Cultural News Today

The acting legends have reunited for Martin Scorsese’s mob picture The Irishman. They discuss 50 years of friendship, getting the film off the ground – and their ‘gangster president’ ‘Hi guys and girls,” says Al Pacino brightly, making his entrance. He is sporting a veteran-boho look: what seems like about six black cardigans on top of each other, lots of chunky finger jewellery and messy bird’s-nest hair. There may even be one of those two-inch ponytails that were popular in the late 80s in there somewhere – it is hard to see in the general tonsorial disorder. Next to stroll in is Robert De Niro , who – in dramatic contrast – looks like he has come in from a round of golf: shirt and sports jacket, grey-white hair slicked back. Welcome, then, to the Al and Bob show. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/33hEQTi

Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carrell match the Friends star stride for stride in this funny, fearless drama from Apple TV+ What a strange and rather lovely thing it is to watch an actor you have grown up with for two and a half decades finally come into her kingdom. So it is with Jennifer Aniston who, 25 years after she arrived on our screens in Friends, returns in a TV series for the first time since the hit show ended in 2004. The Morning Show is a slick, sophisticated venture stuffed with powerhouse performances – Aniston’s foremost among them. She plays Alex Levy, the co-anchor of a morning talk show whose life is thrown into disarray when her co-presenter Mitch (Steve Carrell, proving alongside Aniston that if you can do comedy you can do anything) is accused of sexual misconduct and fired. Their chemistry kept the waning show afloat – without it, she becomes even more vulnerable. Behind the scenes, network executives have already been looking to replace her ageing presence. This

Bolton Library and Museum Beth Hyland attempts to shift the male-and-his-muse gaze in her story about misogyny in the music industry Fiction and history are littered with male artists and their obliging female muses, with women forever relegated to supporting roles. Beth Hyland ’s new musical, loosely based on Chekhov’s The Seagull, attempts to refocus the narrative. Trigorin – a global rock star in this version – is pushed into the wings, leaving singer-songwriter Nina in the spotlight. At its best, Seagulls homes in on the misogyny of the music industry – and culture more broadly. A gifted musician in her own right, Nina soon gets tired of languishing in the shadow of boyfriend and bandmate Con. He wants a muse, not a partner. But in leaving him behind and taking the opportunity offered by Trigorin, Nina walks into a world where she can never be sure if she’s valued for her talent or her looks. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/34hyymX

Kieran Hodgson and Liza Tarbuck offer up a rare treat indeed – the only thing that has managed to make me laugh about Brexit On paper, it’s enough to send you running for the hills. A show about Brexit – pull on your trainers – a young comedian’s examination of its 60s and 70s origins – lace them tight – via impressions of politicians from that era, and you’re off, racing across the greensward, bug-eyed in horror. “Come back!” people might shout. “The conceit is he wants to rebuild his relationship with his leave-voting mother!” “Never!” you reply, without a second thought. “Never!” And this, as with so much to do with Brexit, would be wrong. For the show is How Europe Stole My Mum (Channel 4) and it is really, really good. Odd, unexpected, not for everyone, perhaps, any more than any comedy ever is, but fresh, charming and funny. It succeeded in something I had long believed unfeasible: it made me laugh if not exactly about Brexit then in very close proximity to it – an achievement

Shortlist for this year’s Diagram prize also includes The Dirt Hole and Its Variations, Noah Gets Naked and How to Drink Without Drinking The Dirt Hole and Its Variations, Ending the War on Artisan Cheese and Noah Gets Naked are among the 2019 nominees for the Bookseller’s annual prize for the oddest book title of the year. Many previous winners of the Diagram prize, which has been running for 41 years, have involved a certain part of the human anatomy, such as 1993’s winner American Bottom Archaeology, and Living With Crazy Buttocks, which took the award in 2002. Neither title is quite as it seems: the former relates to “the most ambitious archaeological undertaking to have been conducted in eastern North America since the WPA era”; the latter is a collection of essays about contemporary culture. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/322XwoF

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Halloween is not actually an ancient Celtic custom, nor was it invented by the American sweets industry. DW explores the unique history of this most-spooky of holidays. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/330vR9e

Lisa Hanawalt illustrates a humorous comic in which people prone to irritable-bowel syndrome search for Halloween sweets to give to trick-or-treaters. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2PCAv9p

The Italian film "Perfetti sconosciuti," about smart phones fouling up a dinner, has made it into the Guinness World Records for its record number of remakes. Will the German version have what it takes to be a success? from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/2Wvf7V5

Michael Schulman writes about the musical series “Hip Pocket Musicals,” which was pitched to PBS but never aired, starring Patti LuPone, Priscilla Lopez, Lonny Price, Walter Bobbie, and Ellen Foley. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2N0qoJO

S. Whitney Holmes writes about a video documentary on the silent-film accompanist Ben Model, who counts himself among a dwindling number of people practicing the craft. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2N1jzYm

Geoff Manaugh writes on architectural historians who have discovered evidence and remains of witchcraft, spells, and occult protections inside homes in the Hudson Valley and England. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/36mwDiI

Murat Oztaskin writes on Alejandra Barrera, an asylum seeker from El Salvador, who was detained in Cibola County Correctional Center, the only ICE facility in the country with a unit for transgender women, where she was denied humanitarian parole five times. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/32YJLZk

On The New Yorker’s Poetry podcast, Vijay Seshadri joins Kevin Young to discuss “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” by Sylvia Plath, and his own poem “Cliffhanging.” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2WrzbaX

Charles Bethea writes about the aftermath of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement a raid of chicken-processing plants in Morton, Mississippi, where one in ten of the city’s residents was jailed or fired. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2oD8J1C

An exploration into Putin’s Russia asks what happened to the dream of a united, liberal Europe Thirty years ago, the South African novelist and poet Christopher Hope was drawn to Russia by “the quality of the lies”. The myths peddled by Soviet officials had created “a society steadily falling apart; run your fingers over it and you’d feel the widening stitches. In the night they snapped one by one.” Hope’s observation of a society undone by its own falsehoods echoes throughout Rory MacLean’s gripping book, part-travelogue, part-contemporary history of Europe. In 1989, MacLean recorded his journey from Berlin to Moscow across what was for many still Europe’s terra incognita. A united, liberal Europe had seemed tantalisingly near as walls and dictatorships tumbled, families and nations were reunited, and – it appeared – communism finally joined fascism on the scrap heap of history. Now, he retraces his steps from east to west to explore what became of that dream, and finds it battered a

It has been 25 years since Sharon Isbin last performed in Hong Kong. When she made her debut at the Hong Kong Arts Festival in 1994, the classical guitarist – then 38 – was already more than two decades into her career and had 12 albums to her name.A quarter of a century later and she has more than doubled that number, including this year’s Souvenirs of Spain and Italy, a collaboration with the award-winning Pacifica Quartet from the US state of Indiana.The album explores some of the best music… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2JCskWW

Immersing yourself in silent films offers another level of imagination and escape, one of the few remaining silent-film accompanists says. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/32YAroi

The singer-songwriter talks candidly about her friendship with Jackie Onassis, being humiliated by Harvey Weinstein and why she has no time for the US president Carly Simon somehow appears both brittle and unbreakable as she opens the door to her hotel room in Boston, Massachusetts, where a publicist hovers discreetly. She is wearing a blue sweater, blue jeans and a blue scarf and is smiling broadly. Her hair is shoulder length with the familiar low fringe. She puts on a pair of glasses; lukewarm hotel tea is ordered and poured. The singer-songwriter is chatty and charming. She says she has just been listening to the audio version of her latest memoir, Touched by the Sun, about her friendship with Jackie Kennedy Onassis, the widow of former president John F Kennedy and the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. It is read by Elizabeth McGovern , who plays the Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey. That is fine with Simon, a fan of British TV, including Downton and Last Tango in H

Nintendo Switch Professor E Gadd and new clone Gooigi are among the inventive innovations aiding Mario’s timid twin. A breath of life for the hunt-and-chase format Luigi never seems to learn his lesson. It’s been 18 years since he was first lured to a haunted house and tortured by its spooky inhabitants. Now, having been duped again, he’s trapped in an even bleaker building – the Hotel of Last Resort – as he races to rescue a familiar cast of Mushroom Kingdom characters . Although it treads very familiar ground to its predecessors, there’s a lot to love in the third instalment of the adventure series that lets Mario’s timid twin take charge. You still guide the character through uniquely themed sections of the building, relying on his flashlight and multi-functional Poltergust vacuum to rid the place of ghosts. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2N2ok3X

This surreal look at Russian TV showed a foreigner-bashing propaganda machine in full swing – just the thing to distract from a nation in chaos This is the era of the dead cat. It’s Boris Johnson’s fault. Back in 2013, he wrote an article advising that if you are a politician facing embarrassment over, I don’t know, allegations you funnelled public money to a pole-dancing American businesswoman, slap a dead cat on the table and your problems are over. Noticed how few cats have crossed your path recently? Now you know why. In The World According to Putin (Channel 4), a beguiling compilation of foreigner-bashing, fiercely nationalistic Russian state telly, we were told that Theresa May is a virtuoso at dead cat politics. It was she who ordered the poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury last year, to misdirect the British people from her Brexit debacle. Or so Dmitry Kiselev, whom Vladimir Putin appointed in 2013 to head the new Russian government-owned internatio

From Howards End to Bag End, fictional houses can be as characterful as the people who live in them Where, or rather what, would Rebecca be without Manderley, The Forsyte Saga without Robin Hill or Howards End without, well, Howards End? In this collection of 20 sparkling mini-essays, Christina Hardyment sets out to show how bricks and mortar make compelling fictional characters just as surely as skin and bone. Skilfully deploying biography, close reading and psychogeography, Hardyment creates a series of charming house portraits, starting with Horace Walpole’s gothic castle of Otranto (1764) and winding up with the equally crenellated Hogwarts, courtesy of JK Rowling (1997-2007). Along the way we stop off at Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and JRR Tolkien’s Bag End (1937). You can’t help noticing that there aren’t many airy, well-lit interiors in evidence here. No one seems keen on open plan, cleaning up or putting things away

A group of grieving friends gather at a remote lakeside and start telling spooky stories in this effective comedy-horror As the title suggests, this portmanteau film tips a wink to the multi-stranded spookfest Tales from the Crypt (1972), but this time with even more winking and a fair few nudges thrown in for good measure. The umbrella narrative finds five university chums in their late 30s – two couples and another bloke, Paul (Dustin Demri-Burns) who’s brought along his trashy new girlfriend, Miki (Kelly Wenham) – assembling at a remote lakeside cabin to scatter the ashes of a sixth pal who drowned there a few years back, the result of a misadventure, suicide or maybe something more sinister. There’s good-natured sniping over who forgot to bring food, moaning over the lack of phone signal and bitchier remarks from tart-tongued Martha (Laura Fraser) directed at Miki, who no one really likes. With well-timed rhythms and backchat, the ensemble is quite credible as a gaggle of slight

Architects are taking issue with risk-averse playparks full of sluggish roundabouts and tiny climbing frames. But are playgrounds in the middle of roads really the answer? In the decades after the second world war, the celebrated architect Aldo van Eyck designed more than 700 playgrounds in Amsterdam , filling bomb sites with dazzling constellations of tumbling bars, leapfrog posts and climbing domes. His idea was that by providing children with a range of elemental forms and open-ended structures – rather than swings, roundabouts and other playground staples – their creativity would be stimulated and they would invent new games. These “tools for the imagination”, as he called his kit of sandpits, frames and posts, became a familiar part of Amsterdam’s streetscape, a connected galaxy of playtime fragments that spread across the city, from public spaces and even to roadside verges, never fenced off. It was a vision of play without walls, the protected domain of the child thrown open

For Halloween, Guardian writers discuss their most horrifying childhood cinematic experiences, from Arachnophobia to Freddy vs Jason Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PIOZF1

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Masha Gessen on the Army lieutenant general Alexander Vindman’s experience as an immigrant from the Soviet Union and how prominent supporters of President Donald Trump are misconstruing and misrepresenting his origins. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2pubOBj

The versatile actor and comic, who played Ice Cube’s father in the comedy franchise, has died in Los Angeles Actor-comedian John Witherspoon, who memorably played Ice Cube’s father in the Friday films, has died. He was 77. His manager Alex Goodman confirmed that Witherspoon died in Los Angeles. No cause of death was released. The actor had a prolific career, co-starring in three Friday films, appearing on The Wayans Bros television series and voicing the grandfather in The Boondocks animated series. His film roles included Vampire in Brooklyn and Boomerang, and he was a frequent guest on Late Show with David Letterman. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/36gVvIB

Royal Exchange, Manchester Sarah Frankcom says her farewell as the Exchange’s artistic director with this moving testament to the power of family life This has the air of an event. It is the sixth play Simon Stephens has written for this space and it is Sarah Frankcom ’s final production as the Royal Exchange’s artistic director. Both artists are happily on their best form: Stephens’s ability to celebrate human resilience in the face of adversity is matched by the characteristic clarity of Frankcom’s production. As so often, Stephens reveals his penchant for geographical restlessness. In Harper Regan (2008), he sent his eponymous heroine on an odyssey through the north of England. Light Falls begins with a monologue by middle-aged Christine (Rebecca Manley), who records the exact moment of her death in a Stockport supermarket in February 2017. We then see where the scattered members of her family were on the day in question. Her husband, Bernard, was looking for sex and company wi

Jenny Slate writes a humorous letter from an imaginary Committee for Evening Experiences about a series of odd dreams she’s had, which is drawn from her book, “Little Weirds.” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2JybxnT

Marry Norris writes about a proposed change to the Associated Press style for making a name that ends in “S” possessive, which has drawn comments ranging from bafflement and consternation to scorn and reason. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/323pq41

Loyalties and self-interest collide as two best friends unleash the secrets of the sea gods The Costa-winning children’s writer Frances Hardinge is known for the fascinating strangeness of her settings: The Lie Tree ’s stifling Victorian society conceals a plant nourished by deceit, and A Face Like Glass takes place in an underworld where wines can extract memories and perfumes enforce trust. Whether they are wholly invented or rippled glass visions of familiar history, however, her worlds are navigated by characters who stay human to the marrow – flawed, cowardly, doubtful, determined, unprincipled and brave. This remains true of her latest novel, Deeplight . In the island chain of the Myriad, gods once rose from the weird waters of the Undersea, ravaging shipping and coastlines, devouring sailors. Razor-mouthed or glass-tentacled, they were a source of fear and reverence – until one day they turned on one another, and tore each other apart. Now “godware”, the powerful detritus of

From mandatory coffins to the time-honored "corpse feast," Germany has an array of burial laws, funeral traditions and customs. But new trends are changing this too. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/2NpnoWn

HBO has announced a new prequel series to Game of Thrones. The new show is to be titled House of the Dragon. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/32UbI4x

Sarah Moss, Imogen Hermes Gowar and Oyinkan Braithwaite introduce the objects from the Wellcome Collection that inspired their new short stories ‘Bits of people, drifting in time’ Sarah Moss The Wellcome Collection’s permanent exhibition, Medicine Man , has plenty of disturbing objects. Partly because I arrive in and leave London through Euston station, just over the road, I often stop by if I’m early for a train (this kind of casual visiting is one of the joys of free museums), and so I find myself gazing out of the window at Watford Junction and still thinking about a box of false eyes or an amulet. It’s good to be a little haunted. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2MWhj4P

Chance encounters hint at great romance, and Oliver dreams of Elio, in a stylised yet frustratingly unrealistic novel of love In Richard Linklater’s film Before Sunrise , two strangers meet on a train, strike up a conversation and soon find themselves wandering around Vienna, intoxicated by each other’s presence and recognising that from a chance encounter a great romance might have begun. Find Me is a sequel to Call Me By Your Name , André Aciman’s 2007 novel that became an Oscar-winning film, and it begins in the same way as Linklater’s movie, but rather than the protagonists being a couple of twentysomethings, Samuel and Miranda have a greater disparity between their ages. The former, the father of the young pianist Elio from the earlier novel, is at least 30 years older than the latter. It’s a brave conceit in 2019, when any suggestion of impropriety between an older man and a younger woman is generally given short shrift, but there’s no touching or hand-holding here, no lewd co

Ginette Bedard ran her first marathon at the age of sixty-nine, runs ten miles every day, and says that running keeps her young. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/34cVTWU

I was invited by the singer’s manager to the Hollywood Bowl concert where he donned the notorious T-shirt Back in June, I wrote a piece for the Guardian recounting how Morrissey had once been my greatest inspiration . As one of his very few black fans, I described how, after years of giving him the benefit of the doubt, buying every record he ever made, and leaping on stage to kiss him at shows, I felt personally betrayed by his repeated demonstrations of intolerance. Fast-forward a few months, and on Sunday I woke to friends sending me pictures of Morrissey wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Fuck the Guardian” . One message was accompanied by expletives, another by the eye-roll emoji. Another simply said, “You did this.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2WnHfcy

It was a tearful and disaster-laden final – the natural endpoint for the series that curdled our ultimate comfort TV Spoiler alert: this review reveals the winner of the Great British Bake Off 2019. Do not read on if you have not watched the final. It was the twice-baked Stilton souffles that started the decline. Failing to rise to the occasion, and collapsing in a soggy heap, was Steph’s fate – the soufflés did the same. Going into the final of The Great British Bake Off (Channel 4), she – the four-time star baker – was the one to beat. Watching the prize slip from her floured hands, crestfallen under her fringe, was heartbreaking to watch. Even Paul Hollywood couldn’t bear it. “It doesn’t matter, alright?” he said, comforting her after the only thing her showstopper stopped was her Bake Off-winning dreams. Of course it doesn’t matter. But it also sort of does: this is the Great British Bake Off, cultural institution, a pick-me-up for troubled times, comfort food for the nation. C

Phillip Youmans used his own savings to make his award-winning debut film, attracting the attention of Ava DuVernay Phillip Youmans, age 19, sits in a chic downtown Manhattan restaurant drinking coffee. As recently as a year ago, when he was just another NYU undergrad, he might very well have walked by and gotten a glimpse of a tableau like this from the outside-in. That sort of thing has been happening a lot lately – finding himself on the other side of a scene he’s witnessed over and over again. Related: Beyond Ken Loach: where have the social-realists in cinema gone? Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Nmgf9u

Kelly Bachman called out the producer while he watched. Two years earlier, she had organized a show that used standup to tackle sexual assault That I crossed paths with Harvey Weinstein at a standup show last Wednesday to me is some kind of cosmic wonder, because this isn’t the first time I’ve responded to him with comedy – although it was the first time he was in the room. When the news broke in 2017 about rape accusations against him, it was difficult to find a comedy show where I didn’t hear a bad rape joke, usually coming from a male comedian who was punching down on accusers with unoriginal and offensive jabs. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/34jzK9z

Revisiting a diary forces you to confront ‘ugly, foolish behaviour’, writes Helen Garner . Pulling together a book of extracts was instructive – but not easy • Read more about Guardian Australia’s Unmissable books of 2019 I’ve always thought I was quite good at reading faces, but the look people give you when you tell them you’re going to publish your diary is more complex and mysterious than the average expression: a half-smiling blur of alarm, tinged with suspicion and protest, which opens into a shyly guilty curiosity. A writer I like and greatly respect, when I told her about my plan, drew in a sharp breath and said, “Your idea of privacy must be very different from mine.” I was mortified. Did she imagine my diary as a narcissistic spilling of guts, the sort of ghastly self-glorifying mush that women like Anaïs Nin used to spew out? We were sitting in a bar. I started babbling about how it was a stream of fragments, chunks of life. She still had that doubtful look. So I got out

The artist’s portrait of the Go-Betweens frontman embodies ‘the endless possibilities of portraiture and painting’, say judges The artist known as “What” was not prepared to be awarded Australia’s richest art prize. When his grammatically confounding name was called – it is not really a pseudonym, as his partner, his friends and even his parents call him “What” – the artist appeared stunned. A space opened up around him. Camera shutters snapped wildly. His partner, who had accompanied him to the event, burst into tears. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2MVjWUu

Dreams of empire, blitz spirit, a country in decline … this crisp and concise book shows that competing visions of the past are driving the Brexit project For diehard Brexiters, the most potent image of their project is the “clean break”. It is in itself a rather attractive notion, especially in our culture of personal make-overs and radical transformations. Brexit is the New You. It proposes a Year Zero and an Independence Day – points of origin at which a whole other story of British greatness begins. Like most revolutions, it imagines a sloughing off of history, especially, of course, the history of half a century of deep entanglement with the European Union. It offers a free programme of collective rehab, a political version of the Scientologists’ goal of “going clear”. Yet one of the many incoherences of the Brexit project is that it cannot sustain even this rhetoric of a magical escape from the past. It proposes a giant leap into a glorious future but, as the Anglo-Irish philos

A half-baked comedy series rewrites the life of the American poet as a defiant feminist who ignores chores and delivers clunky dialogue Emily Dickinson doesn’t seem like the historical figure most ripe for a feminist revision. The American poet, whose work was published almost entirely after her death, lived a pious life in a stable, publicly invested New England family, wrote mostly in private, and was a recluse for most of her adult life. Dickinson, one of four shows in the freshman class of originals for the Apple TV+ streaming service, launching 1 November, assumedly saw promise in the name brand of one of America’s most famous 19th-century female poets. It mines her life for the strict, defining details – child of a town-figure father (Toby Huss) and cold homemaker mother (an extremely miscast Jane Krakowski) in Amherst, Massachusetts; two siblings'; comfortable home – while shoehorning in the more inconveniently introspective, cerebral, of-her-time personality of the unhera

From Adwoa Aboah in Rubchinskiy to Claire Foy in Alexander McQueen and long-time muse Tilda Swinton in Armani, the photographer Tim Walker’s portraits are highly imaginative pieces of work. Wonderful People is his first private gallery exhibition, at the Michael Hoppen Gallery , London, 25 October to 25 January Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/34cQ5wv

Music is no longer something that just plays in the background at restaurants.Many have finally understood it’s quite annoying to listen to Diana Krall or Adele on repeat all night long. But I think the real reason why mood music has taken on greater importance is that a lot of chefs secretly want to be DJs. Now they have the perfect excuse to indulge their favourite hip hop, Britpop, alt rock or classic soul grooves.After prepping the mise en place in the kitchen, a lot of them switch to… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2NnzaAL

Hong Kong’s biggest annual music and arts festival, Clockenflap, is pressing ahead this November, despite continuing anti-government protests. On Wednesday, organisers released the final line-up for the three-day event and expressed hope it can bring some positivity to the city.Among the additional acts announced for this year’s Clockenflap festival are UK indie band Bombay Bicycle Club (returning after a memorable performance in 2011), Australian singer-songwriter Nick Murphy (formerly known… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2Wmtfjs

Drowning villages, gender identity, migration and a rich twist on homelessness – all subjects tackled by photographers tipped for greatness at this year’s LensCulture Emerging Talent awards Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2BQInw2

Not long ago Sam Tutty was singing songs from the smash-hit musical for a handful of viewers on YouTube. Now he’s preparing for his West End debut – in the lead role Sam Tutty was a fan of the Broadway hit Dear Evan Hansen before he had even seen it. “I listened to the entire soundtrack when it came out and loved it,” the 21-year-old remembers. “Then, when I was in my first year of drama school, we did a summer show and I sang Waving Through a Window.” Indeed, a quick YouTube search pulls up a video of Tutty putting his all into the show’s trademark number about its titular teen who is “on the outside, always looking in”. One commenter reckoned he was the “future Evan Hansen”. It was a prophetic thought, as Tutty is now playing the lead in the much-anticipated transfer of the show to London, having been through a glut of auditions, even flying to the US for the final round. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2psYRYD

More than 33% of students at UK schools are from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, but only 4% of the protagonists in children's books in the UK are BAME. The publishing industry has made big claims about its push for inclusivity both on and off the page, but some believe progress is painfully slow. Grace Shutti investigates what’s taking UK publishing so long and meets some of the creators who are championing change, including the authors of hit books Amazing Grace and Look Up!, and the owners of inclusive publisher Round Table books ‘What’s taking so long?’: children’s books still neglect BAME readers, finds study Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2MW15sw

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Briana Haynie and Ysabel Yates write a humorous piece imagining a contract for new employees at a cursed office. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2osX8SH

A new version of the 1944 duet, whose gender dynamics have long been argued over, will appear on Legend’s forthcoming Christmas album Baby It’s Cold Outside, the beloved Christmas song that has lost some of its sparkle in recent years, has been rewritten by John Legend to make its lyrics less controversial. Penned by Frank Loesser in 1944, the song is a duet where a man tries to convince a woman to spend the night at his place – ostensibly because of the weather – and she gives a series of hesitant excuses why she must leave. Stars who have performed it include Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Dean Martin, Lady Gaga and Tom Jones. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/32WST0G

From travelogues to Banzai, there’s a history of portraying the country as kooky and odd – saying more about its makers than its subject It just feels so alien! So other! So extraordinarily strange!” So said Sue Perkins as she walked across Tokyo’s most crowded zebra crossing in the opening sequence of her travelogue. But shouldn’t this all be more familiar by now? Related: The 40 best TV shows coming this autumn Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PtIR32

Swift and two other songwriters are accused of taking lyrics from a song by girl group 3LW for her hit Shake It Off A copyright lawsuit against Taylor Swift is returning to court in the US, after an appeal overturned an earlier dismissal of the case. Swift and her fellow songwriters Max Martin and Shellback are accused of copying lyrics from the 2001 song Players Gon’ Play by US girl group 3LW, for Swift’s song Shake It Off. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2MYKl3T

From Florence to London, Krakow to St Petersburg, galleries show off their prized paintings in this impressive, authoritative documentary The prolific Exhibitions on Screen strand takes a step away from its normal practice of surveying specific gallery spaces by assembling a virtual exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci ’s paintings in a way no art gallery – not even the Louvre ( currently showing seven ) – can manage. The result is undeniably impressive: a whistle-stop tour of masterpieces that hops from one Leonardo venue to another. London’s National Gallery shows off its Virgin of the Rocks, the Uffizi in Florence its Annunciation, St Petersburg’s Hermitage its Benois Madonna, the National museum in Krakow’s Lady With an Ermine. (A nice touch: the local curators get to wax lyrical about their particular Leonardo.) Of course, viewing a painting through the documentary lens is never quite the same, but the cumulative effect of seeing one masterwork after another roll across the screen is

In the 60s and 70s, we sent postcards with brief and often hilarious descriptions of holiday romances, disasters and weather. Collector Tom Jackson posted his favourites on Twitter on @PastPostcard . Now, they are in a book, Postcard from the Past , published by 4th Estate Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/36hDVUT

James Marcus writes a personal essay about his divorce and contending with his and his son’s disillusionment among the rides at Disneyland. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/349k7Bf

Deborah Treisman hosts the author Tiphanie Yanique, who reads her short story “God’s Caravan,” from the November 4, 2019, issue of The New Yorker. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2MThnST

Rozina Ali on Indian asylum seekers who are going on hunger strike to protest abusive conditions at ICE detention centers at the U.S. border. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2WllPNa

2/5 starsIf you had the ability to see people’s fate, to know when they were about to die, would you tell them? Even if it jeopardised your own life? This is the quandary at the heart of Fortuna’s Eye, Takahiro Miki’s misty-eyed adaptation of Naoki Hyakuta’s bestselling novel.Ryunosuke Kamiki plays Shinichiro, a young loner who works at a garage polishing luxury sports cars. Orphaned from an early age, after a plane crash that he survived but his parents didn’t, “Shin” has developed the ability… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2WkLeXk

In an era of uncertainty and anxiety, New York theatre is shunning its obsession with private lives to throw a powerful spotlight on politics It used to be argued that British drama is driven by a fascination with public affairs and its American counterpart by a preoccupation with private lives. On the evidence of a week’s intensive theatregoing in New York, I would suggest that hoary generalisation has been blown to smithereens. At a time of potential impeachment , political polarisation and profound uncertainty, American theatre seems to be heavily engaged with the wider world. The most surprising – and controversial – new play I encountered was Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning at Playwrights Horizons . It offers a direct rebuttal to the stock charge that modern drama simply reflects the liberal assumptions of the theatregoing audience. Arbery writes about a group of deeply conservative Catholic friends who meet in Wyoming for the installation of a new president at their

Books by two of the company’s key players shed light on our current political malaise Hindsight is the only exact science, as these two books confirm. Chris Wylie and Brittany Kaiser are two youngish, idealistic, clever people who got involved in some very dark stuff orchestrated by unscrupulous operators. Eventually, both realised they had become accomplices to activities that were at best unethical and at worst illegal, realisations that prompted them to break loose and blow the whistle. And both their memoirs, though very different in style and tone, are attempts to atone for the societal damage their respective collaborations with the devil have done. But there the similarities end. Wylie is an unorthodox, gay Canadian who is passionately interested in fashion; Kaiser is a straight, liberal American interested in human rights and other humanitarian causes. And yet both were ensnared in the same net: a sinister dirty-tricks, election-manipulating “consultancy” outfit called SCL run

From a body-positive activist to ‘good fatties who work out’, this fascinating reality show brings together nine people to tackle all the biggest questions about their weight It’s the simplest of formulas – put X number of people united by one common factor and differing in almost all other respects in front of cameras and let what will be be – but when it works, it really works. In Who Are You Calling Fat? (BBC Two) it is the turn of nine people living with obesity to be brought together under one Oxfordshire roof for a month to examine attitudes to fatness. At one end of the spectrum is gastric-banded 57-year-old Del, who was previously 25st, and had many health issues, together with side-effects from the drug he takes to control them. At the other end of the spectrum is Victoria, a fat-positive advocate and activist who calls bariatric surgery “stomach amputation” and considers “overweight” and “obese” to be offensive terms that carry unnecessary moral implications by suggesting

On this week’s show, we look at endangered languages around the world and how poets and publishers are fighting to keep them alive. Sian sits down with Chris McCabe from the National Poetry Library, which has been asking the public to contribute to a database of endangered languages since 2017. The resulting anthology, Poems from the Edge of Extinction, features poems in languages from Assyrian to Zoque. Two poets in the collection – Valzhyna Mort, who writes in Belarusian, and Vaughan Rapatahana, who writes in Te Reo – talk about their efforts to spread awareness of their languages. And Clive Boutle, who runs independent publisher Francis Boutle , comes into the studio to talk about his mission to preserve minority languages by publishing poetry in Livonian, Kernewek, Scottish Gaelic, Catalan, Frisian and many more. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/36bdKiK

One of the most fascinatingly strange and unpredictable films of 1999 still carries with it more pleasures to be discovered When Being John Malkovich opened in 1999, nobody knew the name of its screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, who’d spent the previous 15 years laboring in the comedy salt mines, submitting articles on spec to National Lampoon, writing a number of unproduced pilots, and landing gigs on short-lived (if beloved) sketch shows like Get a Life and The Dana Carvey Show. Yet as soon as it premiered – and for every project he did afterwards – it was talked about as a Charlie Kaufman film, even though it was directed by Spike Jonze, whose work on innovative commercials and videos for Weezer (Buddy Holly), Beastie Boys (Sabotage), and others had earned him a reputation as one of the most sought-after talents in the business. This was virtually unprecedented; even Robert Towne, whose script for Chinatown is frequently cited among the best ever written, wasn’t credited over its direc

The actor is selling more than 500 items, including memorabilia from the hit film, to raise funds for her cancer treatment centre Olivia Newton-John’s black leather jacket and tight black pants from the 1978 musical film Grease – complete with a broken zipper – will be auctioned this week as the top item in a sale to help raise money for Newton-John’s cancer treatment centre in Australia. The outfit that marks the character’s transition from demure high-schooler to sexy Sandy Olson in her final duet with John Travolta, You’re the One That I Want, is expected to fetch up to $200,000, Julien’s Auctions said. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/344wuhY

Juggling a $200m deal with Netflix, David Benioff and DB Weiss are ditching their Star Wars trilogy, saying they ‘could not do justice to both’ Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and DB Weiss have announced they are dropping out of Disney Lucasfilm’s upcoming Star Wars trilogy, citing a Netflix commitment which has left them not enough time to do both. Benioff and Weiss’ deal with Disney Lucasfilm was highly publicised when announced in February 2018 . Under the agreement the pair would write and produce the new films to sit outside of the franchise’s main film storyline, which finishes this December with The Rise of Skywalker . Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/32XL9vs

Judd Apatow and Brad Bird have both voiced opposition to a new test feature that will allow consumers to speed-watch certain titles Netflix is facing a backlash from film-makers over a new test feature that allows viewers to watch their content at different speeds. After tech sites spotted the new option on the app, the streaming giant confirmed that it was trialling the feature which would mean downloaded films and shows could be watched at either a slower or faster pace on a smartphone. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PsmRpw

Equity publishes guidance for entertainment professionals working with LGBT+ actors The actors’ union Equity has called for more casting directors to consider hiring transgender performers to play non-trans characters. In guidance for entertainment professionals working with LGBT+ performers, published on Monday, the union said some trans actors were better suited to playing characters who were cisgender – meaning their gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NjhlCL

Occultists are asked to contact a dead child in this chilling novel redolent of 70s folk-horror Andrew Michael Hurley has been carving out a niche for himself as a notable writer of modern gothic since the success of his Costa-winning debut, The Loney , and his third novel, Starve Acre , offers an atmospheric tale in the same tradition of English folk-horror. Hurley has a fine talent for evoking the menace of his northern landscapes Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2WqSEs7

By Jason LimSulli was a 25-year-old actress who made her debut when she was only 11 years old and joined the K-pop girl group f(x) at age 15, leaving the group in 2014, reportedly due to malicious and unfounded online attacks. Ironically and tragically, she was most recently the host of a TV show trying to educate the public about the harms of cyberbullying, even reading out loud some of the online comments that she has had to deal with.The anonymity and ubiquity of online platforms make it too… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/36dbXd4

Phelan also performed in a range of local television series including Homicide, Blue Heelers and Neighbours Australian actor Anne Phelan, best known for her role in long-running television series Prisoner – known as Prisoner Cell Block H in the UK – has died at the age of 75. Phelan has been a well-known face on Australian screens since her television debut in 1968, with recurring roles in popular and acclaimed local series including Homicide, Blue Heelers, Neighbours, and Winners and Losers. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2WkEQzt

29% of parents of children with special needs felt unwelcome and 42% were made to feel uncomfortable on visits Britain’s heritage attractions are not as inclusive as they should be, according to a damning survey. The research found that more than a quarter of parents of children with special needs (29%) have felt unwelcome at a museum, gallery, theatre, stately home or castle, even to the point of being asked to leave. Only 13% of parents of children without special needs had similar experiences. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/34cHoT7

Going against the flow, this new series treats lauded amateur MCs not as struggling artists but as fodder for shameless sneering and mockery Three years ago, Vice made a documentary called Blackpool: The Controversial Rise of Blackpool Grime, followed a year later by a sequel. Both looked at the enormous popularity of grime music among the young, mostly poor kids in Blackpool who had adopted it, and gave participants in this unlikely scene a human face. What a shame It’s Grime Up North (Channel 4, 2 stars) could not locate the same level of empathy. This new three-part series follows some of the same people who found fame on the YouTube channel Blackpool Grime Media, and then in the Vice films, but it adds in a few others, too. The first episode homes in on Little T, the best-known face of Blackpool grime, who was a curly-haired, baby-faced, foul-mouthed 11-year-old when he started out. Now, he has millions of views for his tracks, but no obvious way of turning this into a sustainabl

Facing down fascists in the BBC’s Philip Pullman adaptation is child’s play for an actor whose improv left Wolverine speechless. The prodigy talks jellyfish, religion and her night out with Lin-Manuel Miranda Dafne Keen does not much look like Lyra Belacqua, at least not as Philip Pullman describes her in His Dark Materials. In Northern Lights , the first book of the trilogy, she is “like a half-wild cat”, with dirty fingernails, green eyes and grubby blond-ish hair. Keen, who is half British, half Spanish and lives in Madrid, is darker and is already the master of an intense glare, as anyone who saw her alongside Hugh Jackman in the Wolverine swansong Logan will know. When we meet, in a London hotel, she has the self-possessed cool of a total pro, even at 14. But there are plenty of Lyra-esque flourishes that make it obvious why she got the part. She was almost 12 when she finished filming Logan. She had heard about the BBC/HBO adaptation of His Dark Materials , then in its early s

Lenny Henry is heartfelt and contrite about pandering to bigotry as a young comic “Lenny Henry owes me an apology,’’ said a black friend recently. “For all those years when he told unfunny jokes against black people on TV, Lenny owes me.” But, focusing on the first decade of his career, Henry argues in his memoir, Who Am I, Again? , that for a black performer to survive in the world of 1970s light entertainment it was best “to get all the dodgy jokes in before [the audience] did”. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NnjKMC

Bamboo shoots, char sui and mashed potatoes … Sue Cheung remembers the highs and lows of growing up above her parents’ restaurant Most teenagers want to leave home to experience their first taste of independence. I just wanted to move to a place where the door didn’t go “ding” every time someone walked through it. We moved to Coventry in the early 80s, when I was just coming up to my teens and the new-romantic movement was at its peak. Back then, it was enough of a concern trying to get my hair to flick right, so when we ended up living in a Chinese takeaway I panicked about the grease wilting my fringe. Little did I know that was to be the least of my worries. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/32SGCKD

The director has unleashed his latest broadside against Broken Britain. But with escapist cinema on the rise, can the genre survive? Modern Toss on social-realist cinema When it comes to keeping it real, Ken Loach is in a league of his own. For more than five decades, he has carried the torch for British social realism; that fine tradition of everyday, usually working-class drama that has produced some of the most powerful, important cinema of our times. But 83-year-old Loach is practically the last man standing. He is like the David Attenborough of British cinema: when he goes, what will happen? Loach already announced his retirement in 2014, before returning to make I, Daniel Blake . Now he is back with Sorry We Missed You , which tallies the toll of the gig economy on a hard-up Newcastle upon Tyne family. Promises of “being your own boss” come with ruthless terms and conditions for delivery driver Ricky, while his care-worker wife contends with exploitative employers, difficul

After films like The Wicker Man and Midsommar, grisly visions of the countryside have made the leap from screen to page, writes horror author Andrew Michael Hurley The British countryside is rich with dark tales, and while the term “folk horror” might be more popularly associated with film – think Edward Woodward facing pagan sacrifice on a remote Scottish island in 1973’s The Wicker Man – the last few years have seen a growing number of literary horror stories. Think of Jenn Ashworth’s Fell , set on the eerie mudflats of Morecambe Bay, or Kerry Andrew’s Swansong, with its ominous dead birds, as well as the recent anthologies The Fiends in the Furrows and This Dreaming Isle . These stories don’t have to be supernatural. The “horror” in folk horror can often stem from isolation, and the permission remoteness seems to give to human depravity, as in Fiona Mozley’s Booker-shortlisted Elmet and Benjamin Myers’ The Gallows Pole , each set in rural Yorkshire. In both, seclusion enables

On the actor’s birthday, our critic picks three key performances that illuminate her gift for earthy honesty Joan Plowright, who celebrates her 90th birthday today, is the senior figure in a remarkable generation of actors including Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Eileen Atkins, all celebrated in the film Nothing Like a Dame . Her marriage to Laurence Olivier inevitably made her part of showbiz aristocracy but Plowright brought to British theatre a quality of earthiness and emotional directness shared by near-contemporaries such as Albert Finney , Peter O’Toole and Billie Whitelaw . As the daughter of a Lincolnshire newspaper editor, she could hardly be called working-class yet she was part of a movement that helped British theatre shed its aura of evasive gentility. You could, for the sake of convenience, divide Plowright’s working life into three phases: her Royal Court period, her National Theatre years and her post-National freelance career. Continue reading... from Culture | T

The American writer’s extraordinary novella tells the story of one man’s fall from grace with real nerve Ostensibly, it seems quite shameless of Serpent’s Tail to have put Mary Gaitskill’s This Is Pleasure between hard covers. Her novella runs to a mere 84 tiny pages, each one printed in a typeface so large, the middle-aged will not even need to put on their glasses to read it; the story has, moreover, already appeared in its entirety in the New Yorker . But, in the present moment, this is an incendiary volume. Having read it twice, I’ve come to feel that Gaitskill’s immaculate words demand such a protective casing – though I could probably have done without the pouting lipstick kisses that adorn it. This Is Pleasure is a response to #MeToo. Specifically, it would appear to be a response to the Google spreadsheet called Shitty Media Men (a list of allegations about various individuals in American publishing) that circulated on the internet in 2017. The tale is told, in alternate c

From Shackleton in the Antarctic to Edmund White on the Aids crisis, Emily Chappell rounds up stories of survival “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” is the weary conclusion of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnam able , a sentiment that, whether or not Beckett intended it, captures the inherent tension in acts of endurance. Whether that is cycling nearly 4,000 miles across Europe in less than a fortnight, or journeying through life itself, it can sometimes seem impossible or unbearable for mind, body and spirit to continue, and yet somehow they keep going, always fearing that the seemingly impossible may indeed prove to be so. Failure was at the heart of Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 expedition to Antarctica, his ship Endurance crushed by pack ice. The journey, as recounted in his book South , was remarkable not only because the entire 28-man crew survived their estrangement from the world for 22 months, but also for the relative good humour Shackleton reports. Continue reading... from Culture | The

The author Tiffanie Yanique discusses “God’s Caravan,” her story from the November 4, 2019, issue of The New Yorker. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2Jq2O7i

Françoise Mouly talks to the artist Richard McGuire about his cover for the November 4, 2019, issue of The New Yorker. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2BKKh1f

Shouts & Murmurs by Bob Odenkirk: In an early version of the Book of Matthew, our narrator toils over finding the right metaphor. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2pj29NZ

Poetry by T. R. Hummer: “I foresaw my own undoing in the slow, clumsy flight / of pelicans over Lake Maurepas.” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2WjOt1e

Letters respond to Joan Acocella’s article on reading “Gilgamesh” and Dana Goodyear’s Profile of Thomas Joshua Cooper. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2osdUBm

New cartoons from the magazine. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2MSVanP

Arthur Krystal on the gift of a long life and whether we are really grateful for it. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/36aF0xU

Corey Morris on a couple who had planned to get married at the Monster Lake Ranch before Kanye West bought the property. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2BPIlEE

Playing Richard Hendricks, the angsty, low-E.Q. coder and star of “Silicon Valley,” required no research for the Internet-native Middleditch, Dana Goodyear writes. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/31Tq6bX

Raffi Khatchadourian on Tiversa, which dominated an emerging online market before it was accused of fraud, extortion, and manipulating the federal government.  from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2pafNDc

Fiction by Tiphanie Yanique: “ ‘Ride or die,’ the electric mouths shouted. ‘Amen,’ the mouths of the boys shouted back.” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/31VO8CZ

Until recently, the piece hung on a wall in the home of an unsuspecting elderly woman in northern France. The painting fetched about five times more than its initial estimate. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://www.dw.com/en/art-masterpiece-discovered-in-woman-s-kitchen-sells-for-€24-million/a-51008771?maca=en-rss-en-cul-2090-rdf

The singer opens up about her tumultuous relationships with the ‘bad boy’ of French music and her late daughter Jane Birkin will always be France’s favourite “petite Anglaise”, but few will have even guessed at the depth of the insecurity suffered by the “little English girl” – until today. The British-born actress and singer captured Gallic hearts when, aged 21 and the epitome of London’s Sixties cool, she took up with singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg – 20 years her senior and the bad boy of French popular music. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/31Jbagw

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Kevin Dettmar revisits the poet T. S. Eliot’s seminal essay on literary criticism and reflects on its broad influence in the field. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/32RPaBw

Hampstead theatre, London The painter resembles a drunken YBA in a flawed but timely show that veers from camp humour to political intrigue ‘This is not just a play, it’s an extravaganza,” says the painter Sandro Botticelli , as he swigs from a bottle of wine and addresses the audience. He might be right. Botticelli in the Fire is staged in audacious ways but it feels more like multimedia performance art with a play tucked in-between. It features Botticelli as a rock’n’roll artist living in politically dangerous times; its mashup of historical fact and fiction revolves around the ideological clashes between liberals, elites and the masses, the latter of whom rise up in 15th-century Florence, first to dismantle the ruling class and then to mobilise in a wave of anti-liberal zealotry that leads to the persecution of “sodomites”. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2JsuBUt

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London After a year of tragedy, the spotlight-shy producer stays in the shadows during this erratic yet utterly mesmerising set T ricky has always been allergic to celebrity. When his 1995 debut album, Maxinquaye, went No 3 and made him a media darling, his horrified reaction was to dismiss the “coffee-table” record and the trip-hop movement it birthed, and to move his music firmly left field to evade unwanted critical hyperbole. This aversion to the limelight was best illustrated when he was an unlikely guest during Beyoncé’s headline set at Glastonbury in 2011 . Trapped in the spotlights before roughly 100,000 people and a TV audience of millions, he froze, unable to deliver his verse. “I told the press my mic wasn’t working,” he later admitted. “It was working fine.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/31MLtLX

This rich collection of stories from cold war Berlin captures the city’s many complexities “Berlin resembles the Holy Roman Empire, described by the great jurist Pufendorff as Monstro Simile – like unto a Monster. Seek not to understand – only to preserve!” With these words, old Dr Kohn, the Bonn embassy’s legal adviser, would begin the induction of each incoming British ambassador into the mysteries of divided Berlin. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/369KmcJ

Royal Academy; National Gallery, London Lucian Freud’s presence pulses menacingly throughout a thrilling show of self-portraits, while Gauguin, in a neighbouring blockbuster, sees himself as the suffering outsider The first picture in the Royal Academy’s exhibition of self-portraits by Lucian Freud dates from 1948 and is titled Startled Man . It is a pencil drawing, but you would no more refer to it as a sketch than you would refer to a three-course dinner as a snack. Freud would have been 25 when he made it and, if not already married (to Kitty Garman , one of Jacob Epstein’s daughters), then soon to be so – and in some ways, its immaculacy seems to speak to that moment. The artist’s depiction of his youthful self is boyishly sensual: his lips like pillows, his skin as smooth as a sheet stretched over a mattress. Freud’s new status must, at the time, have seemed surprising, not to say alarming, and here he bottles that incredulity for posterity. You can almost hear the sharp intake

Sarah Kempa humorously writes and illustrates a pep talk for a person’s wardrobe of jumpsuits. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/31TU1AB

Inspired by the upheaval in his native Colombia, Alejandro Landes’s story of teenage guerrillas descending into anarchy is a hypnotic triumph This second fiction feature from Colombian-Ecuadorian writer-director Alejandro Landes is a dizzying fable of child soldiery that plunges its audience headfirst into an immersive world of war and adolescence. Brilliantly played by a youthful ensemble cast, and accompanied by a breathtaking Mica Levi score, it is alternately sensuous and scary, thrilling and appalling, with a dark heart of horror at its core. We open on a remote mountaintop, where a ragtag band of teenagers plays blindfolded football. These are the titular Monos (alluding to the Greek word for “alone”) – a guerrilla outfit overseen by a fearsome “Messenger”, who teaches them that “we work for the Organisation; the Organisation is our family!” They have cartoonish noms de guerre (Rambo, Dog, Wolf, Boom Boom) and lead a regimented life amid a landscape of surreal stone structures,

A new literary genre offering escape and insight has sprung up Some are epic tales of the ancient kings who battled to rule Britain. Others are books about bakers in abandoned northern towns or novels about mild-mannered fascists in 1930s rural England. As works of fiction go, they do not seem to have much in common – but together, they represent the growth of a subtle and complex new movement in contemporary British literature: Brexlit. Brexlit is uniting literary authors across genres, settings and sales brackets. And unlike nonfiction about Brexit, it offers escape as well as insight: an opportunity to understand the nuances of Britain’s decision to leave the EU in a fictional world where, possibly, no such vote has ever taken place. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2WjGCkw

Wendell Pierce, the Duchess of Sussex’s co-star on the legal drama Suits, feared for her privacy after her engagement The actor Wendell Pierce reveals today he warned Meghan Markle, his former co-star on the legal drama Suits , that her world would be “forever changed” by her relationship with Prince Harry. Pierce, 55, who played Robert Zane, a successful lawyer and father to Markle’s character, Rachel Zane, on the show, worked alongside Markle for four years after joining the series in 2013. “It was great,” he recalled. “She’s a really good actress and was always sweet, always kind.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2JoJHdN

This avian-themed collection – mixed with stories of hangovers and red carpets – is witty, insightful and fabulously bizarre You can never predict how – or where – a Paul Farley poem is going to land. This hugely enjoyable collection The Mizzy (nickname for a mistle thrush) is, among other things, a birder’s book. The birds are scattered as in life – they alight between poems on other subjects. They have something of John Clare ’s style or disarming lack of it (Farley was editor of a selection of Clare’s poems for Faber in 2007). Like Clare, Farley is comradely towards nature, his bird’s-eye view is respectful, his anthropomorphism not belittling. But he has his own wit and singular insights. What the robin shows him as it hops ahead, he passes on, a plain expression of a good thought: “... showing us where the edge/ of the present moment is”. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2qJhWWE

With flying debris and strong female leads, the franchise’s opportunistic sixth film gets the job done The year is 2022 and in Mexico City, a terminator just dropped out of the sky. A sleek Rev-9 model (Gabriel Luna) has been sent from the future to kill factory worker Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes). Lucky for Dani, she is soon flanked by two avenging angels; Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), still around and hunting terminators, and an augmented human soldier named Grace (Mackenzie Davis, of Black Mirror ’s San Junipero episode) who has time-travelled to serve as her protector. Arnie’s T-800 is also back (he said he would be), providing extra muscle and cheap laughs about interior design. Though it’s the sixth film in the Terminator franchise, this instalment follows on directly from 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day , a way of discarding the series’ less celebrated outings. As a genre exercise, it mostly works; set pieces are tense, explosive and pleasingly gory, littered with flying scr

The designer and his partner Pierre Bergé are seen at the height of their success, but permission to screen it was refused In 1998 a young filmmaker called Olivier Meyrou was invited by Pierre Bergé, the long-term partner of Yves Saint-Laurent, to film the pair at the height of their success. He spent three years capturing the most intimate moments of their everyday lives, forming a close circle of trust. But when the film found a distributor Bergé insisted the footage never be seen, despite not having seen any of it himself. In 2015, two years before his death, Bergé finally gave permission for it to be shown and now, nearly two decades after filming was wrapped up, 11 years after Saint-Laurent died, Yves Saint-Laurent: The Last Collections will be released in cinemas this week. Despite what he calls an “ugly fight”, Meyrou insists there is no bad blood. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2MSdBJr

2019 has been the UK rapper’s breakout year. He talks about how drum’n’bass informed his style – and why Boris Johnson is ‘a very small man’ "Yo, it’s the hyperman set, AJ Tracey, live and direct!” Roll down a car window or scroll the radio dial over the past few months and Ladbroke Grove, the no-frills garage tune by the west London rapper, will have no doubt been making the speakers shake. Tracey’s track, with its pitched-up sample from soul singer Jorja Smith, cut through all the season’s Latin-flavoured pop, functional house and endless Ed Sheeran singles and still sits, unbudged, in the charts, a feelgood summer hit that refuses to accept that autumn is here. Tracey, whose real name is Ché (after Guevara) Wolton Grant, though he usually goes by his stage name, has been having a breakthrough year. In February, he self-released his debut album, which has since become the second-biggest album of 2019 by an independent musician; to cap it off, he’s playing two sold-out nights a

The former Lord Varys on Antony Gormley, Strictly, and his lifelong literary companion, Stephen King Born in 1964 in Ballycastle , Northern Ireland , Conleth Hill graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1988. He made his Broadway debut in Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets , which earned him a Tony nomination and an Olivier best actor award in 2001 . Between 2011 and 2019 Hill played Lord Varys in Game of Thrones , and he recently appeared as former Observer editor Roger Alton in Official Secrets and BBC drama Dublin Murders . He currently stars in Annie Baker’s The Antipodes , at the National Theatre until 23 November . Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2pkSu9w

Nirvana frontman wore the jumper on MTV Unplugged, months before his death A cardigan worn by Kurt Cobain during Nirvana’s appearance on MTV Unplugged has sold for $334,000 (£260,388) at auction, making it the most expensive sweater to go under the hammer. The olive green Manhattan brand acrylic and mohair cardigan was sold during Julien’s Auctions’ two-day auction of rock memorabilia at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York. The auction house described it as “one of the most famous sweaters in music history”. Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York was recorded at Sony Music Studios in front of a live audience five months before Cobain killed himself on April 5, 1994. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2pWVp8k

Brian Dillon writes about Sage Sohier’s photography book “Animals,” which depicts people with their animals. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/31NY41t

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A quarter century after grunge’s enigmatic rhapsodist took his own life, Kurt Cobain’s iconic cigarette-singed cardigan worn during Nirvana’s 1993 “Unplugged” performance has sold for US$334,000.The tattered, olive-green, Manhattan-brand, button-up sweater, which has never been washed since Cobain wore it, came with dark stains and a burn hole.The seller, Garrett Kletjian, owner of Forty7 Motorsports, bought it four years ago for US$137,500.“This cardigan, it’s the holy grail of any article of… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2pgsI6r

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