Cultural News Today

In Midsommar, Ari Aster’s divisive follow-up to Hereditary, scares are drawn out for 140 minutes, allowing for a more effectively nightmarish experience As a movie-watcher develops a more clearly honed sense of their own taste, they may come to understand certain disparaging critical remarks as covert positives. A connoisseur of gore might hear a new release knocked as “gratuitously violent,” for instance, and prick up their ears in the knowledge that they’re in for a treat. Those with formalist leanings, privileging aesthetics over narrative, will take the disses “more like a feature-length music video” or “90-minute perfume commercial” as compliments. Personally, when a horror film gets dinged on the grounds of being “overlong” or “full of bizarre tangents that go nowhere”, I take notice and pay attention. The unwieldy, the inexplicable, the ambitious-to-a-fault – this is my cinematic happy place. Related: Midsommar director Ari Aster: 'I often cling to dead things' Conti...

The work of 75 artists from over 15 countries is being shown at a tough, timely exhibition looking at displacement and migration on a global scale Last Wednesday, a photo was released of a Salvadorian man and his young daughter face down in the Rio Grande, who drowned while attempting to migrate from Mexico to Texas. This chilling shot brought yet more attention to the ongoing border dangers faced by migrants while attempting to find asylum in the US. “It’s a sad day to talk about this, there aren’t many fairytale endings,” said Massimiliano Gioni, the artistic director of New York’s New Museum the same day. Together with associate curator Natalie Bell, he’s assembled a timely new exhibition focusing on the history of migration in America. The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement features 75 artists from over 15 countries, many who have experienced displacement firsthand. “It’s not exactly an uplifting exhibition, it might have to do with the spirit of the times, s...

Netflix has promotional agreements with 75 different brands for season three of the show. Why do they like it so much? Netflix and the Duffer Brothers are up against it. In Stranger Things, they have managed to create a juggernaut that satisfies critics and fans in equal measure. But, at the same time, the show comes with its own form of inbuilt obsolescence. This isn’t a series designed to run for ever because, short of forcing them into a nightmarish round of age-denying cosmetic surgery, the cast will reach adulthood before long. The current prediction is that Stranger Things will check out after four or five seasons. The third season becomes available this week. This means that Netflix only has a short time to wring every last penny it can from the show. And, oh boy, is it trying. According to the New York Times, Netflix has promotional agreements with 75 different brands for the new season. It’s a huge, sprawling campaign that will essentially render Stranger Things impossible...

The closure of Gatwick highlighted the problem that rogue drones can cause. But what can be done about it? Plus, C-list celebs on a fishing boat. Here’s what to watch this evening Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2RM2UJb

Exhibition promises to unearth the forgotten treasures of 20th-century British comics People probably know Billy Bunter, the Heavyweight Chump of Greyfriars, but how many recall the equally food-obsessed Hungry Horace, a stalwart of the Sparky? We remember Beryl the Peril but what about the even more troublesome Jonah? “Jonah was on the back page of the Beano for seven or eight years,” said comic expert Steve Marchant . “He was an ugly sailor. Every week he would rock up on to somebody’s boat and the boat would sink, that was the gag. The humour was in how the inevitable happens … terrific stuff.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2J1XVBz

Trafalgar Studios, London The Star Trek actor plays a fading TV star in a play that blends giddy pastiche with affecting ruminations on fame and fandom It will come as no great shock to Star Trek: The Next Generation fans that Marina Sirtis, who played the much-loved Empath Deanna Troi, is an actress with real heart. It isn’t a faultless performance (sometimes the lines feel shaky) and Michael Dennis’s debut play is a fairly juddery, flippant one minute and extravagantly emotional the next. But Sirtis is genuinely moving as a near-forgotten actress whose star is on the wane, and Dennis writes passionately about television’s ability to transport us to another dimension and forget ourselves for a while. Andrew Keates directs with a palpable sense of mischief and affection. Scenes from Dark Sublime, the sci-fi show that made Marianne famous, play out between the “real” scenes from Marianne’s later life. Tim McQuillen-Wright’s neatly drawn domestic set gives over to sci-fi silliness: t...

Love, Money and Obligation: Transnational Marriage in a Northeastern Thai Village, by Patcharin Lapanun, NUS Press, 4/5 starsWell-researched and easy to follow, Patcharin Lapanun’s Love, Money and Obligation: Transnational Marriage in a Northeastern Thai Village is a powerful reminder of how interconnected the world has become – and how love can develop between people from completely different backgrounds.Though a work of academic anthropology, based mainly on Patcharin’s PhD research, the book… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2XdbfXv

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Pyramid stage Robert Smith’s band of goth-pop veterans focus on their imperial phase: a catalogue that can’t help but be anthemic There’s a sense in which the Cure’s performance is the opposite of every other headline performance on the Pyramid stage this weekend. There’s no special guests, not much in the way of explosive special effects and there’s no attendant sense of can they do this – or how will this work? It’s been 41 years since they started plying fretful suburban melancholy and rainy Sunday afternoon ennui: the first time they headlined Glastonbury was some years before a considerable portion of this year’s attendees were born. These days, they release albums so infrequently that huge – and incredibly lengthy – live shows are pretty much the band’s raison d’etre. This kind of thing is tried and tested; it’s just what they do. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2KOcElC

Braun’s Ithaca Holdings acquires Big Machine Label Group Singer on Tumblr: sale worse than ‘worst nightmares’ Taylor Swift on Sunday lamented the sale of her catalogue to the manager and mogul Scooter Braun , writing in a scathing Tumblr post that she was sad and grossed out that her music now belongs to a man she accuses of subjecting her to years of incessant and manipulative bullying. Related: Pop super-manager Scooter Braun: 'I was not going to let Justin Bieber die' Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FJBsa8

The cult director of Blue Velvet is soon to bring his creative vision to Manchester international festival. But how does he get his ideas? David Lynch is best known for his strange, beguiling, often nightmarish work for cinema and television – films such as Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive and the TV phenomenon Twin Peaks – but from his home studio in the Hollywood Hills he also produces music, paintings, sculptures, books, short films and music videos. The breadth of Lynch’s creative interests will be on full display this week at the Manchester international festival , where the 73-year-old presents a special season of screenings, live music and talks at the city’s Home arts centre, alongside his first major UK exhibition of visual art. Lynch was born in Montana and grew up in various parts of the white-picket-fence middle America he would later interrogate in his films. He studied painting in Philadelphia before making a transition to experimental cinema. His 1977 debut, Eraser...

The pair met on the rocky Greek island of Hydra in 1960. Their romance inspired countless Cohen songs – and now a poignant documentary by Nick Broomfield In November 2016, the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, renowned for his plaintive ballads, died a few months after the woman who inspired many of them, his Norwegian lover and muse, Marianne Ihlen . Theirs had been a large and chaotic romance that was in many respects a product of the particular times (the 1960s) and the specific place (the Greek island of Hydra) in which they met. The relationship’s legacy was a catalogue of classic songs – So Long Marianne , Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye , Bird on the Wire – a great deal of heartache, but also a lasting sense of the creative power of love. All of this the documentary maker Nick Broomfield explores in his tender, funny and hauntingly moving new film Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love . Broomfield is not a disinterested observer. He knew Ihlen well. They too were lovers for a w...

Show’s creator regrets that guesswork about inspiration for characters made life tricky for those close to her Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the creator of the dark comedy Fleabag , has confessed to making serious mistakes with those she cares about following her extraordinary success as a writer and performer. Her family, she claims, have “taken the brunt” of the negative impact of her sudden fame due to her failure to protect them from outside guesswork about the inspiration for her hit BBC Two show, which portrays the misadventures of a young woman known as Fleabag. The character’s strained relationships with an elder sister, Claire, played by Sian Clifford, and her godmother, played by Olivia Colman, are pivotal to the story, as is suppressed grief over a mother’s death and the loss of a close friend. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FIq9zb

A new lease of life for Hastings art; a London clinic for dancers closes; and whose reviews to trust on David Mamet’s new play? Forget 1066. For the past decade, the new battle of Hastings has been fought at the south coast resort over an art gallery. Next weekend, the Hastings Contemporary opens after an acrimonious tussle with the owners of the building, the Jerwood Foundation . Back in the late 2000s many Hastings folk tried to stop a gallery being built on the seafront, as local gas guzzlers wanted to keep the area as a car park. But culture won out, and the Jerwood Gallery, funded by the foundation, opened in 2012. Over the next few years its fortunes were mixed - with displays of its 300-plus British collection, including works by Hepworth and Lowry, and exhibitions. But visitor numbers disappointed, partly because of excellent nearby rivals, the De La Warr in Bexhill and Towner in Eastbourne . Mutual bitching finally led to a parting of the ways between foundation and galle...

Judith Krantz, who has died at 91, was a queen of the genre, putting confident women and their friendships to the fore It was hard not to see the death of Judith Krantz at the age of 91 last week as the end of an era. Krantz was the “queen of the bonkbuster”, those glitzy novels with their gaudy covers and snappy often one-word titles – Scruples , Lace , Rivals – that dominated commercial fiction in the late 1970s and 1980s, spinning stories of fabulous lives lived at full tilt and stuffed full of sex, secrets and shopping. As a teenager, I thrilled to those books: to Krantz’s Scruples , in which her formidable heroine, Billy Ikehorn (nee Winthrop), essentially anticipated the hipster shopping experience by about two decades, opening the shop that gave the book its title, a perfect pleasuredome with an on-site bar in which women tried on shoes and sipped champagne while their husbands drank beer and played backgammon; to Shirley Conran ’s Lace , every 80s schoolgirl’s most feverish...

Festival shuts down showers and offers extra shady areas, while sales of ice-cream soar Long queues at taps and shower closures were seen across the Glastonbury site as the festival dealt with its hottest day as temperatures rose to 30C on Saturday. Showers were closed across the site as a precautionary measure to preserve water as temperatures soared and the festival’s management coped with the demands of 200,000 people requiring drinking water in challenging conditions. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NnSzEX

Pyramid stage Brandon Flowers and co – with a little help from the Pet Shop Boys, Johnny Marr and the pyrotechnics department – provide one of those special Glastonbury Moments Catch up on Saturday highlights on our liveblog A band that obviously have nothing in common musically with Stormzy, the Killers nevertheless share a problem: before they play, a shadow hangs over their headline performance. One rumour circulating around the audience is that they were the third choice for the Saturday night headlining slot, drafted in after big name heritage artists declined to sign up. Whether that’s true or not, something about Brandon Flowers’ demeanour onstage, at least initially, suggests a man who isn’t entirely sure how things are going to pan out. “At the end of this show, I don’t want anyone to say ‘They got away with it,’” he offers, early on in the band’s set. “I want people to look up to this stage and say: ‘Those are the sons of bitches that did it.’” Certainly, you’re stuck by...

Pyramid stage The younger Gallagher brother continued his Glasto residency with a set of transcendent Oasis classics – and the occasional unasked for solo song Catch up on Saturday highlights on our liveblog After Lewis Capaldi performed on the Other stage wearing a T-shirt with Noel Gallagher’s face on it in response to his recent barbs about him, Liam Gallagher missed a trick not coming on in a T-shirt bearing Capaldi’s face, therefore completing the circle of trolling of the Gallagher brother most deficient in humour. Still, Liam’s Pyramid stage set isn’t exactly lacking in animosity towards his chèr frère: he labels him “a little fart” and mocks his dismissal of Oasis’s greatest hits. Evidently it’s not a position Liam shares, dedicating a good half of his set to the band’s back catalogue. He comes on to the riff from Fucking in the Bushes, just as Oasis did at their massive Wembley shows in 2000, and performs Rock’n’Roll Star. It feels like a territorial land grab in the f...

Lack of women in this year’s major headline slots attracts criticism as Emily Eavis pledges 50/50 gender balance in future lineups Festival-goers were preparing to see Kylie’s eagerly awaited performance on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury on Sunday, but her performance comes amid criticism of the lack of women in major headline slots. When it was announced in March that Janet Jackson, who played the Pyramid stage on Saturday, was to perform at Glastonbury, she tweeted a poster for the festival to her fans, but with the order of the acts altered to make it appear that she had top billing. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FHgzwp

(XL) Electronic music’s Cassandra-in-chief has long soundtracked our age of anxiety with queasy mood music. His latest album takes its working methods from the live digital improv of LA e-jazz operative Flying Lotus and comes with a Paul Thomas Anderson short film . Although Yorke sounds refreshed, the results here don’t vary wildly from the Radiohead frontman’s instantly recognisable musical signatures, evolved over 20 years. Radiohead’s go-to producer, Nigel Godrich, helped condense these improvisations into song-forms and the result is nine tracks that are often (like the strong opener Traffic) dusted with echoes of the joys of club music, and sometimes (as on the sombre but hopeful Dawn Chorus) more still and intimate. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2XeUhrE

Composed entirely of archive footage, this documentary invests the historic mission with a tense immediacy Given that we all know how the mission turned out, this documentary about the Apollo 11 lunar landing shouldn’t be as nervily tense as it is. But the archive-only approach – unlike the 2007 picture In the Shadow of the Moon, there are no contemporary interviews, just material recorded at the time – lends the film an immersive sense of urgency. Like the rows of crew-cut, clench-jawed scientists staring fixedly at banks of grainy screens 50 years before, we almost forget to breathe as Armstrong manoeuvres a rickety little capsule that looks like it’s held together with duct tape and faith. There is no shortage of factual films that explore this moment. But a combination of superb research – behind-the-scenes footage is augmented by newsreel shots of crowds camped out in the car park of a JC Penney department store, craning to catch a glimpse of history – and first-rate editing mak...

(Nonesuch) Their first record since 2006’s Magic Potion without the guiding hand of Danger Mouse on production duties finds the Black Keys reverting to the simple, stripped-back bluesy rock of their earlier work. The sense that “Let’s Rock” is a conscious return to basics is only amplified by that title, even if the quote marks give them the option of distancing themselves from the sentiment. Ironic or not, there’s certainly plenty here that’s easy on the ear, from the breathlessly propulsive rhythm of Eagle Birds and the slick 70s-influenced AOR of Tell Me Lies to the Stonesy swagger of recent single Lo/Hi (even if the latter’s lyrics appear to have been composed using a Bobby Gillespie-edition fridge-magnet poetry set: “Out on a limb in the wind of a hurricane”, indeed). Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FHKHrD

Andrew Bujalski’s day in the life of a sports bar is a nuanced, episodic tale of female solidarity It’s not much to look at. Double Whammies is a squat concrete sports bar crouched by a relentlessly screaming highway. But for fiercely protective general manager Lisa (Regina Hall), it’s a matter of pride. The institution is, she states, a “mainstream” one; the scantily clad girls who serve up “Big Ass” beers and a chaser shot of flirtation to the punters are a family. And at the beginning of the eventful 24-hour period over which the film plays out, one of the family is in trouble, having run over her abusive boyfriend with her car. Lisa sets up an illicit fundraising car wash, in addition to dealing with the childcare issues of staff members and the hapless burglar who is wedged in the air con vent. Add a vindictive boss with rage issues and the slow, painful breakup of her marriage and Lisa has plenty to juggle with, even before the cable TV packs in and someone vomits all over the ...

The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon Robin French’s new play mixes music, folklore and contemporary ideas to intriguing, if overlong effect Into a house in a forest go a boy and a girl. Wolves howl. Inside, the boy and girl are fed gingerbread by a wise woman. Strange things happen in the night. Robin French’s new play seems part fairytale, part play of ideas. In appearance, at first, it looks like a contemporary drama. Katy (Jeany Spark, below) is a struggling journalist. Nick (Olly Mott) is an upcoming photographer. Their paper has sent them to Paris where the acclaimed, publicity-shy Chilean pianist Silvia de Zingaro (Ruth Lass), on the eve of her retirement, will give them her first interview for a decade. If Katy can get Silvia to tell the secrets of her private life, it will be the scoop she dreams of. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ZUeoxd

A topical tale of rape and murder burns with justified anger A bruising cop thriller set in Uttar Pradesh, Article 15 tackles two of the most contentious themes in Indian society: the caste system and the culture of violence against women. And – fair warning – it tackles them with a thunderous lack of sensitivity, particularly given that the film is loosely based on a real-life gang rape and murder case. That said, the anger that propels the picture towards violence is authentic and the official corruption and collusion depicted are all too real. Director Anubhav Sinha, who also co-wrote, has an eye for the kind of searing image that drives home a point. And Ayushmann Khurrana, playing the good cop who can’t bring himself to look away to preserve “society’s balance”, combines soulful Bollywood heartthrob charisma with an arrestingly intense performance. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2xj7pSh

(Keep Cool/Columbia) American rapper Freddie Gibbs and producer Madlib, known for his work with Talib Kweli, J Dilla and MF Doom, first collaborated on 2014’s acclaimed Piñata . Gibbs, born and raised in Indiana, has some of the spiky, conversational flow of Jay-Z but lacks the New York rapper’s ability to bring images and ideas to life with words. On this sequel, Gibbs mostly sounds bored, aggressively bored or boringly aggressive. The ever creative Madlib chucks in everything he can find to dazzle the listener. When this coheres – in the vicious swamp-beat of Massage Seats, for example – it’s sensational. Often his work sounds too dense to compete with mass-market trap, and struggles to support Gibbs’s gruff rhymes. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ZWq1DM

From being a public figure to poetry in the age of Trump, from old prejudice to new audiences: when US poet laureate Tracy K Smith met Jackie Kay, Scotland’s makar, they had a lot to talk about… “There are so many things that you get asked to do,” says Jackie Kay of her role as makar, or poet laureate of Scotland, “that you think, God, wouldn’t it be great to be one of those artists who have 10 or 15 people working for them and they all make this huge big painting? I’d love to have mini-makars. I’d give them this line to do and that commission, because there isn’t really enough of you to do everything you’re asked. It’s just not possible. I’m only the one makar.” Luckily this makar, the third since the position was established by the Scottish parliament in 2004, has found time to meet up in the lobby of a Manchester hotel, prior to an appearance at the city’s literary festival, and compare notes with another eminent national bard. Tracy K Smith is the 22nd poet laureate of the United...

National Portrait Gallery, London From Manhattan dowager to gawky boy and everyone in between, Sherman gives a one-woman masterclass in the art of keeping up appearances A tearful blonde sits alone at the bar, eyes bleeding mascara. She is trying to hold herself together with a dry martini. Perhaps her date has stormed off, or never arrived in the first place. Another girl stands alone in a car’s headlights at night, waiting for the recovery vehicle that won’t get there in time. A third kneels to pick spilt groceries from the floor, looking up at someone who is evidently staring angrily back down at her. A man’s jacket dangles ominously from her shoulders. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FExRdG

A cursed red dress makes life hell for whoever wears it in this eerie blend of tragicomic realism and consumerist satire In Cornell Woolrich’s 1937 novella I’m Dangerous Tonight , a dress fashioned from the devil’s cloak drives its owners to commit terrible deeds. Filmed by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper in 1990, Woolrich’s story established a familiar pattern that can be found lurking in the shadowy seams of many a supernatural thriller. The latest film to be cut from such fiendishly seductive cloth is In Fabric , a deliciously tactile romp from Peter Strickland, British writer-director of Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy . A heady mix of intoxicating nostalgia, clothing-related alchemy and horror-inflected twisted comedy, it’s an impressively uncategorisable affair, seemingly inspired by Strickland’s traumatic/ecstatic memories of being dragged to department stores as a child. Part consumerist satire (think a livelier version of George A Romero ’...

Tom Wood’s 13 years taking photos of shoppers at Great Homer Street Market earned him the nickname Photie Man Between 1978 and 1991, Tom Wood would take the ferry from his home in New Brighton and spend his Saturday mornings photographing the people toing and froing in Liverpool’s Great Homer Street market. After spending a few hours there, which earned him the local nickname Photie Man, he would head over to watch the football, surrounded by men. But at the market the crowds were mostly made up of women. Wood became fascinated with the family relationships of those around him; the features shared across different faces; the interactions between the women and girls, now celebrated in his latest show, Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, opening tomorrow at the Arles photography festival . Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Xi09FH

There’s something inherently satisfying about watching other people cook – doubly so if Korean-American chef Roy Choi is at the stove. Seoul-born Choi, the pre-eminent taco-slinger of the “gourmet food-truck movement”, and much else besides, is an unflappably genial presence in the kitchen, be it wheeled or welded to the floor, proving that screaming middle-aged white men being abusive to their staff aren’t essential ingredients for a successful cooking show. The Chef Show (Netflix) is,… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2Xno6LT

Pei-Pei and Xuezhong live in Shanghai’s French Concession. They married in 1968 and, as was typical for the time, have just one small black-and-white wedding photo.“Pre-wedding photography could never have happened in 1968 because of the Cultural Revolution,” says Xuezhong, referring to the upheaval that took place under Mao Zedong, from 1966 to 1976. “Colourful clothing was not allowed. We had no choice.”They did choose, however, to create new memories by having the wedding photos of their… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/32016kC

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the redrawing of national boundaries in Eastern Europe and the supposed end to “the red menace”, a whole vocabulary for global communist mindsets has been largely discarded. Some communist regimes collapsed at the end of the cold war, most notably in Eastern Europe, and their societies reformulated on different political foundations. Others, such as the People’s Republic of China, partially rebranded and… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2xmycNA

In the middle of a huge warehouse in Silvertown in east London, the founders of the festival’s raucous after-hours playground, Block9, unveiled its latest and most ambitious stage installation to date, IICON. IICON is a 65ft video-mapped 'anonymised head' with a holding capacity of 15,000 people Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2YkTkQ5

Viewed by 30 million people on its opening weekend, this woefully average comic caper is an odd addition to the actor’s CVs Thirty-nine minutes and 40 seconds, I have it down as – 39m 40s flat. That marks the first time I laughed during the dark comedy film Murder Mystery (Netflix, out now), starring Adam Sandler (90s comedian) and Jennifer Aniston (no better actor in Hollywood at saying : “Ooh!” while blowing fringe out of her face to exclaim mild-to-medium surprise). And I want to say something to caveat that fact: I am a very simple man. Phenomenally easily entertained. Leave me alone in a silent room – solitary confinement, say, inside a high-risk prison – and I’ll find something to laugh at within 40 minutes. I have been to humorous funerals. Some third-warning meetings at work. You can laugh while a headmaster is screaming at you, and I have the stern letters written home to my mother to prove it. But Adam Sandler, trying his best? Forty entire minutes. That is the review. Co...

The actor on a first kiss in the rehearsal room, not becoming a footballer, and all he learned from his mother Born in Nottingham, James, 53, was raised in care after the death of his mother. Having studied at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he wrote and appeared in the drama Storm Damage, which won a Royal Television Society award in 2001. He was in the first series of Line Of Duty and his movies include Snatch and Blade Runner 2049. In 2010, he was cast as Morgan Jones in The Walking Dead and now stars in Fear The Walking Dead ; season five airs on Mondays at 9pm on AMC (BT TV). James is married with three daughters, and lives in Los Angeles. What is your earliest memory? Following my big brother Kester around. I have a clear memory of the back of his head as I followed him, seeing what he was doing and wanting to do the same. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2KLNXpN

From Taylor Swift’s new video to M&S sandwiches, everyone is capitalising on Pride. Is it cause for concern? When Taylor Swift released her video for You Need to Calm Down , it was satirical news site the Onion that delivered the funniest and most poignant response: “Taylor Swift Inspires Teen To Come Out As Straight Woman Needing To Be At Center Of Gay Rights Narrative”. The video, directed by Drew Kirsch and Swift herself, was designed to make a statement: it sees the musician parade around a campsite with a bunch of celebrity LGBTQ+ friends. There’s a same-sex wedding, a drag pageant and a food fight – a parade of out and proud behaviour provoking the video’s “redneck” protesters who hold placards with slogans such as “Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve”. With cameos from Ellen DeGeneres , Laverne Cox , Jonathan Van Ness , Adam Lambert , Billy Porter and the crew from Queer Eye, it certainly brings out all the LGBTQ+ big guns. But as you watch them cavort around fulfilling gay ...

Kiese Laymon writes on the exhibit “The Soft Fence,” by the photographer Gioncarlo Valentine, and how the photos therein catalogue how black men can ritualize fear in their bodies. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/323bIyW

In amongst the raving and fantastical costumes, the music kicked off in earnest, with career defining performances by Stormzy and Jorja Smith After a couple of days of preamble, Glastonbury’s music properly began – and while the defining performance on Friday was a sensational show from Stormzy, there was plenty more to savour. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2JbqBqE

The BBC’s Worthy Farm coverage continues, with Mark Ronson and Lizzo among the big names. Plus Killing Eve shifts up a gear. Here’s the evening’s best TV 3.30pm, BBC Two Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Nko42D

Her take on the Gypsy art form has powered the Catalan maverick’s rise, and as for cries of cultural appropriation: ‘Music is beyond races,’ she says Rosalía always knew she would be famous. “I’m a spiritual person so I had a vision of this moment in my life,” she says the day before her cover of Spanish Vogue drops, and a week on from being namechecked by Madonna in an interview (more on that later). In the space of just two years she has evolved from singing flamenco standards on her death-obsessed debut album Los Ángeles, to controversially modernising that genre’s folkloric traditions via the high-gloss sheen of R&B on her breakthrough collection El Mal Querer , swiftly becoming pop’s most exciting new superstar in the process. Last year, in a New York Times profile , the 25-year-old was hailed as “the Rihanna of flamenco”. Along the way, she has picked up fans ranging from James Blake to Alicia Keys (to whom she’s been giving Spanish lessons) and director Pedro Almodóvar,...

Freelands Foundation, London Uniting the work of Jacqueline Donachie, Lis Rhodes and Veronica Ryan, this show demonstrates how dynamic art could be if only there were more women at work Jacqueline Donachie’s An Era of Small Pleasures is based on those tiny moments of light relief parents experience when their children are young – maybe over a silent five-minute cup of coffee. But it is not relevant that the people that assisted Donachie in creating it were all women with young children. “They are artists” she emphasises, “it is coincidental”. And, even though the three participants in Donachie Rhodes Ryan at the Freelands Foundation appear because they received funding from the Freelands award as mid-career female practitioners, their gender is not relevant. They are artists; artists without the “female” prefix. There is no millennial pink here or a spangly sign, nor is there heavy-handed curatorial themes of “the body”, “domesticity” or “feminism”. Donachie Rhodes Ryan unites Donac...

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At some point in the late 80s – though no one remembers exactly when – Glastonbury festival became a nexus of the traveller, free party and acid-house scenes, and the festival was never the same again Giant rubber duckies; tunnels of flowers; bassbins disguised with gingham tablecloths; sitting in upturned burning cars as entertainment. As if it weren’t enough of a struggle trying to get people to untangle their first Glastonbury raving memories from three decades ago, the things they do remember feel pretty hallucinatory on their own. Nobody can be quite sure when raving first started in Glastonbury. Obviously all-night dancing predates acid house, but through the 80s that meant dub reggae: Youth of Killing Joke and the Orb remembers Saxon and Jah Shaka soundsystems as “the only music you could go dance to all night long that wasn’t acoustic around a bonfire”. The Mutoid Waste Company ’s dystopian wreckage sculptures hosted pagan-industrial metal-banging dances throughout the nigh...

Did Jesus talk about being God’s son, or did the gospels tell it that way? A fascinating, wise exploration of the Bible’s evolution A quiz question, which is also a trick question: how many references to the doctrine of the Trinity are there in the Bible? The answer: two, at a pinch. One of them was probably inserted into the text of the Gospel of John by a zealous scribe well after the gospel was written. This is known as “the Johannine comma” (where comma means “clause” or “phrase”). The other (in Matthew) was also probably a later addition by a pious scribe. As John Barton shows in this massive and fascinating book, the Bible really did have a history. It grew and developed. As its disparate books were gradually integrated into the theological structures of the church, scribes would engage in what is called “the orthodox corruption of scripture”. So once the notion that God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were all equal persons of the Trinity was established it became natu...

Lyric Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre For 51 years, Bolshoi’s take on Spartacus has been considered definitive. It debuted in Brisbane as part of a double-bill that runs until 7 July Greeted ardently by Brisbane audiences in 2013 following a 19-year absence from Australia, the Bolshoi Ballet – the world’s biggest ballet company – is back again, bringing more than 100 company members to Queensland in 2019. And it’s not just in numbers that the Bolshoi reflects the definition of its name: the ballet is big in style, confidence, energy and passion too. The dual program for QPAC pairs the Brisbane premieres of two complete productions: the legendary spectacle, Yuri Grigorovich’s epic showcase Spartacus; and George Balanchine’s neoclassical Jewels, which makes its Australian debut by the company on Saturday night. Both are from the 1960s, and both are signature pieces from their choreographers. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2RJkwFE

A New York journalist’s debut recalls Franzen or Roth – but is much more than just another wannabe Great American Novel Fleishman Is in Trouble is a remarkable work of ventriloquism from the New York Times Magazine journalist best known for her revealing profile interviews with the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Jonathan Franzen . Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s debut is ostensibly the story of Toby Fleishman, a 41-year-old hepatologist whose estranged wife Rachel drops off their kids at 4am one night and then, with a casual text message, disappears out of their lives. Toby is an angry man – and understandably bitter about Rachel’s self-centred hostility – but somewhat cheered that, since he was last single, there is suddenly internet dating. All of New York is “now crawling with women who wanted him … Women who would fuck you like they owed you money.” It is a promising start, especially for fans of Franzen or Philip Roth, or the type of contemporary writer who can often be found on the shor...

Following Nicu as he grows from childhood to adulthood, this documentary is as tender as its content is ugly Some children come trailing clouds of glory. Nicu comes surrounded by a cloud of silver paint fumes, which he huffs from a plastic bag almost constantly, as do his fellow street kids and adults who are the legacy of the collapse of the communist regime in Romania. He pays for the bottles of paint, called Aurolac, by begging and – we see his bravado and tears afterwards – “sucking men off” for the leu that will buy him oblivion. Film-maker Joost Vandebrug spent six years following Nicu as he grows from 12-year-old boy to manhood. The result is Bruce Lee and the Outlaw (PBS), a film as beautiful and tender in form as its content is ugly and brutal. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2YjxTPb

Pyramid stage, Glastonbury His annoyingly irresistible set – rehearsed anecdotes aside – is lapped up like a cool breeze by a crowd stacked to Coldplay proportions By rights, George Ezra should live squarely in the same bracket as Ed Sheeran, Paolo Nutini, James Morrison and all those ordinary blokes called Tom who litter the upper reaches of the charts: largely inoffensive, unless you perceive inoffensiveness as an offence itself, in which case he makes devil music. He writes tunes to soundtrack barbecues in the Home Counties, where he is from. Bit bluesy, bit brassy, high on bonhomie, exhibits a genuine fondness for the work of Mumford and Sons. He is incredibly nice, and although funny enough to land himself an invitation to guest on Vic and Bob’s Big Night Out, not, like, Lewis Capaldi funny in a way where it constitutes a key part of his #brand. And yet, and yet, something about Ezra is irresistible. Yes, you cold get annoyed with the bluesman shtick, especially when he starts o...

Pyramid stage, Glastonbury Hill left her biggest hit mostly to her backing singers, but she saved the best for last with a singalong Follow all of our Friday night coverage of Glastonbury festival Every time Lauryn Hill is booked to play a gig, one question arises: will she show? And if she does, how late will she be ? To her fans, just the virtue of her turning up seems enough to justify the ticket price. Yet when she does show and she’s feeling the performance, the result is often mesmerically energetic, as she hurtles through double-speed renditions of her Miseducation hits, as if barely suppressing an appetite large enough to devour her own back catalogue, and to devour the audience and her own precision-commanded band in the process. In these moments, we see testament to Hill’s much-lauded status as one of hip-hop’s foremost lyricists and one of contemporary soul’s most passionate vocalists. So, on the Pyramid stage, 10 minutes after the scheduled start, there was a palpable...

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Pyramid Stage Not only is this headline performance a show of supreme talent, it also underlines how Stormzy’s talent and charisma has pushed forward UK rap The notion of Stormzy headlining the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury is an intriguing one. On the one hand, an artist who’s only released one album being elevated to such a rarefied status – up there with Jay-Z, Paul McCartney, U2 and the Rolling Stones – seems unprecedented. On the other, a persistent rumour around the site suggests that Stormzy’s show cost more to stage than any other in the festival’s history. That may or may not represent one of the histrionic myths that annually circulates around Worthy Farm – festival-goers with long enough memories to remember Glastonbury before the arrival of the internet and its fact-checking powers may recall the story that used to go around in the 90s that Cliff Richard had unexpectedly died. But watching Stormzy perform, you can believe it. His set opens with the kind of pyrotechnics tha...

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Examining race, class and Lee Rigby’s murder, Guy Gunaratne’s debut novel won last month’s Dylan Thomas prize. He talks about rebellion and leaving the UK When Guy Gunaratne was a teenager he would catch the bus home from school in north-west London, listening out for the chat of his fellow passengers. “Like this one kid who said to his friend, ‘Come on, you’re moving like molasses.’ That rattled in my head for so long. It’s so inside, ” he says. “London can be an unkind place to live and grow up in, but I just love the way we spoke, and to make something out of where you’re from, loving the kind of things people usually forget or dismiss, is a thrilling experience.” Gunaratne’s debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City , was longlisted for last year’s Man Booker prize and shortlisted for a string of others before winning the Jhalak prize and the International Dylan Thomas award for writers under 40 last month. The Dylan Thomas jury described it as astounding, provocative and entic...

Focusing on socially critical cinema, the 2019 Munich Film Festival shows the consequences of globalization — in both fictional and documentary films. But the directors also seek to entertain. from Deutsche Welle: DW.com - Culture & Lifestyle https://ift.tt/2NgLWUB

Club complains of ‘social cleansing’ after being given three months to wind up One of London’s biggest gay nightclubs is facing closure to make way for a £1.3bn apartment, hotel and office development, in a move that the club’s founder say amounts to “social cleansing”. XXL is believed to be the last “bear” club in London, and DJ Fat Tony, a close friend of Elton John, regularly performs to 2,000 people a night. This week developers backed by investors from Malaysia and Singapore gave the club three months to wind up after its owners lost a court appeal. The club has been operating for 19 years and 40 jobs will go. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Yikl6B

The American photographer left behind a haunted body of work that is uniquely gripping Francesca Woodman is one of 20th-century art’s great martyrs. Before killing herself aged 22, she created a haunted body of work, only discovered after her death. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2KINLry

Three leading artists explain the new works they’ve created for tomorrow’s magazine (click on each artwork’s title to download a copy) I heard some young activists chanting, “Fuck you, CO 2 ” at the school climate strike on 24 May. It wasn’t the most profane chant I heard that day – there were a lot about politicians. But it worked well: it was short, strong – and kids just like swearing, don’t they? So I didn’t come up with this: I nicked it from the air. But by getting it down on paper, I’m giving it more life. I can imagine people putting it in a window at home, like a party-political poster. In 2017, I did something similar with Theresa May’s words in my poster Strong And Stable My Arse [which was posted around London]. Her repetition of the phrase gave it its power. I just took it and turned it into a poster. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2XePkEl

His wickedly hilarious films are the stuff of nightmares but the man behind the gory Hereditary has his own terrors to conquer Midsommar is an agonisingly lovely horror film about four American students bungling an invite to a pagan celebration in Sweden. It is highly likely to give you nightmares. The film’s writer/director, Ari Aster, is currently having one of his own: battling reporters determined to discover his own demons. “I’m cripplingly neurotic when it comes to these interviews,” he says. “For me, these are just total minefields.” Hereditary , his breakout debut from last year about a miserable family, featured two beheadings and a sobbing Toni Collette literally climbing the walls. People sensed that this soft-spoken, charmingly awkward young film-maker might have been inspired by a past he didn’t want to share. After much grilling, Aster has learned to reveal small intimacies (a stutter when he was young, a solitary childhood) while palming the truly personal. Continue ...

The ship that gave its name to a generation of immigrants, and a scandal, had a fascinating Nazi past A decade before the Empire Windrush brought around 490 West Indians to Tilbury docks in 1948, marking the symbolic beginning of a multicultural Britain, the vessel was in use as a Nazi cruise ship, taking passengers on package holidays organised by Joseph Goebbels as part of his “Strength Through Joy” public enlightenment and propaganda programme. Most people will recognise the ship from the famous Pathé news footage that showed Jamaican ex-servicemen disembarking in England, pronouncing that these people were “citizens of the Empire coming to the mother country with good intent”. Over the last year, images of it have illustrated articles about the immigration scandal that took the ship’s name, and in which thousands of legal British residents were wrongly classified as illegal immigrants by the government, some detained and deported, others sacked or made homeless. Continue reading...

From Yesterday to Ed Ruscha, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NitriP

The dead just keep on risin’ on the big screen. But which are the grisliest, bloodiest, most skincrawling flesh eaters ever? The zombie genre has long had a vehemently offensive “Nazi” subsection and this is a perfect example. Members of Rommel’s Afrika Corps are still alive in the desert as zombies, guarding a cache of Nazi gold. So at least they are preoccupied with something other than their own selfish flesh-hunger. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2JfITXt

We know there are monsters out there. But this interview with Paris Bennett, who killed his four-year-old sister when he was 13, added nothing in the way of insight or analysis It is hardly the first time the question of what exactly the viewer is supposed to be getting out of a programme has presented itself, but with Psychopath With Piers Morgan (ITV), it does feel slightly more pressing than usual. There are very few possible answers, after all, that would seem to justify the existence of an hour of airtime being given to a remorseless 25-year-old murderer (who killed his sister 12 years ago when he was 13 and she was four) to seemingly rehearse gambits for the parole board when he becomes eligible for release in eight years’ time. Morgan had secured an interview with Paris Bennett, who, in 2007, persuaded the babysitter to go home early and then beat, choked and stabbed his little sister Ella to death. It was a well thought-out plan and it went off without a hitch. Continue read...

Coliseum, London Christie Prades is superb as the Cuban-American singer in a rags-to-riches story charged with sociopolitical significance On paper, a West End jukebox musical based on the work of Gloria Estefan is a tough sell. Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine may be massive stars in much of the Spanish-speaking world and in the US (where this show played for two years on Broadway before touring the country), but their UK appeal is rather more niche. The one big advantage that On Your Feet! has over so many similar musicals is that its story – of a Cuban-American band crossing over to an English-language audience – taps into something much deeper. At its best, Jerry Mitchell’s show is about immigration and assimilation, about the after-effects of the Cuban revolution, about how culture mutates in exile. All of the rags-to-riches cliches of the rock biopic are freighted with sociopolitical significance. The one weak spot is that, for a show billed “The Story of Emilio and Glo...

Campaigners joined by indigenous people who have led fight against global heating Nearly 2,000 festival-goers have joined climate change campaigners Extinction Rebellion to stage a procession across the Glastonbury site, paying tribute to indigenous people who have led the fight against global heating. Waving flags bearing the extinction symbol, which was seen across central London earlier this year when Extinction Rebellion protests brought the city to a standstill , the crowd marched for about an hour in the scorching afternoon sun on Thursday from the festival’s park stage to its stone circle. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2xgItKZ

If you’re not going to Worthy Farm, the Guardian and the BBC have an entire weekend of highlights to watch and listen to from a mud-free sofa It’s looking like the current European heatwave will put paid to the schadenfreude you may have previously enjoyed during Glastonbury: watching people on TV slog through mud while you smugly sip tea with your dry feet perched on an ottoman. But even if you are a bit jealous of everyone down at Worthy Farm, there’s still a huge amount of coverage to enjoy at home via the Guardian and the BBC. We’ll be on site , liveblogging from 11am until midnight each day with reviews of all the key acts, plus features on Glastonbury’s food, fashion, politics, raves, sex, hippies and weird secret corners. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2JdrKO9

Communist party figures say The Eight Hundred glorifies second world war heroism of rival Nationalist party The premiere of an epic Chinese war movie has been cancelled a week before its scheduled release, in what appears to be a new round of tightening of ideological control in the country . A terse one-sentence statement on the official microblog of the film The Eight Hundred this week announced that the film’s 5 July premiere will be cancelled and “a new release date will be announced later”. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IR7u6e

4/5 stars Spider-Man: Far from Home’s storyline directly follows on from Avengers: Endgame . So if you haven’t seen that, stop reading here. Set eight months on, like the rest of the world, our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man (Tom Holland) is still mourning the demise of his mentor Iron Man, aka Tony Stark. He needs to step back. Thankfully, his teenage alter-ego Peter Parker has a “plan” for the summer. Travel with his classmates to Europe for the school trip and tell MJ (Zendaya) how he… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/31YVMxS

Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Kamala Harris’s strong performance at Thursday night’s Democratic Presidential-prinary debate. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2KFSie8

Troy Patterson on the 2020 Democratic Presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s debate-night fashion choice. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2Xa47LH

The California senator Kamala Harris’s narrative instinct enabled her to frame the most powerful moment of the debate, Katy Waldman writes. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2X9fzXI

Eric Lach on Senator Kamala Harris’s personal moment during the discussion of race relations during the second night of the first Democratic-primary debate. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2LmLDVT

Eric Lach compares the second night of the Democratic-primary debates to the first, noting how Kamala Harris interrupts a fight. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2XgCbKX

By Bahk Eun-jiYang Hyun-suk, the former CEO and the chief producer of K-pop agency YG Entertainment, was questioned for nine hours by police over allegations that the 50-year-old provided prostitutes to foreign investors. YG Entertainment represents hugely successful K-pop acts such as Blackpink, BigBang and Psy.According to the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, Yang was grilled on Wednesday over the claims that he courted potential foreign investors at a fancy restaurant and arranged… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2xhRwvq

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Unhappy families I was born in Delhi, in 1983, to a Punjabi family. We lived in a big house in a posh area of south Delhi. Although it was big, my parents and I lived in just one room. My mum made a small kitchen within the room and there was a bathroom. My father’s parents and his younger brother and his wife lived in the rest of the house.My uncle wanted my dad, mum and me out so they could have (a larger) stake in the property. They would cut off the water and electricity to our room. My… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2RDDq0u

The relationship expert Esther Perel, along with a professional wedding-vow writer, explain the evolution of vows, and why the best ones embrace marriage in all its imperfections. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2JfHwZc

Katy Waldman reviews “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” the début novel of Taffy Brodesser-Akner. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2Yg0cy1

The rapper and singer who caused conservative outrage with his impassioned Camp America video talks about why he’s decided to take a stand A group of children downing pills and drinking toilet water behind bars makes for uneasy, provocative imagery in the video for Camp America, the debut single from Vic Mensa’s politically charged new project dubbed 93PUNX. A song meant to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (Ice) controversial network of detention camps and their policy of separating children from their parents, it’s part of a new direction for the rapper both lyrically and musically. “There was one particular comment made by Matthew Albence that inspired the song,” Mensa says from his label Roc Nation’s New York City headquarters of the current deputy director of Ice. “He said that immigrant detention centers were more like a summer camp than a prison. It was obviously an extremely disrespectful and offensive distinction, but I also found it to be really interesting in a...

Wednesday saw the early arrivals, a dazzling fireworks display – and the first night of after-dark debauchery Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2X4pPQY

If you think working and doing your own washing are ‘adult challenges’ for someone in their late 20s, this one’s for you Emily Atack is “going places”. Last year, she narrowly missed out on winning I’m a Celebrity … in which the Inbetweeners actor “found some new love and respect for myself”, presumably not while Holly Willoughby was panic-flicking giant cockroaches off her body with a cue card. Since then, her Instagram followers have grown in number from 70,000 to 1.4 million, she has done standup about her roaring 20s, has released a clothing range and is writing a book, which I can only assume is about how Atack found new love and respect for herself in the jungle, the standup tour, the clothing range and the book. You might ask what is left. A preposterously overpaid column in a rightwing newspaper? Leader of the country? No, the inevitable consequence of all this is Emily Atack: Adulting (W), a reality TV series in which Atack, with the help of family, friends, and that most tr...

They’ve shaken the leather and chains in a gay sex club. Now the transgressive trio have their sights set on stirring up the rest of the world “It’s like getting on a runaway train, not knowing when you’ll get off” says James Jeanette, frontman of performance art rock’n’roll trio Wild Daughter . “I used to take loads of drugs to get out of my own head … now I perform instead.” It’s certainly a more exciting statement of intent than you’d get from, say, George Ezra. And suggests why there’s quite a buzz for when said runaway train hits the ICA for a quite unlikely gig. Entitled The Moon Sextiles the Sun , it promises a night of performance and video art based around themes of “desire, addiction and gender fuckery”. Joining the scuzzy, Suicide and Cramps-inspired rock’n’roll of Wild Daughter on the bill will be Melbourne’s Spike Fuck , a transgender artist who claims to have invented the genre “smackwave”, and Berlin’s Die Hässlichen Vögel , who refuse to record or release any music. ...

I love the music, but I want a good view of the acts – and there’s no way I’m going to share a toilet There are only three reactions to the mention of the word Glastonbury: “I can’t wait to get there”, “I’d love to be going”, or “I can’t think of anything worse.” It is the most Marmite of things. I’m very much in the “I can’t think of anything worse” camp. Music is a massive part of my life and I would love to see most of the acts on this year, but you couldn’t pay me to show my face. I have searched deep into my past for the origins of this. The furthest I have gone back so far is a camping trip in the late 1970s. My dad took me and my brother to a campsite on the banks of the River Wye, somewhere near Hereford. I was about 11 and my brother was eight. My brother was, and is, more competent than me in most ways. As we set about pitching our tent, I got in a muddle and started flapping about something or other. My dad, I’m afraid, lost his temper and said: “Ade, you’re about as much u...

Glastonbury’s gates have opened, ready to welcome about 200,000 people to the UK’s biggest music and performing arts festival Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ZPapSl

The American Library Association will rename the Melvil Dewey medal in recognition of their co-founder’s racial discrimination and sexual impropriety American librarians have voted to remove the name of Melvil Dewey, widely seen as the father of modern librarianship, from one of their top awards, citing his history of antisemitism, racism and sexual harassment. The council of the American Library Association (ALA) passed a resolution this week to rename its top professional award, the Melvil Dewey Medal . The resolution explains that Dewey did not permit Jewish people, African Americans or other minorities admittance to the resort he owned, the Lake Placid Club. He also “made numerous inappropriate physical advances toward women he worked with and wielded professional power over” and was ostracised from the ALA after four women accused him of sexual impropriety, the resolution continues, declaring that “the behaviour demonstrated for decades by Dewey does not represent the stated f...

Gates open for 49th festival with ban on single-use plastic and anti-Brexit billboard dominating site Glastonbury festival-goers were preparing for a weekend of soaring temperatures as gates opened, with the 49th edition of the event set to be dry, plastic free and potentially very, very hot. There was also room for bizarre political satire as the viral anti-Brexit artists Cold War Steve and Led By Donkeys had collaborated on a billboard overlooking the entire festival site above the Park stage. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NdIs5r

French actor was famed for role as the masked protagonist in the cult classic before resurgence in films such as Holy Motors Édith Scob, the French actor best known for her first starring role in the creepy 1960 Georges Franju horror film Eyes Without a Face , has died aged 81. Her agent confirmed the news to AFP , saying she had died on Wednesday in Paris. No cause of death was disclosed. Scob’s role in Eyes Without a Face is one of the great breakout performances in French cinema. Playing the daughter of a surgeon who undergoes extensive skin grafts after her face is disfigured, she spends much of the film swathed in bandages or wearing a mask, only her eyes visible. Scob’s ethereal, expressive qualities made a stunning impact and the film has remained a cult favourite. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NgORNb

Cast of seminal comedy TV show reveal details of events to celebrate its inception They return – it would appear – to a time where no one is the messiah but there is no shortage of naughty boys. Fifty years after the first broadcast of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the men who revolutionised comedy have revealed details of events to mark their anniversary in what they dubbed “an increasingly Pythonesque world”. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2X6Pfxf

Private display for historians attending peace conference marks centenary of treaty of Versailles From the elaborate red velvet, silk and gilded treaty of London, signed by the 19th-century prime minister Lord Palmerston, to the Locarno postwar territorial settlements, Europe is largely defined through the peace treaties of the first world war. On the centenary of the signing of the treaty of Versailles , which marked the formal end of the war, the beautifully bound originals of all those treaties have now been brought together for the first time. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2xhFFNy

The Lunchbox director Ritesh Batra returns with an enigmatic meditation on chance meetings and things unsaid R itesh Batra stole the hearts of moviegoers the world over with his gentle romance The Lunchbox in 2013, and after some uncertain English-language movies he has returned to India with this odd, enigmatic high-concept love story set in Mumbai. Photograph has some beautifully shot moments, and Batra sometimes captures the city with something approaching the rapture with which Wong Kar-wai captures Hong Kong. Yet it is weirdly opaque and internalised, and doesn’t ever really come to life. This is a romance in which the lovers do no more than briefly touch hands. They rarely even smile at each other, and their voices are hardly ever raised higher than a murmur. Photograph is elliptical, so much so that I almost suspect some scenes have been lost in the edit. The plot turns on a photograph that we never see. The lovers meet under extraordinary circumstances that they do not disc...

Osita Nwanevu writes on the surprising embrace of Elizabeth Warren by centrist Democrats at the Aspen Ideas Festival, watching the first Democratic debate. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2RGland

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes about Elizabeth Warren’s opposition to inequality and corruption, and the moral case against Donald Trump, at the Democratic Presidential debate. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/31WOHhi

Dengue fever is one of the most deadly mosquito-borne diseases – half the world’s population is at risk from it. Adrienne Surprenant’s photos from the World Mosquito Program in Brazil capture the fight against it Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IR6e2S

Thom Yorke helped rewrite the rules of album releases in 2007 when his band, Radiohead, surprise-dropped “In Rainbows” online as a pay-what-you-want download.More than a decade later, the avant-garde British rocker is looking to shake things up once more with Netflix film Anima. Streaming Thursday, the 12-minute short is a musical companion to his forthcoming solo album of the same name, out July 19.The stunning new clip is directed by filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson ( Phantom Thread , There… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2FBBQHG