Cultural News Today

Gone are the days when cartoons were for children. Cannon Busterson Netflix is testament to that, because although it features a chirpy little maintenance droid (hello, Star Wars) and a magnificent muscle car-cum-1950s Cadillac that transforms itself into, well, something closely resembling a Transformer, it would undoubtedly be a post-watershed viewing experience on regular television. Made by Japanese studio Satelight, this is Cowboys & Aliens on intergalactic steroids. Butchery and blood… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/32gJNLp

Megan K. Stack writes from Hong Kong on the protests, unrest, and street battles that have shaken the city as it grapples with its standing as a special administrative region and its relationship with China. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2zGFe0A

The rapper on being cast in the new series of the London drama, and meeting its biggest fan, Drake • Read an interview with Top Boy writer Ronan Bennett Simbiatu Abisola Abiola Ajikawo – better known as rapper Little Simz – was born in north London in 1994. She started acting aged nine, appearing in the BBC series Spirit Warriors and E4’s Youngers , before turning to music. Her third album, Grey Area , released in March, was described by Pitchfork as “a wickedly assured, highly entertaining, coming-of-age marvel”. In Top Boy , she plays Shelley, “a driven, independent single mum… who wants to break out and do better in life”. How did you end up in the show? The link came from Kano [the rapper who plays Sully in all three series of Top Boy ]. They were gearing up for this season and I guess Kano put in a good word for me. I had three auditions. The first time I walked out thinking, Ah, I don’t think it’s mine, but then I got a recall. Continue reading... from Culture | The Gua

The prequel to Jim Henson’s 1982 film has a nice retro vibe and is unexpectedly topical, but ultimately is a prime example of ‘Netflix bloat’ This is Netflix at its best and worst. The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance treats a niche fandom to a luxury rendering of the world they hold dear , taking its time to build a mappable fantasy realm teeming with details that will repay repeated viewings and fuel endless nocturnal discussions. Few linear broadcasters would consider it and, if you can’t step fully into the series’ domain, you might soon think they had a point and that this is a gauche folly. The new series is a prequel to the cult 1982 film The Dark Crystal. That was, in essence, Jim Henson and Frank Oz suddenly screaming in Muppets fans’ faces , handing them rotten darkness instead of clean fluff. Whereas the protagonist there was one of the few survivors of the kind, elvish Gelflings, battling against the patently nefarious Skeksis tribe, here Gelflings are still plentiful an

“Since time is money, I now present our hero, a Forgot­ten Man, a Little Man, an Average Man.” Until the recent publication of The Hanging on Union Square, by Penguin Classics, its author, H.T. Tsiang, might easily have been confused with Mr Nut, the nowhere man, hero-failure he invented for that self-same novel first published in 1935. “So today, a Forgotten Man, a Little Man, an Average Man, Mr Nut, Dr Nut, is doing his bit! Of his own free will, he is hanging himself on Union Square.” In… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2ZH3wCb

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Nylon Germany withdraws altered image after backlash Eilish, 17, says she ‘did not consent in any way’ to picture A German magazine apologised and withdrew a cover which used an altered picture to show Billie Eilish bald and shirtless, after stinging criticism from the singer herself. Related: Billie Eilish: the pop icon who defines 21st-century teenage angst Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Zs3a79

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BBC says such pairings could happen ‘should opportunity arise’ Strictly Come Dancing is “completely open” to having same-sex couples compete on the show in the future, the BBC has said. In previous years, the broadcaster said it had no plans to change the mixed-sex format , despite calls from several of the show’s stars. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Pwlcko

The musician, 38, on trying not to be a perfectionist, Stevie Wonder and Love Island I feel like I’m getting younger in my heart. I’m starting to loosen up a little. I’ve always been a perfectionist – I’ll exhaust things until I feel happy. But over the years I’ve realised there’s a point where you have to pull back on that. I’d still be messing around with Born To Do It if I had had my way – and that’s nearly 20 years old. I’ve stopped taking fitness so seriously. There was a period when I’d go to the gym twice a day. It’s different now because it’s just about staying healthy and keeping the body moving. I use my performances as my cardio. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PGP1OW

Writer Ben Chanan says that his new six-part drama reflects our worst fears about manipulation of video evidence Every era gets the thriller it deserves, from the paranoid films of the 1970s through the nuclear fear of Edge of Darkness in the 1980s and the adrenaline rush of Paul Abbott’s 2003 drama State of Play . Now a new series hopes to tap into our surveillance-driven times by examining the rise of “fake news” and the ease with which false narratives can be created in print and online and, perhaps more worryingly, through audio and video images. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Puqtsw

(Polydor) With its classic rock references and brazen lyrics, the American’s involving fifth album proves she can do more than merely conjure up a mood It was probably inevitable that Lana Del Rey would one day write a song called California. Having often set her tunes in specific locales – Brooklyn Baby , West Coast and Venice Bitch are just three previous stops on the open-top Del Rey bus tour – it comes as little surprise that at the heart of Norman Fucking Rockwell , the fifth of her acknowledged studio albums, Del Rey should be throwing a party for some hot guy, if he’s ever in California again. “Crazy love,” muses Del Rey, audibly shaking her head at the memory, yet nursing some unspecified guilt. What’s odd, however, is that while California is technically one of the strongest songs (there are actual beats; it’s about something tangible) it’s also one of the least interesting tracks on this unorthodox, involving album, named after a devotee of lived American iconography, th

Unidentified is a new doc series about aliens, funded by the pop-punk guitarist and ET hunter If you ever wanted proof that we were on an alternate chaos timeline in parallel to another Earth where only normal stuff happens, then news earlier this year that “ Tom DeLonge is producing a UFO documentary miniseries for the History Channel” was probably the surest evidence of that. Have a think about who you might be, a universe or two over, where things like this aren’t happening. Consider how happy and at peace you are over there. Their Amazon isn’t on fire . That bad break-up you had last year never happened and you’ve already got an iPhone 15. And, crucially, the former singer–guitarist out of Blink-182 hasn’t made a six-part documentary about the viability of alien spacecraft. That has yet to happen there. Related: Tom DeLonge: from Blink-182 to the world's leading UFO hunter Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/30MJvLL

Less public pontificating; more afternoons spent flower arranging. If generous Uncle Elton wants to see you, let him make the journey to you Those angered by what feels like nigh-constant nitpicking at the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not imagining it. The noise is endless. I’ll call their Royal Highnesses “Harry and Meghan” from this stage on because, let’s be frank, this is the sort of breezy informality you invite when you reach out to fans daily via Instagram inspirational messages, plug an ethical clothing label, allow Jameela Jamil to fight your battles on Twitter, broadcast your daddy issues via open letters, share your mental health history on podcasts, milk the press for their attention, then loathe the press for their attention, and cadge free holidays from wealthier, internationally famous people. None of this, I must stress is wrong – and in celebrity land, it’s completely humdrum. Particularly the free holiday part. Very rich celebs can rarely finance the calibre of h

Mark Cognata writes humorously about the sexual fantasies of New Yorkers, involving umbrellas, oat milk, improv shows, and washing machines. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2PubQpa

You hear the title, you hear the song — the one recently revisited on "Stranger Things." But before the 1980s hit film, there was Michael Ende's bestselling book, published 40 years ago. Here's why it's still a classic. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/2ZA4O66

The poet and novelist recalls the lacerating east wind, the weekly library van and eventually finding inspiration in village life When I was 11, my family moved from London to an Essex village. I was bereft. My plan for my teenage years involved going to see David Bowie and T Rex at the Roundhouse , not sitting about in bus shelters. We arrived in winter at a time of power cuts. People spoke of the lacerating easterly wind as blowing in “straight from Siberia”. Even Siberia had to be better than this. When I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , the tedium of the gulag made me sigh knowingly. I read compulsively and without discrimination as a way of being anywhere but there. Books protected me from my loneliness, too. I read trashy apocalyptic novels, decrepit romances, the small ads in the local paper, the parish council noticeboard and the back of the cornflakes packet. A library van appeared once a week and I remember the librarian as being kindl

The TV and radio presenter on her dream dinner guests and the difficulty of walking in high heels Born in Bolton, Sara Cox, 44, worked as a model before becoming a presenter on Channel 4’s The Girlie Show in 1996. By 2000, she was presenting the breakfast show on Radio 1, where she spent three and a half years. In 2013 she moved to Radio 2, and in January 2019 took over the teatime show. In September she will present a new series of Love In The Countryside for BBC2. She is married with three children and lives in London. When were you happiest? Getting a daily show on Radio 2, because that was an ambition for so long. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/30Q6wxq

Could the controversial director be drawing personal parallels with this solid account of the Dreyfus affair, about a falsely accused French-Jewish army captain? Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish captain in the French general staff, a man of spotless reputation and character accused of selling military secrets to the Germans. Convicted on duff evidence, he was exiled to flyblown Devil’s Island off the South American coast, railroaded and martyred, like Jesus, or Peter, or possibly Roman Polanski, who has spotted certain parallels between his situation and that of Dreyfus and has helpfully made a movie that may encourage us to do likewise. I’ll leave it to finer legal minds than mine to locate possible holes in Polanski’s thesis, suffice to say that Dreyfus was never found guilty of the statutory rape of a minor. But the film itself is handsome and involving – a dogged procedural that exposes the institutionalised antisemitism of 1890s France and builds to the publication of Emile Zola’s J’

From royal saga The Crown to Cardi B’s rap-battling Rhythm and Flow, here are this season’s best comedy, drama and reality series Ryan Murphy’s reliably wicked and impressively durable horror anthology has always bounced around different time periods in an attempt to keep things fresh. The imminent ninth season rocks up at a classic 1980s summer camp, where a bunch of innocent teens have gathered for what looks like an enthusiastic skewering of Friday the 13th-style slasher movies. In fact, the chopping started early, with some regular AHS cast members – Billy Eichner and Evan Peters – skipping this season. GV Expected: 19 September, Fox Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NIRrdA

Harper was a breakout star on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, then the lead of her own series, Rhoda Valerie Harper, who stole hearts and busted TV taboos as the brash, self-deprecating Rhoda Morgenstern on back-to-back hit sitcoms in the 1970s, has died aged 80. Longtime family friend Dan Watt confirmed Harper died on Friday, adding the family was not immediately releasing any further details. She had been suffering from cancer for years, and her husband said recently he had been advised to put her in hospice care. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ZASWRq

Zellweger rises to the challenge superbly in a standard-issue heartwarmer, premiering in Telluride, that sugarcoats the sadness For Judy Garland fans, the final station of the cross in the ordeal of her last years was a five-week booking at the Talk of the Town nightclub in London in 1969, which she desperately needed for the money. In those famous and often chaotic concerts she appeared frail, unwell, tipsy or bleary-eyed: mannerisms that she had long since semi-consciously incorporated into her live act. But they were real at some level. Also real were the many flashes of the old magic; emotional arias made more glorious for having been wrenched from her battered heart. This movie is about that troubled period: a defiant last stand in full view of her passionately supportive fans. It was Judy’s emotional Alamo in the face of parasitic husbands, spiteful press and misogynist showbiz overlords – beginning with studio chief Louis B Mayer, who ruined her childhood on the yellow brick r

After his writing about his recovery from methamphetamine addition was nominated for a Walkley award (awards presented annually in Australia for excellence in journalism), Luke Williams was high on meth again. Three years of travelling around Asia – which almost killed him – showed him how to live. He details those experiences in his new memoir, Down and Out in Paradise, which is published on September 1. Here, Williams writes about the journey that resulted in the book.I flew to Kuala Lumpur… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2PrlTLP

She’s a French film star. He’s rock’s mercurial madman. Together they’re l’Épée, as seductive as Serge Gainsbourg and as druggily alluring as the Velvet Underground It may be the hottest day on record in Paris, but no one appears to have told Emmanuelle Seigner. Striding through the lobby of the Royal Hotel on the Champs Elysées in black jeans, a David Bowie T-shirt and leather boots – a gift from her husband, the film director Roman Polanski – she is the personification of French cool. Heads turn, newspapers twitch, bellhops sweat a little more profusely. Is the star of Frantic and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly aware of the effect she still has on people? “People see me that way because, when I was very young, I played those type of roles,” says the 53-year-old, with a shrug. “But it’s not the way I am. I feel more like a tomboy.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2UfRKxA

The Booker prize nominated novelist on the King James Bible and finding comfort in books about birds The book I am currently reading It’s a new novel by a very promising writer, Amir Ahmadi Arian , called Then the Fish Swallowed Him , to be published next year. I’m also reading, slowly, Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift . The book that changed my life Changing one’s life is asking for too much of art, and something we writers often make ourselves believe because it adds the feeling of concrete utility to our trade. I’d say books don’t have to change people’s lives as much as touch something in them. Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard was probably that book. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/34bkRGO

(Big Machine) Big-name guests abound in a valedictory 11th album that offers a fitting reminder of Crow’s melancholy magic With her 11th and reportedly final album, Sheryl Crow undertakes a confident albeit meandering victory lap. Across 17 songs and 75 minutes of frayed Americana and back-porch country she collaborates with no fewer than 23 artists, each one representing either Crow’s musical idols turned friends (Keith Richards, Stevie Nicks) or new-ish musicians she sees as the future (St Vincent, Maren Morris). Most of the 12 originals, four covers and one reworking of her own anti-war anthem Redemption Day loosely fall under the umbrella of protest songs, with the Chuck D-assisted Story of Everything touching on political idiocy, while opener Prove You Wrong tackles sexism and, as she recently told the LA Times, the sentiment of: “if anyone thinks that I can’t, let me just show you that I can.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HyYmSE

The Belgian gives a tour de force as a violent inmate tasked with taming a horse in Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s daring debut Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s impressive directing debut is a grounded, gutsy drama set in a maximum-security prison in Nevada where violent prisoners bond with wild mustangs as part of a rehabilitation programme. Her film manages to be inspirational without going Disney. “This is a particularly crazed one,” growls a rancher about a horse charging into the prison’s corral. Or perhaps he’s talking about the offender tasked with taming the horse: Roman, a shaven headed wardrobe of a man played with frightening intensity by the Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2MNHueX

(Volcano, RCA) Every track is an epic on this almighty fifth album from a band intent on securing their status as masters of metal It says something about the power of Tool that, even after 13 years, four blokes who like weird time signatures and lyrics about purging, fear and flesh can nearly knock a pop star off the global top spot. At the start of August, the enigmatic prog-metallers finally made their entire back catalogue available on streaming services for the first time: every one of their albums went Top 10 on iTunes, while Sober became the highest charting song after Ariana Grande’s Boyfriend. The band realised that they had to “roll with the times”, guitarist Adam Jones said recently – although pleasingly they are still flogging such ancient-sounding artefacts as “a tri-fold Soft Pack Video Brochure” with their new album (£79.99, in the deluxe version ). Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NEde64

The past haunts the present in a multi-layered narrative centred on the film industry and themes of betrayal In the final pages of Patrick Flanery’s immersive fourth novel, Helen Fairdale sits down to write a letter. It’s the summer of 2016; in her youth she was an actor in Hollywood, at the beck and call of the studio system in the years after the second world war, a period of anti-communist hysteria when the House Un-American Activities Committee wielded terrifying power. The film industry was a particular focus of the committee’s investigations, culminating in the persecution of the “Hollywood 10”, a group of writers and directors called to testify in 1947. When they refused to cooperate, the men received jail sentences and blacklistings. Helen recalls the righteous venom of those bygone days. “How could men and women in the 1940s and 1950s who believed they were doing good (as I want to believe the witch hunters did believe, whatever we thought of them then, whatever we think of t

(Rhino/Warner) This long-awaited remake of the pop-infused 1985 sessions may not quite do Davis justice but it hits compelling highs ‘When I’m playing, I’m never through. It’s unfinished,” Miles Davis said in a revealing interview with the NME in 1985. “I like to find a place to leave for someone else to finish it. That’s where the high comes in.” As it undoubtedly would have when John Coltrane was reacting to the teasing daydreams curling from Davis’s trumpet-bell. But he never got to find that place with 1985’s pop-oriented Rubberband sessions, ditched after three months’ work by his new record label, Warner Bros. The tapes have finally been reinvented – 28 years after his death – by Davis’s drummer nephew Vince Wilburn Jr, and original producers Randy Hall and Attala Zane Giles. Vocal celebs Lalah Hathaway and Ledisi take the parts originally intended for Chaka Khan and Al Jarreau. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L8G2BZ

A harassed mother is dangerously cut off from reality in this modern twist on the horror genre When women entered the workforce en masse in the 1980s, sociologist Arlie Hochschild called it the “second shift”. Women’s lives were transformed, she found, but the men they shared their homes with were stubbornly unchanging in their habits. So, as men were clocking off and chilling out, their wives and girlfriends were clocking back in for an evening of domestic duty: the cooking and the cleaning, the laundry and the to-do lists, the shopping and the shuttling between childminder and swimming classes. The situation remains the same today. In effect, women in employment are pulling double shifts, and their unpaid labour is subsidising the men who live with them – or rather, live off them. Molly, the American suburban mother at the centre of Helen Phillips’ s novel, hasn’t read Hochschild, but then she doesn’t have time. She’s got a small daughter called Viv and a baby called Ben; a job as

Jamaican music veterans are reunited for an acoustic session in a music doc ingrained with joy, intrigue and urgency Potentially tricky territory here. Back in 2017, the white British film-maker Peter Webber travelled to Jamaica to document a musical reunion destined to remind seasoned arthouse patrons of Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club . The Inna de Yard sessions gathered reggae veterans on a rickety porch in Kingston to re-record their best-known standards acoustically – mirroring that unplugged tradition prevalent in MTV circles almost since the electric guitar’s invention, while venturing a Jamaican analogue to the Great American Songbook. As one interviewee puts it: “Some countries have diamonds, some have pearls, some have oil; we have reggae.” As with all those resources, the spectre of exploitation has never been far away; Webber’s entirely disarming tactic is to allow the musicians to tell their own stories in their own words. Few require much prompting. Continue readi

A crowd of young eco-warriors and international media greeted the teen-age climate activist as she sailed into town on a carbon-neutral boat to attend a summit at the U.N., Emily Witt writes. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2ZIWCAI

As local bands recently performed at an opposition rally in Moscow, other pop stars were simultaneously invited by the government to perform at 'spoiler' festivals that some say aim to distract the public from politics. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/34a0LNk

The film Judy tracks the final year of Judy Garland’s life, the quintessential cautionary tale of child stardom. The list of tragic names since suggest things have not improved much – although some directors are trying Judy Garland was a walking ghost story. Watch footage of the patron saint of child stars from any time after The Wizard of Oz, made when she was 16, and you see a woman haunted by the girl she never had a chance to be. How that haunting ended is the subject of a new movie, Judy , starring Renée Zellweger as Garland in 1969, middle-aged in London, broke and addicted. She was doomed long before then. The details – an adolescent starlet destroyed by studio executives – remain less ghost story than horror movie. For generations, Garland has been a cautionary tale for kids who might venture on to the big screen. But the comfort of Judy, in theory at least, is that of a story safely in the past. How terrible the old times were; how long ago it was. Well, maybe. This summer,

His second album is one of the most outrageous folies de grandeur in music history. Yet the drum’n’bass legend doesn’t care – it helped him recover from his damaged childhood In John Niven’s scabrous 2008 novel Kill Your Friends , there is a scene that dramatises the moment in 1997 when Goldie unveiled his second album, Saturnz Return – specifically, its hour-long opening track, Mother – to his expectant record company. Goldie is lightly disguised as a character called Rage. Like Goldie, he has survived an appalling childhood of abandonment, neglect and abuse to become the biggest star in Britain’s burgeoning drum’n’bass scene . Like Goldie, he has a penchant for gold jewellery and grills and, like Goldie, there is a great weight of music-industry expectation around his forthcoming album: expectation that goes up in smoke the minute he presses play. “People cross and recross their legs, sip their wine and pray for it to end,” offers the novel’s horrendous narrator, Steve Stelfox. “B

Del Rey goes back to her well of swooning melodies, twanging guitars, Twin Peaks-ish Americana and cinematic ballads about women in love with ne’er-do-wells We live in a world of terrifying flux and instability, where any consideration of what might happen next comes with a side order of blind terror. If you were looking to understand the appeal of Lana Del Rey , eight years and five albums since her commercial breakthrough, you might alight on the fact that she offers a certain respite from uncertainty. You put her albums on and know more or less exactly what will happen next. There will be ballads decorated with cinematic orchestration. Guitars will twang and electronics will waft and surge in a manner that evokes Angelo Badalementi’s soundtrack to Twin Peaks, and her voice will be swathed in reverb in a manner that evokes Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star . The vocals will have a dead-eyed quality at odds with the yearning ache of the lyrics, in which girls will simper after brooding n’

As politicians and publications continue to target young trans people, representation on a show like Neighbours matters On Friday evening, the Australian soap opera Neighbours will introduce the show’s first trans character in its near-35-year run. The story of Mackenzie Hargraves – played by the Australian trans activist Georgie Stone – centres on the character befriending Yashvi Rebecchi, a fellow student at her school; revealing that she is trans; being accepted by her new friend; having her classmates stand up for her right to use the female bathrooms. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2UhMaKZ

The actor blasts off in search of long-lost pops Tommy Lee Jones in James Gray’s intergalactically po-faced take on Apocalypse Now Brad Pitt is an intergalactic Captain Willard, taking a fraught mission up-river in James Gray’s Ad Astra, an outer-space Apocalypse Now which played to rapt crowds at the Venice film festival. In place of steaming jungles, this gives us existential chills. Instead of Viet Cong soldiers, it provides man-eating baboons and pirates riding dune-buggies. It’s an extraordinary picture, steely and unbending and assembled with an unmistakable air of wild-eyed zealotry. Ad Astra, be warned, is going all the way - and it double-dares us to buckle up for the trip. Set in the near future, this casts Pitt as Major Roy McBride, a lonesome samurai who prides himself on the fact his pulse rate has never climbed beyond 80. He’s travelling out to Neptune in search of his lost father, a man he barely knows, and seeking to halt a series of unexplained cosmic rays that threa

The Open Ears Project sees stars like Alec Baldwin and Jesse Eisenberg discuss how classical music changed their life. Plus Spotify tries to turn us all into podcasters WYNC, the studio behind the likes of Radiolab and Snap Judgement, are launching an ambitious month-long podcast series aiming at bringing classical music to the masses. Hosted by former BBC Radio 3 presenter Clemency Burton Hill, The Open Ears Project will see likes of Alec Baldwin, Jesse Eisenberg, and Call Your Girlfriend host Aminatou Sow reflect on how a piece of classical music changed their life. It all kicks off on 10 September. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2zyALgk

Clanging parables abound as an Irish-accented Cara Delevingne ferries migrants to a Dickensian wonderland in Amazon Prime’s spectacularly silly fantasy tale Isn’t life grand?! There you can be, all mopey about Brexit and Trump and the Amazon burning, then along comes something like Carnival Row and cheers you right up! First there’s some portentous, pre-credit scrolling text to give us the set-up for this steampunk fairytale: “For ages the homeland of the Fae was a place of myth and legend. Until the many empires of man arrived and warred for control of its riches …” It goes on for a supremely confident length of time. The short version is that the Burgue and the Pact were at war in Fairyland but seven years ago the Burgue withdrew, leaving the Fae to their enemy’s tender mercies. It only gets better – or worse – from here. Related: ‘A steampunk fever dream’: why Carnival Row is not the new Game of Thrones Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2zxTXeo

Blake’s Lambeth home was also the scene of the spiritual apparitions captured in a major new Tate exhibition, writes the graphic novelist When we speak of the poetry or painting of place, we generally refer to words and images that celebrate or else investigate some fixed location. And yet, given that all creative works have arisen from whatever influences surrounded their geographic point of composition, surely all art could be said to be the art of place, something that could only have emerged from that specific spot at that specific time? A city, a field, a house, a street: all of these have their own aura, their own atmosphere, a lyric condensation born of memory and history. Might it be, however, that some places have not only an embedded past, but an embedded future also? Could some works of art be already contained within their site of origin, immanent and waiting for discovery, for realisation? If we imagine the material world about us having a concealed component of the fict

The organisers of an infamous full-moon party in Hong Kong have been accused of running a series of scams after failing to refund customers for a number of events that never took place.The full-moon event on Hong Kong Island’s Shek O Beach organised by event company Luxnetworking went viral in June after attendees described it as the “Fyre Festival on a two-dollar budget”, a reference to a music festival in the Bahamas that collapsed spectacularly in 2017.Hundreds of people paid up to HK$550 … from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2zzRccc

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September will bring new shows like Unbelievable and The Politician and old favorites like Superbad , The Lake House , and Eat Pray Love . from Culture - ELLE https://ift.tt/2HwX6j4

Following his Palme d'Dor triumph in 2018 for "Shoplifters," the Japanese director's anticipated new film starring Juliet Binoche and Catherine Deneuve has made a splash on Venice's opening night. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/2LfRvyt

Honoured at the MTV VMAs this week, the Virginia rapper has just surprised fans with a new EP, Iconology. We rank her 22 singles, from her 1997 debut to 2017’s I’m Better A ballad from the album Miss E … So Addictive, enlivened by its off-kilter rhythm and queasy-sounding sample, retooled as a tribute to Elliott’s late friend and collaborator Aaliyah . While the lyrics sort of fit their new purpose, the accompanying video bizarrely concludes with a version of party anthem 4 My People, apparently intended as Elliott’s comment on 9/11. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/329AMUn

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The slapstick series, which has been voted the network’s best, had charm by the bucket-load and made the brothers national treasures – despite their more unsavoury moments ChuckleVision has been named the greatest CBBC show of all time by a Radio Times survey. It’s hard to argue otherwise. ChuckleVision may have lacked the glamour of Miami 7, the melancholy of Greenclaws or the childhood-scarring terror of Alfonso Bonzo, but it had charm by the bucket-load. It helped that it ran and ran – ChuckleVision aired close to 300 episodes over two decades, which meant that it received votes from multiple generations of viewers – but the success of the series lay in the fact it was proudly old-fashioned. ChuckleVision was just two idiots failing at stuff over and over, but it was always executed flawlessly. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2MK8cW2

Islington Assembly Hall, London The hit affirmation-as-song purveyor of Unwritten turns Linda-Perry rocker, but it’s more mild than wild The late-noughties reality phenomenon The Hills is back, and so is the woman who wrote its theme song : Natasha Bedingfield. Back then, Haywards Heath’s least offensive musical scion struck commercial gold with a smattering of breezily uncynical self-affirmations-as-songs. At the end of music’s lucrative CD era, that was enough to rack up a startling 10m album sales, as well as a Grammy nomination for her wide-eyed gap year anthem Unwritten . Bedingfield has teamed up with Linda Perry for her first album in eight years, Roll With Me. Going by Bedingfield’s live return , the influence of Perry, who’s made rockers out of Christina Aguilera and Pink, has stuck. It’s a decisive left-turn from the Radio 2-friendly sound perhaps expected of Bedingfield, and one she seems to relish. Backed by a five-piece band, she wears a black velvet jumpsuit and spike

Alex Beggs writes a satirical list of exercises for a bride to practice before putting on a wedding dress. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2Zzpvem

Announcing details of London film festival, Tricia Tuttle says glass ceiling remains in place White men are still the decision makers and gatekeepers for big budget commercial movies and the glass ceiling for women remains in place, the head of the BFI London film festival has said. Tricia Tuttle welcomed an increase in the number of films directed or co-directed by women in this year’s programme as she announced details of the festival. The overall figure, including shorts, has gone up to 40%, from 38% last year . In the competition strands, 64% of the films are made by women. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Pnfcub

Makeover was needed to restore mysterious chalk figure on Dorset hill that inspires local legend The scene could hardly have been more quintessentially English. As buzzards circled above and butterflies darted across the flower-dotted slopes, dozens of volunteers were digging and scraping at a huge figure carved into the steep hillside. The Cerne Abbas giant has loomed large above this Dorset valley for centuries, but 11 years after he was last spruced up , he and his impressive nether region were beginning to look a little faded. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Pie5M8

QMU, Glasgow At times using his walking stick as a conductor’s baton, Collins may have turned 60 but he’s not letting up in this cracking show It has been 14 years since Edwyn Collins – the former Orange Juice frontman turned suave solo star – suffered two cerebral haemorrhages, a near-death experience that scrambled his language skills and left him physically impaired . In the years since, his focus on rehabilitation and determination to make new music have been inspiring examples of grit and wit. He turned 60 last week , but rather than taking his foot off the gas, Collins and his six-piece band are heading off around the UK in support of Badbea , his ruminative but often frisky new record. One of the creative sparks behind Badbea, his ninth solo album, was repurposing lyrics that Collins had written before his brush with mortality. Similarly, this gig straddles the past and present, interlacing recent material with beloved classics. In Glasgow, it is a particularly supportive ho

An essential study of what is wrong with capitalism – and how to create a new socialist society As long as there have been people who called themselves socialists, there have been people arguing about what socialism is. Socialism is a large, fractious family. Many of its members are not on speaking terms, or have a history of killing one another. Meltdowns are common. Differences of opinion that may seem microscopic to outsiders often serve as the basis for centuries-long shouting matches. Yet even in the most dysfunctional family, there are certain resemblances. Whether Fabian or Maoist, Eurocommunist or anarcho-syndicalist, socialists share the desire to create a world without capitalism. What would such a world look like? And how might we get from here to there? Until recently, very few people in the US and the UK were interested in debating these questions. Socialist movements were in deep retreat. The possibility of a world without capitalism seemed preposterous. In recent years,

‘It was important the photos were candid, so I didn’t tell anyone I was shooting them. They are bodies you don’t often see in magazines or on social media’ Several years ago, when I was back home in Lithuania, I went to the beach for the first time in years. I grabbed my longboard, gathered a group of friends and family, and headed for one of the most popular spots on the Baltic coast. On this beach, there is a bridge that overlooks the shore. As I walked across it, I could see all of the bathers lying beneath me on the sand. I had a perfect bird’s eye view. I had never seen the beach from that angle, and it was fascinating. That evening, I began the research for this series, Comfort Zone . I looked through reams of beach photography, but pretty much none of the images had captured the scene from above. I found nothing documenting it from this angle in this clean, simple, almost clinical way. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ZwcMcj

The artform has allowed many female illustrators to confront how they see their bodies and how their bodies are seen by the man around them In Commute: An Illustrated Memoir of Female Shame, Erin Williams draws herself dozens of times. The rough, reality-based illustrations of her body move through the memoir’s pages both as a person enduring the banal, and as a sexualized figure, recovering from trauma. Spanning a single day with extended departures into reflection and digression, the memoir chronicles both the journey of a daily commute, and a larger one from blackout sexual encounters to sobriety and motherhood. That means a fair amount of difficult, sometimes shame-filled, material: “All the mornings I woke up and couldn’t remember whether I’d had sex the night before, I’d finger myself to see if I was sore,” writes Williams beneath a drawing of her with a hand beneath her scrunched-up shorts. Related: Before emojis: the utopian graphic language of Marie and Otto Neurath Contin

The care system’s brutal attack on a black child’s sense of self worth is targeted in the poet’s frank recollections of life in children’s homes Early on in this affecting memoir, Sissay recalls the authors and books that fired his imagination when he was young. CS Lewis was a kind of “rock star”. In 2019, Lemn Sissay MBE is something of a literary luminary himself. His poetry and plays are lauded. He is chancellor of Manchester University. He was the official poet of the 2012 London Olympics. He was recently awarded the PEN Pinter prize and has appeared on Desert Island Discs . But glittering as these garlands might be, his early life was anything but golden. It’s a painful narrative that underpins much of his creative output and is emotively reframed in My Name Is Why . Just after he was born in 1967, Sissay and his mother – a young Ethiopian student who had recently arrived in England – were taken to St Margaret’s Home for Unmarried Mothers in Wigan. Their short stay ended when,

This documentary on the pleasurable highs and puritanical prejudices around cannabis use was lively and educational – even when its presenter got the munchies It is the best and the worst time to have a documentary that requires you to balance two contradictory thoughts in your head; we are out of practice. We are a bit too mono, in everything, these days. But the latest instalment of the flagship science show Horizon, presented by the wisely chosen Javid Abdelmoneim – a doctor who wears his intelligence lightly and always looks to take the audience with him – encourages us to do so. In Cannabis: Medical Miracle or Dangerous Drug? (BBC Two), Abdelmoneim disentangles the facts-so-far from the myths that have grown up around cannabis – and, since legislation changed last year, the over-the-counter products that contain it – with a view to discovering where he, as a doctor, should stand. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3284mcS

Six years after its debut, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s monologue is back in the theatre after its tearaway success on TV. We sent three millennial critics to watch it Related: Sexy, subversive … and sad: Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag in West End premiere After six years, two television series, several theatrical revivals (including a sold-out Off-Broadway run) and a shot-for-shot French remake , Fleabag is back in theatres for one final run: just Phoebe Waller-Bridge, alone on a spotlit stool, performing the one-woman show that made her the toast of Hollywood. Since it’s been widely perceived as a tract on millennial womanhood, we assembled three millennial critics for a discussion on the play’s relevance, cult status and sexual politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2LcX6Wp

The director confirms her status as a modern visionary with a deft, distinctive and deeply personal story of young love Joanna Hogg’s new movie is her most intensely personal yet – but this mysterious and beautiful film is not revelatory in any obvious way. It is the second time I have seen it since writing about the premiere at Sundance in January, and the things about it that perplexed and baffled and bemused and entranced me have done so more fiercely. Yet its difficulties now feel not like flaws but rather sunspots of inspiration. The mother-daughter relationship is quietly superb and the musical interludes are wonderful: there is a glorious outing for Robert Wyatt’s haunting Shipbuilding and Willie Mabon’s Poison Ivy. The Souvenir has already received plaudits as a breakthrough for this director – although I don’t think she needed a “breakthough” given the quality of her three previous films , for those open-minded enough to see them. A rather lovely poster image of its two l

Mainland China has, in recent years, been playing down Hong Kong’s distinct qualities as an international financial and cultural hub. Officials have long sought to integrate the city into what they proclaim to be a bigger and better national whole. The State Council’s extolling of Shenzhen’s potential to become a “top cosmopolis” and a “global pacesetter” by the mid-21st century is one more example of this long-running campaign.The same mantra seemed to have worked in mainland cinema, as ever… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2ZmUijt

Chinese pop star Jane Zhang will front Brand USA’s biggest ever campaign on China’s Twitter-like social media platform Weibo next month, as it attempts to turn around a drop in Chinese tourists during an increasingly acrimonious trade war.Mandopop star Zhang, who is nicknamed the “Dolphin Princess” for her high vocal register, has been filming in Las Vegas, New York and San Francisco for the campaign, set to be called “Feel the USA”, the organisation said.During her career as a pop star, Jane… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2PuAm9Q

3.5/5 stars When a director wins the Palme d’Or, you can expect the next project to potentially be a step up in scale and ambition. Japan’s Hirokazu Koreeda, who won the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize in 2018 for Shoplifters , returns with what, on the surface, is exactly that. With an international cast led by Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche, two titans of French cinema who have never been on screen before together, The Truth is a Paris-set drama that takes Koreeda far from his… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2zuDLuc

Violent conquest and louche hedonism in a wide‑eyed glorification of the Islamic golden age Like many recent years, 2013 saw Richard Dawkins tweet a summary judgment about Islam. “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” The coarse implication in his first statement is hardly softened by the condescending allusion to the “great things” done by past Muslims. Still, it was only a tweet. Islamic Empires , Justin Marozzi’s new work, is a 464-page elaboration of the same argument, with additional bloodshed and sleaze. Marozzi opens by quoting a Tunisian friend who is “embarrassed to be an Arab these days”, distressed as he is by the “chaos, fighting, bloodshed, dictatorship, corruption, injustice, unemployment” plaguing the Middle East . The Tunisian certainly has a point, but it’s one that Marozzi misconstrues. Marozzi advises his friend to think back to a time when “for an Arab Muslim, pride in occ

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Together with Iranian artist Shirin Neshat and the Mongolian publisher Enkhbat Roozon, the German-Turkish author has been honored by the Goethe-Institut. Akhanlı talked with DW about his writing — and state persecution. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://www.dw.com/en/author-doğan-akhanlı-receives-goethe-medal/a-50194630?maca=en-rss-en-cul-2090-rdf

Blythe Roberson imagines a humorous list of iPhone updates that merely serve to exacerbate the condition and battery life of an old phone that its user has been putting off an upgrade for. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2L0RkYW

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UNIIQU3 gives retro sounds a new sheen with her AFROPUNK mix, while MssingNo devastates with his glorious melodrama Dazed Mix: Anthony Naples Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2KZYrke

Fired? Grab your hat. While hats and caps are no longer part of people's everyday wardrobe, Germans use idioms involving hats all the time. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/345unLS

Stephania Taladrid writes on the August 11th primaries in Argentina, in which the incumbent President, Mauricio Macri, fell behind the Peronists Alberto Fernández and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and the economic consequences of the Macri administration. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2MFRsPN

Isaac Chotiner interviews Raja Shehadeh, the Palestinian lawyer, writer, and activist who co-founded the human-rights organization Al-Haq, about the decline of the Israeli left and how changes in American politics affect the fate of Palestinians. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2NAQ40k

Ariel Francisco joins Kevin Young to discuss “By a Lake in Minnesota,” by James Wright, and his own poem “Along the East River and in the Bronx Young Men Were Singing.” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2MH1qjK

A screenwriter and a film-maker clash in this complex story of loss and grief “I wonder if we are stuck in bad movie plots we make ourselves,” says Magsalin, the character at the centre of Gina Apostol’s thrillingly imagined and provocative inquiry into the nature of stories and the unfolding of history in our collective consciousness. The remark is made in one of many terse conversations she has with an American film-maker, Chiara Brasi, who has come to the Philippines to shoot a movie based on her father’s experience in the 1970s of making a film about a notorious massacre of 1901. Magsalin reads Chiara’s script and objects not just to the accuracy of certain details and the viewpoints it adopts, but to the very motivation behind it. A Filipina translator and mystery writer on her first visit to her home country after many years in New York, she decides to put things right by writing her own script. In this jostle for primacy, narrative strands collide, history doubles back on itsel

From a caramel schnauzer to a blood-spattered treasure chest, here’s another scrumptious series to save us from a sugar-free life. But have we been blessed with the new Nadiya? On your marks, get set … GET HAPPY! The Great British Bake Off – the show that brought the nation together at the exact same time everything else fell in the bin like a sabotaged baked alaska – is 10 years old. To celebrate, we get … another scrumptious series of The Great British Bake Off (Channel 4). No surprises hidden like currants in a fruit cake. No crimes or misdemeanours (not yet anyway). No boat-rocking channel switches. Just some decent folk getting in a tizzy over the height of their genoise in a Berkshire tent. Let’s face it, reviewing Bake Off is now about as necessary as scoring your nan’s scones. Of course they’re going to be just right, you ungrateful wretch. Nevertheless, like those scones, Bake Off commands attention, praise, respect. And we show this recognition not by making ‘mmmm’ noises a

Recent trailers for Greta Gerwig’s take on Louisa May Alcott and Hailee Steinfeld as a punk rock Emily Dickinson suggest a resurgence for 1860s literary women The girls of the 1860s appear to be having a moment. Two weeks ago, the trailer for Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women – featuring a stacked cast including Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan, Meryl Streep, Laura Dern and Timothee Chalamet – dropped with much fanfare, depending on your cultural circle. The Lady Bird director’s take on Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, first published in 1868, seems ready to breathe a modern, candid air into the story of four sisters confronting change and (often thwarted) ambition during the Civil War. In the trailer, Ronan, as Jo March (the young, tomboyish writer Alcott modeled after herself), punches Chalamet, as neighbor-boy Laurie, in the arm; the sisters wrestle; Jo and Laurie dance in the dark and then break into a full, joyous flail. Related: Greta Gerwig: why Little Women still generat

In making her second feature, the film-maker refused to pander to US or Chinese audiences – and perfectly captured the Chinese diaspora Changchun, the capital of China’s north-eastern Jilin province, has a name that translates to “long spring”. According to folklore, the name was bestowed by an emperor in recognition of its temperate summer. So mild and pleasant was the city at that time of year that it felt as though spring could stretch on endlessly, without ever morphing into the sticky humidity that beset the rest of the country. It’s easy to imagine idyllic summers there and Lulu Wang recalls her own with glee. “My grandmother had a house with a garden where we would catch dragonflies in the yard,” she says. “It was sort of the iconic childhood.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HrJWnc

ITV’s new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sanditon has come under fire for filling the screen with naked male bottoms. But Austen herself wouldn’t have batted an eyelid ITV’s new Jane Austen adaptation, Sanditon, made a splash at the seaside this week. While the female characters used a bathing machine to change into long red Handmaid’s Tale-style smocks before taking to the waters, the men stripped off and plunged in. ITV stopped short of showing anything frontal, but more refined viewers may have found themselves reaching for the smelling salts as naked male rumps filled the screen. Bottoms in Austen! Whatever next? Let’s hope there were some smelling salts left, for next was a scene that hinted at a handjob. Anne Reid, who plays Lady Denham on the show, expressed dismay (with tongue in cheek): “It’s the times we live in,” she told the Radio Times : “There are a lot of naked males around and I think it’s unnecessary.” The screenwriter Andrew Davies, who also wrote the hugely influentia

Less reboots! More Keanu! Less Shaft! The summer season is over and it’s time to sift through the hits and misses to see what the industry can learn Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3280x7y

Standup comedian also takes aim at callout culture that sees public figures held to account by audiences Dave Chappelle has come under fire for his latest Netflix special in which he claims he does not believe Michael Jackson sexually assaulted young boys, and makes jokes at the expense of Jackson’s accusers. In a standup set that seemed designed to provoke precisely the backlash that it was critiquing, Chappelle took aim at a prevailing callout culture that sees celebrities being held to account by audiences and in the media for perceived or actual crimes and for the offensive things they say. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2UcOjrp

Cave tells fan on on his website The Red Hand Files, ‘I suspected that drugs might have been a problem between us’ The Boatman’s Call has long been considered one of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ most confessional records, written around the time of Cave’s break-up with English musician PJ Harvey. But while it’s long been known that the 1997 album was in part inspired by her, Cave revealed on Tuesday the reasons behind the break-up – and the toll it took on him. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HorDPV

US rapper officially resolves long-running case after he was accused of carrying firearm on a public street Meek Mill has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor gun charge in a deal that will spare him additional prison time, resolving a case that followed the rapper most of his adult life and turned him into a high-profile activist for criminal justice reform. The negotiated plea came after an appeals court threw out the 2008 conviction of the 32-year-old rapper, born Robert Williams, last month. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/32aFfX4

It’s manipulative and sappy, but this show about celebrities attempting to swim the Channel will make you well up like a rain cloud “White men can’t jump. Black men can’t swim,” says Linford Christie. What nonsense. The 59-year-old Olympic gold medallist and former world champion is now spending 12 weeks proving himself and the stereotype wrong. Along with 10 other celebrities who, like 25% of British adults, struggle to swim, Christie is getting in condition to form a relay team that next month will swim 21 miles across the Channel. Which, as you know, is an obstacle course featuring jellyfish, waves, cold, polluted water, plastic debris, container ships, gulls ready to feast on your still-warm corpse, and the piercing shards of shattered human dreams. More people have climbed Everest than have swum the Channel, says Keri-Anne Payne, the two-time 10km open-water world champion and coach to this – no offence – unpromising bunch. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian http

Nikita Khrushchev, a war-hardened Harold Macmillan and a young Thatcher fire up this genially narrated history of the early 1960s In 1962, Whitehall’s war planners spotted a fatal flaw in their defensive preparations against a surprise nuclear attack. What if the prime minister happened to be on the road when the four-minute warning came? The solution, decided the men from the ministry, was to issue the PM’s driver with a radio link, borrowed from the technology that the AA used to communicate with their mechanics on motorbikes. On receiving the alert, the driver would divert to the nearest public call box, whereupon the PM would phone Whitehall, pass on the nuclear codes, and escalate Armageddon. But what if neither the PM or his driver had the requisite coins to make a call from a phone box? After some back-and-forthing between various departments, Tim Bligh, the principal private secretary, came up with a ruling: if the PM found himself caught short, he should simply reverse the cha

Royal Albert Hall, London Jörg Widmann’s Babylon Suite is anarchic but infectiously enjoyable, framed here by pristine Beethoven and Schumann J örg Widmann ’s opera Babylon, a bombastic, Stockhausen-baiting mix of myth, spirituality, human sacrifice and singing genitalia, had its premiere in Munich seven years ago. It has yet to be staged in the UK; until then we have to make do with his Babylon Suite, already heard in Cardiff and Birmingham. This performance by the Orchestre de Paris and its outgoing music director Daniel Harding was its first in London. It’s a barnstormer of a piece, wheeling through music from the opera in an unbroken 30-minute work for a huge kitchen-sink orchestra but no singers. Initially, the music grows swiftly from a single accordion line into a layered, chaotic whirl. It’s the kind of opening passage that promises cataclysm – and that’s what we get, although not in the brutal way we might anticipate. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian http

Disgraced K-pop star Seungri was questioned by police on Wednesday for illicit overseas gambling, the latest step in a snowballing sex and drugs scandal that saw him retire in March.The 28-year-old singer from popular boy band Big Bang is accused of habitual overseas gambling at luxurious casinos in Las Vegas involving illicit foreign exchange transactions.Dressed in a sharp dark suit, Seungri stepped out from a black sedan to a mob of reporters waiting for him at a police building in Seoul.“I… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2PfIJpq

Ceremony looks backward with its host but forward in its music, with Spanish performances, space gear, and a crowd-rousing tribute to Elliott The 2019 VMAs often didn’t seem to know what year it was – a mix of dad jokes, Latin music, double-denim outfits and one performance set in 2079, in a ceremony that mostly lacked the typical controversy. With awards split between longtime pop dominator Taylor Swift and the very 2019 star Lil Nas X, it was perhaps fitting that the night’s top honor celebrated the genre- and era-defying musical work of Missy Elliott. Swift opened the show with two singles from her new album Lover: the technicolor trailer park-themed You Need To Calm Down, and return-to-form acoustic track Lover. The colorful performance kicked off a big night for Swift, who took home Video of the Year for You Need To Calm Down: a song pitched as an LGBTQ anthem for Pride Month . In her acceptance speech, she pointed to the Equality Act, for which the video solicited petitions. “B

Linguist Steven Pinker is among those who have implied the singer was wrong to say ‘I was literally about to break’ In a frank interview with the Guardian at the weekend, Taylor Swift revealed just how traumatic the summer of 2016 was for her. “I was literally about to break,” she confided. As fans lapped up the detail about her spat with Kanye and why she felt unable to endorse a presidential candidate, in a more specialised corner of the internet, all hell broke loose. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration – the eminent linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker did call her “The newest member of A.W.F.U.L. (Americans Who Figuratively Use ‘Literally’)”, implying that he wasn’t keen on her choice of words, and around 3,000 people backed him up. The point is, we have to assume Taylor wasn’t in fact “about to break”, unless there’s something she’s not telling us about her yoga regime. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NCNiHV

We are watching the raw majesty of the natural world being smothered to death by human emotion The BBC wildlife series Serengeti is an odd duck. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a dramatisation of a wildlife show. Masterminded by Pop Idol creator Simon Fuller, it contains real wildlife footage that’s been shaped into narratives by writers. Multiple animals represent the same character. John Boyega is credited as a “storyteller” rather than a “narrator”. My colleague Rebecca Nicholson called Serengeti “the Made in Chelsea of nature docs” for good reason. To watch it is to watch the raw majesty of the natural world being smothered to death by human emotion. This weekend, the show was hit by accusations that it inserted a composite shot of a zebra being swept down a river to heighten the drama of a scene. Serengeti is a bold experiment into humanity’s tolerance of anthropomorphism. If it had worked, similar tactics could have been used to heighten awareness of the climate emergency, maybe

The festival is over for another year but plenty of its theatre, comedy and dance hits have announced dates around the UK Collapsible Breffni Holahan gives a searing performance as Essie in Margaret Perry’s corrosive play about a woman’s disintegration. Essie is trapped atop a stone plinth dusted in dirt. Gigantic spikes of rock splinter the air around her. Her feet dangle. Having lost her job and broken up with her girlfriend, she is in every way ungrounded. This is where Perry’s play is rooted: in the queasy gap between her feet and the floor. KW At HighTide festival, Aldeburgh , 10-15 September. Read our four-star review All of Me This used to be a lighter, more hopeful kind of show about depression, Caroline Horton explains. But she became ill again, so now All of Me is unashamedly bleak. Her depression is interwoven with myth, switching abruptly from ancient narrative to everyday hopelessness. One moment, Horton is approaching the guardians of the underworld; the next, she’s

Spanish artist Domingo Zapata has brought a record-breaking new piece of art to Times Square and hopes it might cause crowds to pause Times Square is not exactly a hotbed of high culture. As Fran Lebowitz once said : “If you’re a New Yorker, and you run into another New Yorker in Times Square, it’s like running into someone at a gay bar in the 1970s — you make up excuses about why you’re there.” Now, this tourist-heavy hub in the center of midtown Manhattan is changing — it’s starting to see more art. Spanish artist Domingo Zapata has just finished painting the largest mural New York City has ever seen, hanging 300 feet high on the building at One Times Square. It took him three weeks to paint and will hang here for the next few months. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2U4POIg

From the Apple II to the ZX Spectrum, the aural experience of loading a game from a cassette, disc or cartridge was all part of the fun The first time I ever put a ​5¼-inch disk into an Apple II drive to play Lode Runner , I was hooked. It seemed wildly futuristic – this was in the early 1980s – but there was also something pleasingly analogue about the process. You had to slide the disc from its sleeve like a vinyl record, then gently feed it into the mouth of the drive, before closing the little plastic door behind it with a satisfying click. The loading noise was a stuttering series of electronic snare drum taps, accompanied by the baseline hum of the computer itself. There was something almost organic about it, like a CT scan or ultrasound. To me it seemed incredible that typing something on a screen could cause the disk to start loading, as though I was talking to the computer, and the clicking noise only accentuated this feeling of communication. In these early days of video ga

Fleabag and Killing Eve creator to guest host the US sketch show on 5 October The British actor and writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge is to host Saturday Night Live alongside musical guest Taylor Swift. The creator of Killing Eve and Fleabag will guest host the late-night American sketch show on 5 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2KWrOE3

A vital study offers a way out from the ‘tangled disingenuousness of mainstream narratives around racism’ I once considered outing a manager at work as a racist. I hesitated from the discomfort of embarking on such action, an unwillingness to fall into the category of victim, and because of the potentially serious consequences for the manager to be so labelled. I also knew that it was near impossible to prove; the racism was covert, though obvious to me. But in the end, I pulled back for a more prosaic reason: I realised that the boss to whom I’d have to report my assessment was more obviously racist than the offending manager. It’s a mark of the transformative and unsettling power of Ibram X Kendi’s writing that I relaxed into How to Be an Antiracist with the comforting and self-righteous knowledge that the title was not addressing me. After all I am black; I couldn’t possibly be racist, could I? By the book’s end, I wasn’t so sure. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardia