last few hours being photographed in a studio in London. It’s a nondescript building that sits between a janitorial supply store and a tinned tomato factory, but the place carries very distinct memories. “It’s where I did my main audition for The Crown,” Foy says, shuddering. “I was five months pregnant. They put me in a wig and – oh God – a wedding dress. I had really bad carpal tunnel, and a swollen nose, and my lips were just massive. I had to flirt with Winston Churchill. I remember thinking, ‘I’m not sure this is gonna go my way...’” We flee the weird associations to a pub not far away, where Foy, who’s been off caffeine for a couple of months, makes do with a long, pained sniff of my c

'It was like tending to a disgusting baby': life as a Harvey Weinstein employee

It’s a year since allegations about the producer sparked the #MeToo movement. Has workplace culture changed? Three ex-employees look back I’d had other jobs in the industry before and felt this one, in Harvey Weinstein’s London office, was a step up. The business was very successful at this point. There was a fairly high turnover of staff; I worked there for just under a year. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NQjgSu

Carlos Acosta: ‘My guilty pleasure? I love Poldark’

The dancer and choreographer on reversing ageing, his twin daughters, and selling stolen mangoes Born in Havana, Carlos Acosta trained at Cuba’s National Ballet School. He joined the Royal Ballet in 1998 and was a principal guest artist there from 2003-2016. In 2003, his show Tocororo: A Cuban Tale , based on his childhood, broke box office records. He celebrates 30 years in dance at the Royal Albert Hall from 2-5 October . He is married with three children, and lives in Somerset. What is your earliest memory? Going to the countryside with my mother, during a time we were struggling for food. We would exchange soap bars and old clothes for grain and beans. I must have been five or six. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2R9beSD

The British in India: a social history of 350 years of colonisation – book review

The British in India: Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience by David Gilmour Allen Lane 3 stars On September 24, 1599, while William Shakespeare was mulling over a draft of Hamlet in his house downriver from the Globe theatre in Southwark, south London, a few kilometres to the north a motley group of Londoners were gathering in a half-timbered Tudor hall. The men had come together to petition the ageing Queen Elizabeth I, then a bewigged and painted sexagenarian, to start up a company... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2DGpcc6

Childbirth: natural event, not medical emergency – how a film changed restaurateur Jindsay Jang’s life

Polemical documentary feature The Business of Being Born (2008), directed by Abby Epstein and produced by actor and talk-show host Ricki Lake, who is also one of its interview subjects, attacks the medicalisation and cost of childbirth in the United States. Presenting home births overseen by midwives as a preferable alternative to hospitals and obstetricians, the film advocates treating childbirth as a natural event rather than a medical emergency. Lindsay Jang, co-founder of restaurants... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2zEQmfn

Jeff Flake’s Limited Resistance

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes about Senator Jeff Flake’s resistance to President Trump and his role in the confirmation process of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2NRQmRZ

Is the 'rentrée littéraire' a blessing or a curse for the French publishing industry?

Hundreds of novels are released during France's yearly "rentrée littéraire". Literary debates dominate the media and publishers race to publicise their offerings. It’s as French a tradition as the baguette, but it has its critics. from Culture – France 24 - International News 24/7 https://ift.tt/2OVdyeo

Trump’s Public-Charge Rule Is a One-Two Punch Against Immigrants and Public Assistance

Jonathan Blitzer on a new proposal from the Department of Homeland Security to dramatically expand the list of public benefits that the government would treat as “negative factors” in visa and green-card applications. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2xNphFl

17c review – rollicking 21st-century take on Samuel Pepys

Old Vic, London Pepys’s celebrated diaries come under feminist scrutiny in Big Dance Theater’s postmodern mashup What’s the British slang for penis? The woman in the wig wants to know. She’s addressing the audience. Come on now, don’t be shy. After all, we’re here to talk about Samuel Pepys and he certainly wasn’t – masturbation, constipation and defecation are all recorded in his diaries. Those chronicles of Pepys’s daily life form the basis for director Annie-B Parson ’s 17c, opening the Dance Umbrella festival. Dance Umbrella is 40 this year and on great form: still curious, still adventurous, still bringing over artists new to the UK, such as Parson’s New York troupe, Big Dance Theater . There’s less dance, more theatre in this show, as the multi-talented cast of five deliver slices of Pepys’s journal – alternately earnest, arch and sarcastic – then seamlessly mix in modern speech, video, song, and baroque-tinged dance. Especially good is the funny-boned Cynthia Hopkins (who d

Ana Juan’s “Unheard”

Françoise Mouly talks to Ana Juan, the artist behind this week’s cover, which was inspired by the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, to the Senate Judiciary Committee, about the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2NMTezA

Claire Foy reveals deep anxiety beneath her career success

Crown star praised for ‘dazzling’ assurance says self-doubt ‘works at a thousand beats a second’ As the young Queen Elizabeth in the Netflix series The Crown , Claire Foy portrayed an under-confident woman growing into steely self-assurance. But away from the camera, the actor has revealed she has battled for many years with paralysing anxiety , characterised by “lots of thoughts about how shit I am”. Speaking to the Guardian Weekend magazine, Foy, 34, said she had struggled with the condition since childhood, but that it had “exploded” as she got older and began working as an actor. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Qb3ePy

'Home theatre' boom lets audiences star in their own kitchen-sink drama

Community-led performers are flipping theatre’s power dynamic by putting on shows in their audience’s home The rise in immersive and interactive theatre means audiences are used to being part of the action. But what about hosting a show in your own home? And what if it’s based on your own life? That’s the concept of “home theatre”, created by directors Kerry Michael and Marcus Faustini. “It’s about looking at the power between those who decide what audiences should be seeing and what audiences may want,” says Michael. “By taking the show to people’s homes, the homes of those who have been the inspiration for the work, there is a hierarchical reset.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2OmpatV

Charlie Ward review – Chaplin's slapstick turns into shellshock

York Army Museum Lying in a row of beds, an audience of 10 is transported to a wartime hospital in Sound&Fury’s arresting show There are no images of the first world war in Sound&Fury’s commemorative installation. So acquainted are we with the iconography of trenches, mud and barbed wire that the absence is more powerful than any number of poppies or corpses. Unseen, the horrors of conflict become all the more haunting. Charlie Ward attempts instead to enter a shell-shocked imagination. Lying in a row of beds, an audience of 10 is transported to a wartime hospital, surrounded by its busy hum of noises. Dan Jones’s intimate sound design takes us into the mind of Harry, a wounded soldier drifting in and out of consciousness, moving between memory and trauma. In one moment, his mother’s voice is whispering tenderly in our ears; in another, the room vibrates with the impact of an exploding shell. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Qg08tF

Pacific views, radical politics and all the fun of the fair – the week in art

Oceania reveals its inspiring treasures, Tania Bruguera prepares to surprise Tate Modern, and Frieze returns to London – our weekly dispatch Oceania This is a stupendous odyssey through the superb art and fascinating culture of the Pacific, with masterpieces that inspired Picasso, bear witness to history and are simply mesmerising to behold. A blockbuster and then some. • Royal Academy, London , 29 September-10 December. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2DDXGfg

The high-fliers club: how Susan Wood captured the original rebel girls

Celebrities, intellectuals, icons: Susan Wood shot the most celebrated women of the 20th century, unaware she was in the middle of a revolution. She relives her great assignments – and the hottest gossip There’s Jayne Mansfield , striding through New York in a tight dress. There’s fashion designer Diane von Fürstenb erg , reclining on a flight with a notepad on her lap. There’s lifestyle icon Martha Stewart , leading ducks round her property dressed in a denim romper suit. They’re all here, along with Susan Sontag , Nora Ephron and countless other celebrities, intellectuals and icons of the 20th century – and all of them women. Susan Wood, the celebrated photographer who took these shots, found that her subjects all shared certain characteristics. “The first thing is intelligence,” she says. “The second is responsiveness. And they all had tremendous energy, joie de vivre, openness. They could understand things that weren’t quite said.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guard

Screens could be damaging your child’s cognition, study reveals

Screens could be damaging your child's cognition Screen time is a bigger factor in children’s cognition than previously thought 28 Sep 2018 News from Life & Culture https://ift.tt/2R8jkuW

What went thong? How Sisqo said ‘I do’ to pop narcissism

When the singer performed a ‘lively rendition’ of his greatest hit at his own wedding, he joined a long line of artists who love the sound of their own voice a bit too much Picture the scene: Sisqo, glowing with pride on his wedding day, fighting back tears of happiness. He stands up, taps his knife on his champagne glass, turns to his new wife and raises the microphone. And, right there, in front of their assembled guests and possibly the vicar who married them, he belts out “LET ME SEE THAT THONG-ONG-ONG!” That’s right: Sisqo performed his international mega-hit Thong Song at his own wedding last month. He didn’t even try to slow it down into a romantic ballad, albeit one with the lyric “she had dumps like a truck, truck, truck”. Reports described it as a “lively choreographed rendition”. “I initially sang Thong Song about the first thong that I ever saw, so it was only right to sing it about the last one I will ever see … in private, that is,” he explained in an email to his local

Fantastic Beasts isn't racist, but JK Rowling should stop tweaking the source material

The latest row over casting in the Harry Potter wizarding world highlights the author’s problem with retroactive character changes When it comes to Harry Potter, JK Rowling just can’t leave it alone. This is not necessarily a bad thing – fans have got to see Harry and friends all grown-up in the Cursed Child plays – but she’s also managed to muddy the waters by her constant rejigging of the original narrative furniture. The latest act of retroactive continuity (or “retcon” as it’s become known) to the source material comes via the final trailer for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, which confirmed that the mysterious character played by Korean actress Claudia Kim is in fact Nagini, the same Nagini who was Lord Voldemort’s right-hand-snake in the original books and film series. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2xZHbUy

Female success and male decline: what A Star Is Born tells us about fame, fear and feminism

Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper lead the latest incarnation of the films that have, since 1937, told a simple yet resonant story of life in the impossible spotlight A man stands on the stage. The sun is setting on his career but he is – for now – still in the spotlight. He suddenly reaches out into the shadows and plucks a woman from the crowd. She takes the spotlight from him, and he self-destructs into oblivion. Hollywood is built on remakes and reinventions, but the most interesting and certainly the longest-running of these first emerged more than a decade before the first Superman movie. A Star Is Born , which gets its fourth outing next week after months of ecstatic hype, is now 81 years old and has starred, in its various incarnations, increasingly improbable pairings: Janet Gaynor and Fredric March in the 1937 original; Judy Garland and James Mason in the 1954 remake; Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson in the 1976 version; and now Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. Often descri

Golden Lion winner The Woman Who Left from Filipino director Lav Diaz coming to Hong Kong

At three hours and 46 minutes, Lav Diaz’s The Woman Who Left (2016) is a short film compared with his other works. The Filipino art-house master has made some of the longest movies on record but the lengthy running times are validated in this drama, which has the expansive scope of a novel rather than the reductive format of most films. In The Woman Who Left, which won the Golden Lion for best movie at the Venice Film Festival in 2016, Diaz uses every second to explore his characters,... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2zC622Y

Bez gets Happy Mondays disqualified from Bargain Hunt special

Dancer broke show’s rules by artificially inflating prices, handing victory to Pulp The Happy Mondays were disqualified from a special edition of the BBC’s Bargain Hunt after Bez broke the show’s rules by artificially inflating prices, handing victory to Pulp. The programme, due to be aired on Friday as part of the BBC’s Music Day , featured the dancer and Rowetta Idah from Happy Mondays going up against Jarvis Cocker and Candida Doyle from Pulp. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2N6Zjl1

Romance, regrets and notebooks in the freezer: Leonard Cohen’s son on his father’s final poems

Almost two years after the musician and poet’s death, Adam Cohen explains how his father’s efforts to finish his last collection The Flame ‘bought him some time on Earth’ Exclusive: read three poems from The Flame below Was he, in the end, a musician or a poet? A grave philosopher or a grim sort of comedian? A cosmopolitan lady’s man or a profound, ascetic seeker? Jew or Buddhist? Hedonist or hermit? Across his 82 years, the Montreal-born Leonard Cohen was all of these things – and in his posthumous book of poetry, given the Lawrentian title The Flame by his son Adam, all sides of the man are present. Other than that, Adam Cohen won’t say much more. “This was all private,” he says, sitting in an office on Los Angeles’s Wilshire Boulevard, near the house where his dad passed away after a late-night fall almost two years ago. “My father was very interested in preserving the magic of his process. And moreover, not demystifying it. Speaking of any of this,” he says, his voice droppi

Kate Beckinsale on her role in Farming: 'If the parent is 100% evil, it's almost less damaging'

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s first, autobiographical film is a fractured love story between mother and adopted son. He explains why he chose Beckinsale to play the emotionally abusive woman to whom his parents ‘farmed’ him out as a child Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje wrote what became his first film script in the hope it might help him to get a good night’s sleep. The 51-year-old actor, best known for roles in Lost, Game of Thrones and Suicide Squad , wanted a way to process his painful childhood. Farming – the film, not the occupation – became his therapy. “I think I’d attained a certain amount of success in my career and life, but was plagued by some feelings that I’d not really resolved,” he says. “I used to write at night just to get to sleep, just to let it out of me. By the end of two weeks, I had a 500-page manuscript.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NPNvcf

Blame parents for ‘snowflake’ millennials, says author Fay Weldon

Writer says criticism of young people is unfair and older generation deserve no respect It is unfair to deride millennials as “snowflakes” or to criticise them as overly sensitive, self-centred or ignorant because it is their parents who are at fault, the author Fay Weldon has said. “We should stop being beastly to the snowflakes since we, their forebears, left them with such a mess to clear up and no tools to deal with it,” she said. “Today’s young grow up into a violent, angry, unstable environment, all too likely to end up jobless, homeless and childless, unlikely to reach their full potential. They are probably the most despairing generation ever conceived. The least we can do is not add to their burden by slagging them off.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2xIkjd7

Anchor and Hope review – barges, babies and big themes in touching canal drama

Two women want a child somewhat unequally in Carlos Marques-Marcet’s honest and compelling waterway film Spanish-born Kat (Natalia Tena) and English Eva (Oona Chaplin) are a gleefully, almost nauseatingly happy couple who live on a funky reconditioned barge on which they chug along the canals of London. Neither has a particularly well-paying job – Kat wants to get deeper into boat-building but pulls pints at a pub, while Eva teaches salsa – but they get by on a steady diet of intense love, tequila and hot sex. A few key events lead to a realignment of their priorities: their beloved cat Chorizo dies, leaving a big pet-sized hole; Kat’s best friend Roger (David Verdaguer) comes to visit from Barcelona, and Eva starts longing to have a child, particularly so someone else will remember her beloved, kooky hippy mother Germaine (Geraldine Chaplin, Oona’s mother in real life). Kat is less enthusiastic about the baby idea, but goes with the flow when Eva suggests they ask a willing Roger to

Pinter at the Pinter review – terrifying, tantalising power games

Harold Pinter theatre, London Antony Sher, David Suchet and Hayley Squires are among the cast for a compelling set of works by the master playwright Jamie Lloyd has had the bold, bright idea of bringing together all of Harold Pinter’s one-act plays in a season comprising seven separate programmes and lasting six months. And what exactly do you learn from the opening pair – Pinter One and Two – which can be seen on a single day? That Pinter has the capacity to both terrify and tantalise but, above all, that the division of his works into the political and the personal is ludicrously artificial: whether the context is the public or the private world, he is always fascinated by the roots of power. Pinter One, containing nine pieces including plays, poems and sketches, deals more obviously with domination and has a pulverising quality that left a matinee audience emerging dazed into the sunlight. But even here there was evidence of Pinter’s black humour. The most astonishing piece was

J.K. Rowling channels Dickens for latest Galbraith outing, Lethal White, a gripping romp of a read

Lethal White By Robert Galbraith Robert Galbraith is the pen-name J.K. Rowling chose to write under for her first crime novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013) – a title indebted to a poem by 19th-century English writer Christina Rossetti. It’s not hard to understand the allure of anonymity for the world’s most famous living author. As well as escaping the shadow of Harry Potter, Rowling was trying her hand at a new and distinctly adult genre. One wonders, too, if she was... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2NQuXZu

Why sports cars are works of art

Sleek and elegant, powerful and fast: the Museum Kunstpalast shows classic sports cars from the 1950s to the 1970s. Curator Barbara Til explains why they are part of the history of European design. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/2xIGqQH

Rose McGowan issues apology to Asia Argento over 'not correct' allegations

Fallout over sexual assault accusations appears to be at an end after McGowan says she regrets ‘not correcting mistakes sooner’ The actor and activist Rose McGowan has issued an apology to Asia Argento after the latter threatened legal action over what she termed “horrendous lies” in connection with sexual assault allegations made against Argento by the actor Jimmy Bennett. In a statement posted on Twitter , McGowan said an earlier statement she had made about the allegations “contained a number of facts that were not correct” and that she “deeply regret[ted] not correcting my mistake sooner and apologise to Asia for not doing so”. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NNLTiU

Tim Hecker: Konoyo review – Japanese forms abstracted by ambient dystopias

Kranky Having created his own particular aesthetic over nearly two decades – imagine an ambient dreamscape in the rain-soaked alley between a church and a nightclub – the Canadian composer Tim Hecker continues to hone and broaden it out. On his previous album he semi-abstracted an Icelandic choir ; now he looks to Japan, collaborating with Tokyo Gakuso , a group who play traditional courtly gagaku music. Hecker takes their drums, chimes, and close, borderline discordant strings – a heady, spiritual sound – and adds his own sense of disruption, suggesting real or psychological fracture. On the most adventurous pieces, such as This Life and Keyed Out, the instruments are made to shiver and thrash as if on a hospital gurney, struggling for equilibrium, as Hecker’s trademark plumes of static billow beneath. On the magnificent Across to Anoyo, the album’s only steady pulse is crowded out by a kind of maniacally melodic feedback, itself taken over by industrial chords and bass notes of