Cultural News Today

After 9/11 the director felt haunted by the twin towers attack. As his epic photographs of Ground Zero go on show for the atrocity’s anniversary, he remembers the horrors of that day – and considers its legacy As a boy growing up in the rubble and ruins of postwar West Germany, Wim Wenders would often dream of falling towers. So at the age of 56, when he watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center blaze and then plummet into the streets of New York, the impact hit him hard. “It started to haunt me badly,” he says. “I mean, I saw everything live on TV like everybody else. All of mankind was badly shaken. But I kept dreaming of being stuck in collapsing towers. I wanted to somehow exorcise these things. And I figured if I could go to New York and see for myself, that would help.” That was how Wenders came to be at Ground Zero in the aftermath of the attacks and took the five large-format photographs now showing at the Imperial War Museum in London as part of its 9/11: Twenty Year

A 20-year-old cold case throws the AI-assisted police partners back together in a new series of Code 404. Plus, more Changing Rooms. Here’s what to watch this evening Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mUiJPB

In an impassioned address, Biden vowed that he was not going to extend the forever war or the “forever exit.” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3mQJSTI

For a fan, the day sessions of tennis’s Grand Slams are like nothing else, even—or especially—now. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2WFabRu

This BBC show about Miri’s return home after 18 years in prison is a pure and painful delight, which can move you from tears to laughter within a single line We pick up with thirtysomething ex-con Miri Matteson (played by Daisy Haggard, co-creator of this comedy-drama with Laura Solon) for the second series of Back to Life (BBC Three/iPlayer) just a few weeks on from when we left her. She is now six weeks into life as a free woman – bar her mandatory meetings with her probation officer, Janice (Jo Martin, still lethally brilliant in a part that has been beefed up this go-round, surely in recognition of everything she did the first time) – and things are ... OK. Miri is keeping her Tamagotchi alive, is taking driving lessons, is about to start a trial run as a supermarket employee and is still friends-with-benefits with neighbour Billy (Adeel Akhtar). The benefits are basically food-based (or, as Janice puts it, “You haven’t even seen his cocky yet”). After last series’ ice-cream cone

While Halsey’s album dramatizes the horrors of being a mother, another new record, Cleo Sol’s “Mother,” takes a more subdued approach. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/38urh7u

In an extract from his book on late musicians’ estates, Eamonn Forde explores the feud that began shortly after Jeff Buckley’s death between the songwriter’s label and his mother Jeff Buckley had released two live EPs (Live at Sin-é in 1993 and Live from the Bataclan in 1995) plus one complete studio album (Grace in 1994) before he died in 1997. Since his death, eight live albums and multiple compilation albums have been released, spanning music recorded while he was signed to Sony and also before he had a record deal. The most contentious is Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, which was released a year after his death. Buckley had already scrapped a batch of recordings produced by Tom Verlaine in late 1996 and early 1997 and was preparing to record afresh in Memphis, the place where he drowned in the Mississippi. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3ju9EL7

Punk frontman, who lost case against bandmates over use of music in TV series, says he fears band’s legacy may be ‘watered down’ In a new written statement, John Lydon has responded with worry and dismay after losing a court case over the use of music by the Sex Pistols in an upcoming TV series, directed by Danny Boyle. Lydon, known as Johnny Rotten during his time fronting the punk band, had been sued by drummer Paul Cook and guitarist Steve Jones after Lydon prevented the use of Pistols songs in the series Pistol. Lydon lost the case, with a judge ruling that Jones and Cook were allowed to overrule him using a majority rule created in the terms of a band agreement. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3jC8BJv

Book festival boss says next year will be a staging post in recovery that could take until 2030 A senior figure in the Edinburgh festivals has said it could take the rest of the decade before the events fully recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. Nick Barley, the director of the Edinburgh international book festival, said the August festivals faced a long haul before regaining their status as the world’s largest arts event. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mTgHiV

Biggest names of Hollywood’s golden age appear in footage for British-born actor’s ‘rollercoaster life story’ She is one of the last surviving actors of Hollywood’s ”golden age”. Now Dame Joan Collins has given the BBC unprecedented access to her private home movies for a forthcoming documentary. Dating back decades, the footage features some of the biggest names of the silver screen, from Sammy Davis Jr to Paul Newman, who can be seen relaxing beyond the gaze of their fans and studio cameras. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3zAdfgk

This celebratory documentary captures the spirit of a strongly multicultural community but avoids probing the unrest of 1981 As a community organiser says at the start of this documentary, the name Toxteth – apparently hardly used in the area pre-1981 – has become synonymous with riots. Directors Daniel Draper and Allan Melia set out to show otherwise in this artfully shot but only loosely structured documentary; less an oral history of the L8 postcode than a contemporary social snapshot with a neighbourly penchant for doorstep chats in search of the Toxteth spirit. “There’s a lot going on,” observes a Nigerian-Russian-Spanish-Jewish beautician. It’s Toxteth’s multiculturalism and tolerant ethos, on streets once occupied by dock workers, that Almost Liverpool 8 is most at pains to show. We encounter Jamaican beekeepers, Yemeni newsagents, Arab rotisserie workers. The area is home to what may be the UK’s oldest black community and Draper and Melia include a short section on how Toxtet

The author discusses his new novella, “Muscle.” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3BttSLc

The fewer clues you need, the more points you receive. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2WBGGQP

Start a slow clap, throw a bar snack in my mouth, and other ideas. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3Dw82bS

Making a celebrity appearance at the village fete, the viral star of the Handforth parish council meeting proves she really has the authority as she out-Archers the Archers The scene: a spare bedroom in Amy Franks’ flat, Nottingham. At first we do not recognise who lies immobile beneath the duvet. The air is thick with the stench of stale alcohol. Detritus lies around the bed, Tracey Emin-style: empty bottles of corner-shop vodka, take-out cartons crusted with half-consumed food, jeans and underwear tangled in a grubby heap. Then, with a sigh, the figure turns and we see that it is Ambridge alcoholic Alice Carter – asleep or, more properly, passed out. Cut to a montage of images as they pass through her mind in dizzying progression: in one crazed vignette, Shula Hebden Lloyd screams as she’s tossed from her pony. A moment later, the heavy figure of Neil Carter lumbers towards her prone body and cradles her mournfully. Next, Shula is back home from hospital, her arm in a sling; Neil h

1980s tune wins after more than 20,000 choose their favourite theme in Classic FM and Radio Times poll Inspector Morse has been voted the No 1 TV theme song of all time in a poll by music fans. More than 20,000 Classic FM listeners and Radio Times readers voted in a poll for their favourite TV themes. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3jvg4Kk

As the Roy siblings strategise their next moves, get one step ahead with our at-a-glance stats of their potential for success (or, more likely, disaster) Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3kH1m1U

A new Penguin collection of the American poet’s work brilliantly showcases the spare beauty of her writing When Louise Glück won the Nobel prize last year, she was, to many in the UK, an unknown quantity. Even though she had been garlanded with literary awards in the US and faithfully published by Carcanet in Britain, she is a poet who never seeks attention. To read her is to encounter stillness and slow time. There is a bare-branched, midwinter feeling to her writing, a leaflessness that has its own beauty. This month, Penguin is presiding over a grand introduction – or reintroduction – to her work, bringing out the collected poems (also including 2006’s Averno , a reimagining of Persephone’s story and one of her finest volumes). Glück could not have written her poems had Emily Dickinson never existed (she confessed in her Nobel acceptance speech to having devoured Dickinson’s poetry in her teens). But unlike Dickinson, Gluck’s approach is non-ecstatic: she is more undeceived than

Dirk Bogarde’s magnificent performance as a man hiding his sexuality is the strongest note in a difficult, and groundbreaking, film that challenged censors Twenty seven minutes into Victim, after some circuitous beating around the bush, the word is dropped into the dialogue – an unprecedented bombshell on screen at the time, and if it no longer shocks today, you can still sense the film bracing for impact. It’s not a slur, or a profanity, but it was enough to make audiences wince and censors bristle: in 1961, the simple word “homosexual” was more dangerous than an idle swear. Its blunt appearance in Victim ensured the British film initially fell foul of US censors. The British Board of Film Censors let it squeak by with an X rating, though objected to a different scrap of innocuous dialogue, when one man says of another, “I wanted him.” Sixty years ago, the love that dared not speak its name began – as discreetly and politely as possible while maintaining some level of candour – to mu

They brawled with the Sex Pistols, gaffer-taped a journalist to the Eiffel Tower and got thrown out of Sweden twice. Now, for their 18th album and final tour, the punks seem to be maturing at last As Jean-Jacques Burnel drily admits, the Stranglers had “a bad reputation for quite a while”. During the punk years, their many outrages ranged from being escorted out of Sweden by police with machine-guns (twice) to gaffer-taping a music journalist to the Eiffel Tower, 400ft up, upside down, without his trousers. However, the singer and bass player says the biggest outcry actually came when they got themselves a keyboard player. “It was seen as sacrilege,” he laughs, recalling this supposed affront to the ramshackle garage punk ethos. “And worse than that – he had a synthesiser. We were called heretics and ostracised. Nobody wanted anything to to do with us. But look what happened a couple of years later: synth pop!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3kHZ9n

The co-founder of Justice for Women’s inspiriting book is the perfect primer for understanding the current state of feminism Away from the sulphurous world of Twitter, the feminist campaigner and journalist Julie Bindel is best known as the co-founder of Justice for Women , an organisation that since 1990 has advocated for those convicted of murder after having experienced violence by men; JfW campaigned successfully for the release of Emma Humphreys , who killed her violent pimp, Trevor Armitage, in 1985, and more recently for Sally Challen , who was convicted of the murder of her abusive husband, Richard, in 2010. Thanks to this work, and to her reporting elsewhere, Bindel also has expertise in the areas of porn, prostitution and sex trafficking; she was one of those who helped to break the story of the grooming gangs operating in the north of England, an investigation that would eventually lead to the independent inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham in 2013. All of

In a new documentary, the former US president and his team recall the 12 hours after the September 2001 terror attacks. Plus: Daisy Haggard returns in Back to Life. Here’s what to watch this evening Where Monday night’s Surviving 9/11 told the story of some of the civilians who found themselves in the midst of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, this documentary analyses 12 hours in the US presidency as the news and its aftermath unfolded. Former president George W Bush recalls hearing of the attacks at a primary school, while members of his team revisit their unpreparedness for an attack like that, as the press records their reactions. Ammar Kalia Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/38rLQ4q

Playwright, born in Czechoslovakia, talks of his gratitude to UK for saving him from a life under communism Sir Tom Stoppard has revealed how his staunch criticism of communist regimes in his plays, born out of his own past as a Jewish child refugee from Czechoslovakia, set him at odds with the “lively” leftwing strain of the UK theatre scene. His passionate defence of writers and journalists under threat by communist and totalitarian regimes, as well as his pride in being British, did little to endear him to some parts of the British theatre establishment, Stoppard told the Radio Times. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Wwc0jL

The actor stars with Martin Short and Selena Gomez as true crime aficionados in a mildly entertaining murder mystery with the lull of podcast voice Only Murders in the Building, Hulu’s 10-part whodunnit, has an immediate hook in its seemingly mismatched stars – comedy veterans Martin Short and Steve Martin, both in their 70s, and millennial superstar Selena Gomez, in her first scripted television role since Wizards of Waverly Place, the late-2000s Disney show that launched her career. Related: ‘Marty just kept following me!’ Steve Martin and Martin Short on their 35-year friendship Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/38ttGPC

The U.S. has extricated its military from a two-decade-long conflict, but the country, and tens of thousands of Afghan allies, have been abandoned to the Taliban. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3yvubmT

The city may be better protected today than it was before Katrina, but with every day that passes the protection is waning. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3jttB4U

It’s past time to take the planet’s limits seriously. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3jtUzJB

In this riveting drama, Coogan stars as DCI Clive Driscoll, who finally investigates the racist killing of Stephen Lawrence fully, underlining the extra years of agony his parents had to endure A few lines across the screen sum up the dreadful story so far. “On 22 April 1993 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence was murdered in an unprovoked racist attack. The police failed to catch his killers. A public inquiry found the Metropolitan police to be incompetent and institutionally racist. In 2006, 13 years after their son’s murder, his parents are still fighting for justice.” We begin in 2006, in ITV’s new three-part drama Stephen – scripted by Frank Cottrell-Boyce with every ounce of his customary compassion and intelligence. Stephen’s mother Doreen (Sharlene Whyte) gives a speech at the centre under construction, whose users she hopes will become her boy’s living legacy, and his father Neville (Hugh Quarshie, who also played him in the award-winning 1999 ITV docu-drama The Murder of Stephen L

The nail-biting submarine thriller returned with hooded burglars, another murder and a desperate race to save the boat. Four more hours of deep-sea danger to go! • Episode one recap – what a maritime humdinger. Consider us hooked! Spoiler alert: this blog is for those watching Vigil on BBC One. Don’t read on unless you have watched episode two. Back on troubled Trident submarine HMS Vigil for the second night in a row, it was action stations as the crew desperately raced to save the boat. Meanwhile, on-board detective DCI Amy Silva (Suranne Jones) and her dry-land colleague DS Kirsten Longacre (Rose Leslie) were closing in on the killer among the crew. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3zxe1uv

For a nude production of “Antigonick,” a translation of the Greek play “Antigone,” performers for Torn Out Theatre dodged the crazies and the lookie-loos during rehearsals in Prospect Park. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2YdxL93

Cartoons from the magazine. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3kFnGsX

Remember last summer, when we all wore masks and everyone was adopting a pet? Wait! That’s this summer, too. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3DuaQq8

For decades he was wildly out of fashion, now DH Lawrence is everywhere – from novels and biographies to a new adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover When the clock struck for lockdown last March, many of us found ourselves condemned to live alongside people in more intense proximity than we’d bargained for. Flatmates, spouses, children were no longer occasional companions but a constant presence. For me, this has been the case with DH Lawrence. Having committed to writing a book on him, suddenly I found myself sequestered with him. There was a time when this would have felt sexually charged. In my 20s, I fell for his vision of bodily life, as so many of his female readers had done. “His intuitive intelligence sought the core of woman,” Anaïs Nin wrote after his death. Visiting the shrine at Lawrence’s former ranch in New Mexico in 1939, WH Auden mocked the “cars of women pilgrims” traipsing “to stand reverently there and wonder what it would have been like to sleep with him”. Conti

Unlike in Adaptation or The Player, the new Billy Crystal and Tiffany Haddish comedy presents its main character’s job as a glorious career peak John August, who has written several Tim Burton films including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, had harsh words for anyone thinking of putting a screenwriter at the centre of their script: “It shouldn’t be a surprise that Hollywood is not knocking down your door to make that movie because it’s just about a screenwriter. And who cares about a screenwriter?” Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3ymRyPC

He played some of the most memorable characters of all time on The Muppet Show and Sesame Street - then became a brilliant comedy director. What is he most proud of? I ask Frank Oz if he feels like the Paul McCartney to Jim Henson’s John Lennon, the one left behind to carry the flame after his revered creative partner suddenly and shockingly died. Oz takes a deep breath and turns his head to the side, thinking. If you grew up in the 1970s and 80s, your childhood was shaped by Henson and Oz and their work with the Muppets, just as the kids who grew up in the 50s and 60s did so in the shadow of Lennon and McCartney. Even if you weren’t a devoted fan of the Muppets themselves, you couldn’t help but take in their influence osmotically, what with The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, the Muppets movies and Labyrinth swirling in the atmosphere. I was pretty much raised on the Muppets, just as I now raise my own kids on them, and I cannot remember a time when Henson and Oz’s creations were not st

Jennifer Lee, Disney Animation’s chief creative officer and the writer and co-director of Frozen, describes expanding her hit for the stage, and reveals whether she’s more of an Elsa or an Anna It was the sound unleashed from a million pairs of little lungs across the land: “Let it “go-oooo-ooo!” The standout hit from Disney’s 2013 animation Frozen ; a song that wormed its way into the ears of everyone who heard it, but especially young children. Director Jennifer Lee still gets videos sent to her of toddlers belting out that tune with all their hearts. “When Kristen [Anderson-Lopez] wrote Let It Go, if we played it for anyone, just someone coming in the room, everything stopped,” says Lee, on a video call from LA. “It was this incredible reaction – we knew there was something really special there.” Why it struck such a chord with preschoolers, she is not certain. “It’s a rebellion song,” she offers, “particularly when you’re learning the word ‘no’, as you’re trying to individualise

The Australian opera singer on five-hour Wagner marathons, the Last Night of the Proms – and why he smokes the occasional cigar A lover of fast cars, cigars and cocktails, the Australian operatic tenor Stuart Skelton , 52, is one of the world’s most exciting singers, acclaimed for his epic Wagner roles and as a brilliant Peter Grimes in Britten’s opera, a role he will reprise in Munich next year , with Edward Gardner conducting. Resident in Florida, married to an Icelandic violinist, Skelton might be driven by adrenaline but he has enough patience to make a classic manhattan from scratch. He will star at the Last Night of the Proms with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sakari Oramo, next month. Simon Rattle recently said he felt uneasy about the “jingoistic tendencies” of the Last Night of the Proms. Presumably you don’t share that feeling? As a colonial kid growing up in Australia, I’ve always loved the Last Night – an internationally iconic event. I still do. Given the pas

After a summer of free entry, visitors will now have to pay up to £8 to climb the London project. But will they bother? It has been called a “BTec Eiffel Tower” and a “slag heap”. It’s been compared to “ a car-park Santa’s grotto, with dogs pretending to be reindeer” . The Marble Arch Mound, the temporary artificial hill commissioned by Westminster city council as an “ambitious” visitor attraction, has become, as a representative of the local community put it, “an international laughing stock”. The council responded to criticism by allowing free entry during August, and a certain number of the curious and the ghoulishly fascinated have turned up. This week it will start charging again. Given fundamental flaws in the project’s conception, the question is whether people will want to pay £8 for a weekend fast-track ticket now, any more than they did when it first opened at the end of July. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3ys8QLb

Figura worked with staff to produce poems reflecting their experiences during the Covid crisis Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage One poem imagines an NHS nightshift worker at the height of the coronavirus crisis as an astronaut, adrift and untethered from a spacecraft. Another touches on the difficulty of trying to console a patient when the comfort of a smile is obscured by a mask. The feelings of horror, sadness, isolation and frustration that NHS staff and volunteers endured at the height of the pandemic have been crystallised in verse as part of a spoken word collection at Salisbury district hospital. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3yqqa3i

Actor shone in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and spin-off Spell as Screen Actors Guild president ended over liberal views Ed Asner, a burly and prolific character actor who became a star in middle age as the gruff but lovable newsman Lou Grant, first in the hit comedy The Mary Tyler Moore Show and later in the drama Lou Grant, died on Sunday. He was 91. Related: Ed Asner obituary Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3gHQHmB

Demonstrators attach themselves to railings in reaction to museum taking funding from oil firm for Our Future Planet show Extinction Rebellion protesters have glued and locked themselves to the railings inside the Science Museum, in a protest against the oil firm Shell’s sponsorship of an exhibition about greenhouse gases. Five people have put their arms through the railings and glued their hands together so that they are not damaging the museum’s property. Six have deadlocked their necks against the railings. Some are scientists dressed in lab coats, while others are in clothes with Extinction Rebellion logos. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mWTDzR

Paintings commissioned by East India Company in 18th and 19th century up for sale at Sotheby’s Remarkable paintings of the flora and fauna of India, including a work once owned by Jackie Kennedy Onassis depicting a stork eating a snail, are to go on sale in the first auction dedicated to Company School art. Sotheby’s has announced details of a sale that shines light on overlooked Indian artists today regarded as forgotten masters. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mHooZf

This Has Gotta Stop lines include ‘I can’t take this BS any longer’ and follows negative comments about restrictions Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage Eric Clapton, a staunch critic of measures designed to tackle the Covid pandemic, has released a song entitled This Has Gotta Stop. While the song does not directly mention lockdown measures or vaccines, the musician has performed on anti-vaccine songs in recent months. His latest offering has been interpreted by some as an attack on the measures recommended by health officials. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2WwSrIe

She risked arrest, torture and jail to fight racism in 1980s South Africa, and her story is being made into a film As a white South African, Sue Dobson risked arrest, torture and imprisonment spying for the black nationalist cause during the latter days of the brutal apartheid regime. She was a middle-class woman in her 20s when she joined the African National Congress (ANC) and infiltrated the white minority government – even having a honey-pot affair with a police official to obtain information, with the full support of her husband, a fellow activist. When her cover was blown in 1989, she fled to Britain, where she sought political asylum after threats to her life. Now, for the first time in 30 years, she is ready to talk publicly about her story – that of a “very ordinary” woman who played an extraordinary part in fighting racism. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mLnwCS

Martin Compston is in trouble and Jones’s detective must calm the troubled seas, in a murky marine drama that delivers solid, old-fashioned entertainment Read the first of our episode-by-episode recaps A nuclear submarine. A dead body. A fishing trawler and her crew dragged beneath the waves by an unseen, unstoppable force. A reactor shutdown. Suranne Jones as a bereaved police detective battening down her grief to get on with the job. Martin Compston (DCI Arnott from Line of Duty) as – well, we’ll get to that. Paterson Joseph as a naval captain whose first duty is to his crew and his mission, not to a murder investigation. The BBC’s new six-part drama has all the ingredients to be an absolute humdinger of a series, and it is. Claustrophobics beware – the submarine scenes are very, very submarine-y, all tiny bunks, narrow corridors and building pressure in all senses of the word – but anyone who can bring themselves to watch will have hours of solid, old-fashioned entertainment de

The actor’s harrowing account of the breakdown he suffered in his 20s highlights the psychological impact of racism In his hospital records, the esteemed actor David Harewood is described as a “large Black man”. This means that during his stay on a psychiatric ward, aged 23, he was administered diazepam (to manage anxiety) and haloperidol (used to treat schizophrenia, delirium and agitation) at four times the recommended level. “Were they afraid of me?” he asks upon reading the files that detail the breakdown he had more than 30 years ago. There’s a racist history of classifying black men as “ giant ” or “ superhuman ”. Their perceived size has long been used as a justification for brutality. Think of the 2014 murder of Michael Brown, shot dead by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Wilson described himself as “like a five-year-old holding on to [wrestler] Hulk Hogan ”. “I’m absolutely convinced that had I been in America at the time of my breakdown, I’d most likely b

Crystal Palace Bowl, London David Junghoon Kim, Roland Wood and Natalya Romaniw were excellent in ENO’s outdoor semi-staging of Puccini’s opera Sleaford Mods three weeks ago, now Puccini’s Tosca: the South Facing festival , which has brought Crystal Palace Bowl back to life as a performance venue at weekends this summer, has aimed at something for everyone. With most of the audience – except the seated few at the front – stretched out on the grass, watching English National Opera’s singers as much on the big screens as in the flesh, and with Donna Stirrup’s modern-dress semi-staging crammed in front of the orchestra, this performance was taking place very much not under usual theatrical conditions: the burger and pizza stands were doing a brisk trade as Tosca bargained for her lover’s life. It shouldn’t have worked, perhaps, and yet a belting musical performance, relayed via an impressively responsive sound system, overcame the distractions. And sometimes the results were magical: Da

Royal Albert Hall, London The band Folktone cleverly swapped notes with Patricia Kopatchinskaja before the violinist whipped up a joyous musical whirlwind of Bartók and Ligeti There’s a sepia photo of Bartók out collecting folksongs in what is now the Czech Republic in 1907, phonograph at the ready. The music he recorded didn’t just preserve a vanishing way of life, it also resonated for decades through his compositions. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3sU5O1f

(Columbia) UK rap’s go-to collaborator makes a strong case for his music not to be pigeonholed with this radio-friendly debut album It’s been a frustrating few years for east London singer-rapper Not3s . Since 2017’s viral hit Addison Lee , he has coped with the record industry’s sluggish release schedules by becoming UK rap’s go-to collaborator for the likes of Mabel , Headie One and Tinie . He has also questioned why his blend of Afrobeat, trap and R&B can’t just be labelled pop as opposed to being awkwardly pigeonholed as Afroswing. As if to prove his point, the first half of this debut proper (there have been mixtapes) prioritises radio-friendly bangers. The bouncy, AJ Tracey-accentuated One More Time playfully riffs on Britney’s biggest hit, while hook-laden summer sizzler Boom Bam is basically one long chorus. Even when things get introspective on the spiritual 3rd Eye, it’s anchored by a billowy, Radio 2-ready chorus. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian

Coogan stars as the DCI who reopens the Lawrence case six years after the Macpherson inquiry in three-part dramatisation. Plus: Is someone having a love affair in Ghosts? Here’s what to watch this evening Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3BkDSq8

The modernist maestro had carte blanche to build a great museum. The result? A breathtaking icon hopeless for displaying art. British architect David Chipperfield relives his gargantuan repair job Never has so much praise been lavished on so dysfunctional a building. The last major project of modernist master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie is a perfectly square temple of steel and glass, raised above the street on its own granite acropolis. Built in 1968, not far from the recently erected Berlin Wall, it was intended to symbolise the freedoms of the west, its big black roof enclosing an epic column-free hall for the display of modern art. It has long been venerated as a 20th-century Parthenon, the ultimate example of Mies’s pursuit of “universal space”. But as a museum, it has always been a disaster. Ever since it opened, the New National Gallery has been dogged by cracking windows, heavy condensation and awkward display spaces, presenting a curatorial nigh

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Old College Quad, Edinburgh This lightweight cabaret-style set sells its subject short, even if Cumming can belt out a power ballad convincingly The promise is that Alan Cumming will talk about ageing through a medley of stories and songs. He comes on stage looking spry and super fit in a sleeveless waistcoat and says he is told he does not look his 56 and a half years (he doesn’t). A four-piece band plays as he croons to Charles Strouse’s But Alive and it sets the mood. The band is excellent and the crooning is good but there are several more songs and we wait for the story part of the evening to begin in earnest as Cumming tells us about his relief at being able to fly to Australia again and his cabaret bar in New York’s East Village, Club Cumming. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3BAO3ar

Greenwich Peninsula, London Abseiling on pointe, snazzy suits and spinning geometry were eye-catching openers for the Greenwich and Docklands festival There’s a reason we normally trap audiences in dark theatres. There’s so much to distract the attention at outdoor dance events: the weather, the people milling about, here, the backdrop of shiny new buildings and cable cars over the Thames. But the performances in Dance by Design, part of the opening weekend of Greenwich and Docklands international festival, in London, all have ways of cutting through the noise. The three fantastical figures of The Lost Opera are clearly inspired by Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer ’s Triadic Ballet, their bulbous monochrome bodies made of spheres and cones. But these characters have speakers built into their costumes, so sound is emitted from bell-like sleeves and swings in and out of our auditory orbit as they move and spin. It’s pretty cool. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://

The seventy-one-year-old comedian on his early ambitions to be a singer, his circle of funny people, and the wisdom he’s gleaned from the likes of Joni Mitchell and Neil Simon. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3jr22cl

Producer and performer who worked with Bob Marley and pioneered both dub and roots reggae styles dies in hospital in Jamaica Lee “Scratch” Perry, whose pioneering work with roots reggae and dub opened up profound new depths in Jamaican music, has died aged 85. Jamaican media reported the news that he died in hospital in Lucea, northern Jamaica. No cause of death has yet been given. Andrew Holness, the country’s prime minister, sent “deep condolences” to Perry’s family. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3gK3oND

The cook and the film-maker, who struck up a friendship on Twitter, discuss aesthetics, watching and being watched, and the benefits of ageing M ark Cousins and Nigella Lawson seem, at first, an unlikely pairing. He is an author and film-maker from Northern Ireland, based in Edinburgh, who makes enraptured documentaries about the wonders of cinema. She is one of the most recognisable faces in the food world, a cookery writer and broadcaster who, with each new offering, seals her status as a national treasure. Looking closer, their friendship – and it’s a relatively recent one, conducted mainly via Twitter – begins to make sense. Cousins approaches everything he sees with unbridled enthusiasm and a sense of almost childlike awe, to which Lawson clearly responds. She shares his love of the movies, particularly Italian cinema, while he is evidently a great fan of her TV work, declaring it “more noticeably aesthetic, more into imagery and feel, than many” food shows. And they are both

Prized collection smuggled out of Vienna by Jewish couple in 1930s expected to fetch more than $2m A collection of prized Meissen porcelain smuggled out of Vienna after its Jewish owners were forced to flee the Nazis and later procured for Hitler before being uncovered in a saltmine by the ”Monuments Men” , is to be auctioned in New York next month. The extraordinary journey that the 18th - century artworks have undergone, reflecting the turmoil of the second world war years, has been reconstructed by art historians and restitution lawyers ahead of its upcoming sale by Sotheby’s, the international auction house. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3yqA30P

In this elegant study, the former Conservative minister warns that the US must rethink its relationship with China and embrace a peaceful rivalry That China is an economic superpower rivalling, if not surpassing, the US is not a secret. Political scientists have been debating the implications of that fact for most of this century, and there’s little consensus. What’s clear is that under President Xi Jinping China has been more forthright about its global economic ambitions, not least with the vast and much touted belt and road project. But it has also begun to flex its political and military muscles more openly in its extended neighbourhood. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3DsDQ1h

From the magazine’s archive: a selection of pieces on the effects of our increasingly atomized existence. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3sZtCAS

The challenge to Governor Gavin Newsom strains election norms and institutions that are already dangerously frayed. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2WzmrU6

Quickly leave South Carolina atop farm animal (5). from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3jrQSo0

Correspondence found in archives shows how ‘pushy’ novelist used ‘collusion, networking and back-scratching’ to win literary awards As one of America’s foremost novelists, Philip Roth was awarded nearly every literary accolade, including a Pulitzer prize. It might be assumed that his work spoke for itself in securing these plaudits, but previously unpublished letters reveal he was, in fact, a master of self-promotion, networking and mutual back-scratching. Professor Jacques Berlinerblau, who studied the correspondence while writing a book about Roth , was surprised by how pushy the author was and by his wheeler-dealing with friends and colleagues from the worlds of publishing, literary criticism and academia. “It’s something one would never get from reading his highly autobiographical descriptions of the writer’s lonely life,” he said. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3kz83TJ

Three Texas authors expose the myth that the 1836 battle at a San Antonio mission was about freedom. It was about slavery As the ancient American struggle over how much truth to tell about the traditional oppression of minorities bubbles over, with arguments over everything from the teaching of Critical Race Theory to the mention of anything gay in the presence of anyone under 18, this engaging new book about the history of the Alamo arrives at the perfect moment. Related: Our Own Worst Enemy review: a caustic diagnosis of America after Trump Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3BrKenT

Despite the balancing act – home schooling, a second baby, a fifth album and a nationwide tour – Paloma Faith always comes out fighting… and full of stories Here’s a nice little exclusive for you,” Paloma Faith leans into my voice recorder generously, grinning, “and you’ll like this because it’s about lactation!” We are huddled outside a café on a day that promised sun but delivered rain, and she pulls her jacket around her a bit tighter – on the back, in big letters it reads: IT’S ALL BOLLOCKS. So, she says, a week ago she put a post on Instagram about her second baby’s aversion to breastfeeding, and minutes later got a call. “‘Don’t bin the milk!’ they said. Six months of milk, I’d been pumping since my baby was born, and a lactation consultant called and told me she’d pick it up, give it to a new mother who couldn’t breastfeed and was beside herself with worry. It was all marked, dated, so I put it in a freezer bag stuffed with ice packs and sent it off.” Does the woman know… “Tha

Jude Law is terrific as a devious City trader who moves his family from New York to a spooky Surrey mansion in this richly atmospheric drama Jude Law ’s glittering and insincere salesman’s smile has rarely been better used than in Sean Durkin’s prickly domestic drama The Nest . As brash British City boy Rory, he blasts the full force of his skin-deep charm, arms outstretched, as he welcomes his American family to the 17th-century Surrey mansion he has leased for a year “with the option to buy”. Having unilaterally decided to relocate them all from a comfortable life in New York back to the UK to take advantage of the imminent deregulation of the 1980s financial market, Rory is fully invested in the move to this crumbling pile. The ostentatious, impractical house, with its jutting turrets and the vacant Valium gaze of its windows, is a core part of the oversize identity that Rory is crafting for himself. It’s not a home, it’s a waymarker on a social climb, a capricious trophy wife of a

From teen therapy to creative force behind cancel culture drama What is the best way to deal with critical customer feedback? Well, Joan, a veteran academic at the fictional Pembroke College, an almost-Ivy League American university, knows exactly what to do with it. She quietly puts a match to reams of negative student evaluations of her work. It is an amusing, angry scene that takes place inside her grim, cellar-like university study and occurs somewhere towards the middle of new six-part television drama The Chair . But it is also a moment that sits right at the show’s emotional core. Joan is clearly doing wrong, but her diminished status as an ageing, overlooked lecturer makes her a sympathetic figure. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3joIVj4

Pioneering young black photographer Dana Scruggs’s celebration of movement and form The headline act at this summer’s photography festival in Arles is an exhibition devoted to the young black photographers who are – literally – changing the face (and bodies) of fashion photography. The New Black Vanguard features the work of Tyler Mitchell , the first black photographer to shoot a Vogue cover, and Dana Scruggs, who achieved the same extraordinarily overdue milestone at Rolling Stone , when she photographed the rapper Travis Scott in 2019. Scruggs, born in Chicago and based in New York, started out photographing vintage clothes and furniture for her own Etsy store a decade ago. In 2016, frustrated by the continuing lack of diversity in advertising and fashion, she crowdfunded the launch of her own magazine, SCRUGGS , to showcase her distinctive ways of expressing light and movement, focusing on the black male body. “There’s a fearfulness of black men in American society and globall

In lockdown in Galway City, Burke focused on the bright side – creating gaudily retro, deadpan tableaux with his parents in all the starring roles Enda Burke spent lockdown with his parents in Galway City on the west coast of Ireland. As a street photographer, with street life on hold, he decided to focus on the people closest to hand. The result is an award-winning series, Homebound With My Parents, which turns lockdown into theatre. His luminously exuberant colourscape – candyfloss pink, sunflower yellow and turquoise – offers “an antidote to the gloom of Covid”. It’s a bid for “vibrancy, humour, a form of escapism”. To pull this bright new world off, Burke turned the family home upside down and meticulously constructed each set himself. He ordered his retro items online, put up wallpaper and drilled his parents into their new lockdown roles. When I cross-question him about how they reacted to this hijacking, the 33-year-old reports that his parents are “very easygoing”, and says

Charles Foster’s search for the meaning of human life leads him and his son to become hedgehog-eating hunter-gatherers in a Derbyshire wood Charles Foster’s previous book, Being a Beast , is one of the oddest things I’ve read. In it, the author, a barrister, professor of law, part-time judge and former vet, attempts to live as a series of animals, often in the company of his charming and heavily dyslexic eight-year-old son, Tom. We see Foster eating worms and burrowing into the earth as a badger, swimming naked as an otter, foraging in bins as a fox. Now Foster is back with a follow-up, Being a Human , which acknowledges the charges of eccentricity and even insanity that were levelled at the last book. Foster’s new work continues the project of its predecessor, although this time, rather than seeking to understand the brains and bodies of animals, his question is closer to home: what does it mean to be human? He begins with a contentious argument: far from being a story of progress,

(Capitol) The singer-songwriter contemplates new motherhood on this intriguing fourth album American singer-songwriter Halsey’s excellently titled fourth album comes accompanied by a film , unavailable to view at the time of writing. Trailers suggest a Game of Thrones -meets-French Revolution-themed goth rock opera about the Madonna-whore complex . The album’s 13 tracks don’t quite live up to that billing, but there is no denying that Halsey, who recently gave birth, wants to make a muscular and epic statement. Otherwise, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails would be a very odd choice for midwives to a pop superstar’s emotional album about love, pregnancy and female sexuality. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3sX1LRD

Maritime drama Vigil begins with Jones tackling a murder case aboard a Trident submarine. Plus: Mortimer and Whitehouse go fishing once more. Here’s what to watch this evening Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3BiH71i

Jaboukie Young-White stars in “Dating & New York,” an old-school rom-com refreshed for the swipe-right era. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3BhlEG7

The comedian, 33, talks about funny anger, homophobic hecklers, selling soffits and his trouble with Heinz pasta shapes Anger is a funny emotion. That’s how I accidentally got my consumer show. In my stand-up set, I’d read out my complaint letters. My genuine fury about minor injustices got laughs. It grew from there. Basically, a parking fine in York ended up making me loads of cash. It’s paid for itself many times over. I learn ed to make pasta in lockdown. I did all the bread-baking clichés too – banana bread, soda bread, sourdough – but pasta was my great victory. I got really good at it, as my waistline will attest. Except for ravioli. My meaty parcels kept falling open. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3jn8CAx

(EMI) The Glaswegian trio use horror film tropes to explore fame, double standards and battles closer to home on their intense fourth album In 1992, the US film professor Carol J Clover published Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton University Press). In it, she introduced the concept of the “final girl”, a female protagonist who survives the bloodbath to take on the slasher in the closing scenes. If the final girl is heroic, she is also a problematic figure, kept alive by the film-maker because of her sobriety or chastity while other women who have more fun get the axe. The sequel makes the final girl’s victory pyrrhic anyway. Midway through Screen Violence , Chvrches ’ intense fourth album, a song called Final Girl puts the well-worn horror trope to a more personal use. Lauren Mayberry – mouthpiece of the Glaswegian synth-pop trio – doesn’t want to “end up in a bodybag”. In 2019, Chvrches co-authored a huge tune, Here With Me , with Marshmello.

Stones post montage of clips from drummer’s almost 60-year career with band The Rolling Stones have released a video tribute to Charlie Watts, following the drummer’s death aged 80 this week. The world of rock and roll united to salute Watts after he died peacefully surrounded by his family at a London hospital on Tuesday . Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3ByTzdF

How did humans learn to talk and why haven’t chimpanzees followed suit? Linguistics expert Sverker Johansson busts some chauvinist myths How and when did human language evolve? Did a “grammar module” just pop into our ancestors’ brains one day thanks to a random change in our DNA? Or did language come from grooming, or tool use, or cooking meat with fire? These and other hypotheses exist, but there seems little way to rationally choose between them. It was all so very long ago, so any theory must be essentially speculation. Or must it? This is the question presented as an elegant intellectual thriller by The Dawn of Language: Axes, Lies, Midwifery and How We Came to Talk . Its author is Sverker Johansson, a serene and amiable 60-year-old Swede who speaks to me over Zoom from his book-crammed home study in the city of Falun, where he works as a senior adviser at Dalarna University. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2WwyyRi

A cartoonist discusses his new show about the development of an American art form. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3gIog7U

Tsai Ming-liang’s cinema of illness, desire, and the power of attention. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3mDxsyn

What’s next, an episode on critical race theory? from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2XVVPge

The activist and author discusses why there is no one-size-fits-all feminism and her aim to create work that comforts women of colour who have been ‘gaslit’ Rafia Zakaria’s new book Against White Feminism starts with a sort of Sex and the City scene entitled “At a wine bar, a group of feminists ...” In it, some well-heeled white women are gathered for a drink in New York. The only brown woman in attendance, Zakaria winces and wilts under the glare of their innocent questions, as she tries to avoid the responses she tends to receive when she tells her true story – ones of pity, discomfort and avoidance. Zakaria was born in Pakistan and at the age of 17 agreed to an arranged marriage to a Pakistani man living in the US. “I had never experienced freedom, so I gladly signed it away,” she writes. The marriage was unhappy, and she left her abusive husband at the age of 25, seeking refuge in a shelter with her toddler. What followed were years of precarity in the US. Continue reading...

This multilayered murder mystery set on a nuclear submarine takes the usual police procedural beats and gives them a new lease of life There are three things we, as a nation, love and adore: bank holiday weekends, multilayered murder mysteries being solved by someone who keeps having flashbacks to that one time they had trauma, and Suranne Jones being class. The BBC knows this, which is why it’s putting out the first two episodes of Vigil (Sunday 29 and Monday 30 August, 9pm, BBC One) – a multilayered murder mystery featuring Suranne Jones being class – on this, the woozy long weekend that heralds the end of summer. Put the grill away and apply aloe to that welt of sunburn: Suranne is here, and – what’s that? Drop to knees, inspect ground, shine torch on ill-lit corner. Yep, just as I thought: that’s blood. Captain, this just became a murder investigation. Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian ht

From full-bodied dramas to zesty comedies, use our recommender to discover returning favourites and complimentary viewing tips • Vigil: Suranne Jones’ classy new drama is Sunday night TV at its best Pen15 (Sky Comedy, Saturday 28 August ) Once you adjusted to the Quantum Leap-style visual of thirtysomethings Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle playing their 13-year-old selves in this bracing teen sitcom, it proved to be an awkward delight . A special animated episode heralds the back half of season two later this year. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2WuDHcT

Ruling says parents had no legal right to ‘destroy property that they dislike’ A judge in Michigan has ordered a couple to pay $30,441 (£22,100) to their son, for throwing out his pornography collection. US district judge Paul Maloney’s decision this week came eight months after David Werking, 43, won a lawsuit against his parents . Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3BdFG4a

At 30, the Normal People author is already the most talked-about novelist of her generation. As she readies her third novel, she’s bracing for more (unwanted) attention Sally Rooney appears before a stark, white background, stripped of even the most incidental feature. It makes me laugh: in 18 months of Zoom meetings, I’ve encountered people in their bedrooms and home offices, in front of bookcases and windows – situations that, no matter how bland or contrived, still betray some minor, contextualising detail. The empty staging today is, evidently, something that Rooney, after two hit novels and the rapid onset of an unwelcome fame, clearly wishes might extend further than a video call. Later in our conversation she will tell me celebrity is a condition that, in many cases, “happens without meaningful consent – the famous person never even wanted to become famous”. Now, after exchanging greetings, I mention the singularity of the naked white walls and she laughs and says merely, “Yes

With a hit Netflix series and The Fran Lebowitz Reader now published in the UK, the American wit talks about failing to write, her dislike of Andy Warhol and her best friend Toni Morrison Fran Lebowitz is a famous writer who famously doesn’t write. “I’m really lazy and writing is really hard and I don’t like to do hard things,” she says, and it’s the rare writer who would not have some sympathy with that. Yet, as all writers also know, writer’s block, which the 70-year-old has suffered from for four decades now, is never really about laziness. Lebowitz’s editor Erroll McDonald (“the man with the easiest job in New York”) has said she suffers from “excessive reverence for the written word”. Given that Lebowitz has, at last count, more than 11,000 of them in her apartment, there is no question that she loves books. “I would never throw away a book – there are human beings I would rather throw out of the window,” she says. So is this talk of “excessive reverence” a euphemistic way of sa

Wild island adventures, hungry monsters, TS Eliot’s cat – plus the best new YA novels The remote wildness of a Scottish island blended with Celtic folklore and Hindu mythology: Jasbinder Bilan’s Aarti & the Blue Gods (Chicken House) is a gem for readers of eight-plus. Aarti lives alone with her exacting, cruel aunt, cut off from the world and her own history – until a boy washes up on the beach, and she makes an extraordinary discovery. Deftly interweaving the tangible and the numinous, this richly layered adventure confirms Bilan’s striking, original talent. From Scavengers author Darren Simpson comes The Memory Thieves (Usborne), a tense sci-fi thriller. In the Elsewhere Sanctuary, young residents, including Cyan, submit to Dr Haven’s memory modifications to escape deep-rooted trauma – but when Cyan finds a cryptic message carved into a whale skeleton, and sees a new arrival resist the regime, he begins to rebel, too. Simpson combines fast-paced visual storytelling with a c

Farrell and Stephen Graham star in the gritty new thriller about an 1850s whaling ship. However, the drama wasn’t confined to the screen … Nothing shocked me about The North Water,” says Colin Farrell, stroking his straggly beard. “If I want to be shocked, I’ll go out at 3am and see someone homeless in the street. That’s shocking because it demonstrates apathy that results in abject cruelty. This has blood, seal and whale killings, murder, rape, mayhem. But however brutal that seems, it’s a film set. It’s all artifice.” Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3BkCtzT

A Malaysian novelist of Chinese descent explores his roots – and the shadow of family trauma Years ago I was queueing in a fruit and veg shop in Cornwall with my half-Chinese dad when an elderly woman came up and asked him: “Where are you from?” “Liverpool,” he said. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/38icHj9

Lawrence Kasdan’s thrilling update of Double Indemnity brought the noir template into a new decade with help from a never-better Kathleen Turner The first time we see William Hurt in Body Heat, he’s standing naked with his back to the camera, glistening in post-coital sweat and staring out at a burning building – which, in the seedy world of south Florida real estate, counts as a business transaction. His latest conquest acknowledges his lack of interest in her after sex (“You’re watching the fire,” she says. “You’re done with me.”), but she doesn’t seem put out by it. Like the audience, she’s enjoying the view. Related: An American Werewolf in London at 40: John Landis’s crafty creative peak Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3kAPUVJ

Tracy Swinton Bailey has written an inspiring book about Freedom Readers and how to use literacy for good As the school year begins, teachers and parents share common concerns about the education of young people, a concern greater than virus variants or mask mandates. Related: David Blight on Frederick Douglass: 'I call him beautifully human' Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3DlDQQR

When her partner left her with a newborn one dark Finnish winter, Anna Härmälä didn’t crumble. Inspired by Fleabag, she turned her pain into raw, funny cartoons “It’s Finnish winter in complete darkness, and it’s raining ice. And then you can’t sleep, and the baby is screaming, and you’re too tired to get up, but if you don’t get up, there is no one else there.” Anna Härmälä is describing February 2015, when her partner walked out on her and their five-week-old baby. In order to remember, she has to inhabit the “brutal darkness” of that time. “There was extreme tiredness, a deep sadness, moments of despair – but also moments of great love and purpose. That first year was a crazy rollercoaster. It was absolutely… ” She pauses, and breathes in, searching for the right word. What is the word for how it feels when your partner has an affair and abandons you with a newborn? How do you explain it? Härmälä, a Finnish art teacher and children’s book author, started drawing comics. The comic

The veteran host looks back through 50 years of celebrity interviews in a new documentary. Plus: Bettany Hughes’ Treasures Of The World. Here’s what to watch this evening Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3juacB3

The central flaw in U.S. strategy is the belief that military force can eradicate extremist groups or radical ideologies. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2Y5uAA4

Scholars, filmmakers, and curators all use eBay as a vital resource for queer history, but the site has recently banned the sale of “sexually oriented materials.” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2WxeL4t

Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, expects his opponent to paint him as racist, sexist, and homophobic. But he’s ready to strike back. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/38kxLFL

The author-illustrator on being read Tolkien at school, the perfect picture book and struggling to crack The Da Vinci Code The book I am currently reading James Holland’s magnificent account of the invasion of Sicily, Sicily ’43 , filled with first-hand testimonies from private soldiers, generals, future princes and Hollywood movie stars. The book that changed my life The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. It was read to me and the rest of my class by our teacher over the course of many weeks. I missed the battle of the five armies at the end because I had flu, so I borrowed the book from the school library and never looked back. The Hobbit turned me into an avid reader for life. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2WmnOWh

Carnival regulars describe why it means so much, as Covid keeps it off streets for second year in a row When asked when he first attended Notting Hill carnival, Steve Clarke initially has to pause. Before he was born, he answers while laughing, as his mum went to the festivities while pregnant with him. “Carnival is in my blood.” Clarke, 52, grew up in Ladbroke Grove and spent much of his childhood standing on the balcony watching the bombastic procession go past. He joined the parade as a participant in a mas band aged 16. His favourite memory is of when he first put on his costume for the carnival band United Colours of Mas (UCOM), co-founded by Paul O’Donoghue and Richard Gallimore. He felt at home and part of a multicultural family. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3jkZ9K2

A celebration of the brains behind some of the small screen’s biggest and best shows, including The Wire, Grey’s Anatomy and Friends Since graduating from the US remake of The Office , Schur has done more than anyone to develop its ethos of making comedy that’s cool without being unkind. He was the boss of Parks and Recreation , which recovered from a so-so start to become truly beloved. Then The Good Place wowed us with primary colours and slyly intelligent philosophising. He co-created Brooklyn Nine-Nine , too. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2WygGWB

The brilliant Annie Murphy skewers TV cliches in this meta-sitcom that takes a detour into drug-fuelled crime drama. But can it deliver on its ingenious premise? It’s a classic multi-camera sitcom setup: an ordinary Joe sitting on his couch in a brightly lit sitting room, trading beer-fuelled wisecracks with his dad and his buddies while a laughter track greets every utterance. His inexplicably beautiful wife appears – a new butt of new jokes! – to roll her eyes at the schlub on the sofa, gather glasses from the coffee table and leave more beer. Then she returns to the kitchen on her own and everything darkens, goes quiet. Artifice disappears. She closes her eyes in despair and gashes her hand as she shatters one of the merry gang’s empty beer steins against the counter. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3BhZx2o

(Smalltown Supersound) The Norwegian musician mics the whole studio, influenced by everything from techno to queer theory, on his hypnotic second album Bendik Giske is a saxophonist who doesn’t appear to like the saxophone very much. As a gay man growing up in Norway, and then attending a music conservatoire in Copenhagen, he hated the straight, male establishment that constituted the Scandinavian jazz scene; he hated the saxophone’s “thrusting”, phallic implications; he even hated playing melodies on his instrument. “By playing tunes you step into that understanding of what the saxophone is supposed to be, what it usually does,” he says. “I wanted to find my voice by abandoning the soloist role, which is a very illogical thing to do on the saxophone.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3DqDtoa

From Tito’s gulags to a kibbutz … this is a powerful retelling of a Jewish woman’s extraordinary life, and of a family’s emotional trauma, from the author of A Horse Walks into a Bar Israeli author David Grossman’s concisely devastating novel was inspired by the life of Eva Panić Nahir, a Jewish woman from the former Yugoslavia who, having been imprisoned and tortured as a traitor in one of Tito’s gulags, came to Israel with her daughter, married a widower and created a politically and socially active life on a kibbutz. But that condensed biography barely scrapes the surface of a story so emotionally, ideologically and morally complex that it takes all of Grossman’s considerable skills to render. He is not the first artist to attempt it; the Serbian novelist Danilo Kiš made a television series about Eva, and there was a documentary in 2003. But Grossman, who had a “profound friendship” with her for more than 20 years until her death in 2015, evidently felt that there was more to say,

This adaptation of Alan Warner’s The Sopranos is led by a terrific ensemble cast – though some of the gags feel dated post #MeToo After Alan Warner published his brilliant and hilarious third novel The Sopranos in 1998, about a group of working-class convent schoolgirls on the rampage in Edinburgh, for years the big surprise has been that it hasn’t been turned into a film. Now, finally, here it is, an adaptation of The Sopranos (renamed, for obvious reasons) – and the thing is, it’s a few years too late. Post #MeToo, there are scenes here that are a bit off; in all honesty, though, they might have felt wrong as far back as the Rotherham child abuse scandal. Such as the moment when the girls on the back of the coach flash their bras and wave “shag me” signs to passing builders’ vans. Still, plenty of Warner’s wonderfully un-PC gags stand the test of time. “Why are nuns ballbags?” asks one of the girls. “Low wages and no sex,” jokes her mate. What’s more, Rob Roy director Michael Caton