Cultural News Today

More shiny, happy people from Korean television central casting seem to have dropped into Start-Up (Netflix, series one now streaming). Well-heeled, high-flying and in hi-tech, they glow with success and ambition – at least superficially. A closer look, however, shows some of those heels to be scuffed, success to be a light at the end of an elongated tunnel and ambition a pipe dream, where it’s not a nightmare. K-pop goddess Bae Suzy is Seo Dal-mi, who, as an aspiring technology entrepreneur,… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3mzJgOK

Half of the community’s eligible voters haven’t cast their ballots yet. The work done by volunteers could prove decisive. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3kPkcTE

Twice, the popular K-pop group known for their catchy lyrics and colourful aesthetics, invite listeners to explore the band’s more daring side on their second full album.The all-female group made their debut in 2015 and have achieved success in both South Korea and Japan.“Eyes Wide Open” was released on Monday and features 13 songs, including the lead single, I Can’t Stop Me. The members hope to follow in the footsteps of breakout K-pop acts BTS and Blackpink by cracking the US market and… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3efqRE3

Sean Connery, who rose to super-stardom after playing James Bond in the 1960s and early 1970s, has died at the age of 90, his family told the BBC. from https://ift.tt/3jG0at7

Famous for many roles including that of James Bond, actor Sean Connery has died. He rose to fame as James Bond and stole the hearts of women all over the world. Later, he won awards with character roles. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/37YrTDm

Multiple award-winning Scottish actor best known for 007 role in seven spy films Sean Connery , the Scottish actor best known for his portrayal of James Bond, has died aged 90. The cause is not yet known. He was admired by generations of film fans as the original and best 007, and went on to create a distinguished body of work in films such as The Man Who Would Be King, The Name of the Rose and The Untouchables. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3jFWQOF

Season 4 of The Crown, which will debut on November 16 on Netflix, is making headlines thanks to the long-awaited arrival of a key character in the seemingly never-ending royal saga: a young Diana Spencer, played by British actress Emma Corrin.Created by Peter Morgan, the series has received accolades for its clever dramatisation of the history of the house of Windsor, dating back to Queen Elizabeth’s early days as a young girl who did not expect to be enthroned at the age of 25.Amy Roberts,… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3jIgUjG

Twelve celebs, including Tom Watson and Jodie Kidd, row the length of Britain in a show that has the perfect mix of silliness and suffering Freddie Flintoff is standing at the top of a cliff commanding Shaun from The Chase to run down it face-forward. Jack Fincham from Love Island shivers with fear. Sometimes, reality TV can jump over the blade-thin line from “bombastic TV set-piece” to “harrowing vision of a dystopian Britain”, and at many points, Don’t Rock the Boat (Monday, 9pm, ITV) does exactly that. Am I really watching Jodie Kidd row to Ullapool while Craig Charles both cacks himself and vomits? I am, and it’s fascinating . Before I explain the broad structure of Don’t Rock the Boat, I would like to take a moment to ask ITV’s producers to reach out to me and inform me of the exact names, dosages and source of whatever black market stimulants they are taking, because this is the kind of idea I have after I drop a Jägermeister into a glass of wine so hard I can see through time:

First published in 1969, Mario Puzo’s novel is a page-turning fable of 20th-century America – and now it is a set text for politicians in Washington and Westminster Mario Puzo’s The Godfather now functions the way fairytales or Bible stories do. It’s become a fundamental narrative deeply embedded in the collective psyche, regularly adapted and reworked for radically different settings. Stripped to its essentials, this is a story of unwanted succession, of an heir to the throne who yearns to escape his destiny. “What Michael wanted was out, out of all this, to lead his own life,” Puzo writes. Watch the first season of The Crown and you soon realise that it is The Godfather narrative that is unfolding before you, with a young Elizabeth cast as the reluctant heir who, like Michael Corleone, “couldn’t cut loose from the family until the crisis was over”. Michael, son of mafia boss Don Corleone, is the archetypal prince who cannot be free, and is eventually transformed and hardened by

Hannibal Lecter, the guy from “Saw,” Freddy Krueger, and other creepy characters closing in. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3kKmsLN

She doesn’t believe in a stiff upper lip, or pretending – unless it’s for work. The actor talks about her split with Tim Burton, friendship with Johnny Depp, and playing the Queen’s sister Ding-dong, it’s the doorbell. And look who’s standing on my rain-sodden doorstep, it’s Helena Bonham Carter . In her stompy, clumpy boots and dark floral ruffled dress, curls piled on top of her head, she looks so exactly herself – which is to say, like a Victorian goth drawn in charcoal – that she could be an actor playing a character playing Helena Bonham Carter. Which, to a certain degree, she is. “I love dressing up and creating myself, as it were, according to the day and the mood. But it’s an illusion, because then the Daily Mail photographs you, and you see it and think, that wasn’t what I meant at all,” she says as we walk into my kitchen and I compliment her outfit. Her fashion sense – invariably described as quirky (“God, quirky ,” she says, as if repeating a doctor’s fatal diagnosis) – h

The satirist who skewered the 1980s in What a Carve Up! is approaching elder statesman status. He talks about Brexit, prizes, cancel culture – and his Hollywood hero Billy Wilder One Sunday evening in 1975 in a leafy suburb of Birmingham, 14-year-old Jonathan Coe put off his school dread by switching on the telly. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was on BBC One, the beginning of the author’s lifelong fascination with director Billy Wilder, who was to become “a far more influential figure on the way that I write than any novelist,” he says, 45 years later. Such was the impact on the young Coe that he started recording the soundtracks of his favourite films from the TV so he could lie in bed listening to Wilder on his Walkman until “the rhythm to his dialogue kind of seeped into my subconscious”. That screening “set a lot of ripples in motion,” he says (young film buffs Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat also watched it that evening, leading to the hit TV series Sherlock ). Coe’s latest

Returning to the role of the duke’s curious young bride after the enforced silence of lockdown, Karen Cargill found Bartók’s opera more powerful and troubling than ever We all know Bluebeard. From Jane Eyre to Kubrick’s The Shining, his castle has become shorthand for a place where dark secrets lurk behind locked doors, and the man himself has become a synonym for evil. Today’s Merriam-Webster dictionary defines Bluebeard as “a man who marries and kills one wife after another”. But what of his young bride, his final wife? Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HRnp6D

From ghostly spaceships to zombies in a haunted shopping mall, author Daisy Johnson selects tales to give you goosebumps It is that time of year again. The tree branches are beginning to show through, the ground is soggy with fallen red and orange leaves, the supermarket shelves are filled with pumpkins. With many of us working from home – or struggling to find work – and unable to see family or friends, small joys become large. This is the time of year to sit in the darkening evenings by a fire and read a book, preferably an unsettling or scary one. Luckily, we are spoilt for choice in this regard and many authors have been turning recently to the weird and the uncanny. Short stories have always been a brilliant place to go to find horror and revel in the strange. The last 10 years have produced an abundance of collections worthy of visiting. Kelly Link’s astounding Get in Trouble has haunting tales about ghostly spaceships and warehouses filled with sleeping people. Friday Black

The last white rhino, a stolen inheritance, terrifying sea journeys and some ballet dancing bunnies This month there’s an emphasis on change and transition, loss and hopefulness. In picture books, Nicola Davies’s Last (Tiny Owl) is inspired by the true story of Sudan, the last male northern white rhino. Having lost his mother to poachers, a captive rhino lives in a near-monochrome environment with other “lasts” of their species – a sad contrast to the colourful landscapes he remembers. Once returned to the wild, though, he finds he may not be the last after all. Pulling no punches, but inspiring the reader to fight for nature against all odds, the book is delicately balanced between sorrow and hope. Hope is also invoked in Rain Before Rainbows (Walker) by Smriti Halls and David Litchfield. First released as a free ebook, this dreamlike vision of a girl and fox travelling from darkness and difficulty to a blaze of morning light offers, with its few well-chosen words and heart-liftin

The poet, film-maker, photographer and former young people’s laureate for London talks about growing up on the North Peckham estate and his debut collection, Poor Every Monday when Caleb Femi was a young boy in the 1990s, the walkways in the housing estate where he lived with his parents and four siblings were swabbed down with a detergent that smelled of bubblegum. Home was “one bedroom and seven bodies making do” on the 13th floor of a tower block: “But all of a sudden that space was transformed by my eight-year-old imagination into a wonderland where everything felt shiny and bouncy,” he says. “Mondays were my favourite days.” London’s North Peckham estate takes centre-stage in his debut poetry collection, Poor , which has been hailed as “stunning” and “revelatory”, gathering advance praise from a stream of fans including British screenwriter and actor Michaela Coel and the American political sonneteer Terrance Hayes . Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://i

Shodai Horiren got her first tattoo as a lark on a trip to Australia nearly three decades ago. Now, tattooed head to foot, even on her shaven scalp, she is one of Japan’s most renowned traditional tattoo artists.“Your house gets old, your parents die, you break up with a lover, kids grow and go,” said Horiren, 52, at her studio just north of Tokyo. “But a tattoo is with you until you’re cremated and in your grave. That’s the appeal.”Horiren belongs to a proud, growing tribe of Japanese ink… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/37Z95Uf

From a profile written when he was a state politician to an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, the former President has a long history in the magazine’s pages. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3mHkSuu

The last Democrat to win statewide office says many Republicans privately lament Trump’s incompetence. “The question is: Will they now follow through in the voting booth?” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/320f5ID

3.5/5 starsSocially conscious Hong Kong feature films are rapidly becoming extinct. Given that commercial film financiers are allergic to content that might appear even remotely unfriendly to Beijing’s narrative, and creative expression risks being further curtailed by the ill-defined yet all-encompassing reach of the national security law, it is unlikely we will ever again see a movie make even mild mention of the city’s political reality.All of which makes Apart feel like a last hurrah… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/34HqAXe

Lavish new television period drama The Singapore Grip is set in the Lion City and features stunning locations – all of which are in Malaysia.Based on the third book in J.G. Farrell’s Empire trilogy, published in 1978, the story revolves around rubber barons Mr Webb (Charles Dance) and Walter Blackett (David Morrissey) against the backdrop of the fall of Singapore. But the production team found the city state too gleamingly modern and urban to fit the bill for the early 1940s. Instead they… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3mAWdb6

“There is zero spontaneity in life.”Jhumpa Lahiri is telling me about her disorienting return to work at Princeton Uni­versity, where the acclaimed writer is director and professor of creative writing. “We teach everything online, which is strange and frustrating and exhausting. We have no choice.”A weekly coronavirus test is mandatory for anyone spending more than eight hours on campus, in New Jersey, in the United States. Lahiri can’t go anywhere without being checked in and out. “They want… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3mHj2dp

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While some women are declining to have kids because of climate change, Mothers Out Front is leveraging the power of a mother’s love to get politicians to take action. from Culture - ELLE https://ift.tt/3emrxHX

For Halloween, writers including Neil Gaiman to Lauren Beukes and Joe Hill reveal the characters who have given them, as well as their readers, the greatest terrors Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3kJQ9fN

It’s been 40 years since he left one of TV’s most iconic roles. But far from being stuck in the shadow of Who, Tom Baker continues to relish its legacy – and lend the franchise his voice “I miss Waitrose terribly,” Tom Baker says in those unmistakable tones. “And Boots, and the places I used to go without realising how dependent I was on them.” The year of coronavirus is treating the veteran actor well on the whole, he explains, “because I live in the country and have a garden and some woodland and a cat and a wife”. But there is a melancholy and a reminder of his own mortality when he does venture out. “When my wife and I go for a spin, I drive to Tenterden [in Kent] and – we don’t sob exactly – but it gets solemn as we catch a glimpse of the hardware store, and Boots, and Waitrose, and then we turn round and come home again. Then I go down to the paradise of my woods and think: ‘Well, eventually it will pass.’ Another voice, of course, says: ‘Yes, but by then you’ll be gone.’” Con

Despite being dismissed as teenage girl fodder, the millennial outfit were influential for a generation of bands The year is 2005, combat trousers inexplicably have tassels and chart music is groaning under the weight of reality TV winners and Crazy Frog . Tweens across the country are crying in front of Newsround because Busted have split, and the last hope of respite from the onslaught of Fame Academies and Pop Idols lies solely at the oversized trainers of a new musical outfit: McFly. For those who had outgrown S Club 7 or couldn’t relate to Blue, there was a creeping adolescent need for something that felt “real”. The scorn towards “key change, stool rise” boybands was beginning to set in, but fully fledged indie rock bands still felt a way off, impenetrable in their “serious” music press and 16+ gigs. Busted proteges McFly provided a credible halfway house: they wrote their own songs, they played their own instruments, they were funny and youthful and cool. Behind every perky Al

There’s a man-eating dragon, new faces and a moral message as the Star Wars spinoff returns to screens with a western-style adventure Spoiler alert: this blog is published after The Mandalorian airs on Disney+ . Do not read unless you have watched season two, episode one. I guess every once in a while both suns shine on a womp rat’s tail – Cobb Vanth Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2JloBjf

Depp victory could mean more libel claims in London courts while Sun win could lead to bolder celebrity stories, say experts It has been three months since the celebrity courtroom battle starring Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard – containing serious and strenuously denied allegations of domestic violence – closed at the Royal Courts of Justice. Now judgment day in the libel case is about to arrive. Ahead of the ruling on Monday, legal experts forecast that victory for Depp could deliver a bonanza of fresh libel claims to the London courts. If the judge finds for the Sun newspaper, which had Heard as its star witness, however, media reporting on public personalities may be emboldened. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/32dUu3Z

More than 100 leading black authors have signed a letter condemning the equalities minister Kemi Badenoch for saying some authors want racial division More than 100 leading black writers including Bernardine Evaristo, Malorie Blackman and Benjamin Zephaniah have condemned recent comments made by equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, in which she claimed that some authors of bestselling anti-racism books “actually want a segregated society”. The letter, signed by 101 members of the Black Writers’ Guild and to be published on Friday, comes days after one of its members, Reni Eddo-Lodge, announced she would be lodging a complaint with the independent press regulator Ipso over the remarks made by Badenoch in the Spectator. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3jGXATY

The roots of el Día de los Muertos are millennia-deep in Indigenous Mexico from Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine https://ift.tt/2HEyUhX

Figures of the ‘wise woman’ Cailleach deity and her family are part of a tradition that may be centuries old The stone family huddle by their turf-roofed shelter, looking eastwards to the shrouded summit of Meall Daill, Perthshire, as the mists roll down from the burnt orange mountainside. The tallest of the figures, still under a foot in height, is a water-worn rock with a feminine torso and slim neck. She is the Cailleach: a seasonal deity in Gaelic mythology who bestrides the winter months, known variously as an earth-shaper, wise woman, storm-raiser and mistress of deer. Around her are ranged her husband, the Bodach, and their children. This weekend, at Samhain , the Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest season, according to a modest local custom that may span centuries, the figures will be returned to their quartz-studded shieling – a basic shepherd’s hut – to spend the winter months undercover. They will be brought back outside, as they are every year, around Beltane ,

Its bloody instalments turned provincial towns into places where fear was never far away. 40 years on, it remains one of the creepiest, strangest shows ever shown on British TV Forty years ago this month, ITV broadcast a children’s birthday party that no one in attendance would forget. As a group of kids gathered on screen for jelly and games, a torrent of brilliant red Kensington gore suddenly came from above, soaking everything and everyone in the room. The look of shock and upset on the faces of the children invites questions as to exactly how much they – or their parents, for that matter – knew about how the scene would unfold. Listening to them crying, it would have surely been less traumatic had the woman playing mother gone up in a blaze while lighting the candles on the cake. This was not even the climax of The House That Bled to Death, part of British horror studio Hammer’s TV venture, Hammer House of Horror. That would come when the truth about the birthday girl’s duplicito

For today's Perspective segment, we discuss the power of dance. Nadia Massih speaks to Aurélia Sellier, the founder of What Dance Can Do, about why she believes the simple act of moving your body to music can change your life. But with the world still gripped by the pandemic, have social distancing measures made the communal dancing experience a thing of the past?  from https://ift.tt/37R7ekB

3/5 stars Over the past decade, indie film production company Blumhouse has made its name producing low-budget, hugely profitable horror movies such as Insidious and The Purge . It was only a matter of time before it latched on to existing franchises. Two years ago, it was Halloween ; last year it was Black Christmas; and now? The Craft. Made in 1996, The Craft told the story of a coven of teen witches and starred Neve Campbell, Robin Tunney, Fairuza Balk and Rachel True. Over time, it has… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2TQawwl

“Melancholy is the man / Who enters corn without a plan.” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/37Yyuxt

The actor and singer on growing up in Bremen after the second world war, becoming Germany’s Meryl Streep – and her new octogenarian lesbian romance Surely, I suggest to Barbara Sukowa – as she strolls around her garden in Brooklyn and I watch from 3,500 miles away on WhatsApp – it’s time lesbians were shown differently in cinema. Out and proud, not leading furtive double lives. Maybe it’s because they are so often set in the past: The Favourite , Lizzie , Ammonite , Portrait of a Lady on Fire . But Two of Us , Sukowa’s new film, about two octogenarian women in a provincial French town, is set in the present day. That’s not the key difference, she says. “Portrait was about young attractive women. It has a titillating quality for men.” Two of Us is notable for its lack of sensual moments. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3oEXOOS

Resistance offers unsanitised tales from the frontline of the movement for black lives. Plus: warmth and assurance from Gen Z pop star Yungblud Resistance Poet Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr hosts this unsanitised look at the human stories behind the surge of protests for racial equality in the US in 2020. From disturbing audio of a police raid on the home of D-Wreck Ingram, a member of NYC activists Warriors in the Garden, to an interview with Jermaine Guinyard – the only black man in Harvard, Nebraska, who staged the city’s first BLM protest – Tejan-Thomas zooms in on the people behind the headlines. Powerful and current, with language some listeners may find troubling. Hannah J Davies Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2JgFEmp

The Scottish singer recalls obsessing over Titanic, channelling Mariah Carey and learning to beatbox The first time I went to see it I think I had just turned 11 [Titanic had a 12 certificate]. I remember sneaking into the cinema for my birthday and my dad telling me and my friends how to act in front of the staff. He said: “If they ask you your birth date, you have to pretend it’s this day.” We watched the whole film and everybody was crying. My dad always tells the story of having these five 11-year-olds sobbing next to him. Really, it was my first emotional reaction to a romantic story. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3jHenpZ

In time for Halloween, Guardian writers have picked out their favourite underseen scary movies, from Brazil’s first horror film to a found footage gem Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/37SbyQm

The little-known Edinburgh producer accepted the £20,000 prize while quarantining following a positive Covid-19 diagnosis The 2020 Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) award has gone to Edinburgh-based producer Nova for her debut album, Re-Up, the first grime record to win in the prize’s nine-year history. While the ceremony was held in person in Edinburgh’s Summerhall arts complex and streamed to viewers, Nova (AKA 24-year-old Shaheeda Sinckler) accepted her trophy and £20,000 prize via video link as she self-isolates following a positive Covid-19 test. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/386a7yb

English Heritage plaque in St John’s Wood honours artist and first husband John Skeaping It was a place where a young Barbara Hepworth lived for less than a year but the pretty basement flat in north London, with its billiards room converted into a studio, effectively launched her artistic career. Hepworth is one of the 20th century’s greatest artists with a story often told through her birthplace in Wakefield and her later career in St Ives. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3oC2ncS

The pop-metallers’ frontman Oli Sykes has gone from ‘school punching bag’ to chart-topping star – but coronavirus brought back his childhood anxieties In 2019, Oli Sykes foretold “some fuckin’ mental disaster in a couple of years … We’re literally at the end, doesn’t it feel like that to you?” He imagined a tsunami or volcano. His words are from Underground Big, a 24-minute track by his band Bring Me the Horizon , and the first of two prophecies from this Cassandra of stadium rock. He got closer the second time with Parasite Eve, a song about a pandemic. “I had read about this superbug in Japan that was killing loads of people, and the article was saying this is the next war mankind will face,” he says now. “I didn’t think it was going to come this year.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3oEwlwJ

K-pop star Chanyeol has been accused by an alleged former girlfriend of cheating on her repeatedly during a three-year relationship.The allegations against Chanyeol – a member of the boy band Exo who was born Park Chan-yeol – were made by an anonymous commentator on a South Korean blogging platform. The commentator wrote that the pair broke up after being together for three years.His accuser writes that she later discovered Chanyeol had been involved with more than 10 other individuals during… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3oI1Eqs

The Trump Presidency has taken us down the rabbit hole. A past era of reform suggests a way out. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3jFeu52

The Philly-based indie-rock artist and Safy-Hallan Farah discuss internet friendships, IRL fame, artistic vision, and woke boobytraps. from Culture - ELLE https://ift.tt/3kGtxwH

Adopted as Liverpool FC’s semi-official musician, the Merseysider’s Tory-baiting lyrics have made him the voice of the city – and an unlikely new folk star Jamie Webster is recalling the moment he became the first artist to top the newly created Official Folk Album Chart with his debut LP, We Get By . “I was stunned”, says the Liverpool musician. “To hold off Laura Marling ? She’s miles ahead of me in her career. I bet most people in the chart looked at it and went: ‘Who is Jamie Webster?’” Folk traditionalists might well wonder: Webster has taken an unusual route to the top of the charts. A former electrician, the 26-year-old progressed from playing covers in city-centre pubs to becoming the semi-official musician for Liverpool FC, performing at fan-affiliated events and composing songs for the terraces. After a video of him playing Allez Allez Allez , his reworking of Italo disco classic L’Estate Sta Finendo, went viral in 2018, the song became the soundtrack to the team’s recent E

It wasn’t just the rarity of an overseas artist’s visit amid the coronavirus pandemic that made Francis Alÿs’ arrival so hotly anticipated in Hong Kong. His three decades of making humanist, absurdist art from his home in Mexico City and in other places outside the mainstream, developed art centres have informed the work of two generations of Hong Kong conceptual artists.These include Tozer Pak Sheung-chuen, now in his forties, who participated in a 2010 international exhibition called “I‘m Not… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2HApZ11

There will be no candy from strangers, no ironic yet sexy costumes. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still have a little fun! from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/37XcCCR

Ball, one half of comedy double act Cannon and Ball, dies in Blackpool Victoria hospital Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage Bobby Ball, one half of comedy double act Cannon & Ball, has died at the age of 76, his manager has said. A statement said: “It is with great personal sadness that on behalf of Yvonne Ball, and the family, and Tommy Cannon, I announce that Bobby Ball passed away at Blackpool Victoria hospital on 28 October 2020 approximately 21:30. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3kDLWdz

With its season—including “The Nutcracker”—cancelled, the company created a video series that asks, What can dance, so dependent on bodies sharing space, become in the age of social distancing? from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2J8XtUm

A political analyst warned, “Harrisburg in 2020 could be Tallahassee in 2000.” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2Jhnhhj

The last time Holby City made news was when it donated its ventilators to the NHS. Now, along with its sister show, its latest episodes feature topical coverage of a health system in peril On 10 November, a stark, uncompromising episode of Holby City, set at the peak of the first Covid spike, is set to air. In it, staff nurse Donna Jackson likens her work to “walking into hell each day”, while clinical lead Ric Griffin expresses concern that the hospital is “not even close” to being prepared. CEO Max McGerry, meanwhile, is seen admitting to her staff that the PPE they are wearing is four years past its use-by date. So profound has been the impact of the pandemic on the NHS, that when Casualty and Holby City resumed production recently, big changes had to be made. Pre-existing scripts for BBC One’s perennial medical dramas were binned, and planned storylines jettisoned as the focus shifted on to capturing life at Holby City hospital in the midst of a Covid crisis. Continue reading...

As a fictionalised version of real-life author Shirley Jackson, Moss is satisfyingly cantankerous and contemptuous, but the film’s early menace fizzles out If you can imagine that nice young couple Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes from Rosemary’s Baby showing up at the house belonging to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and staying as house guests until their baby is born … well, you still won’t have much of an idea as to what this intriguing, frustrating film is like. It is acted with bravura and the sort of stormy histrionics and whisky hangovers enjoyed by 60s American campus couples indulging in drunken dinner parties and sneaky infidelities. And it’s directed to create a humidly intense atmosphere of emotional abuse as the women involved plunge obsessively down their various rabbit holes of self-discovery and self-harm to the orchestral accompaniment of atonal pizzicato and jarring piano chords. It’s a process comparable to the one director

After a Minnesota inmate wrote to Alec Soth on impulse this year, the two began a freewheeling exchange of ideas on culture and isolation that developed into an astonishing new book In January this year, having completed a working road trip, Alec Soth returned home to his native Minneapolis to find a letter marked Minnesota correctional facility. “Please forgive the audacity of this letter,” it began. “I reach out in great admiration and respect. For years, I have relied on photography for reference material, given my incarceration, and have developed a great admiration for the genre.” The letter was signed C Fausto, short for Christopher Fausto Cabrera, an inmate who on “sheer impulse” had written to the photographer with “no real expectation, but to connect with other artists”. Intrigued, Soth decided to respond. “There was something about the letter,” he recalls. “A politeness and a sense that the guy was really bright and self-aware.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Gua

A German artist collective has set up a drop-off box for missing guns outside Angela Merkel's office. The Bundeswehr has been dogged by reports of stolen weapons ending up in the hands of extremist far-right networks. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/3kHxMbm

2/5 stars Most of us spend too much time staring at our screens, and writer-director Jacob Chase’s horror film takes the literal manifestation of excessive screen use as its bogeyman. Come Play, expanded from his 2017 short Larry, sees a young autistic boy and his family stalked by a demon through their mobile devices. Chase manages to cook up a few decent scares along the way, but this is very familiar territory. Oliver (Azhy Robertson) is unable to speak, due to his condition, and… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3mz6ULj

Childhood memories are bound to be stirred for many by Our Folktales – The All-Time Favourite Folktales of Asia, a book launched last month by the Singapore Book Council and independent publisher World Scientific Publishing.Editor Ruth Wan-Lau says the collection, which comprises stories from eight countries – China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines and Singapore – aims to share Asian folk tales with the rest of the world.“This book illustrates the diversity and… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3oDXS1h

He went from Spinal Tap to The Simpsons. Now, with his album The Many Moods of Donald Trump, the comic takes aim at America’s ‘encyclopedia salesman’ president Unlike pretty much every other person on the planet, actor, voice artist and all round comedy star Harry Shearer , 76, found lockdown a thoroughly productive experience. “The bonus time from not having to drive around Los Angeles every day really adds up. My wife and I would say to each other at the end of every day, ‘God, we accomplished a lot today!’” This is a heck of an understatement. During the past seemingly static eight months, Shearer busied himself recording and making videos for his new comedy-music album, The Many Moods of Donald Trump; kept up his radio show, Le Show , which has been going since the early 80s; and did his weekly work for what he describes as “this TV show I’m involved with”, AKA The Simpsons . For the past 32 years, Shearer has been the voice of pretty much every beloved Simpsons character who is

Films are bum-numbers, books are doorstoppers – even podcasts go on for hours. What’s behind the rise of cultural epics – and is it time someone gave them a trim? About halfway through Tenet, the mind-frying Christopher Nolan film , I began to wriggle in my seat. Twenty minutes later, I had to sit on my hands to stop myself digging around for my phone. At 150 minutes, not only was the film long, it felt endless. Nolan isn’t the only one stretching his legs. Other film-makers – and podcasters, authors and playwrights – are increasingly choosing languor and scale over brevity. The last Tarantino film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood , pipped Nolan’s by 10 minutes, while the forthcoming Bond instalment – when it finally appears – is set to be the chunkiest ever for 007, at two hours 43 minutes. Length seems to be in vogue in other genres, too: just feel the thunder from JK Rowling’s latest Galbraith book as it lands on a table. At more than 900 pages, it’s her longest crime novel, about

Broadcaster Yinka Bokinni brings old friends together to remember their childhood friend Damilola Taylor, killed 20 years ago, and the community that he touched ‘I wanted to show that he was loved’: Yinka Bokinni on her neighbour, Damilola Taylor Nearly 20 years have passed since that day in November 2000, when the 10-year-old Damilola Taylor died on a landing of the North Peckham Estate in south London. Thousands of newspaper stories have been written about the circumstances – there was a Panorama special and a Bafta-winning BBC drama, Damilola, Our Loved Boy – and yet with this Channel 4 documentary, Yinka Bokinni has made an essential contribution to our understanding of his legacy. Bokinni is now a popular Capital Xtra DJ , but back then she was one of the kids who hung around with Taylor on the estate, playing on the grassy “hills” between blocks and in each other’s flats. Bokinni explains how Taylor’s death, followed a few months later by the demolition of the entire estate,

Cybersecurity ops and Russian trolls open up to Alex Gibney in a disturbing two-part documentary. Plus: More twisted parlour games from Taskmaster Greg Davies. Here’s what to watch this evening A timely look at the vexed question of possible Russian interference in the 2016 US election. Alex Gibney’s two-part documentary hears from everyone from cybersecurity operatives to self-proclaimed Russian trolls and, along the way, poses any number of scary questions. Not least of them: isn’t the endlessly contested issue of Russian influence in itself an indication of America’s entrenched division and vulnerability to external manipulation? And how much has really changed in the last four years? Phil Harrison Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2TBdncm

Bestselling author has lodged complaint with Ipso after the magazine refused to apologise for printing remarks made by junior equalities minister Kemi Badenoch Reni Eddo-Lodge, the bestselling author of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, has demanded a correction and apology from the Spectator after it printed comments from junior minister for equalities Kemi Badenoch that Eddo-Lodge says implies that she supports racial segregation. Writing on Twitter on Wednesday, Eddo-Lodge announced that she had contacted the Spectator for a correction to its 22 October interview, which ran under the headline “Kemi Badenoch: The problem with critical race theory”. Before the comment Eddo-Lodge has complained about, Badenoch is described as feeling “particularly incensed by the boom in sales of texts such as White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo and Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race”. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift

Report finds that Black, Asian and minority ethnic employees account for fewer than 20% of executive roles, with women making up about 40% The senior levels of the UK music industry remain stubbornly white and male, with Black, Asian and minority ethnic employees making up only 19.9% of executive roles, and women 40.4%, according to a study. The latest biennial UK Music report into industry diversity found general signs of progress: Black, Asian and minority ethnic representation across the board rose from 17.8% in 2018 to 22.3% in 2020. Gender participation has held steady, with women representing 49.6% of industry roles, marginally up from 49.1% two years ago. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/31RQxlj

Julia von Heinz's political drama was selected to represent Germany in the best international feature film category for the 2021 Oscars. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/3mxgQF1

Our lives may have been turned upside down this year because of the global Covid-19 pandemic, but K-pop stars have kept releasing new material, including songs that touch on living in the coronavirus era.From BTS to Twice and SuperM, here’s a look at some of the K-pop songs that deal with the strange state of life in 2020.1. Tomorrow X Together: We Lost the SummerIn this sprightly tune from TXT’s latest EP, “Minisode1: Blue Hour”, out this week, the members sing about the lost summer of 2020,… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/35IhRn9

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She came "to realize I was voting against my own rights," she wrote in a statement clarifying her voting record. from Culture - ELLE https://ift.tt/2HKTw7Y

Manuscript including lives of the Irish saints and a translation of Marco Polo was captured during a siege of Kilbrittain Castle in the 1640s A 15th-century medieval manuscript, one of the “great books of Ireland”, is returning home almost 400 years after it was captured in a siege. The Book of Lismore, which has been donated to University College Cork by the trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement, was compiled for Fínghin Mac Carthaigh, the Lord of Carbery from 1478 to 1505. It consists of 198 large vellum folios containing some of medieval Irish literature’s greatest masterpieces, including the lives of Irish saints, the only surviving Irish translation of the travels of Marco Polo, and the adventures of the hero Fionn mac Cumhaill, or Finn MacCool. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Gajyku

Chemnitz is situated in the eastern state of Saxony. It was chosen from a shortlist of eight cities across Germany. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/3oypDsj

Recovering the Jewish history of the Iraqi city of Mosul and making it available to all Mosulis. That's the goal of a local historian, who collects Jewish oral history and documents for a virtual museum. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/31QjDBi

These ten films suggest the extremes of experience that are evoked by the very effort to explore the supernatural, the haunted, the tormented, the dreadful, both outward and within. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3e2gfs7

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She went from rave diva with Nomad to winning her third Olivier award on Sunday for Death of a Salesman. Yet the London actor isn’t immune to the storms battering theatre Sharon D Clarke wasn’t expecting to win an Olivier award for best actress . “It’s a joy,” she says in the flush of the morning after. “I was among ladies who are at the top of their game. I was glad to be in the category, and glad I had been noticed but never in a million years did I think I would win.” Then again, she didn’t expect to win her first Olivier in 2014 either (“‘shocked’ is not the right word”). That one was for a supporting role in The Amen Corner . Another came last year, for her performance in the musical, Caroline, Or Change . With this third notch, she has become the first person to be nominated in all four performing categories of the Oliviers, winning the latest honour for her sensational turn as Linda Loman in Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell’s Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic in Lon

From the elegiac Nimrod to the poignant Cello Concerto and his magnificent choral works, there is far more to this British composer than pomp and circumstance If Britain has a national composer, it is Edward Elgar (1857-1934). His music is often seen as epitomising the smug Victorian world into which he was born, but though he wrote his quota of “patriotic” pieces, he was much more than a flag-waving imperialist; his influences and musical outlook were profoundly European rather than home-grown. Elgar was the most significant composer Britain has produced since Henry Purcell, and his finest music – the symphonies and concertos – easily stands comparison with that of his late-romantic contemporaries Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HEZrLy

Artist says she is in remission after operation in the summer but has to wear a stoma bag Tracey Emin has revealed she was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year and is now in remission after an operation in the summer. The artist, one of the most famous of her generation and known for her frank work, said in an interview with Artnet that she had been working on a picture of a malignant lump when she began to feel pain in her bladder, which was caused by a tumour. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/35H7NKX

I depart from the party I once loved so much with an abiding faith in the ability of our citizens to rise above their disagreements and give me a multimillion-dollar contract at a cable news network. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3mz6sNf

The outcry over remarks about Islam by French President Emmanuel Macron and cartoons of Prophet Muhammad has escalated. Muslim nations are protesting with calls to boycott French products. How did it get to this? from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/3muV1Gh

The state remains deeply polarized, and statewide races continue to be decided by razor-thin margins. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3juX9Mg

Feature on the underside of a cat’s paw, cutely: seven letters. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3muhGlV

Lucy Worsley says move is ‘long overdue’ and points to Stuart dynasty’s role in slavery The chief curator of Historic Royal Palaces has launched a review of the residences’ historical links to the slave trade. Lucy Worsley, a TV historian and the chief curator of the charity that looks after properties such as Kensington Palace, the Tower of London and Hampton Court, told the Times an investigation into the royal palaces’ slavery links was “long overdue” and the charity had a duty to make any connections public. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HIbqYE

It had always looked like a foregone conclusion – and so it proved when the South Korean megahit Parasite was named best picture at the 14th edition of the Asian Film Awards on Wednesday afternoon. The film duly proved to be the biggest winner in an hour-long announcement programme streamed on the awards’ official YouTube channel, complete with pre-recorded acceptance speeches.Even in a year that has turned out as surreal as any, no one could have realistically expected anything less for an… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3msoeSa

By taking up issues like mental health and marijuana legalization, New Zealand’s youngest M.P., Chlöe Swarbrick, has shaken up the country’s politics. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/31O4PmX

A new campaign to buy No Time to Die from MGM has been started on GoFundMe. Next step: nationalise 007 If Covid kills the cinema experience for good – a hypothetical that sounds less and less far-fetched by the day – then No Time to Die will forever be held up as a key co-conspirator. Although almost every other film set for release this year has been shunted off into the middle distance, there’s something about No Time to Die’s repositionings that seems to have drawn everyone’s wrath. First it was booted away from a spring release. And then again from an autumn release, which is when Cineworld decided to board itself up. This week it was reported that, in an act of increasingly characteristic jumpiness, No Time to Die tried to hawk itself around the streaming platforms for the tidy sum of $600m. Even that failed. At this rate it would take a miracle for anyone to see it. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/35DWHq1

Sales of War and Peace, Don Quixote and Middlemarch are booming. The appeal of a seriously long read has never been more alluring Tell us: what literary classics have you read during lockdown? What have people been doing to pass all these extra hours at home? Burying ourselves in ultra-long novels such as War and Peace and Don Quixote, apparently. At the start of lockdown No 1, all the way back in March, we reported that readers were starting to stock up on longer novels and classic fiction . More than seven months on, Penguin Random House says that sales of its edition of War and Peace – which runs to 1,440 pages – have boomed by 69% in the UK so far this year: according to book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan, they’ve gone from 3,700 copies sold in 2019 to 6,300 in 2020 so far. The publisher has also seen an uplift in sales of Don Quixote (1,056 pages, up 53%) Anna Karenina (865 pages, up 52%), Middlemarch (880 pages, up 40%) and Crime and Punishment (720 pages, up 35%). Continu

K-pop girl group Red Velvet are facing an uncertain future with member Irene under pressure to leave the group due to a bullying scandal involving a stylist.Debuting in 2014 and known for their stand-out musicality, the quintet have been inactive for most of 2020 since member Wendy was injured during a live performance last December. With Wendy recently returning to the industry following her recovery, Red Velvet were expected to release new music before the end of the year.But earlier this… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3e03L4c

Nothing, it seemed, could stop the literary-festival snowball: a permanently rolling, swelling agglomeration of 400 members and counting, now with its own global association. This year, however, festivals great and small have found that they can be stopped by an invisible adversary – or obliged to adapt to Covid-19 to ensure the show goes on. Approaching its 20th incarnation, the Hong Kong International Literary Festival (HKILF) long ago established itself among the worldwide elite… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2JdnlyB

The coronavirus pandemic has battered many industries around the world, and the film industry is no exception. Major studios around the world have withdrawn their big ticket blockbusters from the schedule, exhibitors are on the ropes, and even the festival circuit has been left in tatters.Cinephiles should be delighted, therefore, that this year’s Hong Kong Asian Film Festival is going ahead as scheduled, kicking off its 17th edition on November 3 with more than 50 new films hailing from 16… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/35CE5a8

It was found in Kyiv and ended up in California — here's how a painting by Renaissance master Lucas Cranach the Elder stolen and resold by the Soviets may be coming home. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/3jynhpA

The Crown 's Princess Diana isn't totally ready for superstardom, but it's waiting for her. from Culture - ELLE https://ift.tt/31KyaOW

As we spend our time at home, these future A-listers are lighting up our screens—and our days. from Culture - ELLE https://ift.tt/2TsQ841

In the 80s, a group of residents were given cameras to document the London borough. Now, their work has come to light showing the passionate spirit of a lost era In 2016, Andrew Woodyatt started working at the Rio cinema in Dalston, Hackney, London. Handed a large bunch of keys, and blessed with a healthy curiosity, he started to explore the Rio’s basement rooms, which had been used for years for storage. Among the broken hoovers and discarded paperwork, he started to come across negatives – local street scenes shot on film strips, which seemed interesting enough to save. Then he hit the jackpot. Opening a rusty filing cabinet, he found 10,000 frames, mounted on glass slides and neatly organised into folders, some with labels such as “NHS”, “Greenham Common” and “Colin Roach”. “I just thought ‘Wow!’” says Woodyatt, who also lectures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Woodyatt had stumbled across the remains of the Rio Tape/Slide Newsreel Group, a project that ran at the Rio from 1

All hail Loose Women! In the age of prestige drama, sometimes we need warmth and familiarity, making Bafta’s new daytime telly award long overdue Daytime television has long been treated as a punchline; as bad, repetitive, cheaply made TV designed exclusively for people who haven’t got anything better to do. Indeed, this reputation has only been amplified in the age of streaming. After all, when you have a near-limitless library of the best television ever made permanently on hand, why on earth would you spend an hour watching yet another tedious documentary about traffic wardens? However, hopefully, daytime is about to get a boost. This month, Bafta announced the creation of a new awards category just for daytime television, and it is much overdue. Man cannot live on prestige drama alone. Sometimes we need warmth and familiarity, and the promise that a dead relative has placed an antique of life-changing value at the back of our cupboard. When we need this, we turn to daytime telev

I’ve met all of my idols, and I’ve been disappointed by every single one. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3ozJcR8

Sacha Baron Cohen’s creation is the perfect totalitarian subject: ever ready to believe anything and nothing. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/31HtLMP

A notably chill woman, voiced by Rachel Bloom, is running for office—and she's just unthreatening enough for male voters to give her a chance. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2TvhshY

The author reads her story from the November 2, 2020, issue of the magazine. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2Hu25nP

The stimulus checks are gone, and unemployment claims remain unprocessed. The Jaynes family is holding on to half a tank of gas and a dollar-fifty in change. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2HGFXGd

His soundtrack shredded audiences’ nerves. Now producer Daniel Lopatin is using radio to bring Trump’s America together It has been a peculiar 2020 for many of us, but Daniel Lopatin’s has been odder than most. In January, the warped electronica that he makes under his pseudonym Oneohtrix Point Never soundtracked a hit Netflix movie, the nerve-shredding Adam Sandler thriller Uncut Gems . On 8 March, he tasted the primetime life, playing a song he had written with the Weeknd on Saturday Night Live. Daniel Craig introduced them, a few weeks before the new Bond film was due to be released. “I was shitting bricks if I can be totally candid,” the slightly less famous Daniel says. Fifteen days later, Covid-19 locked down New York. Stuck in his flat, his studio out of bounds, Lopatin had to make music in his bedroom like he did when his recording career began. Granted, life had changed since his 2007 debut, Betrayed in the Octagon: he’d spearheaded a genre, vaporwave, by narcotically slo

Series about reactor explosion kept more of its audience to the final episode than any other Chernobyl was the drama series that British viewers were most likely to watch to the end, according to research that attempts to work out exactly which television shows get viewers hooked and which simply benefit from first-episode hype. Even though most people watching the drama about the 1986 nuclear disaster in the Ukraine probably had an idea of how the story ended, almost all of them watched to the very end of the critically lauded Sky Atlantic series. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3jEbO89

Francis Lee’s much-hyped film in fact belongs to a recent tradition of studiously tasteful, sexually fixated work in which lesbians are a world apart Lesbians have a love-hate relationship with cinema, a place in which, Andrea Weiss wrote in her 1992 work Vampires and Violets , only one image of the lesbian may surface at any one time. For at least the past half-decade (since the release of Todd Haynes’ adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Carol ) that image may look something like this: a period drama with an oedipal understory, chronically white, a sombre mood, dialogue exactingly stark. A sensorium of touch and taste, the space between bodies, and the yearning therein. A fantasy for all audiences to enjoy.. In these films, the action is silently displayed on faces and behind eyes, before it’s finally loosed in the form of a long, drawn-out sex scene. In 2013’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour, the camera hovers over the lovers’ faces so intimately that you can see the spit as they kiss, t

The auteur’s bold and brutal 2000 adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr’s cultish novel about addiction remains an indelible and shocking act of provocation I was 17, and just beginning university, when Requiem for a Dream descended on cinemas like an opaque, bruise-blue mist. Notwithstanding the no-under-18s restrictions stamped upon it by stern censors in the UK and elsewhere, I like to think I was the optimal age for it. Darren Aronofsky’s addiction drama may be cross-generational in its focus, but with its unremittingly punishing storytelling and frenzied, all-systems-go cinematic energy, it represents a very young person’s idea of how a very adult film looks, sounds and spasms. I loved it, even as it followed me through a tertiary arts education to the point of overkill: its poster gracing umpteen friends’ dorm rooms, its Clint Mansell/Kronos Quartet string theme – and its countless remixes – soundtracking all manner of student theatre pieces and presentations, its formal and literary fl

Black men and women tell Emma Dabiri their often fraught hair stories. Plus: birdwatching and seal pupping in Autumnwatch. Here’s what to watch this evening Emma Dabiri’s documentary is a fascinating and, at times, moving exploration of the cultural weight carried by black hair. For many interviewees, hair journeys are genuinely fraught affairs, involving statements of identity, acceptance or rejection of white beauty archetypes, privilege and, in some cases, hair-related physical pain. As one woman says, recalling a realisation prompted by the Black Lives Matter movement: “I never loved my hair. Does that mean I never loved myself?” Phil Harrison Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2TsvOQd

Scientists had warned against breaking rules after journalist told the Radio Times she planned to ignore the rule of six The radio and television presenter Victoria Derbyshire has apologised after saying she planned to defy the law on social gatherings to celebrate with her family at Christmas. London, where Derbyshire lives, is under tier 2 restrictions, meaning the rule of six applies to outdoor settings and people should not mix with members of any other household indoors. People found breaking the rules can be fined by the police. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/37KO4N8

Peter Florence, the director of the event since its inception, has been signed off pending the outcome of a grievance procedure Peter Florence, the founder and director of the Hay festival, has been suspended from his position after allegations of bullying from a staff member. The festival’s chair, Caroline Michel, said that Florence was suspended on 1 October “pending the outcome of a grievance procedure initiated by one of our staff”. He has since been signed off sick, and Michel said in a statement that she was “not at liberty to offer any further comment on personnel issues until this matter is resolved”. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/35CgfuP

3.5/5 stars In 1937, at the height of the Battle of Shanghai, the defence of Sihang Warehouse would prove to be one of the most important conflicts of the second Sino-Japanese war. Director Guan Hu’s epic The Eight Hundred, a patriotic spectacle that is already 2020’s biggest box office hit, and China’s first film shot entirely on IMAX cameras, reconstructs vividly the week-long stand-off that saw 452 young, ill-equipped soldiers from the National Revolutionary Army make a valiant last stand… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/37Kq9NW

British Library, London This intriguing history of the women’s movement – from leg-liberating bicycles to the poems Sylvia Pankhurst wrote on prison toilet paper – doesn’t neglect the struggle’s contradictions and blind spots “We are not beautiful,” say the words on the leaflet, alongside a picture of a raging, cigar-smoking vixen with hairy legs. “We are not ugly,” they continue. “WE ARE ANGRY.” This leaflet was part of the protests against Miss World contests in the 1970s . It features in Unfinished Business, an exhibition that traces the history of the women’s movement through its signature, headline-grabbing flareups, but also through its imagery, philosophy and artefacts, with one eye always on the work left to do. You can’t help but be struck by the vastness of the terrain: this movement needed its engineers as much as its crusaders, its poets and comedians as much as its scientists. It took a village, in other words, and then a load of other villages. It would be glossing the

Delftware was appropriated from China during the 17th century after Guido da Savino, an Italian potter living in the Netherlands, discovered how to produce cheap copies of Ming dynasty porcelain. Large-scale production took off, with the Dutch versions retaining the Chinese blue-and-white style while creating objects of a more European nature. Remarkably, these were then successfully exported to China.Now a ubiquitous icon of Dutch aesthetics and culture, Delft tiles form the starting point of… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3e2AXry

As she releases a box set of her earliest recordings, in a rare interview Mitchell talks about life before fame, the correct way to sing her songs – and her long struggle to walk and talk again after an aneurysm “I was lying in bed last night thinking about getting a cat,” says Joni Mitchell. It’s an early summer Sunday, and she’s sitting in her backyard patio, nicknamed Tuscany. Behind her a bird feeder is busy with hungry visitors. “And this guy shows up at the gate around midnight, meowing.” A light-brown kitten with long white paws, only a few months old, leans contentedly against her shoulder. “I hope nobody comes to claim him,” she confides softly. They’re fast friends. Nearby Marcy Gensic, Mitchell’s longtime friend and associate, mentions they’ve papered the neighbourhood with lost notices. No calls yet. So with our midnight visitor, tentatively named Puss ’n Boots, tucked in the lap of this treasured artist, Mitchell is here to discuss the new set of early recordings she ne

A unit of South Korean boy band NCT has come under fire for using images of an Islamic shrine as a backdrop during a recent performance – the latest in a series of allegations of cultural and religious appropriation levelled against the K-pop group.On Sunday, NCT U performed a new song Make A Wish (Birthday Song) on the South Korean music show Inkigayo, and were accompanied by visuals that some fans on social media quickly identified as the Imam Husayn Shrine, which is both a mosque and the… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3dZ517D

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A study of disaster preparedness suggests that leaders should seek to inspire “swarm intelligence.” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3jtXVt4

The author discusses “A for Alone,” her story from this week’s issue of the magazine. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/31HU0Tg

In Yuval Sharon’s immersive production, audience members drive up the ramps, listening to audio piped into their car radios. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3dVH40Q

Poetry by Toi Derricotte: “Why can’t I // take evidence seriously?” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3dXAs1Z

When the photographer Jona Frank wanted someone to depict her depressed, pie-baking mother in her book about growing up bored in New Jersey, she asked her L.A. best mom friend. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/34vosla

The story behind the Obama Administration’s most enduring—and most contested—legacy: reforming American health care. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3mnfpsH

Fiction by Curtis Sittenfeld: Before her lunch with Eddie Walsh, she writes, “When did you last spend time alone with a woman who is not your wife?” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2J7UThB

The designer David Rockwell’s DineOut NYC program aims to help restaurants safely lure back customers, with construction plans for special booths which anyone can download for free. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3kHf03O

New cartoons from the magazine. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/34v56Nc

How did the British become so blinkered about their nation’s imperial history? from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3ms3ee7

Tate Britain, London From the most devastating depiction of the slave trade ever to an erotically-charged shipwreck, JMW Turner’s heart-stopping maelstroms of sea and steam and smoke made him a true visionary of his age It’s not standard practice for curators to draw attention to a masterpiece they failed to borrow. But right in the middle of Tate Britain ’s roaring whirlpool of a Turner exhibition is a reproduction of his 1840 painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). Apparently, it has become too frail to make the transatlantic journey from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts – another twist in the story of the most devastating work of art ever made about the British slave trade. So, instead of passing over its no-show, the exhibition demands you pause to mourn it – and what it depicts. This painting belongs at the heart of Turner’s Modern World even though it’s just here as an idea, a concept, with an excerpt from David Dabydeen’s poem Tur