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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/mar/03/love-the-central-theme-in-disability-led-stage-production

“Home and Away is ready for a full-time character with Down syndrome,” says Julia Hales. We’re sitting in the lounge space at Western Australia’s state theatre company Black Swan, the day after a momentous night for the performer: the world premiere of a new disability-led mainstage production, with Hales, 37, in the lead. Commissioned by Perth festival, the verbatim play – You Know We Belong Together – was devised by the festival, Black Swan and DADAA: a Fremantle organisation creating access and opportunities in the arts for people with disability. It takes as its starting point Hayes’ life-long dream to star in her favourite show, a show she’s been watching since it came on TV in 1988 – but it’s about much more than Home and Away. On a stage set like the Bait Shop, the Summer Bay diner that oversees much of the Aussie soap’s action, Hales invites fellow performers with Down syndrome to share their own dreams with the audience. We meet Lauren Marchbank, a hip hop dancer and choreographer; Tina Fielding, an actor, performer and palm reader; Joshua Bott, a dancer and visual artist; Patrick Carter, an Indigenous painter and performer (who was unable to make it to opening night); and Melissa and Mark Junor, who met at a dancing class and got married 18 years ago. Hales takes us on a journey through the shocking history of Down syndrome in Australia, and how the genetic disorder has been represented in art. And through it all we watch footage from Hales’ short film Finding Love, a documentary featuring the ensemble – and others with disability – talking about romance and relationships. It’s a sweet, joyful and generous piece of theatre, more about love than anything else, and the opening night crowd rose in standing ovation before it had even finished. “It feels good,” Hales says. “I made my dad cry. He gave me a hug and cried and said, ‘I’m really proud of you sweetheart, I love you’.” In the play’s most moving parts, Hales weaves memories of her childhood and her mother, who fought to carve a path of opportunity for her daughter. But Hales’ mum passed away just a few years ago – and on opening night, as she spoke about her, the actor began to cry. So did most of the audience. “It’s really upsetting,” she says now. “It’s still recent and it’s still quite hard. But I’ve been trying to hide the emotion. I was feeling a bit upset on stage when I mentioned her, but at least people will know that I am getting on with my life. “She did such an amazing job raising me. She pushed me really hard to get out there, and I did.” Hales, who studied at Waapa, lives independently in an apartment in Fremantle. She has spent 20 years working with DADAA, and advocating for people with disability. “I’ve been living in the world. I’ve been doing my own things. I can live by myself, look after myself properly ... That’s why I dedicated the play to her.” On-screen representation of people with disability is a driving issue for Hales. “You hardly ever get to see some of those people on screen,” she says. “[I’m] trying to get everyone out there so the public can see that yes, we do have a disability, but we can do acting as well.” And as the play was put together – a collaboration between Hales, director Clare Watson and writer Finn O’Branagain, who turned Hales’ story into a script – the actor got a chance to live out her dream: she went to Summer Bay, where the crew of Home and Away filmed a scene for her opposite Ray Meagher, who plays Summer Bay legend Alf Stewart. “That was amazing ... I got makeup done, hair done,” says Hales. The scene is included in the production. Clare Watson, the play’s director who is in her first year as Black Swan’s artistic director, was there that day too. “I like to think of myself as being pretty tough, pretty resilient,” Watson says, “but I found myself standing at one end of the pier, Julia at the other with Ray Meagher walking towards her, and they’re starting to shoot the scene, and I just had tears running down my face. I was like, ‘I can’t believe this. I’m standing in Summer Bay and bawling.’ “Yes, it’s a dream come true for an individual, but there was also something that – I think it’s in the work, and it’s in Julia, and it was certainly in that moment: there’s a fierceness, there’s a quiet revolution in everything she’s doing. She’s changing the world. She’s making it better.” This play marks the first time a local disability-led production has opened at Black Swan, and Watson – introduced to Hales by Perth festival director Wendy Martin – threw herself into it. “The thing I was most fearful of was not doing Julia’s story enough justice ... not helping her make the work I knew she was capable of,” she says. “It was about making sure that the framework allowed for complete authenticity, but also complete support. And that’s a really delicate balance: how much do you allow for the risk of things going wrong, when you know you need to take those risks in order to get at the truth? “For instance, we realised that if Julia were to learn a script off by heart, suddenly we weren’t getting the beauty of her just telling us her story. So we had to manage that.” In the end, Watson took the script away, and just talked through sections of it with Hales. “I was like, ‘Tell me that. Tell me that again. Tell me that again, where you say that line again. Try it once more, not using that sentence.’ So she was basically live-writing what was already there, through a process of just playing.” In the end, the work was made in just two weeks. “She’s an absolute knockout. She’s extraordinary,” Watson says of Hales. “It has been a daily pleasure and privilege coming to work, and working with this ensemble of artists who are so diverse and who have – like all of us – incredibly complex emotions, and different communication strategies around those emotions, and with everyone just being so open to this process of sharing who they are. The bravery of everybody on stage to truly be themselves is a gift for the audience. It was certainly a gift to me,” she says. “Last night, people were laughing, and crying, and clapping. This is what theatre should be: Just feeling, being connected to each other.” Hales is hoping that the play will get the opportunity to tour. But she’s still got her eye on the prize: “I might audition for Home and Away.” • You Know We Belong Together continues at Perth festival until Sunday 4 March – Guardian Australia travelled to Perth as a guest of Perth festival

culture/2018/mar/03/love-the-central-theme-in-disability-led-stage-production

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2018-03-03T04:44:37Z

The disability-led stage production celebrating love – and Home and Away

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/mar/03/love-the-central-theme-in-disability-led-stage-production

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/mar/02/seth-meyers-on-trump-and-guns-republicans-dream-president-is-now-their-nightmare

Late-night hosts on Thursday discussed Hope Hicks’ departure from the White House, Trump’s flip-flopping on guns and Jared Kushner’s conflicts of interest. Seth Meyers NBC’s Seth Meyers discussed both Trump’s amorphous stance on guns and Jared Kushner’s rocky week. “Republicans including Trump spent eight years spinning unhinged fantasies about Obama trying to take people’s guns away,” he said, “and then yesterday, as Vice-president Mike Pence was discussing the idea of gun violence restraining orders, Trump just blurted out the exact thing he falsely accused Obama of doing.” “Republicans got their dream president and now he’s just blurting out their worst nightmares,” the host joked. “While Trump swings wildly on policy, his White House keeps getting engulfed in new scandals,” Meyers went on. “Just take the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, who’s already under fire for his business dealings, his lack of a security clearance and his inexperience.” Meyers then noted that this week reports surfaced that Kushner took a half-billion dollars in loans from various companies, including $184m from Apollo Global Management and $325m form Citigroup, after meeting with officials from those companies at the White House. “That is cartoonishly corrupt. How much more suspicious can Jared Kushner get?” Meyers asked. “He took millions in loans from companies he met with in the White House, tried to set up a secret channel to talk to Russia, can’t get a security clearance to complete a background check, and lurks ominously in the background of every White House photo like he’s the ghost of a boy Trump killed with an errant tee-shot.” Stephen Colbert “Yesterday, we learned about the resignation of White House communications director and step-mother-who-went-to-college-with-her-new-daughter, Hope Hicks,” Stephen Colbert began. “On Tuesday, Hicks told Congress that she sometimes tells white lies for Trump. For example, that she only does it sometimes.” “That news did not sit well with the president,” Colbert explained, “who reportedly berated Hicks and demanded to know ‘How could you be that stupid?’” Colbert went on to cite a Politico article in which a close friend of the president’s compared losing Hicks to Trump’s losing a limb. “It’s not just Hicks,” Colbert added. “Trump is reportedly freaking out about the way the media is jumping on senior White House son-in-law and haunted Ken doll, Jared Kushner.” Colbert then noted that, after losing his top-level security clearance, Kushner’s clearance is now reportedly lower than that of the White House chief calligrapher. Colbert added that national security adviser HR McMaster is also rumored to be on his way out. The host continued: “McMaster found himself in hot water with Trump last month when he told a German audience that Russian meddling in the election was incontrovertible, which violated Trump’s policies against acknowledging Russian interference and of using big words.” But the imminent departures don’t end there: “The guy who’s really upsetting Trump is attorney general and racist Dobby Jeff Sessions,” Colbert said, noting that Trump apparently calls the former senator “Mr Magoo”. “Quick note to anyone under 80,” Colbert said sarcastically. “Mr Magoo was a cartoon character 60 years ago and what was funny about him was that he was legally blind. Simpler times.” Trevor Noah Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah discussed Trump’s open-door meeting on gun reform at the White House. “President Trump invited lawmakers back to his Apprentice set to discuss what can be done to stop gun violence,” Noah began. “If people came in expecting Trump to side with Republicans, they were in for a big shock, because Trump is unpredictable.” In footage shown by Noah from the meeting, Trump accuses Republicans of being “petrified” of the NRA. “If you thought Trump was going rogue when he attacked the Republicans and the NRA, wait until you see him supporting the Democrats,” Noah added. He then showed more clips, in which Senator Dianne Feinstein is gleeful when Trump agrees with her about assault weapons. “All the Democrats in this meeting were giddy: look at Amy Klobuchar when Trump shut down the Republicans’ concealed carry idea,” Noah joked. “All of a sudden she’s Jim from The Office.” “At one point, Mike Pence tries to step in and say ‘Calm down, people’, there will be due process before anyone’s guns are taking away,” the host said. But infamously, Trump replied to Pence by saying he’d rather “take the guns first, due process second”. “My mind is going to explode: Donald Trump just said, ‘Fuck your rights, I’m taking your guns.’ Isn’t that what he said Hillary was going to do?” “Before you get too excited, just remember what happened with Daca not too long ago,” Noah concluded. “Trump was at that same table agreeing with Democrats on immigration and then, two days later, Africans were from shithole countries and the whole thing fell apart.”

culture/2018/mar/02/seth-meyers-on-trump-and-guns-republicans-dream-president-is-now-their-nightmare

pillar/arts

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culture

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2018-03-02T15:26:38Z

Seth Meyers on Trump and guns: 'Republicans' dream president is now their nightmare'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/mar/02/seth-meyers-on-trump-and-guns-republicans-dream-president-is-now-their-nightmare

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/mar/02/domesday-book-lent-to-british-library-for-anglo-saxon-exhibition

Domesday, the earliest public record and perhaps the most famous book in English history, is to be lent to the British Library for a landmark exhibition on the Anglo-Saxons. The National Archives announced on Friday that it was lending one of its most prized possessions, the great survey of England commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1085, two decades after his Norman forces defeated King Harold at the Battle of Hastings. The book lists around 13,000 towns, villages and hamlets in the king’s possession, from Abberton in Essex to Zeals in Wiltshire, and the accompanying livestock, castles, vineyards, watermills, potteries, fisheries and more. Claire Breay, the curator of the British Library’s Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition, said Domesday was “an amazing feat, an amazing production”. “It is the most famous book in English history and with very good reason,” she said. “There is nothing else like it in contemporary Europe. The level of detail it contains is not replicated for centuries, not until you get the censuses in the 19th century. It is very exciting to have it in our exhibition.” Domesday can be seen online and a translated Penguin edition is available, but there is something thrilling about seeing the real thing up close, said Jessica Nelson, the head of medieval and early modern collections at the National Archives. “It is not just one bit of history,” she said. “It gives us a window on both the pre-conquest world and then the post-conquest world. You can see the enormous changes that have been wrought on English society and politics by the Norman conquest.” The record was given its Domesday nickname in the late 12th century, a reflection of the “day of judgement” awe it was held in. It was originally kept in the royal treasury at Winchester before being moved to Westminster in the early 13th century. From about 1600 it was kept in a large iron-clad chest with three different locks and keys given to different officials so that it could only be opened with the consent of all three. Domesday entered the vaults of Public Record Office, now known as the National Archives in 1859, and moved to its new headquarters in Kew in 1977. Disappointingly for curators, Kew is not in Domesday. The book is rarely lent out, but it formed part of an exhibition at Lincoln Castle last year, and in it was displayed at the Tower of London for the turn of the millennium. The British Library hopes that Domesday will be one of a number of show-stoppers at its exhibition. It will compete for attention with the oldest complete Latin bible in existence, the Codex Amiatinus, one of the greatest of all Anglo-Saxon treasures which is returning to the UK for the first time in 1,302 years. It is being lent by the Laurentian library in Florence. • Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms will be at the British Library from 19 October 2018 to 19 February 2019

culture/2018/mar/02/domesday-book-lent-to-british-library-for-anglo-saxon-exhibition

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2018-03-02T00:01:06Z

Domesday book lent to British Library for Anglo-Saxon exhibition

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/mar/02/domesday-book-lent-to-british-library-for-anglo-saxon-exhibition

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/mar/01/trevor-noah-ben-carson-daily-show-colbert-meyers-round-up

Late-night hosts on Wednesday discussed the bipartisan meeting on gun violence held at the White House and controversy at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud) over secretary Ben Carson’s spending habits. Trevor Noah Trevor Noah discussed the Hud secretary, Ben Carson, who has found himself in hot water after his spending habits at the department were revealed. “You may disagree with Ben Carson’s views, but you have to admire a man who’s so consistently committed to saving money,” Noah said. “Unless, it’s all bullshit.” The host showed news coverage of the latest controversy at Hud, where a whistleblower was demoted after refusing to spend over the legal $5,000 limit on redecorations for Carson’s office. “Yesterday morning when this news broke, Carson’s people denied that he was out there buying gold-plated chairs, and that was cool for a few hours until this came out,” Noah continued, noting further reports that Carson spent $31,000 on a dining room set. “The Guardian reported that his department just spent over $160,000 on lounge furniture,” the host explained, before detailing drastic spending cuts to the department and showing Carson refusing to respond to a congressman’s questions about the department’s cuts to housing vouchers and community development block grants. “Ben Carson is clearly doing some shady shit at his department,” Noah concluded. “I do think this is probably why the secretary was so evasive last year when Congress was questioning him about his budget.” Stephen Colbert “The president invited members of Congress for a bipartisan meeting to address gun violence in America,” Stephen Colbert began. “Trump immediately made clear the real obstacle to gun control: Barack Obama.” The host went on to show footage from the meeting, in which Trump continually suggested that the failure to pass gun control legislation was Obama’s fault. “I distinctly remember how the Republicans were begging Obama to sign the GOP gun control bill but Obama couldn’t get it done because Americans demanded to keep their guns to shoot down all the flying pigs,” Colbert joked, before explaining what was perhaps the most surprising moment of the televised meeting. Colbert said: “When vice-president Pence suggested an early intervention system that allows courts to take away people’s guns after a hearing, Trump said this: ‘Take the guns first, due process second.’” The comment shocked some people as a rebuke by Trump of his own party. “Well, he’s finally doing something Obama never did,” Colbert quipped. “He’s coming for your guns.” Colbert also had former White House adviser Omarosa Manigault-Newman on the show, and the two discussed her time working for Trump and comments she made on Big Brother suggesting she was haunted by Trump’s tweets and that “everything is not going to be OK.” “What was it about the tweets that haunted you?” Colbert asked. “He announced major policy issues on Twitter,” Omarosa responded. “The transgender ban, for instance, was announced on Twitter. For someone who is in communications like Hope [Hicks] and myself, that’s not a thing you want to find out at five in the morning about something that will impact so many people’s lives.” In response to a pointed question from Colbert about Omarosa having compared the White House to a “plantation”, she said: “The White House that I worked in was troubling. It was very difficult when you aren’t allowed to do the job that you were brought to do. That’s where that oppression comes from and that’s what that analogy meant. I was speaking as how I felt as the only African American senior adviser to President Donald Trump.” Seth Meyers Finally, Seth Meyers addressed the removal of Jared Kushner’s top-level security clearance and Trump’s open-door meeting on gun violence. “Carson is not the only high-level official mired in scandal at the moment,” Meyers said. “There’s also the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, who on Friday was stripped of his high-level security clearance. “Kushner had access to the nation’s most guarded secrets through his temporary clearance,” the host continued, “and yesterday we learned more about Kushner’s conflicts of interests and how other countries may have sought to use those conflicts against him.” Meyers then showed news coverage detailing how four countries, Mexico, Israel, China and the United Arab Emirates, looked to exploit Kushner’s complex business arrangements, financial difficulties, and lack of foreign policy experience. “While more and more of Trump’s aides come under legal and ethical scrutiny, he’s also struggling to deal with the nation’s epidemic of gun violence,” the host added, noting that Trump seemed to express relative support for every idea suggested at Wednesday’s meeting. “Here’s the thing: we’ve been through with Trump before,” Meyers said. “In January Trump held a similar bipartisan meeting on immigration where he said he would support a compromise and then completely changed his mind. And that’s because Trump changes his mind based on the last person he’s spoken with.”

culture/2018/mar/01/trevor-noah-ben-carson-daily-show-colbert-meyers-round-up

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-03-01T16:45:05Z

Trevor Noah slams Ben Carson's 'gold-plated' chairs and 'shady' spending

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/mar/01/trevor-noah-ben-carson-daily-show-colbert-meyers-round-up

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/mar/01/i-have-a-post-911-mentality-creating-art-while-muslim-in-australia

Light flashes upon 11 television screens the refugee artist and former hip-hop performer Khaled Sabsabi has arrayed in a circle on the floor. The formula for calculating the speed of light is printed nearby in five languages, including Arabic and English, acknowledging that diverging cultures share energy, space and time. If we could enter unseen realms, his work suggests, perhaps we could interact with angels. Sabsabi’s works are showing at Adelaide’s ACE Open gallery along with 10 other Muslim artists, part of the Australian Muslim artist collective Eleven, that the Tripoli-born, Sydney-based Sabsabi initiated in 2016, inspired by the Indigenous Australian artist collective proppaNOW. In this first major exhibition by the collective, Waqt al-Tagheer: Time of Change, the multidisciplinary artists reflect on migration, exile, social and political upheaval and spiritual epiphanies. Sabsabi, 52, arrived in Australia in 1978 at age 12, his family fleeing Lebanon’s civil war. “All religions and faiths there caused atrocities,” he says. “The memories are still with me: bodies being brought in and the smell, and witnessing battles and going from shelter to shelter. It was only five years ago I found out what post-traumatic [stress] syndrome is, and I still suffer from that. That’s the importance of art, not just for poetics and aesthetics, but ... to heal and reconcile as well.” His family settled in western Sydney, where Sabsabi was a disaffected teenager. “It was really white, and there was a lot of racism. The second day at school, someone picked a fight with me. I ended up getting punched in the head. I still don’t know why.” The teenage Sabsabi identified with the black liberation struggles of the Black Panthers in the United States, and began performing hip-hop. He has found peace exploring Sufism, a Muslim form of mysticism, because, he says, it eschews dogma. Sufism guides his art. Sabsabi started the collective with artists, from emerging to established, who are also members of what he calls “marginalised and isolated” communities. “I’ve always loved the idea of collectives, of unionism, and people coming together to find solutions,” he says. Without being prescriptive, he wanted the collective to address pre- and post-9/11 representations of Islam. While the established artists act as mentors, “the less-known artists keep us honest and inspired as well”, he says. Diversity of age, gender, ethnicity and different strands of faith have been key. The age difference between brothers Abdul Abdullah, 31, and Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, 40, both raised in Perth, is starkly reflected in their respective artworks. Abdul was 15 when terrorists brought down the twin towers in New York on 11 September 2001, and he suffered from more suspicion, as a teenager, than Abdul-Rahman did. “The biggest difference between our approaches is he has a pre-9/11 mentality and I have a post-9/11 mentality,” says Abdul, who recalls his own outrage when his Malaysian-born mother’s head scarf was ripped from her head on a Perth street. “I see being Muslim as a political identity.” Now based in Sydney, Abdul overtly confronts racism and Islamophobia in his work, wearing an ape mask in the photo Journey to the West because he is perceived as the “monstrous, threatening and villainous ‘other’”. Meanwhile, his brother’s painted wooden sculpture, 500 Books, recreates the romantic moment in 1988 when he uncovered 500 identical Sufi texts beneath a sheet in the family garage. The boys’ sixth-generation Australian father, who had converted to Islam, had saved the books from being pulped. In Abdul Abdullah’s Wedding series, subjects wear balaclavas to signify “the projection of criminality on innocent bodies” – a shared experience of Muslims and, most recently, African migrant youth, targeted by both media and politicians. “A lot of the African kids they’re targeting are Muslim anyway,” he says. “So there’s overlap. [But] for many people Muslims represent an existential threat ... the suspicion that that person has the mindset to kill people on a broad scale.” On the far gallery wall, collective member and poet Eugenia Flynn’s text “With my sister” is printed in large letters, speaking of her watching footage of “light brown dust all over the people” while holding the “secret” of “me and al-Malik”, one of the 99 names of God in Islam. The poem reflects the simultaneous public horror of the 9/11 attacks and the already growing private spiritual realisation by Flynn, a Tiwi, Larrakia and Chinese woman, that she wanted to convert to Islam. The events are unrelated: “It was only years later I had a realisation of the timing,” she says. Flynn saw converting to Islam as the opportunity to express her belief in the “oneness of God”. She is the youngest of four sisters growing up in Adelaide to a Catholic father and Buddhist mother. Flynn felt unable to accept the Catholic teaching of God in human form or the existence of a trinity. “My dad was happy someone else in his family was religious. Everyone is very supportive now, but at the time it was tough: when you have a close family, it can be challenging when someone does something that can seem quite foreign.” The collective’s other works on display include a a circular pierced copper sculpture hanging from the gallery ceiling, called Musallah, by Shireen Taweel inspired by an old mosque in Broken Hill. Its exterior made of corrugated iron and interior lined with pressed tin, the mosque is situated at the site of a former camel camp, where Afghan and Indian camel drivers loaded and unloaded teams. Taweel’s interpretation might be seen as a metaphor for the Lebanese Muslim diaspora and its cultural contribution to Australia. Taweel says the exhibition audience will come to understand the diversity of Muslims in Australia. “We have very different voices and come from very different perspectives,” she says. Showing art together has been emboldening for the artists who might otherwise feel vulnerable exhibiting alone: “Working with the collective gives a sense of connection and community. To share conversation and have that safety of openness has been great.” Abdullah MI Syed’s Aura II consists of white crocheted prayer caps delicately hand-stitched together and placed over LED lights on the gallery wall, commenting on the “unity, beauty and infinite presence of the divine in Islam and its relation to nur (light)”. The work purposely resembles the moon, on which Syed would obsessively gaze as a child. At other times, Syed has drawn beards on non-Muslim men from magazine covers, never having dared to grow a beard himself outside of Pakistan for fear of attracting racial profiling. He is interested in showing that men can be empathic, feminine: “If I want to cry and show myself and hug someone, why wouldn’t I do that?” Having first migrated to the United States before migrating to study and practice his art in Australia a decade ago, Syed brings to the collective a perspective that Islamophobia and the political far right is much more pronounced in the US, to which he often returns to visit family. “As Australians, we understand diversity probably more so than in America. As a minority, I feel more protected here.” Working in a collective is attractive because art is part of a “global narrative”, says Syed, especially now given the Trump influence on Australia. “There are 11 members here, but each one comes from a different experience, practising or being raised as Muslim. That tells us a lot about what Islam is today. There are different sects – Sunni, Shia and so on – and the collective has representation of them. It suggests Islam being not so monolithic; the Qu’ran is there to guide what we need to practice, but at the same time it’s also about individual choice.” • Waqt al-tagheer: Time of Change is showing at ACE Open, Adelaide, from 3 March to 21 April • Steve Dow travelled to Adelaide as a guest of Adelaide festival

culture/2018/mar/01/i-have-a-post-911-mentality-creating-art-while-muslim-in-australia

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-28T17:00:08Z

‘I have a post-9/11 mentality’: creating art while Muslim in Australia

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/mar/01/i-have-a-post-911-mentality-creating-art-while-muslim-in-australia

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'mi', 'syed', 'aura', 'ii', 'consists', 'white', 'crocheted', 'prayer', 'caps', 'delicately', 'hand-stitched', 'together', 'placed', 'led', 'lights', 'gallery', 'wall', 'commenting', 'unity', 'beauty', 'infinite', 'presence', 'divine', 'islam', 'relation', 'nur', 'light', 'work', 'purposely', 'resembles', 'moon', 'syed', 'would', 'obsessively', 'gaze', 'child', 'times', 'syed', 'drawn', 'beards', 'non-muslim', 'men', 'magazine', 'covers', 'never', 'dared', 'grow', 'beard', 'outside', 'pakistan', 'fear', 'attracting', 'racial', 'profiling', 'interested', 'showing', 'men', 'empathic', 'feminine', 'want', 'cry', 'show', 'hug', 'someone', 'would', 'first', 'migrated', 'united', 'states', 'migrating', 'study', 'practice', 'art', 'australia', 'decade', 'ago', 'syed', 'brings', 'collective', 'perspective', 'islamophobia', 'political', 'far', 'right', 'much', 'pronounced', 'us', 'often', 'returns', 'visit', 'family', 'australians', 'understand', 'diversity', 'probably', 'america', 'minority', 'feel', 'protected', 'working', 'collective', 'attractive', 'art', 'part', 'global', 'narrative', 'says', 'syed', 'especially', 'given', 'trump', 'influence', 'australia', 'members', 'one', 'comes', 'different', 'experience', 'practising', 'raised', 'muslim', 'tells', 'us', 'lot', 'islam', 'today', 'different', 'sects', 'sunni', 'shia', 'collective', 'representation', 'suggests', 'islam', 'monolithic', 'quran', 'guide', 'need', 'practice', 'time', 'also', 'individual', 'choice', 'waqt', 'al-tagheer', 'time', 'change', 'showing', 'ace', 'open', 'adelaide', 'march', 'april', 'steve', 'dow', 'travelled', 'adelaide', 'guest', 'adelaide', 'festival']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/28/colbert-kushner-daily-show-seth-meyers-late-night-round-up

Late-night hosts on Tuesday discussed senior White House adviser Jared Kushner’s demotion, potential Russian interference in the 2018 midterms and the opioid epidemic. Stephen Colbert “Huge news this afternoon: first son-in-law Jared Kushner was denied his security clearance and has lost access to top-secret intelligence,” began Stephen Colbert. “How will he fix the Middle East now? He was so close to starting.” “So far, Trump has not commented on Jared’s demotion,” the host continued. “He tweeted a bunch of stuff this morning, but one that really stood out was just two words, all caps: WITCH HUNT!” Colbert went on to say that, “despite the ironclad defense”, the House intelligence committee interviewed White House communications advisor Hope Hicks, who stonewalled the committee by refusing to answer questions about events occurring after Trump took office. “There is no doubt in any of the intelligence agencies that Russia did everything it could to influence the 2016 elections, from effective methods like Facebook ads and Twitter bots, to total dead ends like Don Jr,” Colbert continued, noting that intelligence chiefs agree unanimously that the Kremlin efforts will continue into the 2018 midterms. “And with this sword hanging over the neck of American democracy, earlier today the Senate armed services committee heard testimony from director of the NSA Admiral Mike Rogers,” the host said. “The Trump administration has refused to impose sanctions Congress overwhelmingly approved to punish Russia, and Rogers believed that sent Putin a clear message.” In his testimony, Rogers concluded that Putin believes there’s little “price to pay” for his interference and, when questioned by senators about the NSA’s response, revealed that he had not been given the authority by Trump to combat Russian cyberwarfare. “Thats right,” Colbert said. “The president has not told the National Security Agency to secure the nation against Russian hacking that we know is still happening.” Trevor Noah Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah also looked ahead to the 2018 midterms. “These elections are shaping up to be dramatic, because with Trump’s low approval numbers the Democrats have the momentum going into November,” Noah said. “Rather than have to deal with that blue tidal wave, dozens of Republicans have decided to retire instead. Those vacancies are shaking things up, like in Utah, where an open seat has made room for an old character to get a new storyline.” Noah then showed news coverage of Mitt Romney’s announcement that he’s running for Orrin Hatch’s Senate seat in Utah. “He’s definitely going to win; the dude’s got resting senator face,” the host joked. Noah also covered Bernie Sanders’ son Levi Sanders, who announced this week that he’s running for Congress in New Hampshire. “So, Republicans have old new people running, Democrats have some new old people running, but as with any election there’s always going to be someone who’s doing it just for the fame,” Noah added, before revealing Clueless actor Stacey Dash’s intentions to run in a southern California congressional district. Noah then showed clips of Dash’s commentary on Fox News, in which she advocated doing away with Black History Month and the BET network, saying they were obstacles to integration. “Good Lord, forget Congress; Stacey Dash should run for president of the sunken place,” Noah joked. “Stacey isn’t running because she actually expects to win. We know this is a publicity stunt to raise her profile for her next job, which I’m guessing is either going to be Big Brother or the star of a movie that only gets released in Bulgaria.” “The point is,” Noah concluded, “we better pray that Vladimir Putin isn’t a big fan of Clueless.” Seth Meyers Finally, Seth Meyers talked about the Trump administration’s response to the opioid epidemic. “America has about 4% of the world’s population, but about 27% of the world’s drug overdose deaths,” Meyers began. “For now, opioid addiction is one of those uniquely American problems, like type 2 diabetes and adults wearing shirts with Disney characters on them.” Meyers asked: “Among other promises to fight the opioid epidemic, Trump said he would increase funding to give resources to states that needed it most right away, so how did that go?” In coverage Meyers then showed, the administration’s lackluster efforts were detailed by Patrick Kennedy, a member of Trump’s opioid commission who described the response to the epidemic as “pitiful” and said “this and the administration’s other efforts to address the epidemic are tantamount to reshuffling the chairs on the Titanic”. Meyers then showed Trump discussing the epidemic in a recent speech, in which he said that there is nothing desirable about drugs. “The problem, of course, is that there is something desirable about drugs,” Meyers responded. “They make you feel great. That’s why we have a huge problem with drug addiction and no problem at all with celery addiction.” Meyers then explained that White House adviser Kellyanne Conway has been put in charge of the epidemic. “Reports say Kellyanne isn’t even heeding the advice of actual policy experts or those most affected by this tragedy,” the host explained, noting that the Office of National Drug Control Policy has no director and got its budget slashed by 95%. “That’s right: last year the White House allocated about $368m to the office, and for next year’s budget they’re only asking for about $17m,” Meyers said. “The office trying to stop the opioid epidemic is getting less than Mark Wahlberg got for Daddy’s Home 2.”

culture/2018/feb/28/colbert-kushner-daily-show-seth-meyers-late-night-round-up

pillar/arts

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2018-02-28T16:21:01Z

Stephen Colbert mocks Kushner's downgrade: 'How will he fix the Middle East now?'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/28/colbert-kushner-daily-show-seth-meyers-late-night-round-up

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/28/the-far-side-of-the-moon-review-robert-lepages-space-race-drama-ignites-emotions

In 2000, French-Canadian auteur Robert Lepage staged a play about the space race. It was a huge hit, attracting rave reviews, eventually being staged in 45 cities around the world, being made into a film (released in 2003) and winning a swag of awards. That stage production, revived almost two decades later and currently touring Australia’s festival circuit, doesn’t feel dated. Apart from a few near-obsolete bits of technology as props (who still has a landline at home?), it could have been written today. It is ostensibly the story of two brothers. Philippe is a hopeless academic who we meet in front of a panel of unseen academics, trying to defend his thesis on the effect of space travel on popular culture. He has an air of failure about him. His younger brother, with whom he shared a room when they were young, is his opposite: Andre, a television weatherman, is brash, materialistic, loud and confident – a yang to Philippe’s tentative and unsure yin. But Philippe is a lot more relatable. The world is not enough for him. He yearns for escape, an experience of life beyond our planet. He sees people on Earth like goldfish, constantly circling the same places and situations. How can they be happy with that? Why can’t they be like him – curious about space, how to get there, and how to communicate with other beings while there? The brothers’ struggles are essentially an allegory for the play’s overarching theme: the space race between the United States and Russia. Archival footage charts elements of the race. The networks eventually tire of showing it, but Philippe’s passion does not wane. In a flashback to his teenage years, one of the play’s more poignant moments, he takes LSD and lies on the Plains of Abraham – the plateau outside Quebec where the pivotal battle between British and French armies took place in 1759 – and stares at the moon, trying to see a Russian satellite. It’s hard to believe The Far Side of the Moon is a one-man show. Yves Jacques – taking over from Lepage himself – plays all roles including both brothers, their mother and a doctor. The one-act production runs at a lengthy two-and-a-half hours (it could have lost 15 minutes of plot), making it a feat of endurance and versatility for the performer, and Jacques is exceptional. The fairly simple story is made magical by inventive staging that shapeshifts as frequently as Jacques changes character, deploying everything from mirrors to chalkboards, cameras, trick lighting and video, from newsreels to home movies. (One of the play’s funnier sequences is when Philippe films the interior of his apartment – room by room – in an effort to explain to the aliens the domestic habits of humans.) Laurie Anderson’s score is a real treat – appropriately spacey and atmospheric. There is also a small amount of puppetry, but the main prop is a washing machine – a round portal projected on to the stage. More than it initially appears, it becomes an MRI machine, an access point to space, a birth canal and a goldfish bowl. Tickets to The Far Side of the Moon are rarer than hen’s teeth, with all of the three performances at Perth festival sold out. But theatregoers in Adelaide and Auckland may still be able to snatch some up for forthcoming performances. The play reminded me a little of the work of Michel Houellebecq – showing us that here on Earth we are all essentially alone and cut off from each other. Despite its beauty, The Far Side of the Moon made for melancholy viewing. Perhaps things are better in space. • The Far Side of the Moon is showing at Adelaide festival from 2 to 7 March, and Auckland Arts festival from 22 to 25 March • Guardian Australia was a guest of Perth festival

culture/2018/feb/28/the-far-side-of-the-moon-review-robert-lepages-space-race-drama-ignites-emotions

pillar/arts

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2018-02-28T03:56:38Z

The Far Side of the Moon review – Robert Lepage's space race drama shines on stage

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/28/the-far-side-of-the-moon-review-robert-lepages-space-race-drama-ignites-emotions

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/27/late-night-hosts-on-trumps-parkland-comments

Late-night hosts on Monday discussed president Trump’s suggestion to arm teachers in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and his comments regarding how he would have acted had he been at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. “Trump met with the nation’s governors and at the top of the agenda, of course, was the urgent problem of school shootings,” Stephen Colbert said, referring to a summit held at the White House. “Donald Trump has said that maybe we should arm teachers. This idea has not been received well by people who have had or been a teacher.” Showing footage of Trump doubling down on his suggestion to arm teachers particularly adept with guns, Colbert said: “If you’re in the pocket of the NRA like he is, the solution is never fewer guns. The solution is always more guns. Then again, the school in Florida did have an armed sheriff deputy, and even with guns and training he didn’t enter the building, nor did the next three armed deputies who showed up.” “Who among us could honestly say what they think they would do in that situation?,” Colbert asked. He then showed a clip of Trump, at the event with the nation’s governors, saying, “I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.” “There’s a lot in there that I doubt, but the part I really don’t believe is that he can run,” Colbert responded. “Sir, we already know how you react to combat situations. You got five deferments from Vietnam!” Trevor Noah also tore into Trump for saying he would have entered the high school unarmed. “While the shooting was happening, an armed deputy stayed outside the school doing nothing,” Noah said, before showing footage of various pundits and lawmakers sharply criticizing the deputy for his “unconscionable” inaction. “Damn, that was harsh,” the host said. “That was like hearing the white people version of ‘Fuck the police.’” “For some people, this shows exactly why there’s no point in arming teachers, because if a trained officer didn’t come to the rescue, then how is Mrs Flanderson going to do any better?,” Noah explained, before noting that there’s no cure-all to the country’s epidemic of gun violence. “Here’s what frustrates me about this gun violence discussion. ‘It’s the guns! No, it’s the cops! Maybe it’s both?,’” Noah said. “Maybe with training, the deputy would have known how to go into the situation while keeping himself relatively safe? But maybe with better gun laws, once the deputy did go into the school, he wouldn’t have to face a teenager with an AR-15?” “There’s no one solution that will solve all shootings. Except for this one solution,” the host said, before showing Trump extolling how he’d respond to the situation. “To be fair, if Donald Trump ran into a school during a shooting, I do believe he would actually stop the shooting,” Noah joked. “How distracting would that be? He’d be like, ‘That’s right, it’s me, Donald Trump. I don’t have a gun, but what I do have is an amazing electoral college victory.’” Finally, Seth Meyers also discussed the administration’s response to the country’s reckoning with guns, and the attacks on the students of Stoneman Douglas. “The immediate crisis facing Trump and the rest of the government right now is our country’s epidemic of gun violence,” Meyers said. “The national conversation over gun safety had only intensified in the days since the Parkland shooting. And people are demanding action.” “In response to those demands, Trump has spent the last week or so rambling nonsensically about his truly deranged idea to arm teachers,” Meyers said, showing a clip from Monday’s White House event comparing a deft handler of firearms to someone who consistently makes four-foot putts. “Even when he’s laying out his plan to prevent school shootings, he can’t hide how much he’d rather be playing golf,” Meyers joked. “The only reason we’re still talking about the issue of gun violence is because of the students at Stonemason Douglas high school, who have demanded action and sparked a national movement for gun reform.” Meyers went on to note that, as a result of their outspokenness, the Parkland students have been subjected to attacks on their credibility and tone. The host mentioned Sarah Chadwick, a survivor of the shooting who tweeted, “We should change the name of AR-15s to Marco Rubio because they are so easy to buy.” “Damn, that is a white-hot burn,” Meyers said, before detailing Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham’s response. “How teens speak to and abt adults,” Ingraham wrote, referring to Chadwick as a “Stoneman Douglas sophomore.” The student responded to Ingraham’s tweet: “I’m a junior.” “Laura Ingraham, what is wrong with you?,” Meyers said. “Don’t go after teenagers on social media. You saw what happened to Marco Rubio.”

culture/2018/feb/27/late-night-hosts-on-trumps-parkland-comments

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2018-02-27T16:09:53Z

Late-night hosts on Trump's Parkland comments: 'We already know how you react to combat'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/27/late-night-hosts-on-trumps-parkland-comments

['late-night', 'hosts', 'monday', 'discussed', 'president', 'trump', 'suggestion', 'arm', 'teachers', 'wake', 'school', 'shooting', 'parkland', 'florida', 'comments', 'regarding', 'would', 'acted', 'marjory', 'stoneman', 'douglas', 'high', 'trump', 'met', 'nation', 'governors', 'top', 'agenda', 'course', 'urgent', 'problem', 'school', 'shootings', 'stephen', 'colbert', 'said', 'referring', 'summit', 'held', 'white', 'house', 'donald', 'trump', 'said', 'maybe', 'arm', 'teachers', 'idea', 'received', 'well', 'people', 'teacher', 'showing', 'footage', 'trump', 'doubling', 'suggestion', 'arm', 'teachers', 'particularly', 'adept', 'guns', 'colbert', 'said', 'pocket', 'nra', 'like', 'solution', 'never', 'fewer', 'guns', 'solution', 'always', 'guns', 'school', 'florida', 'armed', 'sheriff', 'deputy', 'even', 'guns', 'training', 'enter', 'building', 'next', 'three', 'armed', 'deputies', 'showed', 'among', 'us', 'could', 'honestly', 'say', 'think', 'would', 'situation', 'colbert', 'asked', 'showed', 'clip', 'trump', 'event', 'nation', 'governors', 'saying', 'would', 'run', 'even', 'weapon', 'lot', 'doubt', 'part', 'really', 'believe', 'run', 'colbert', 'responded', 'sir', 'already', 'know', 'react', 'combat', 'situations', 'got', 'five', 'deferments', 'vietnam', 'trevor', 'noah', 'also', 'tore', 'trump', 'saying', 'would', 'entered', 'high', 'school', 'unarmed', 'shooting', 'happening', 'armed', 'deputy', 'stayed', 'outside', 'school', 'nothing', 'noah', 'said', 'showing', 'footage', 'various', 'pundits', 'lawmakers', 'sharply', 'criticizing', 'deputy', 'unconscionable', 'inaction', 'damn', 'harsh', 'host', 'said', 'like', 'hearing', 'white', 'people', 'version', 'fuck', 'police', 'people', 'shows', 'exactly', 'point', 'arming', 'teachers', 'trained', 'officer', 'come', 'rescue', 'mrs', 'flanderson', 'going', 'better', 'noah', 'explained', 'noting', 'cure-all', 'country', 'epidemic', 'gun', 'violence', 'frustrates', 'gun', 'violence', 'discussion', 'guns', 'cops', 'maybe', 'noah', 'said', 'maybe', 'training', 'deputy', 'would', 'known', 'go', 'situation', 'keeping', 'relatively', 'safe', 'maybe', 'better', 'gun', 'laws', 'deputy', 'go', 'school', 'would', 'face', 'teenager', 'ar-15', 'one', 'solution', 'solve', 'shootings', 'except', 'one', 'solution', 'host', 'said', 'showing', 'trump', 'extolling', 'would', 'respond', 'situation', 'fair', 'donald', 'trump', 'ran', 'school', 'shooting', 'believe', 'would', 'actually', 'stop', 'shooting', 'noah', 'joked', 'distracting', 'would', 'would', 'like', 'right', 'donald', 'trump', 'gun', 'amazing', 'electoral', 'college', 'victory', 'finally', 'seth', 'meyers', 'also', 'discussed', 'administration', 'response', 'country', 'reckoning', 'guns', 'attacks', 'students', 'stoneman', 'douglas', 'immediate', 'crisis', 'facing', 'trump', 'rest', 'government', 'right', 'country', 'epidemic', 'gun', 'violence', 'meyers', 'said', 'national', 'conversation', 'gun', 'safety', 'intensified', 'days', 'since', 'parkland', 'shooting', 'people', 'demanding', 'action', 'response', 'demands', 'trump', 'spent', 'last', 'week', 'rambling', 'nonsensically', 'truly', 'deranged', 'idea', 'arm', 'teachers', 'meyers', 'said', 'showing', 'clip', 'monday', 'white', 'house', 'event', 'comparing', 'deft', 'handler', 'firearms', 'someone', 'consistently', 'makes', 'four-foot', 'putts', 'even', 'laying', 'plan', 'prevent', 'school', 'shootings', 'hide', 'much', 'would', 'rather', 'playing', 'golf', 'meyers', 'joked', 'reason', 'still', 'talking', 'issue', 'gun', 'violence', 'students', 'stonemason', 'douglas', 'high', 'school', 'demanded', 'action', 'sparked', 'national', 'movement', 'gun', 'reform', 'meyers', 'went', 'note', 'result', 'outspokenness', 'parkland', 'students', 'subjected', 'attacks', 'credibility', 'tone', 'host', 'mentioned', 'sarah', 'chadwick', 'survivor', 'shooting', 'tweeted', 'change', 'name', 'ar-15s', 'marco', 'rubio', 'easy', 'buy', 'damn', 'white-hot', 'burn', 'meyers', 'said', 'detailing', 'fox', 'news', 'anchor', 'laura', 'ingraham', 'response', 'teens', 'speak', 'abt', 'adults', 'ingraham', 'wrote', 'referring', 'chadwick', 'stoneman', 'douglas', 'sophomore', 'student', 'responded', 'ingraham', 'tweet', 'junior', 'laura', 'ingraham', 'wrong', 'meyers', 'said', 'go', 'teenagers', 'social', 'media', 'saw', 'happened', 'marco', 'rubio']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/27/hitler-was-a-wonderful-painter-erykah-badu-and-other-career-capsizing-interviews

Erykah Badu, Vulture, 2018 What she said Oh dear Lord. She starts with: “I see good in everybody. I saw something good in Hitler,” then proceeds to qualify the statement with the entirely baseless assertions that “he was a wonderful painter” and “he had a terrible childhood”, neither of which is true. She then ponders what her own daughter might have turned into had she grown up in the Hitler household. As one does. The effect on her career A fortnight later she was announced as the headliner of Field Day festival. Sean Connery, Playboy, 1965 What he said “I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman … An open-handed slap is justified … If a woman is a bitch or hysterical … I’d do it.” The effect on his career Bafflingly, he worked solidly for close to four more decades, cornering the market in lovable, irascible father figures. By the time the internet arrived and revisited the comments to note that they were, you know, TOTALLY reprehensible, he had retired. In 2005, his ex-wife Diane Cilento alleged that Sir Sean was as good as his word during their marriage. John Mayer, Playboy, 2010 What he said The purveyor of tedious blues-rock started out his interview with Playboy denying that he was a douchebag, and then rapidly provided ample evidence that, actually, he really and truly is. In addition to dropping a casual N-bomb, he responded to a question about black female fans thusly: “My cock is sort of a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock.” A racist penis, ladies and gentlemen. The effect on his career After some onstage weeping to hammer home the depths of his own feelings of twattery, he stopped doing interviews and didn’t sing in public again for nearly three years. Sensible. Chainsmokers, Billboard, 2016 What they said The “brostep” pioneers farted out a litany of blokey guff in which they honked about being, like, really good at drinking, to the extent it would probably kill them; revealed that of all their artistic motivations, “pussy was [always] No 1 … I had to date a model”; and that they had a combined penis length of 17.34 inches. One of these seems substantially less likely than the others. The effect on their career Non-existent – apparently it was not especially revelatory that the duo have a tendency towards dickheadedness. The next year, they won a Grammy. 5 Seconds of Summer, Rolling Stone, 2015 What they said Luke Hemmings of the Aussie pop-rockers alienated their youthful fanbase by, if not actively confessing to nightly sex sessions with multiple groupies as such, then smirkingly admitted that “the possibility is high” that such happenstances regularly took place. Which somehow seems worse than just saying, “Yes, we had sex with lots of fans, often several at once.” The effect on their career Heart-warmingly for those of us who believe in karma, their one single release since the interview, 2016’s Girls Talk Boys, tanked horribly in all the major global markets. Still, phwoar, sex with girls, eh? Lee Ryan, The Sun, 2001 What he said In a spectacularly poor choice of words, Blue crooner Lee said that 9/11 had been “blown out of all proportion” (oh dear) one month after it happened, and asked, “Who gives a fuck about New York when elephants are being killed?” On a subsequent appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, he claimed he had said the much more even-handed “Fuck New York … Animals need saving and that’s more important”. Hey, that’s fine! The effect on his career In an apology, he claimed that “I’m not good with words and I get mixed up”. You could argue the words “a subsequent appearance on Celebrity Big Brother” tell their own story. As do “Blue finished 11th in the Eurovision” and “got dropped by his record label”. They’re still out there, gamely plugging away, though.

culture/2018/feb/27/hitler-was-a-wonderful-painter-erykah-badu-and-other-career-capsizing-interviews

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

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2018-02-27T09:00:20Z

‘Hitler was a wonderful painter’: Erykah Badu, and other career capsizing interviews

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/27/hitler-was-a-wonderful-painter-erykah-badu-and-other-career-capsizing-interviews

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/27/perth-festival-helen-garner-and-kim-scott-share-their-literary-wisdom

The keynote topic of writers’ week at the Perth festival was “why literature matters”. But with Helen Garner and Kim Scott taking the stage, the topic was immaterial: Garner could deliver her shopping list – indeed, she recently did just that – and we would still be on the edge of our seats. Scott, meanwhile, is the author of some of the most beautiful and urgent missives from Indigenous Australia, and is a truth teller about this country’s history of conflict. To see them both together, having just met each other for the first time, was a treat. Scott initially confessed to feeling some anxiety about being on stage, as if he was about to take some exam. But before long he was on a roll, speaking powerfully about the “the psychosis in the relationship between Aboriginal society and white Australia”. The pair talked for just over an hour, covering topics from being pigeonholed as a writer to the #MeToo movement, but we could have listened for at least twice as long. Here’s an edited version of some of the best parts of the talk. The intimacy of novels Scott: Writing is an offering; it’s an intimacy – a one-on-one we are creating, and sharing some sort of inner voice. I don’t think of being a literary writer in a pejorative way – it’s like being a sportsperson. You have to work at it … A lot of males don’t read fiction because it’s an intimate encounter. Garner: But do you think people are afraid of feeling things? Scott: I was thinking about the vulnerability in writing and reading. It can unsettle. Say a character is not very nice – “here I am with someone, identifying with someone who is an unpleasant character”. Garner: I always get disappointed when people say of my books, ‘Oh I couldn’t go there!’ But that’s why I write the way I write, so that people can go there! When you open a book, you’re throwing yourself into the arms of a writer. It should say, ‘I’m here! Come in!’ [That said], most writers could lose the first page. Young writers Garner: In my experience blokes feel confident writing young, in their 20s. Women take a while to get up the nerve to write their book. Writing for your community Scott: Unlike some Aboriginal writers, I feel like I’m not staunch enough, because I don’t feel like I am writing for a community. It’s one-on-one. I am accountable, but sometimes I’d rather not be. Garner: When I started out I was called a “woman writer” – there were writers and there were women writers. Not so any more when I wrote The First Stone. After that book came out I copped a huge blast of hostility and hate from women. It was shocking. But after it came out and the dust settled, I felt free. I knew what hate was. It was very shocking and painful. But I thought, ‘Now I can say what I like.’ It was bracing. It was a really awful experience [and] I felt fantastic afterwards. Since then, I felt I could say what I wanted to. I was no longer speaking from a position. I didn’t feel like I had a leg-rope on me any more. Finding stories Garner: I’m not on social media; it’s passed me by. I’m 75 and OK with that. A good, interesting place for me is the law courts. It’s presented in a way that’s highly formalised, with lots of character and drama and people suffering and in tremendous pain. But I feel very privileged to discover it. I feel surprised so few people go to court. People – some with PhDs – say, ‘But don’t you have to get permission?’ No! You just go in there. #MeToo Garner: The world seems to be speeding up and going crazy and there are still eternal human sufferings … I look back and I see feminism going through spurts and spasms. When #MeToo first started, I was exhilarated. It was the sound of a million chickens coming home to roost. But then we get to a point where the movements become about trivial things or men cannot speak. The #MeToo movement is a huge and ongoing struggle between men and women for power. It’s not going to end, and it does help to accept that these struggles will never end, because otherwise you’ll fall into despair. Every now and then there’s a beautiful moment and the shooting and the raping stops – and then it starts again. And that’s what life is on this planet. The #MeToo thing is like the Arab spring: there was something unexpected and joyful about it. Then the bombs started falling again. So why write? Scott: To think about who we are and what it means to be human. Who am I? Does this help someone work out who they are? Books can do that. And not all books have to be tragedies. Garner: One of my favourite lines in your book, Taboo, is where a character said, ‘Go on, pick a stick, just pick your favourite one.’ I really like that, the idea of having a favourite stick. There’s an idea that you have to write painful things as tragedies. I disagree. A woman came up to me once and gave me the highest compliment, although it sounds like a bit of a backhander. She was talking about my columns that I used to write in my hometown newspaper, the Age, and she said, ‘Your columns are like a little bit of nothing – then there’s a story.’ • Guardian Australia was a guest of Perth festival

culture/2018/feb/27/perth-festival-helen-garner-and-kim-scott-share-their-literary-wisdom

pillar/arts

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culture

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2018-02-26T17:00:21Z

Perth festival: Helen Garner and Kim Scott share their literary wisdom

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/27/perth-festival-helen-garner-and-kim-scott-share-their-literary-wisdom

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/25/on-my-radar-richard-sennett-cultural-highlights

Born in Chicago in 1943, Richard Sennett has been called “one of the boldest social thinkers of his generation”. His work focuses on ethnography, urban design and social theory and he teaches at the LSE and New York University. His many books include The Fall of Public Man (1977), Flesh and Stone (1994) and The Corrosion of Character (1998) and he has written three novels. Sennett’s latest book, Building and Dwelling, has just been published by Allen Lane. 1. Book Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann I read a lot of books when I was too young to understand how great they were. I’m rereading this, which is about the disintegration of an upper-middle class German family from the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th. It’s a fantastic metaphor, in a way, for what happened to the bourgeoisie. It’s this huge theme that comes through in all these wonderful details. He was 25 when he wrote it, and it’s a novel of complete assurance, wonderfully evocative. I’m in the process of recovering things I didn’t appreciate when I was younger. 2. Hobby Gardening I have bought a house in the country but I have a black thumb. This is the season when garden catalogues begin to come out: it’s a new species, I think, of “middle-aged porn”: everything sounds luscious. But I’m trying to understand how to plant a garden, making my way through this verbiage which is absolutely seductive. I’ve been reading the David Austin English rose catalogue, which is beautifully photographed. But I’m sure I’m going to fail because I’m not much of a gardener. Usually when I touch a plant it promptly turns black and dies. 3. Campaign Open Britain I’ve just joined several groups that are fighting Brexit. I no longer think it’s a political issue: it’s an issue about whether Britain survives as a robust nation or not. I’ve joined lots of them, including Open Britain, a movement [backed] by Chuka Umunna. I don’t know what you’d do door-to-door for it, but I’ve been working on it online. I’m trying to lobby the MPs I know, to stiffen their spines, not to negotiate but to resist. That’s my big political preoccupation at the moment. 4. Music Janáček’s quartets I’m an amateur cellist – I play in a group that includes [former Guardian editor] Alan Rusbridger. At the moment I’m working on the two Janáček quartets – they’re a real challenge to me musically. Not so much technically, though there are tough bits, but it’s very hard to surrender into that peculiar pain and nostalgia and regret that’s in his music. I’ve been playing since I was five – I’ve played it 68 years. And I’m getting worse and worse: it’s something that happens in old age, as your shoulders wear out and the back goes. But I want to play as much as I can. 5. Architecture Neues Museum/David Chipperfield Architects David Chipperfield is making this building that is going to connect all the existing museums in what’s called the “museum island” in Berlin. It’s very grand and yet it’s very human, in a way. It’s an ungainly space and there are lots of touches to take things that look like they wouldn’t work and suddenly make them interesting, even though they’re awkward or difficult spaces. It’s unfinished, but it’s one of the most thrilling buildings I’ve been in for a long time. 6. Art Matt Saunders: Poems of Our Climate at Marian Goodman Gallery, London W1 I saw this last weekend and really liked it. It was photographs and images about climate change, which sounds like it would be hokey and horrible – agitprop sort of art. But it was anything but that. It’s a really interesting exhibit, connecting printmaking, painting and photography. The title is based on a poem by the American poet Wallace Stevens called The Poems of Our Climate. The materials were strange, too: things like printmaking on linen, and there were animations and a large-scale installation. It was indirect and suggestive, very abstract, but it also had a point, it made you think.

culture/2018/feb/25/on-my-radar-richard-sennett-cultural-highlights

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-25T10:00:07Z

On my radar: Richard Sennett’s cultural highlights

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/25/on-my-radar-richard-sennett-cultural-highlights

['born', 'chicago', 'richard', 'sennett', 'called', 'one', 'boldest', 'social', 'thinkers', 'generation', 'work', 'focuses', 'ethnography', 'urban', 'design', 'social', 'theory', 'teaches', 'lse', 'new', 'york', 'university', 'many', 'books', 'include', 'fall', 'public', 'man', 'flesh', 'stone', 'corrosion', 'character', 'written', 'three', 'novels', 'sennett', 'latest', 'book', 'building', 'dwelling', 'published', 'allen', 'lane', 'book', 'buddenbrooks', 'thomas', 'mann', 'read', 'lot', 'books', 'young', 'understand', 'great', 'rereading', 'disintegration', 'upper-middle', 'class', 'german', 'family', 'middle', '19th', 'century', 'beginning', '20th', 'fantastic', 'metaphor', 'way', 'happened', 'bourgeoisie', 'huge', 'theme', 'comes', 'wonderful', 'details', 'wrote', 'novel', 'complete', 'assurance', 'wonderfully', 'evocative', 'process', 'recovering', 'things', 'appreciate', 'younger', 'hobby', 'gardening', 'bought', 'house', 'country', 'black', 'thumb', 'season', 'garden', 'catalogues', 'begin', 'come', 'new', 'species', 'think', 'middle-aged', 'porn', 'everything', 'sounds', 'luscious', 'trying', 'understand', 'plant', 'garden', 'making', 'way', 'verbiage', 'absolutely', 'seductive', 'reading', 'david', 'austin', 'english', 'rose', 'catalogue', 'beautifully', 'photographed', 'sure', 'going', 'fail', 'much', 'gardener', 'usually', 'touch', 'plant', 'promptly', 'turns', 'black', 'dies', 'campaign', 'open', 'britain', 'joined', 'several', 'groups', 'fighting', 'brexit', 'longer', 'think', 'political', 'issue', 'issue', 'whether', 'britain', 'survives', 'robust', 'nation', 'joined', 'lots', 'including', 'open', 'britain', 'movement', 'backed', 'chuka', 'umunna', 'know', 'would', 'door-to-door', 'working', 'online', 'trying', 'lobby', 'mps', 'know', 'stiffen', 'spines', 'negotiate', 'resist', 'big', 'political', 'preoccupation', 'moment', 'music', 'janacek', 'quartets', 'amateur', 'cellist', 'play', 'group', 'includes', 'former', 'guardian', 'editor', 'alan', 'rusbridger', 'moment', 'working', 'two', 'janacek', 'quartets', 'real', 'challenge', 'musically', 'much', 'technically', 'though', 'tough', 'bits', 'hard', 'surrender', 'peculiar', 'pain', 'nostalgia', 'regret', 'music', 'playing', 'since', 'five', 'played', 'years', 'getting', 'worse', 'worse', 'something', 'happens', 'old', 'age', 'shoulders', 'wear', 'back', 'goes', 'want', 'play', 'much', 'architecture', 'neues', 'museumdavid', 'chipperfield', 'architects', 'david', 'chipperfield', 'making', 'building', 'going', 'connect', 'existing', 'museums', 'called', 'museum', 'island', 'berlin', 'grand', 'yet', 'human', 'way', 'ungainly', 'space', 'lots', 'touches', 'take', 'things', 'look', 'like', 'would', 'work', 'suddenly', 'make', 'interesting', 'even', 'though', 'awkward', 'difficult', 'spaces', 'unfinished', 'one', 'thrilling', 'buildings', 'long', 'time', 'art', 'matt', 'saunders', 'poems', 'climate', 'marian', 'goodman', 'gallery', 'london', 'w1', 'saw', 'last', 'weekend', 'really', 'liked', 'photographs', 'images', 'climate', 'change', 'sounds', 'like', 'would', 'hokey', 'horrible', 'agitprop', 'sort', 'art', 'anything', 'really', 'interesting', 'exhibit', 'connecting', 'printmaking', 'painting', 'photography', 'title', 'based', 'poem', 'american', 'poet', 'wallace', 'stevens', 'called', 'poems', 'climate', 'materials', 'strange', 'things', 'like', 'printmaking', 'linen', 'animations', 'large-scale', 'installation', 'indirect', 'suggestive', 'abstract', 'also', 'point', 'made', 'think']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/25/lennie-james-walking-dead-save-me-spurs

Nottingham-born, south London-raised Lennie James, 52, was brought up in care after his mother died, and later trained at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He now lives in Los Angeles and has starred in TV dramas on both sides of the Atlantic, including Line of Duty, Critical and Buried. In the US, he made his name in the post-apocalyptic CBS drama Jericho and is one of the longest-serving cast members on The Walking Dead franchise. His film credits include Snatch and Blade Runner 2049. His first full TV series as both star and writer is Save Me, a gritty new Sky Atlantic drama set amid the pubs and tower blocks of Lewisham. Save Me is about a father’s search for his missing daughter. Was it inspired by a real-life case? Not really. It came from this idea I had about a man who gets brought back into his estranged child’s life when she goes missing. I thought it could be the basis for a really cool thriller. I wanted to set it in the London that I know, which is rarely depicted on screen. If it is depicted, it tends to be issue-led, as opposed to a place where stories can be told. So this unfolds in the most unlikely location with an unlikely hero. Tell us about that unlikely hero, Nelson “Nelly” Rowe. Is he based on someone you know? He’s an amalgamation of characters I’ve come across. Back in the day, I was in this youth theatre group based at the Lyric in Hammersmith. After rehearsal, we’d go to the boozer across the road and there was always this one black guy in an almost exclusively white pub. You used to see that quite a lot in certain areas of London. Nelly’s like that. A throwback. You’ve got three daughters yourself. Did that make this story painful to write? The fact that I’m a dad to three girls is absolutely relevant, yeah, but this story comes from the completely opposite angle. I know what it is to bring up kids and be involved in their lives. Nelly doesn’t. He’s been totally absent from his daughter’s life. Now he learns what it means to be a father in the most unconventional way. Nelly is nicknamed “Legobeast”. What does that mean? It’s an old West Indian name for a guy who lives by his dick [laughs]. Somebody led by their baser instincts. Nelly also has a signature coat… It’s important in TV to have a signature garment, like Columbo’s mac or Del Boy’s cap. Sadly in this, mine is a yellow puffa. Oh well. He has a sideline as a karaoke compere. How are your own karaoke skills? Off the scale. I had to tone it down for those scenes and pretend to be less good than I actually am [laughs]. At my bravest – and if enough Jack ’n’ gingers have gone down – I like to think I can sing Living for the City by Stevie Wonder, but anyone whose heard me might well disagree. Would you like to do more writing? I love writing but don’t get a huge amount of time to do it. There was a point when I thought I would primarily be a writer, but the acting seems to have got in the way. So when I do get a chance, I jump at it. How was working with [co-stars], Suranne Jones and Stephen Graham? Suranne gives a cracking performance in a tricky, nuanced role. She’s high-calibre. I’ve known Stevie for almost 20 years, since we did Snatch together and became firm friends. I’d work with him every day of the week if I could. He’s the best of us, as good as it gets. Are working-class actors a disappearing breed nowadays? I’m not sure that if I was coming through now, I’d be able to have the same career path. Opportunities have been reduced for working-class actors. It was difficult back then, but now it’s harder. That said, at least people have noticed and are talking about it. Variety is important. It’s incumbent on us all to create demand for working-class actors. I felt that on a small level while writing Save Me – it was very important to me to mainly cast working-class Londoners. Doors being closed or made harder to open is something I’m very familiar with – and I don’t like it. Your Walking Dead character, Morgan Jones, is the first to cross over to spin-off series Fear the Walking Dead. How’s that been? I don’t know if I’m blazing a trail, but I’ve left some breadcrumbs. It’s exciting to take an established character into a new landscape. In all honesty, I was thinking about saying goodbye, then this incredible opportunity was offered. It’s exhilarating. Morgan’s signature weapon is a bo-staff. Is it true your instructor is a former Ninja Turtle? That’s right – Steven Ho, who was Donatello’s fight double. He’s a fantastic teacher who trains me to look a lot better than I really am. I lost a television doing it, mind you. I was swinging the stick in the front room, trying a trick I’d seen on YouTube, and the West Wing was on TV. The stick slipped out of my hand, went straight through the TV and pierced Martin Sheen. You killed the president? I literally killed the president. The real president that everybody wanted. You were the original Line Of Duty villain, as series one’s DCI Tony Gates. Have you been angling for a comeback? At the time, I could only do one series, so I knew Tony Gates wouldn’t last. He got run over by a lorry but I’ve been nagging Jed [Mercurio, series creator] to find a way. I’ve come up with all kinds of options, involving ghosts and resurrections, but Jed’s like, “Really bad idea. What, you think you’re a writer now?” My picture appeared on a wall of evidence in series four, so that’ll have to do. You’re a Spurs fan. Do you get to many games? I watch every game, wherever I am in the world. And I’m still a season ticket holder. It’s my one stupid extravagance and my one big argument with my wife each year: “Why are you buying a season ticket? You live in America!” But when I was back shooting Save Me, I got to see all the home games, which was a joy. I like to come home regularly and, when I do, I need something to do on Saturdays. I can’t think of anything better than the mighty Tottenham Hotspur. All six episodes of Save Me will be available from Wednesday 28 February on Sky Atlantic and Now TV

culture/2018/feb/25/lennie-james-walking-dead-save-me-spurs

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-25T09:00:17Z

Lennie James on his new TV drama

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/25/lennie-james-walking-dead-save-me-spurs

['nottingham-born', 'south', 'london-raised', 'lennie', 'james', 'brought', 'care', 'mother', 'died', 'later', 'trained', 'guildhall', 'school', 'music', 'drama', 'lives', 'los', 'angeles', 'starred', 'tv', 'dramas', 'sides', 'atlantic', 'including', 'line', 'duty', 'critical', 'buried', 'us', 'made', 'name', 'post-apocalyptic', 'cbs', 'drama', 'jericho', 'one', 'longest-serving', 'cast', 'members', 'walking', 'dead', 'franchise', 'film', 'credits', 'include', 'snatch', 'blade', 'runner', 'first', 'full', 'tv', 'series', 'star', 'writer', 'save', 'gritty', 'new', 'sky', 'atlantic', 'drama', 'set', 'amid', 'pubs', 'tower', 'blocks', 'lewisham', 'save', 'father', 'search', 'missing', 'daughter', 'inspired', 'real-life', 'case', 'really', 'came', 'idea', 'man', 'gets', 'brought', 'back', 'estranged', 'child', 'life', 'goes', 'missing', 'thought', 'could', 'basis', 'really', 'cool', 'thriller', 'wanted', 'set', 'london', 'know', 'rarely', 'depicted', 'screen', 'depicted', 'tends', 'issue-led', 'opposed', 'place', 'stories', 'told', 'unfolds', 'unlikely', 'location', 'unlikely', 'hero', 'tell', 'us', 'unlikely', 'hero', 'nelson', 'nelly', 'rowe', 'based', 'someone', 'know', 'amalgamation', 'characters', 'come', 'across', 'back', 'day', 'youth', 'theatre', 'group', 'based', 'lyric', 'hammersmith', 'rehearsal', 'would', 'go', 'boozer', 'across', 'road', 'always', 'one', 'black', 'guy', 'almost', 'exclusively', 'white', 'pub', 'used', 'see', 'quite', 'lot', 'certain', 'areas', 'london', 'nelly', 'like', 'throwback', 'got', 'three', 'daughters', 'make', 'story', 'painful', 'write', 'fact', 'dad', 'three', 'girls', 'absolutely', 'relevant', 'yeah', 'story', 'comes', 'completely', 'opposite', 'angle', 'know', 'bring', 'kids', 'involved', 'lives', 'nelly', 'totally', 'absent', 'daughter', 'life', 'learns', 'means', 'father', 'unconventional', 'way', 'nelly', 'nicknamed', 'legobeast', 'mean', 'old', 'west', 'indian', 'name', 'guy', 'lives', 'dick', 'laughs', 'somebody', 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'could', 'best', 'us', 'good', 'gets', 'working-class', 'actors', 'disappearing', 'breed', 'nowadays', 'sure', 'coming', 'would', 'able', 'career', 'path', 'opportunities', 'reduced', 'working-class', 'actors', 'difficult', 'back', 'harder', 'said', 'least', 'people', 'noticed', 'talking', 'variety', 'important', 'incumbent', 'us', 'create', 'demand', 'working-class', 'actors', 'felt', 'small', 'level', 'writing', 'save', 'important', 'mainly', 'cast', 'working-class', 'londoners', 'doors', 'closed', 'made', 'harder', 'open', 'something', 'familiar', 'like', 'walking', 'dead', 'character', 'morgan', 'jones', 'first', 'cross', 'spin-off', 'series', 'fear', 'walking', 'dead', 'know', 'blazing', 'trail', 'left', 'breadcrumbs', 'exciting', 'take', 'established', 'character', 'new', 'landscape', 'honesty', 'thinking', 'saying', 'goodbye', 'incredible', 'opportunity', 'offered', 'exhilarating', 'morgan', 'signature', 'weapon', 'bo-staff', 'true', 'instructor', 'former', 'ninja', 'turtle', 'right', 'steven', 'ho', 'donatello', 'fight', 'double', 'fantastic', 'teacher', 'trains', 'look', 'lot', 'better', 'really', 'lost', 'television', 'mind', 'swinging', 'stick', 'front', 'room', 'trying', 'trick', 'would', 'seen', 'youtube', 'west', 'wing', 'tv', 'stick', 'slipped', 'hand', 'went', 'straight', 'tv', 'pierced', 'martin', 'sheen', 'killed', 'president', 'literally', 'killed', 'president', 'real', 'president', 'everybody', 'wanted', 'original', 'line', 'duty', 'villain', 'series', 'one', 'dci', 'tony', 'gates', 'angling', 'comeback', 'time', 'could', 'one', 'series', 'knew', 'tony', 'gates', 'would', 'last', 'got', 'run', 'lorry', 'nagging', 'jed', 'mercurio', 'series', 'creator', 'find', 'way', 'come', 'kinds', 'options', 'involving', 'ghosts', 'resurrections', 'jed', 'like', 'really', 'bad', 'idea', 'think', 'writer', 'picture', 'appeared', 'wall', 'evidence', 'series', 'four', 'spurs', 'fan', 'get', 'many', 'games', 'watch', 'every', 'game', 'wherever', 'world', 'still', 'season', 'ticket', 'holder', 'one', 'stupid', 'extravagance', 'one', 'big', 'argument', 'wife', 'year', 'buying', 'season', 'ticket', 'live', 'america', 'back', 'shooting', 'save', 'got', 'see', 'home', 'games', 'joy', 'like', 'come', 'home', 'regularly', 'need', 'something', 'saturdays', 'think', 'anything', 'better', 'mighty', 'tottenham', 'hotspur', 'six', 'episodes', 'save', 'available', 'wednesday', 'february', 'sky', 'atlantic', 'tv']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/25/your-pictures-share-your-photos-on-the-theme-of-red

The next theme for our weekly photography assignment in the Observer New Review is ‘red.’ Share your photos of what red means to you – and tell us about your image in the description box. The closing date is Wednesday 28 February at 10am. We’ll publish our favourites in The New Review on Sunday 4 March and in a gallery on the Guardian site. You can share your ‘red’ pictures by clicking on the ‘Contribute’ button on this article. You can also use the Guardian app and search for ‘GuardianWitness assignments’ – and if you add it to the homepage – you can keep up with all our assignments. GuardianWitness is the home of readers’ content on the Guardian. Contribute your video, pictures and stories, and browse news, reviews and creations submitted by others.

culture/2018/feb/25/your-pictures-share-your-photos-on-the-theme-of-red

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-25T09:00:06Z

Your pictures: share your photos on the theme of 'red'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/25/your-pictures-share-your-photos-on-the-theme-of-red

['next', 'theme', 'weekly', 'photography', 'assignment', 'observer', 'new', 'review', 'red', 'share', 'photos', 'red', 'means', 'tell', 'us', 'image', 'description', 'box', 'closing', 'date', 'wednesday', 'february', '10am', 'publish', 'favourites', 'new', 'review', 'sunday', 'march', 'gallery', 'guardian', 'site', 'share', 'red', 'pictures', 'clicking', 'contribute', 'button', 'article', 'also', 'use', 'guardian', 'app', 'search', 'guardianwitness', 'assignments', 'add', 'homepage', 'keep', 'assignments', 'guardianwitness', 'home', 'readers', 'content', 'guardian', 'contribute', 'video', 'pictures', 'stories', 'browse', 'news', 'reviews', 'creations', 'submitted', 'others']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/25/observer-anthony-burgess-prize-winner-nigella-lawson-at-my-table-felicity-james

The mouse had clearly been dead a while. It was entombed in the entertaining section, its grey bootlace tail – it was a field mouse – bookmarking a picture of a party meatloaf. It wasn’t clear whether it had crawled into my mother’s Good Housekeeping to die, or whether the assorted canapes had crushed the life out of it. Either way, there would be no more devilled eggs. And even worse, the whole cupboard of cookery books was doomed. Mrs Beeton’s intricate dinner party menus; the lurid 80s cakes of Jane Asher; Delia soundly holding a brown egg. All of them gnawed at and nested in, in the years since my mother had got ill and my father had begun to subsist on beans and Heinz tomato soup. Into the skip with them all. So Nigella’s At My Table: A Celebration of Home Cooking (Chatto) is a symbolic purchase, my first since the great mouse disaster. That fits in well with the whole premise of the book, which tells, according to Nigella, “the story of home cooking… about who we are, where we’ve come from and the lives that we’ve lived”. It’s accompanied, of course, by a soft-focus, fairy-lighted BBC series. This paean to home cooking is staged in a discreetly expensive set, around which Nigella tiptoes, coyly, curating a shelf of cosmopolitan chilli powders, eating brownies on the stairs by night. A host of telegenic friends descend on her table, periodically, to share her wisdom and tray-baked chicken, beatifically overseen by a strangely ageless, never-changing host. Somewhere in a locked larder, we might suppose, she has a mouldering marzipan figurine, ageing in her stead. The book itself, however, is a slightly different affair, an odder beast. There is a table in its opening pages, but its plates and pink chairs are empty, its cutlery unused. There’s something almost eerie about its stage set. For Lawson, the writer, is much more knowing, and darker, than the cartoon va-va-voom of the television series. Nigella has been in our kitchens for almost 20 years. Her debut, How to Eat, was a product of the very early Blair era, those post-Granita years of Britpop and baked sea bass. I bought it when I first moved into a shared house: how proudly I carried in my basil plant, and the pan my mother had bought at Altrincham market. Now I would join the pasta-eating classes, and my life as a sophisticate would begin.Then I read How to Be a Domestic Goddess and joined the cupcake revolution, all cream frosting and retro housewifery. But how does Nigella fare in today’s clean, lean eating climate? These are more austere years: Theresa May planning her election strategy over chicken lasagne and boiled potatoes; Jeremy Corbyn posing with marrows. On the face of it, At My Table is too rich all round for its own good. The book is lavish, a coffee-table luxury, heavy with photographs and calories. It starts with fried goods and ends with margaritas, and it’s true that its hipster comfort food might stick in the throat. Chilli cheese garlic bread must be made with sourdough; fried cheese toasties consist of ripe Brie, ripe black fig, Parma ham. But cutting through all this cheese is a sharp edge of self-parody. Lawson is always listening in to her own lip-smacking language and making it part of the joke. An Indian meal might be accompanied by a “ruby mound of radicchio and a small bowl of Bollywood-pink, quick-pickled onions”; duck might enjoy a “Kaffe Fassett tapestry of cavolo nero”. Even the chicken has had an apprenticeship in romantic poetry: a stew with red grapes and marsala is “brimming with mellow fruitfulness”; white sauce has a Keatsian “muffling blandness” as opposed to the “bosky depth” of a fricassee. With desserts, we reach new heights with the “celestially airy, cloud-like kiss of a syllabub”, and there’s a good deal of tumbling – berries, pomegranate seeds, cocktail ice. This is such campy playfulness that we begin to forgive its excesses. And there’s also a bleaker, deeper undertow. Lawson has said in interviews that when she started writing, she had her sister Thomasina in mind, who died aged 31: “I was continuing a conversation about food that we’d had daily when she was alive.” This is writing tempered by grief and loss, memorialising a lost sister, mother, husband. And here in the pages of At My Table is Thomasina, standing on a rickety chair to drip oil into a mayonnaise the anxious child Nigella is whisking. Chicken fricassee speaks of “my grandmother’s flat on a Monday evening”; Lawson’s maternal grandfather appears grinding black pepper over strawberries – “he insisted it made their berried freshness sing”. As in some magic realist novel, the spirits of the dead are summoned up through the smell of cooking, invited to eat with the family again. That empty table in the opening pages takes on a poignant meaning. Whose are those unused places? The skip has been taken away, with the kitchen units, the battered baking trays, the walking frame, the Christmas cards and school reports and back copies of the Telegraph. There go all the cookery books, bleached, mouse-eaten. The nursing home has been found, the house rented. And here’s Nigella, looking just the same. Turning back to her, there’s still a sly joy, a self-conscious silliness, which lifts the spirits. At My Table has as its subtitle “a celebration of home cooking”, and there is something defiantly celebratory about it, a willed resistance to change and death. The celestial airiness of her syllabub comes to seem like a promise: even her chickpeas offer “comfort, uplift, aromatic zing and ease”. And look! Here, on p24, are devilled eggs, in proper 1950s style, just as Good Housekeeping decreed. “Pipe away,” urges Nigella, in “golden rosettes.” I rest my eyes on their irrepressible yellow cheeriness. I reach for the piping bag. • At My Table by Nigella Lawson is published by Chatto & Windus (£26). To order a copy for £22.10 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99 The annual Observer/Anthony Burgess prize for arts journalism was established in 2012 to honour the writer’s distinguished career as a literary critic for the Observer from the early 1960s until his death in 1993. The prize for best arts essay in 2017 was awarded on Wednesday by this year’s judging panel chair, Liz Sich. A total of £4,000 in prize money was awarded and the winners will be commissioned to produce new writing about the arts for prize partner Free Word, the international centre for literature, literacy and free expression.

culture/2018/feb/25/observer-anthony-burgess-prize-winner-nigella-lawson-at-my-table-felicity-james

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-25T08:00:15Z

Nigella Lawson’s At My Table by Felicity James

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/25/observer-anthony-burgess-prize-winner-nigella-lawson-at-my-table-felicity-james

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'sharp', 'edge', 'self-parody', 'lawson', 'always', 'listening', 'lip-smacking', 'language', 'making', 'part', 'joke', 'indian', 'meal', 'might', 'accompanied', 'ruby', 'mound', 'radicchio', 'small', 'bowl', 'bollywood-pink', 'quick-pickled', 'onions', 'duck', 'might', 'enjoy', 'kaffe', 'fassett', 'tapestry', 'cavolo', 'nero', 'even', 'chicken', 'apprenticeship', 'romantic', 'poetry', 'stew', 'red', 'grapes', 'marsala', 'brimming', 'mellow', 'fruitfulness', 'white', 'sauce', 'keatsian', 'muffling', 'blandness', 'opposed', 'bosky', 'depth', 'fricassee', 'desserts', 'reach', 'new', 'heights', 'celestially', 'airy', 'cloud-like', 'kiss', 'syllabub', 'good', 'deal', 'tumbling', 'berries', 'pomegranate', 'seeds', 'cocktail', 'ice', 'campy', 'playfulness', 'begin', 'forgive', 'excesses', 'also', 'bleaker', 'deeper', 'undertow', 'lawson', 'said', 'interviews', 'started', 'writing', 'sister', 'thomasina', 'mind', 'died', 'aged', 'continuing', 'conversation', 'food', 'would', 'daily', 'alive', 'writing', 'tempered', 'grief', 'loss', 'memorialising', 'lost', 'sister', 'mother', 'husband', 'pages', 'table', 'thomasina', 'standing', 'rickety', 'chair', 'drip', 'oil', 'mayonnaise', 'anxious', 'child', 'nigella', 'whisking', 'chicken', 'fricassee', 'speaks', 'grandmother', 'flat', 'monday', 'evening', 'lawson', 'maternal', 'grandfather', 'appears', 'grinding', 'black', 'pepper', 'strawberries', 'insisted', 'made', 'berried', 'freshness', 'sing', 'magic', 'realist', 'novel', 'spirits', 'dead', 'summoned', 'smell', 'cooking', 'invited', 'eat', 'family', 'empty', 'table', 'opening', 'pages', 'takes', 'poignant', 'meaning', 'whose', 'unused', 'places', 'skip', 'taken', 'away', 'kitchen', 'units', 'battered', 'baking', 'trays', 'walking', 'frame', 'christmas', 'cards', 'school', 'reports', 'back', 'copies', 'telegraph', 'go', 'cookery', 'books', 'bleached', 'mouse-eaten', 'nursing', 'home', 'found', 'house', 'rented', 'nigella', 'looking', 'turning', 'back', 'still', 'sly', 'joy', 'self-conscious', 'silliness', 'lifts', 'spirits', 'table', 'subtitle', 'celebration', 'home', 'cooking', 'something', 'defiantly', 'celebratory', 'willed', 'resistance', 'change', 'death', 'celestial', 'airiness', 'syllabub', 'comes', 'seem', 'like', 'promise', 'even', 'chickpeas', 'offer', 'comfort', 'uplift', 'aromatic', 'zing', 'ease', 'look', 'p24', 'devilled', 'eggs', 'proper', '1950s', 'style', 'good', 'housekeeping', 'decreed', 'pipe', 'away', 'urges', 'nigella', 'golden', 'rosettes', 'rest', 'eyes', 'irrepressible', 'yellow', 'cheeriness', 'reach', 'piping', 'bag', 'table', 'nigella', 'lawson', 'published', 'chatto', 'amp', 'windus', 'order', 'copy', 'go', 'guardianbookshopcom', 'call', 'free', 'uk', 'pampp', 'online', 'orders', 'phone', 'orders', 'min', 'pampp', 'annual', 'observeranthony', 'burgess', 'prize', 'arts', 'journalism', 'established', 'honour', 'writer', 'distinguished', 'career', 'literary', 'critic', 'observer', 'early', '1960s', 'death', 'prize', 'best', 'arts', 'essay', 'awarded', 'wednesday', 'year', 'judging', 'panel', 'chair', 'liz', 'sich', 'total', 'prize', 'money', 'awarded', 'winners', 'commissioned', 'produce', 'new', 'writing', 'arts', 'prize', 'partner', 'free', 'word', 'international', 'centre', 'literature', 'literacy', 'free', 'expression']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/ng-interactive/2018/feb/25/simone-lia-on-first-world-problems

culture/ng-interactive/2018/feb/25/simone-lia-on-first-world-problems

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

interactive

2018-02-25T08:00:04Z

Simone Lia on first world problems

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/ng-interactive/2018/feb/25/simone-lia-on-first-world-problems

[]

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/25/national-maritime-museum-superyachts-art-conservation

Art conservators and historians, among them the veteran cultural historian Sir Roy Strong, have raised concerns about a symposium aimed at the billionaire owners of superyachts who display valuable art on board their craft. On Thursday, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich will hold an event to advise yacht owners on how to insure and protect their floating collections. Speakers will also offer tax tips to around 45 guests, who have paid £395 for a ticket. “I have got no objection to people having large yachts, but the museum is wading into dubious waters here,” said Strong, a former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. “As a publicly funded institution, I don’t think they come out of it too well.” The museum argues the exclusive event, the first of its kind to be held there, is designed to “promote best practice” and will not make a profit. The rest of the museum will remain open. Yet other conservators echo Strong’s worry that it is not appropriate to encourage important art to be used to decorate superyachts. “What are you going to have eventually? One of the world’s few Leonardos floating about on the waves?” Strong asked. Alison Richmond, chief executive of the Institute of Conservation, the professional body that runs a register of qualified conservators, said keeping art on yachts was a growing trend. “The real value of art is not money, of course, it is sentiment, aesthetic value and historic value. This tends to gets lost now, when it is all about the dollar,” she said. She added that the stability of the onboard atmosphere is crucial. “The real question is what the conditions are, and not whether the art is at sea or not. Advice on considerations such as fluctuations in light, humidity and heat is vital. Superyachts, of course, have air conditioning, but a quick change from damp to dry air causes dangerous expansion and contraction.” Helen Robertson, conservator at Royal Museums Greenwich and curator of the symposium, told the Observer she hopes to offer guidance, “protecting what is already there”, rather than “promoting the carriage of art on board vessels”. The interior of a superyacht is often a safe environment, she added: “Owners tend to be identified with art collecting and philanthropy. So, whether we like it or not, art is carried on board certain superyachts.” Robertson said the subject was “close to her heart” because she was a former seagoing chief steward. “I have seen wonderful examples of how art can be successfully carried within a yacht interior, but also tales of tragic ignorance resulting in loss of art and artefacts. Our aim is to take a holistic look at the subject, which of course means considering the legal/tax/insurance implications of internationally transiting art.” The chosen speakers come from the worlds of art and yachting, she said, and understand the need for debate. “One of the questions we want to raise is: who should be responsible? The subject, as a whole, has very much been overlooked by the industry even though, from damage to seizure, the potential risks are significant.”

culture/2018/feb/25/national-maritime-museum-superyachts-art-conservation

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-25T00:04:32Z

Maritime museum in choppy waters for offering superyacht owners art advice

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/25/national-maritime-museum-superyachts-art-conservation

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/24/what-to-see-this-week-in-the-uk

Five of the best ... films I, Tonya (15) (Craig Gillespie, 2017, US) 119 mins Skating on thin ice at times, this riotously entertaining biopic allows us to sympathise with disgraced skater Tonya Harding even as we laugh at her. Margot Robbie acquits herself well as the brash talent, who transcended her white-trash roots and monstrous mother (Allison Janney), only to be embroiled in a comically inept scheme to hurt her rival. Lady Bird (15) (Greta Gerwig, 2017, US) 94 mins Gerwig’s acclaimed directorial debut is as warm, witty and wise a teen movie as we’ve ever had. Lady Bird follows the tale of a smart teen (Saoirse Ronan) whose ambitions are both modestly familiar and yet way out of reach: going to college, dating boys, getting along with her mum (Laurie Metcalf). Set in early 00s Sacramento, it has a flavour all of its own. Black Panther (12A) (Ryan Coogler, 2018, US) 134 mins The fictional setting and African-diaspora cast make this a different kind of superhero epic, but it is also executed with intelligence and commitment. Chadwick Boseman and Michael B Jordan make for terrific adversaries, whose clash for the throne of Wakanda cuts far deeper than the spectacle, though there are also car chases, landscapes and armoured rhinos to enjoy. The Shape of Water (15) (Guillermo del Toro, 2017, US) 123 mins Fairytale and monster movie swirl together in this fantasy, set in cold war America. Our Beauty is Sally Hawkins’s (pictured) mute cleaner at a top-secret research lab; her Beast is a captive fish-man, who becomes an unlikely soulmate. But these are not exactly permissive times, and scowling FBI boss Michael Shannon has his own agenda … Loveless (15) (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2017, Rus/Fra/Ger/Bel) 124 mins Mysterious and confidently executed, this Russian parable turns a fraught domestic incident into a state-of-the-nation survey. The focus of the story is an aspirational urban couple, whose divorce and eagerness to move on to new lives and partners leaves their young son feeling unwanted and distraught. His disappearance exposes faultlines personal, national, even spiritual. SR Five of the best ... rock & pop gigs Kali Uchis The Grammy-nominated, Colombian-American singer mixes hip-hop, pop and doo-wop for a delectable, vintage yet modern sound, and has worked with everyone from Snoop Dogg to Jorja Smith. Her latest collaboration, After the Storm, features Tyler the Creator and Bootsy Collins. Catch her before she gets huge at this one-off show. Electric Brixton, SW2 Thursday 27 February First Aid Kit Sister act Johanna and Klara Söderberg have reached more rustic heights on their fourth album, Ruins. As well as their newer material, the Swedish duo are likely to bring their older hits to this run of shows, too, and maybe last year’s sexual assault-themed single You Are The Problem Here, which feels rather timely. Glasgow, Saturday 24; Manchester, Monday 26 & Tuesday 27 February; London, Thursday 1 & Friday 2 March Imagine Dragons With their brash stadium rock, the millennial answer to the Foo Fighters will not be to everyone’s taste. In fact, while Imagine Dragons’ latest album, Evolve, was bold and EDM-flecked, it was not as acclaimed as their previous two efforts. That said, the Las Vegas group can put on a show - expect attention-grabbing visuals that might leave Chris Martin feeling jealous. Birmingham, Saturday 24; Dublin, Monday 26; London, Wednesday 28 February & Thursday 1; touring to 4 March Krept & Konan The London rappers gave fans a two-for-one deal by releasing a pair of acclaimed mixtapes – 7 Days and 7 Nights – last year. Pairing road-ready rap with smoother R&B, they give an ideal introduction to this duo, who were definitively thrust into the mainstream after years on the cult fringes of the UK rap scene with 2015 album The Long Way Home. The Junction, Cambridge, Saturday 24 February; touring to 22 March HJD Dave Holland & Evan Parker Two contemporary jazz giants – former Miles Davis bass star Holland and sax innovator Parker – join forces on this Vortex club fundraiser. They first met on London’s flourishing 1960s free jazz scene, since when Parker has transformed the saxophone’s vocabulary and Holland has been a worldwide influence as both a player and a bandleader. The Vortex Jazz Club, N16, Saturday 24 February JF Four of the best ... classical concerts Eugene Onegin Mid Wales Opera goes on the road with its production of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece. It is conducted by Jonathan Lyness and directed and designed by Richard Studer; the cast is led by Elizabeth Karani as Tatyana and George von Bergen as Onegin. Theatr Hafren, Newtown Saturday 24; Aberystwyth Arts Centre Wednesday 28 February; touring to 10 April Powder Her Face Merging two Dublin companies, Irish National Opera makes its debut with a co-production of Thomas Adès’s precocious first opera, first seen at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast last year. Antony McDonald directs and Timothy Redmond conducts, with Mary Plazas as the Duchess. Wexford, Saturday 24; Kilkenny, Tuesday 27 February; Navan, Thursday 1; touring to 9 March Les Talens Lyriques Christophe Rousset brings his outstanding early-music group to London with a programme devoted to the Italian baroque. Sopranos Jodie Devos and Judith van Wanroij sing numbers from Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea, Rossi’s Orfeo and Cavalli’s Didone, as well as madrigals by Monteverdi. Wigmore Hall, W1, Monday 26 February Britten Sinfonia Pianist Jeremy Denk’s collaboration with the sinfonia continues with a jazz-tinged programme. He’s the soloist in Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind and the original jazz-band version of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, while the chamber orchestra contributes Milhaud’s gorgeous short ballet, La Création du Monde. Milton Court, EC2, Tuesday 27 February; St Andrew’s Hall, Norwich, Friday 2; touring to 5 March AC Five of the best ... exhibitions All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life Lucian Freud’s portraits of Leigh Bowery and Sue Tilley, painted in the 90s when he already had a career behind him, are masterpieces. Freud’s great period started on the death of his friend Francis Bacon (work pictured). Ponder the relationship between these mighty artists in a show that should be meaty in every sense. Tate Britain, SW1 Wednesday 28 February to 27 August Murillo: The Self-Portraits The paintings of this deeply religious 17th-century Spanish artist jar with modern tastes owing to their sentimental depictions of poverty. Yet in his self-portraits he puts the soft-focus aside to study his own image. These are haunting, metaphysical poems of time, fame and death. The National Gallery, WC2, Wednesday 28 February to 21 May Emil Nolde The raw energy and expressive sensitivity of Nolde’s paintings from the 1900s to 1940s cannot be denied. He emerges here as one of Germany’s greats, a missing link between the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich and the contemporary vision of Anselm Kiefer. Yet Nolde was a member of the Nazi party and horrific racial stereotypes surface here. A brave journey into the art of darkness. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, to 10 June Anthony McCall Lose yourself in dreamscapes of light and smoke. Since the early 70s, this British pioneer of light art has experimented with the ways a cone of light can seem “solid” when dust and vapour pass through. He creates complex experiences that will have you (and any kids who are around) moving in and out of lightbeams to see illusory glowing corridors and luminous Turner-esque mists. His work unleashes a primitive worship of the power of light. The Hepworth, Wakefield, to 3 June Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography Photography as art was popularised in Victorian Britain, where Julia Margaret Cameron combined an eye for portraiture with a bold imagination to illustrate the poems of Tennyson in strangely subversive tableaux. This exhibition explores her work alongside arty shots by the likes of Lewis Carroll (work pictured) and Oscar Gustave Rejlander. National Portrait Gallery, WC2, Thursday 1 March to 20 May JJ Five of the best ... theatre shows Julius Caesar Nick Hytner’s rabble-rousing revival begins in rock’n’roll style, borrows energy from the promenading audience and develops into something more subtle. Don’t buy a seat, though: this is best experienced standing right in the thick of it, not least for the chance to see Ben Whishaw’s troubled Brutus and Michelle Fairley’s sly Cassius up close and personal. The Bridge Theatre, SE1 to 15 April Not I Jess Thom takes on Samuel Beckett’s motormouth and wins in a performance in which her Tourette syndrome tics and verbal interjections are part of the package. This is not the virtuoso turn that this piece sometimes becomes, but something more human and accessible in every way, including the fact that all the performances are relaxed. Battersea Arts Centre, SW11, Wednesday 28 February to 17 March Gundog It is cold down on the farm and there’s little comfort in Simon Longman’s play about two sisters struggling to survive on the family homestead. It’s undoubtedly grim stuff, featuring sheep corpses and crushed dreams, but also grimly funny, fantastically distinctive and clear-eyed, emphasising that rural life is not all rolling green pastures and gambolling lambs. Jerwood Theatres at the Royal Court, SW1, to 10 March The Great Gatsby This is one party you will not want to miss. Alexander Wright’s immersive take on F Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz-age novel has already had successful runs in a disused nonconformist chapel in York, Theatre Delicatessen in Sheffield and at London’s subterranean Vault festival. Now it is transforming an empty high street pub in Mold. There are cocktails and a chance to dance the Charleston in an evening that feels like small-scale Punchdrunk and which captures the hedonism and sadness of the novel. The Dolphin Pub, Mold, to 25 March Winter Solstice Roland Schimmelpfennig’s family drama is a sly, chilling 90 minutes. It masquerades as a droll Ayckbourn-esque comedy set around the Christmas dinner table but develops into something more unsettling. When elderly Corinna turns up for the family festivities with a man she has met on the train, the courteous stranger is welcomed in. But it soon becomes clear he is more than he seems … Theatre Royal: Ustinov Studio, Bath, Wednesday 28 February to 3 March; touring to 31 March LG Three of the best ... dance shows Lost Dog: Juliet and Romeo – A Guide to Long Life and Happy Marriage Following his solo Paradise Lost, Ben Duke stamps his singular wit and imagination on to Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy, reimagining it into a future where the star-crossed lovers have become a middle-aged married couple, trading romance for habit and compromise. Battersea Arts Centre, SW11 Saturday 24; The Place, WC1 Tuesday 27 February to 3 March Ace Dance and Music: Ten José Agudo joins Afro-fusion company Ace for a new work about the migration of people and culture. Agudo’s trademark style of contemporary dance with an essence of flamenco, Kathak, martial arts and ballet comes with a score by Giuliano Modarelli. Pavilion Dance South West, Bournemouth, Thursday 1 March; touring to 26 April Sasha Waltz & Guests: Körper A welcome return for this signature work from Berlin’s leading modern dance-maker. Exploring the world of the body from a variety of comic, fantastical forensic angles, Waltz uses her 13 dancers to choreograph a tapestry of powerfully visceral and poetic imagery. Sadler’s Wells, EC1, Thursday 1 to 3 March JM

culture/2018/feb/24/what-to-see-this-week-in-the-uk

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-24T09:00:14Z

What to see this week in the UK

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/24/what-to-see-this-week-in-the-uk

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/24/jessica-jones-mind-control-and-redemption-the-timely-return-of-a-feminist-superhero

When she first became Marvel’s Jessica Jones for Netflix in 2015, Krysten Ritter had layers of resonance and magnetism. The actor, whose undignified exit from Breaking Bad had left a world jonesing for her, is quite the performer; not an ounce of sentimentality or shop-bought softness. In her role as superhero Jones, she is the private detective with all the flaws one should have: broken office door-glass; a whisky habit conceived by someone with absolutely no experience of trying to drink throughout the working day; a crummy, shoestring lifestyle despite constantly being handed fists of money; and a deadly enemy in the shape of malevolent mind controller Kilgrave (David Tennant). Jones has superpowers; quite poorly defined ones that mainly involve throwing people, although she often falls, in a Buzz Lightyear fashion (“That wasn’t flying, that was falling with style”). Emotionally, she is held in suspended animation by her PTSD, which was triggered by a series of harrowing events contributing to her traumatic backstory. She is caught in the eye of a three-way storm: the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of Kilgrave; the car crash that killed her entire family; and the institutional violence that somehow bestowed superpowers upon her while she was in a coma (“horrific” experiments took place on Jones, the nature of which are still opaque, but hospital doors give her the most awful flashbacks). Kilgrave’s abuse (she was his sex slave) left her with more than ambient trauma; it hollowed out her belief in her own power as a force for good. In Jessica Jones, the past never passes, just crashes back into the present, in flashbacks, in parallel cases she undertakes to investigate, and now – in the second series – in the queasy expectation of the victim, that she be the town crier of her own experience, for the prevention of future crimes. The second season also arrives post #MeToo, like an answer to questions that were unvoiced when it first came out. What does sexual assault mean, and what does it do? Why does it leave the wrong person ashamed and everybody silent? A bit of quickfire dialogue – “I don’t take ‘no’ for an answer,” says a new villain who wants to take over her business; “How rapey,” Jones replies – marks out the new terrain, where the things that have always been said crash headlong into the things that are never said. Yet – never mind even the chronology of the filming – this is no opportunistic female-empowerment yarn. “It’s a coincidence, that it comes out just as we’re all talking about abuse,” Ritter tells me over the phone. “Me Too was only a couple of months ago, we were already done shooting by then. I think what the movement has done, it’s made women so reactive and so emotional. You read the stories and you do an inventory of your own life. So everyone has been triggered or poked at. Which I think is awesome. It’s a crazy coincidence because that’s what our show does as well.” The show is ensconced in a noir atmosphere – a feeling prompted by the sense Jessica Jones is so close to the hero that nearly but never was: she is the female Humphrey Bogart. The hard-boiled subgenre of noir was getting very near gender parity, with Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man, a man and a woman as wise-cracking and hard-drinking as one another. But then the 1950s happened and the moment passed. Scroll forward 65 years and, even post-Wonder Woman, female physical strength and mental verve have the vividness of the unfamiliar. Yet there is one trope more unusual still: the strong victim. As a dramatic construct, the victim functions as a frame and counterpoint to the hero. But in the case of Jessica Jones she is both victim and hero. Despite the fact we repeatedly see examples of Jones’s weakness against Kilgrave and a backstory that reveals rape and forced murder, she is not the damsel in distress but the knight. It is well-known Jessica Jones lore that the production team is predominantly female. One exec, Liz Friedman, wrote A Feminist and Class-Based Analysis of Slasher Films for her graduate thesis. “It is a very supportive environment,” says Ritter. “There’s no ego, there’s no infighting, which is important, because I can go into darker places if I feel safe to be vulnerable.” In this environment the show remodels the victim narrative, and asks the question: how do we define what rape is? Last season, in a psychedelic amplification of a courtroom cross-questioning (“Yet the complainant had previously had dinner with the accused, your honour …”), Kilgrave and Jones had a showdown over what mind-control meant. “We used to do a lot more than just touch hands,” he says. “Yeah. It’s called rape,” she replies. “Which part of staying in five-star hotels, eating at all the best places, doing whatever the hell you wanted, is rape?” he persists. “The part where I didn’t want to do any of it! Not only did you physically rape me, but you violated every cell in my body and every thought in my goddamn head.” A realm where mind control exists can crack open a conversation about violation in terms where the subtle doesn’t undermine the literal, where the spirit is as real as the flesh. Even at the level of the premise, the show made a statement about rape that is fundamental, seldom made and hard to render more boldly than with a superhero. Serious voices on the subject often cite the muting effect that violation has on women, stretching past the event so that their power is quelled for years afterwards. Nobody violent needs an academic to tell them this, which is why rape is such a timeless and prevalent war crime. But the world at large probably needs to be told, and what could be plainer than a woman with superpowers literally eschewing their full potential and going freelance to get away from her trauma? “Real women on the street came up to me in tears because this was the first time they felt represented by the lead; it made them feel so much better about their own traumas,” Ritter says. “Even hearing women saying they were excited to see a badass female character was great: people responded to her in such a huge way.” Having covered so much ground, in its second season the show winkles into the knottier areas of the feminist dilemma. Jessica Jones always had a scratchy relationship with her sometime employer Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss) and in the second season, Hogarth has gone full Sheryl Sandberg but distills no feminist ideal. Her feminism stretches no further than the coincidence of wanting what she wants, while simultaneously being female. Indeed, without wanting to give anything away, she is the opposite of sisterly, operating to a rule book that more or less demands she make an enemy of anyone whom she cannot use instrumentally. It is another interesting route, into a conversation that is so murky it’s generally easier not to have: is the cooperative more feminist than the competitive? To Jessica Jones, those external struggles are ancillary to the question of her PTSD – whether or not she has a responsibility to open the door further to the traumas of her past, or whether doing so will make concrete what she suspects: that she has been brutalised by her past and become a monster that only wilful ignorance will contain. It is a rarely discussed element of the trauma story: part of silence is that to say anything makes you inherently implausible, yet once you are believed you have a responsibility to yourself and the world to delve as deeply as possible, speak as much as possible. It’s the Rose McGowan bind: an ounce of bravery is never enough. You have to have all the bravery in the world, and then it turns out that you’ve said too much. Here the Humphrey Bogart reticence works beautifully, catching all her avoidance in a caustic self-awareness, while underscoring the harsh truth that post-traumatic stress, like depression, is subject to endless scrutiny about its legitimacy, yet costs the sufferer so much more to explore than it does the casual observer who demands its exploration. There are so many capital-I issues here that it’s amazing it still functions as drama, but it does. You know … Krysten Ritter … being able to throw people, and also kind-of fly. Jessica Jones returns to Netflix on 8 March

culture/2018/feb/24/jessica-jones-mind-control-and-redemption-the-timely-return-of-a-feminist-superhero

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2018-02-24T07:00:12Z

Jessica Jones: the timely return of a feminist superhero

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/24/jessica-jones-mind-control-and-redemption-the-timely-return-of-a-feminist-superhero

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'wanting', 'give', 'anything', 'away', 'opposite', 'sisterly', 'operating', 'rule', 'book', 'less', 'demands', 'make', 'enemy', 'anyone', 'cannot', 'use', 'instrumentally', 'another', 'interesting', 'route', 'conversation', 'murky', 'generally', 'easier', 'cooperative', 'feminist', 'competitive', 'jessica', 'jones', 'external', 'struggles', 'ancillary', 'question', 'ptsd', 'whether', 'responsibility', 'open', 'door', 'traumas', 'past', 'whether', 'make', 'concrete', 'suspects', 'brutalised', 'past', 'become', 'monster', 'wilful', 'ignorance', 'contain', 'rarely', 'discussed', 'element', 'trauma', 'story', 'part', 'silence', 'say', 'anything', 'makes', 'inherently', 'implausible', 'yet', 'believed', 'responsibility', 'world', 'delve', 'deeply', 'possible', 'speak', 'much', 'possible', 'rose', 'mcgowan', 'bind', 'ounce', 'bravery', 'never', 'enough', 'bravery', 'world', 'turns', 'said', 'much', 'humphrey', 'bogart', 'reticence', 'works', 'beautifully', 'catching', 'avoidance', 'caustic', 'self-awareness', 'underscoring', 'harsh', 'truth', 'post-traumatic', 'stress', 'like', 'depression', 'subject', 'endless', 'scrutiny', 'legitimacy', 'yet', 'costs', 'sufferer', 'much', 'explore', 'casual', 'observer', 'demands', 'exploration', 'many', 'capital-i', 'issues', 'amazing', 'still', 'functions', 'drama', 'know', 'krysten', 'ritter', 'able', 'throw', 'people', 'also', 'kind-of', 'fly', 'jessica', 'jones', 'returns', 'netflix', 'march']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/23/stephen-colbert-trump-video-cheat-sheet-guns-florida

Late-night hosts on Thursday discussed Donald Trump’s solutions to America’s gun violence problem, and the CNN town hall with survivors of the Parkland mass shooting. Stephen Colbert: ‘Every option is on the table – except fewer guns’ “The national conversation continues to be how to keep our children safe from gun violence,” Stephen Colbert began. “Everyone acknowledges that this is a crisis, so for the president, the Republican party, and the NRA, every option is on the table except fewer guns.” Colbert went on to address Trump’s listening session with students, teachers, and parents from Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school. “It was clearly a test of Trump’s ability to listen, because he brought along a cheat sheet that included ‘I hear you’,” the host said, invoking the photo of Trump’s talking points on a note card. “It is a little unsettling that the president needs a cheat sheet for reacting to other people’s emotions,” Colbert said. He went on to discuss some of Trump’s proposals, which included arming teachers who are “adept at firearms”, a position he denied and later doubled down on on Twitter. “Yes, Trump never said to give guns to teachers willy-nilly,” Colbert joked, referencing the president’s tweet about arming “weapons-talented” teachers. “I mean, can you imagine what this country would be like if anyone could get a gun?” “Now, obviously, all of this sound pretty grim, but Donald Trump has a message of hope,” Colbert said, before showing footage of Trump saying: “I think we need hardened sights. We need to let people know, ‘You come into our schools, you’re going to be dead.’” Trevor Noah: ‘That was such an epic fail’ Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah also addressed some of Trump’s ideas, as well as those of Senator Marco Rubio, who appeared before survivors and constituents at a CNN town hall to debate solutions to gun violence. “Rubio tried his best to explain his positions, but you could tell he was totally out of sync with the rest of the room,” Noah said, before showing footage of Rubio saying that loopholes are so easily exploited by shooters that you’d have to ban assault weapons outright, an idea that elicited cheers from the audience. “That was such an epic fail,” Noah said. “Rubio said the solution like it was the problem. It reminded me of the reaction of lot of men had to the #MeToo movement, when people were like, ‘If we carry on like this, we’re going to live in a world where men can’t even hit on their female staff. Oh, that is what we want?’” Noah continued: “Usually, town halls are just an opportunity for politicians to spin the narrative and get their talking points out, but these kids held Rubio’s feet to the fire so hard that they got him to do something that most conservatives hate: evolve.” The host then showed clip of Rubio saying he was reconsidering his position on magazine clip sizes. “President Trump didn’t come to the town hall in Florida, but he did host his own listening session in the Mar-a-Lago of the north,” Noah said, ridiculing Trump for his notes. “Seriously, the guy’s a stable genius, but he can’t remember to say ‘I hear you’,” Noah said. “It’s a listening session!” Addressing Trump’s suggestion of giving armed teachers bonuses, Noah said: “America really is a special place. For years, teachers have been asking for more pay and politicians have said they don’t have enough money, but now the president’s like, ‘If you’re willing to cap some fools, we’re gonna make it rain.’”

culture/2018/feb/23/stephen-colbert-trump-video-cheat-sheet-guns-florida

pillar/arts

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culture

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2018-02-23T16:13:44Z

Stephen Colbert mocks Trump for 'cheat sheet' on how to react to shooting survivors

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/23/stephen-colbert-trump-video-cheat-sheet-guns-florida

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/22/kimmel-colbert-florida-gun-control-conspiracy-theories-late-night

Late-night hosts on Wednesday discussed the survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, and the false claims from the far right that they are paid actors. Stephen Colbert: ‘It’s hard not to be inspired by these kids’ “The big story tonight continues to be the inspiring activism of children,” Stephen Colbert began. “Today, students all over Florida walked out of their classrooms and were joined by kids in Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Arizona, Iowa, and a huge group of students from Maryland, Virginia and DC, who descended on our nation’s capitol.” After showing news coverage of the walkouts, the camera cut to Colbert on his cellphone. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch all that,” he joked. “I was reading on Twitter about how all millennials are lazy and entitled.” Colbert then noted that Florida statehouse members this week voted down a motion to debate an existing bill that would van assault weapons on large-capacity ammunition magazines. “What legislation did they focus on instead?” the host asked. “A bill that declared porn dangerous. ‘What are you doing in there? You better be loading a gun, young man.’” “It’s hard not to be inspired by these kids, but some people have managed to do it,” Colbert continued, showing footage of CNN contributor Jack Kingston suggesting the student advocates for gun control could not have organized themselves and were helped by George Soros. “That’s right,” Colbert said, mocking Kingston. “We’re all being taken in by the dazzling theatrical performances of high-school actors.” Trevor Noah: ‘Get the fuck out of here, man’ Trevor Noah of Comedy Central also addressed claims that the students are so-called “crisis actors”. “Most people who see those kids are impressed by how articulate they are, and they’re inspired by their passion,” Noah said. “Other people, like ex-congressman and paid CNN contributor Jack Kingston, they think it’s suspicious that these kids say they don’t want to be shot in the face.” After showing a clip of Kingston’s appearance on CNN, Noah replied: “Get the fuck out of here, man. Really? You think these kids were actually pro-gun and then George Soros showed up and he was like, ‘Who wants Skittles?’ If this guy had even seen one movie about high school, he would know that planning rallies is at least 30% of being a teenager.” “Now, some pro-gun advocates are taking the opposite approach,” Noah explained. “They do believe that these kids are acting without adult supervision, and for them, that’s actually the problem.” The host went on to show a Fox News pundit suggesting the students lack the expertise to weigh in on the gun debate. “You’re right, these kids may not be professors in guns, but maybe being in a mass shooting gets you an honorary degree,” Noah said. “Like, you do realize that if people weren’t allowed to share their opinions unless they studied the issue, then Donald Trump would never be allowed to speak, right?” “Here’s what I find funny about this whole debate,” Noah concluded. “Most of the arguments boil down to one idea: teenagers are too young, too emotional, too inexperienced to talk about guns. But as soon as they turn 18, they can own as many of those bad boys as they want.” Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Your brain is not functioning’ Finally, Jimmy Kimmel also took aim at conspiracists attacking the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. “These are kids who should be applauded, even if you don’t agree with them,” he said. “Unfortunately, there are some who not only aren’t supporting these children who just lived through a nightmare they’ll never forget, there are some who are attacking them, who call them fake news, who say they’re crisis actors who orchestrate tragic events in order to advance some kind of liberal agenda.” Kimmel then mentioned David Hogg, one of the students who survived the Parkland shooting, and whose father is an FBI agent. Online, gun advocates have suggested he is being fed lines from the bureau. “The far right wing thrives on conspiracy theories,” Kimmel noted. “Global warming is a conspiracy, the Russia investigation is a conspiracy, Obama’s birth certificate is a conspiracy. There are a hundred others: Pizzagate, the three million illegal voters.” “People like Donald Trump Jr, the president’s least favorite son, perpetuate this kind of stuff,” Kimmel said, showing how Trump Jr “liked” two separate tweets attacking David Hogg as a puppet for the FBI. Kimmel concluded: “I want you to consider this, especially if you are a Trump supporter or a member of the NRA: do you really think these kids, these teenagers who spoke out after a shooting at their school, are actors who are a part of some kind of deep-state, leftwing conspiracy? If the answer is, ‘Yes, I do believe that,’ you’re crazy. You are a crazy person. Your brain is not functioning.”

culture/2018/feb/22/kimmel-colbert-florida-gun-control-conspiracy-theories-late-night

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2018-02-22T15:56:09Z

Jimmy Kimmel leads attack on Florida conspiracies: 'People like Trump Jr perpetuate this stuff'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/22/kimmel-colbert-florida-gun-control-conspiracy-theories-late-night

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/22/quincy-jones-greatest-ever-moments-ranked

10. Quincy Jones Has a Story About That (2018) Chris Heath’s 10,000-word profile of Jones is as extraordinary an interview as you’re likely to read this year. At 84, clearly too old to give a damn what anyone thinks, Jones dishes on everyone from the Pope to Marilyn Monroe, from a childhood that involved eating rats to Ray Charles shooting heroin into his own testicles. 9. Miles and Quincy Live at Montreux (1993) Taped three months before his death, Miles Davis’s final live recording isn’t his greatest – although there’s something eerie and haunting about the fragility of his playing – but it’s testament to Jones’s apparently limitless powers of persuasion: only he could convince the ornery Davis to revisit his mid-60s material one last time. 8. The Quintessence (1962) The sound of Jones operating in pure jazz mode, fronting a modern big band in December 1961. Concise and fat-free, The Quintessence throws up eight tracks in half an hour: Jones’s originals are coolly sophisticated, but the best thing here might be a frantic, dexterous charge at Thelonious Monk’s Straight No Chaser, over in 180 seconds. 7. Lesley Gore – It’s My Party (1963) If you’re looking for the roots of Thriller’s vast crossover success, perhaps you should start with Jones’s first US No 1 as a producer. A white teen pop single a world away from his previous work as a jazz man and big-band arranger for Ray Charles, its success was fuelled by a certain killer instinct: Phil Spector had also recorded the song with the Crystals, but Jones found out and beat him to the draw. 6. ‘The Beatles were the worst musicians in the world’ (2018) As if to prove Heath’s profile was no fluke, days later another interview with Jones appeared, this time on the website Vulture. Cue more astonishing gossip, not least about Marlon Brando’s sex life, fruity opinions about the Beatles and Michael Jackson, and ample evidence that in addition to his other achievements, Jones may be music’s greatest raconteur. 5. In Cold Blood (1967) Jones had to face down the racism of In Cold Blood’s author, Truman Capote, who lobbied to have him removed from the film because he was black. Capote’s bid failed, and Jones delivered his most extreme soundtrack work: dark, mournful, harrowing and frequently atonal. It garnered Jones one of two Oscar nominations in 1967: the first African-American to be nominated twice in one year. 4. Smackwater Jack (1971) 1973’s You’ve Got It Bad Girl has his sublime take on the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Summer in the City, but Smackwater Jack is the pick of Jones’s early 70s albums, a daring, purist-enraging, oft-sampled melding of jazz, funk and soundtrack work, where blues guitar epics sit alongside TV themes and a gorgeous 10-minute version of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On. 3. Frank Sinatra – Sinatra at the Sands (1966) The greatest of Jones’s collaborations with Sinatra and the apotheosis of the latter’s Vegas years. Jones conducts and arranges the Count Basie Orchestra; Sinatra offers definitive readings of his signature songs and the mind boggles at what the pair got up to afterwards. “Seven double Jack Daniel’s in an hour … [Sinatra] invented partying,” Jones recently recalled. 2. The Dude (1981) Jones’s polymath skills in full effect: effortlessly slick production, arrangements that straddle R&B and pop while still haunted by jazz; restless music taste evident in its nods to rap and new wave (Ai No Corrida was written by former Blockhead Chaz Jankel); and his remarkable address book – the supporting cast features Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson and Herbie Hancock. 1. Michael Jackson – Off the Wall/Thriller/Bad (1979-1987) Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad are indisputably Michael Jackson albums, not Quincy Jones albums with Michael Jackson performing on them. But no one other than Quincy Jones was capable of empowering Jackson’s astonishing talent to soar so high. One apocryphal rumour has Jones coaching Jackson’s vocals by kicking him and shouting “No squeaks, motherfucker!” Certainly, his fingerprints are all over these albums, from the mournful jazz brass line on Billie Jean to the presence of organist Jimmy Smith on Bad. Moreover, he had the team – including songwriter Rod Temperton – and the experience to bring Jackson’s dream of vast, genre-defying success to reality. It was Jones who suggested Thriller needed “a black version of a strong rock’n’roll thing”, hence Beat It. Collectively, they changed pop music for ever.

culture/2018/feb/22/quincy-jones-greatest-ever-moments-ranked

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2018-02-22T11:45:21Z

Quincy Jones's greatest ever moments – ranked!

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/22/quincy-jones-greatest-ever-moments-ranked

['quincy', 'jones', 'story', 'chris', 'heath', '10000-word', 'profile', 'jones', 'extraordinary', 'interview', 'likely', 'read', 'year', 'clearly', 'old', 'give', 'damn', 'anyone', 'thinks', 'jones', 'dishes', 'everyone', 'pope', 'marilyn', 'monroe', 'childhood', 'involved', 'eating', 'rats', 'ray', 'charles', 'shooting', 'heroin', 'testicles', 'miles', 'quincy', 'live', 'montreux', 'taped', 'three', 'months', 'death', 'miles', 'davis', 'final', 'live', 'recording', 'greatest', 'although', 'something', 'eerie', 'haunting', 'fragility', 'playing', 'testament', 'jones', 'apparently', 'limitless', 'powers', 'persuasion', 'could', 'convince', 'ornery', 'davis', 'revisit', 'mid-60s', 'material', 'one', 'last', 'time', 'quintessence', 'sound', 'jones', 'operating', 'pure', 'jazz', 'mode', 'fronting', 'modern', 'big', 'band', 'december', 'concise', 'fat-free', 'quintessence', 'throws', 'eight', 'tracks', 'half', 'hour', 'jones', 'originals', 'coolly', 'sophisticated', 'best', 'thing', 'might', 'frantic', 'dexterous', 'charge', 'thelonious', 'monk', 'straight', 'chaser', 'seconds', 'lesley', 'gore', 'party', 'looking', 'roots', 'thriller', 'vast', 'crossover', 'success', 'perhaps', 'start', 'jones', 'first', 'us', 'producer', 'white', 'teen', 'pop', 'single', 'world', 'away', 'previous', 'work', 'jazz', 'man', 'big-band', 'arranger', 'ray', 'charles', 'success', 'fuelled', 'certain', 'killer', 'instinct', 'phil', 'spector', 'also', 'recorded', 'song', 'crystals', 'jones', 'found', 'beat', 'draw', 'beatles', 'worst', 'musicians', 'world', 'prove', 'heath', 'profile', 'fluke', 'days', 'later', 'another', 'interview', 'jones', 'appeared', 'time', 'website', 'vulture', 'cue', 'astonishing', 'gossip', 'least', 'marlon', 'brando', 'sex', 'life', 'fruity', 'opinions', 'beatles', 'michael', 'jackson', 'ample', 'evidence', 'addition', 'achievements', 'jones', 'may', 'music', 'greatest', 'raconteur', 'cold', 'blood', 'jones', 'face', 'racism', 'cold', 'blood', 'author', 'truman', 'capote', 'lobbied', 'removed', 'film', 'black', 'capote', 'bid', 'failed', 'jones', 'delivered', 'extreme', 'soundtrack', 'work', 'dark', 'mournful', 'harrowing', 'frequently', 'atonal', 'garnered', 'jones', 'one', 'two', 'oscar', 'nominations', 'first', 'african-american', 'nominated', 'twice', 'one', 'year', 'smackwater', 'jack', 'got', 'bad', 'girl', 'sublime', 'take', 'lovin', 'spoonful', 'summer', 'city', 'smackwater', 'jack', 'pick', 'jones', 'early', '70s', 'albums', 'daring', 'purist-enraging', 'oft-sampled', 'melding', 'jazz', 'funk', 'soundtrack', 'work', 'blues', 'guitar', 'epics', 'sit', 'alongside', 'tv', 'themes', 'gorgeous', '10-minute', 'version', 'marvin', 'gaye', 'goin', 'frank', 'sinatra', 'sinatra', 'sands', 'greatest', 'jones', 'collaborations', 'sinatra', 'apotheosis', 'latter', 'vegas', 'years', 'jones', 'conducts', 'arranges', 'count', 'basie', 'orchestra', 'sinatra', 'offers', 'definitive', 'readings', 'signature', 'songs', 'mind', 'boggles', 'pair', 'got', 'afterwards', 'seven', 'double', 'jack', 'daniel', 'hour', 'sinatra', 'invented', 'partying', 'jones', 'recently', 'recalled', 'dude', 'jones', 'polymath', 'skills', 'full', 'effect', 'effortlessly', 'slick', 'production', 'arrangements', 'straddle', 'rampb', 'pop', 'still', 'haunted', 'jazz', 'restless', 'music', 'taste', 'evident', 'nods', 'rap', 'new', 'wave', 'ai', 'corrida', 'written', 'former', 'blockhead', 'chaz', 'jankel', 'remarkable', 'address', 'book', 'supporting', 'cast', 'features', 'stevie', 'wonder', 'michael', 'jackson', 'herbie', 'hancock', 'michael', 'jackson', 'wallthrillerbad', '1979-1987', 'wall', 'thriller', 'bad', 'indisputably', 'michael', 'jackson', 'albums', 'quincy', 'jones', 'albums', 'michael', 'jackson', 'performing', 'one', 'quincy', 'jones', 'capable', 'empowering', 'jackson', 'astonishing', 'talent', 'soar', 'high', 'one', 'apocryphal', 'rumour', 'jones', 'coaching', 'jackson', 'vocals', 'kicking', 'shouting', 'squeaks', 'motherfucker', 'certainly', 'fingerprints', 'albums', 'mournful', 'jazz', 'brass', 'line', 'billie', 'jean', 'presence', 'organist', 'jimmy', 'smith', 'bad', 'moreover', 'team', 'including', 'songwriter', 'rod', 'temperton', 'experience', 'bring', 'jackson', 'dream', 'vast', 'genre-defying', 'success', 'reality', 'jones', 'suggested', 'thriller', 'needed', 'black', 'version', 'strong', 'rocknroll', 'thing', 'hence', 'beat', 'collectively', 'changed', 'pop', 'music', 'ever']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/21/late-night-hosts-on-parkland-students-theres-nothing-they-cant-do

Late-night hosts on Tuesday discussed the indictment of 13 Russian nationals by the special counsel Robert Mueller, Mitt Romney’s forthcoming Senate run and the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. Stephen Colbert “It can be a rough and depressing world, but this weekend we finally got some news that was good, and it comes to us from Wakanda,” began Stephen Colbert. “Black Panther broke all sorts of records this weekend: it had the largest solo superhero opening of all time, the largest ever box office in February and the most white people seeing a movie starring a black person who is not Will Smith.” “Meanwhile, back here in America we have our own drama,” he continued. “On Friday, Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for allegedly meddling in the 2016 presidential election, charging them with conspiracy to defraud the United States. First of all, no one saw this coming. There were no leaks. Mueller’s office does not leak. That place is tighter than Mike Pence’s sphincter.” The host went on to explain some of the Russians’ methodology, including posting divisive Facebook ads, posing as political activists, and using talking points involving immigration, religion and race. “According to the indictments, some of the Russians were also in contact with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign,” Colbert explained. “Unwitting: so that narrows it down to the entire Trump campaign.” Colbert noted that Donald Trump believed the indictment exonerates him, having tweeted: “Funny how the Fake News Media doesn’t want to say that the Russian group was formed in 2014, long before my run for President. Maybe they knew I was going to run even though I didn’t know!” Impersonating Trump, Colbert joked: “Maybe they told me I had to run because they had pictures of me with prostitutes.” Jimmy Kimmel Jimmy Kimmel briefly discussed Mitt Romney’s intentions to run for the Senate in Utah, and his reaction to receiving Trump’s endorsement. After the 2012 presidential candidate announced his candidacy, Trump tweeted: “Mitt Romney has announced he’s running for the Senate from the wonderful state of Utah. He will make a worthy successor to Orrin Hatch and has my full support and endorsement.” Kimmel said this was “interesting because, as you may recall, almost exactly two years ago, Mitt Romney did something that rarely is done in modern American politics,” Kimmel said. “He broke with his party and went full force after Donald Trump, who was a candidate at the time.” Kimmel went on to note that Romney once tweeted, in 2016, that he would not have accepted Trump’s endorsement had he “said 4 years ago the things he said today about the KKK, Muslims, Mexicans, Disabled”. The host said: “But now that Trump has endorsed Romney for senator? Romney said – anyone want to guess?” “Thank you Mr. President for the support,” Kimmel said, reading Romney’s response to the endorsement. “Boy, when Mitt gets to the Senate he’s going to fit right in.” Trevor Noah Finally, Trevor Noah took aim at Republican lawmakers and Fox News hosts for their inaction in the wake of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school. “By now, we all know the tragic story of the Parkland, Florida, shooting,” Noah began. “A 19-year-old who had purchased multiple weapons walked into his high school that he was expelled from and shot and killed 17 students and teachers. “My first instinct is to talk about limiting guns, but I’m an idiot. I get it. In my dumb mind I keep thinking that gun violence is somehow related to guns,” Noah said sarcastically. “But the one thing I am sure about is that a lot of people in America think that after a shooting that is not the time to talk about guns. Noah showed Fox News coverage after the shooting. In one clip, Jeanine Pirro suggests having more police at schools and perimeter controls, while Newt Gingrich proposes arming teachers. Another pundit suggests teaching students hand-to-hand combat. “These ideas are so absurd. It might be kind of fun to live in their world. When you think about it, it’s a world free of embarrassment. No idea is too ridiculous,” Noah responded. “Hand-to-hand combat? Does this guy know what a gun is?” Noah said that, despite the suggestions of Fox News, solving problems was ultimately the job of Congress. He showed a clip of the Florida senator Marco Rubio saying last week that even if regulations were passed, shooters would find a way to get a gun. “Nothing inspires more confidence than a lawmaker who doesn’t believe in the power of laws,” Noah replied. “It’s like your pastor saying: ‘Hey man, I would pray for your cancer but who knows if this shit really works?’” Noah continued: “So another mass shooting and we’re in exactly the same place. Don’t talk about the guns and don’t bother changing the laws. It feels like nothing’s ever going to change. Except this time there was one big difference. Those meddling kids.” After showing coverage of the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, many of whom are vocally advocating for gun reform, Noah said: “These kids are inspirational. They’re doing town halls, they’re marching on Congress, all while mourning the loss of their fellow schoolmates. What they lack in experience they seem to be making up for with sharp moral clarity.” “I know some people think: they’re just kids, can they really make a difference?” Noah asked. “Think of it this way: their generation found a way to make it cool to eat Tide Pods. There’s nothing they can’t do.”

culture/2018/feb/21/late-night-hosts-on-parkland-students-theres-nothing-they-cant-do

pillar/arts

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2018-02-21T15:50:29Z

Late-night hosts on Parkland students: 'There's nothing they can't do'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/21/late-night-hosts-on-parkland-students-theres-nothing-they-cant-do

['late-night', 'hosts', 'tuesday', 'discussed', 'indictment', 'russian', 'nationals', 'special', 'counsel', 'robert', 'mueller', 'mitt', 'romney', 'forthcoming', 'senate', 'run', 'mass', 'shooting', 'parkland', 'florida', 'stephen', 'colbert', 'rough', 'depressing', 'world', 'weekend', 'finally', 'got', 'news', 'good', 'comes', 'us', 'wakanda', 'began', 'stephen', 'colbert', 'black', 'panther', 'broke', 'sorts', 'records', 'weekend', 'largest', 'solo', 'superhero', 'opening', 'time', 'largest', 'ever', 'box', 'office', 'february', 'white', 'people', 'seeing', 'movie', 'starring', 'black', 'person', 'smith', 'meanwhile', 'back', 'america', 'drama', 'continued', 'friday', 'robert', 'mueller', 'indicted', 'russian', 'nationals', 'three', 'russian', 'entities', 'allegedly', 'meddling', 'presidential', 'election', 'charging', 'conspiracy', 'defraud', 'united', 'states', 'first', 'one', 'saw', 'coming', 'leaks', 'mueller', 'office', 'leak', 'place', 'tighter', 'mike', 'pence', 'sphincter', 'host', 'went', 'explain', 'russians', 'methodology', 'including', 'posting', 'divisive', 'facebook', 'ads', 'posing', 'political', 'activists', 'using', 'talking', 'points', 'involving', 'immigration', 'religion', 'race', 'according', 'indictments', 'russians', 'also', 'contact', 'unwitting', 'individuals', 'associated', 'trump', 'campaign', 'colbert', 'explained', 'unwitting', 'narrows', 'entire', 'trump', 'campaign', 'colbert', 'noted', 'donald', 'trump', 'believed', 'indictment', 'exonerates', 'tweeted', 'funny', 'fake', 'news', 'media', 'want', 'say', 'russian', 'group', 'formed', 'long', 'run', 'president', 'maybe', 'knew', 'going', 'run', 'even', 'though', 'know', 'impersonating', 'trump', 'colbert', 'joked', 'maybe', 'told', 'run', 'pictures', 'prostitutes', 'jimmy', 'kimmel', 'jimmy', 'kimmel', 'briefly', 'discussed', 'mitt', 'romney', 'intentions', 'run', 'senate', 'utah', 'reaction', 'receiving', 'trump', 'endorsement', 'presidential', 'candidate', 'announced', 'candidacy', 'trump', 'tweeted', 'mitt', 'romney', 'announced', 'running', 'senate', 'wonderful', 'state', 'utah', 'make', 'worthy', 'successor', 'orrin', 'hatch', 'full', 'support', 'endorsement', 'kimmel', 'said', 'interesting', 'may', 'recall', 'almost', 'exactly', 'two', 'years', 'ago', 'mitt', 'romney', 'something', 'rarely', 'done', 'modern', 'american', 'politics', 'kimmel', 'said', 'broke', 'party', 'went', 'full', 'force', 'donald', 'trump', 'candidate', 'time', 'kimmel', 'went', 'note', 'romney', 'tweeted', 'would', 'accepted', 'trump', 'endorsement', 'said', 'years', 'ago', 'things', 'said', 'today', 'kkk', 'muslims', 'mexicans', 'disabled', 'host', 'said', 'trump', 'endorsed', 'romney', 'senator', 'romney', 'said', 'anyone', 'want', 'guess', 'thank', 'mr', 'president', 'support', 'kimmel', 'said', 'reading', 'romney', 'response', 'endorsement', 'boy', 'mitt', 'gets', 'senate', 'going', 'fit', 'right', 'trevor', 'noah', 'finally', 'trevor', 'noah', 'took', 'aim', 'republican', 'lawmakers', 'fox', 'news', 'hosts', 'inaction', 'wake', 'shooting', 'marjory', 'stoneman', 'douglas', 'high', 'school', 'know', 'tragic', 'story', 'parkland', 'florida', 'shooting', 'noah', 'began', '19-year-old', 'purchased', 'multiple', 'weapons', 'walked', 'high', 'school', 'expelled', 'shot', 'killed', 'students', 'teachers', 'first', 'instinct', 'talk', 'limiting', 'guns', 'idiot', 'get', 'dumb', 'mind', 'keep', 'thinking', 'gun', 'violence', 'somehow', 'related', 'guns', 'noah', 'said', 'sarcastically', 'one', 'thing', 'sure', 'lot', 'people', 'america', 'think', 'shooting', 'time', 'talk', 'guns', 'noah', 'showed', 'fox', 'news', 'coverage', 'shooting', 'one', 'clip', 'jeanine', 'pirro', 'suggests', 'police', 'schools', 'perimeter', 'controls', 'newt', 'gingrich', 'proposes', 'arming', 'teachers', 'another', 'pundit', 'suggests', 'teaching', 'students', 'hand-to-hand', 'combat', 'ideas', 'absurd', 'might', 'kind', 'fun', 'live', 'world', 'think', 'world', 'free', 'embarrassment', 'idea', 'ridiculous', 'noah', 'responded', 'hand-to-hand', 'combat', 'guy', 'know', 'gun', 'noah', 'said', 'despite', 'suggestions', 'fox', 'news', 'solving', 'problems', 'ultimately', 'job', 'congress', 'showed', 'clip', 'florida', 'senator', 'marco', 'rubio', 'saying', 'last', 'week', 'even', 'regulations', 'passed', 'shooters', 'would', 'find', 'way', 'get', 'gun', 'nothing', 'inspires', 'confidence', 'lawmaker', 'believe', 'power', 'laws', 'noah', 'replied', 'like', 'pastor', 'saying', 'hey', 'man', 'would', 'pray', 'cancer', 'knows', 'shit', 'really', 'works', 'noah', 'continued', 'another', 'mass', 'shooting', 'exactly', 'place', 'talk', 'guns', 'bother', 'changing', 'laws', 'feels', 'like', 'nothing', 'ever', 'going', 'change', 'except', 'time', 'one', 'big', 'difference', 'meddling', 'kids', 'showing', 'coverage', 'students', 'marjory', 'stoneman', 'douglas', 'many', 'vocally', 'advocating', 'gun', 'reform', 'noah', 'said', 'kids', 'inspirational', 'town', 'halls', 'marching', 'congress', 'mourning', 'loss', 'fellow', 'schoolmates', 'lack', 'experience', 'seem', 'making', 'sharp', 'moral', 'clarity', 'know', 'people', 'think', 'kids', 'really', 'make', 'difference', 'noah', 'asked', 'think', 'way', 'generation', 'found', 'way', 'make', 'cool', 'eat', 'tide', 'pods', 'nothing']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/20/extra-thumbs-missing-legs-strange-skin-a-rundown-of-celebrity-photoshop-blunders

Reese Witherspoon’s three legs on the cover of Vanity Fair was the Photoshop fail that launched a thousand memes. Along with Rihanna’s Instagram oddities and an odd Kardashian crop, it joins a long line of design mysteries. John Travolta’s face/off The image used on the poster for I Am Wrath is surreal. With his oddly shaped peanut face and glazed expression, it looks as if John Travolta is a Poundland Incredible Hulk. And that Planet of the Apes hair is an insult to the memory of Danny Zuko. Bring back the cheekbones! Rihanna: Thumbrella-ella-ella When RiRi posted the annual photo of herself in full carnival mode to Instagram, it wasn’t her colourful and elaborate bejewelled costume that caught fans’ attention. Instead, their eyes went straight to her mutant double thumb. Who doesn’t need a third thumb, though? Rihanna probably uses hers to give Calvin Harris an enthusiastic thumbs aloft from the vocal booth when he churns out another banger. Keeping Up With Kylie Jenner’s leg The Kardashian/Jenner family are as natural as they are private, so it’s shocking to see that little sister Kylie’s leg disappeared in their Calvin Klein campaign. No wonder Jenner’s eyes are staring off into the distance in this shot: she’s watching that ambitious limb walk away to sign up for its own spin-off show, The Leg of Kylie. Or maybe it’s just under that lovely rug. The Heat’s head swap Critics have called the retouching on Melissa McCarthy’s face “the worst ever Photoshop job”. That’s a bit harsh. Maybe there’s an explanation for her smooth-as-an-eel appearance. Like she was smothered in Vaseline. Or wearing a full face 10-denier stocking. The result: a head transplant in which her face looks as if it has been reshaped, her eyes changed colour and her smize swapped with the kind of stare that starts a bar-room brawl. Keira Knightley’s Towie makeover Being an English rose is Knightley’s thing, so there’s no way she’d go down Electric Beach for a spray tan and then book in for a boob job. But that seems to have escaped the attention of the over-enthusiastic designers of the King Arthur poster, who made her look more Gemma Collins than Guinevere. Her verdict? “If you’re going to make me fantasy breasts, at least make perky breasts.”

culture/2018/feb/20/extra-thumbs-missing-legs-strange-skin-a-rundown-of-celebrity-photoshop-blunders

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2018-02-20T09:47:54Z

Extra thumbs! Missing legs! A rundown of celebrity Photoshop blunders

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/20/extra-thumbs-missing-legs-strange-skin-a-rundown-of-celebrity-photoshop-blunders

['reese', 'witherspoon', 'three', 'legs', 'cover', 'vanity', 'fair', 'photoshop', 'fail', 'launched', 'thousand', 'memes', 'along', 'rihanna', 'instagram', 'oddities', 'odd', 'kardashian', 'crop', 'joins', 'long', 'line', 'design', 'mysteries', 'john', 'travolta', 'faceoff', 'image', 'used', 'poster', 'wrath', 'surreal', 'oddly', 'shaped', 'peanut', 'face', 'glazed', 'expression', 'looks', 'john', 'travolta', 'poundland', 'incredible', 'hulk', 'planet', 'apes', 'hair', 'insult', 'memory', 'danny', 'zuko', 'bring', 'back', 'cheekbones', 'rihanna', 'thumbrella-ella-ella', 'riri', 'posted', 'annual', 'photo', 'full', 'carnival', 'mode', 'instagram', 'colourful', 'elaborate', 'bejewelled', 'costume', 'caught', 'fans', 'attention', 'instead', 'eyes', 'went', 'straight', 'mutant', 'double', 'thumb', 'need', 'third', 'thumb', 'though', 'rihanna', 'probably', 'uses', 'give', 'calvin', 'harris', 'enthusiastic', 'thumbs', 'aloft', 'vocal', 'booth', 'churns', 'another', 'banger', 'keeping', 'kylie', 'jenner', 'leg', 'kardashianjenner', 'family', 'natural', 'private', 'shocking', 'see', 'little', 'sister', 'kylie', 'leg', 'disappeared', 'calvin', 'klein', 'campaign', 'wonder', 'jenner', 'eyes', 'staring', 'distance', 'shot', 'watching', 'ambitious', 'limb', 'walk', 'away', 'sign', 'spin-off', 'show', 'leg', 'kylie', 'maybe', 'lovely', 'rug', 'heat', 'head', 'swap', 'critics', 'called', 'retouching', 'melissa', 'mccarthy', 'face', 'worst', 'ever', 'photoshop', 'job', 'bit', 'harsh', 'maybe', 'explanation', 'smooth-as-an-eel', 'appearance', 'like', 'smothered', 'vaseline', 'wearing', 'full', 'face', '10-denier', 'stocking', 'result', 'head', 'transplant', 'face', 'looks', 'reshaped', 'eyes', 'changed', 'colour', 'smize', 'swapped', 'kind', 'stare', 'starts', 'bar-room', 'brawl', 'keira', 'knightley', 'towie', 'makeover', 'english', 'rose', 'knightley', 'thing', 'way', 'would', 'go', 'electric', 'beach', 'spray', 'tan', 'book', 'boob', 'job', 'seems', 'escaped', 'attention', 'over-enthusiastic', 'designers', 'king', 'arthur', 'poster', 'made', 'look', 'gemma', 'collins', 'guinevere', 'verdict', 'going', 'make', 'fantasy', 'breasts', 'least', 'make', 'perky', 'breasts']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/20/perth-festival-siren-song-reimagined-with-an-end-of-mining-boom-vibe

It’s Thursday, and it’s one of the hottest days of summer in Perth. It’s beautiful on the beaches and in the parks but in the CBD there is little shade and walking in the streets, through the bright canyons between the office towers, it’s as if every drop of moisture is being extracted from my skin. Before heritage protection laws came in in the 1990s, many of Perth’s elegant, more human-scale buildings were destroyed in favour of these high-rise monuments to mining money that reflect the sun’s glare and provide no shade. “These are developers’ buildings – easy and cheap to construct, but paying little attention to our hot, sunny climate or the architecture of earlier generations,” the former executive director of Heritage Perth Richard Offen once said of the architecture that started going up in the mining boom of the 1980s. It’s almost eerie, this bank of steel and glass towers rising from desert and dust in one of the most isolated capital cities on earth. The scene is futurist in the manner of a JG Ballard novel, but with the boom waning and the homeless appearing on the streets, the tone is less triumphant and more elegiac. Seen in this light, it seems apt that Perth was chosen as one of the few cities in the world where Uber’s driverless cars will be tested. Whether by default or not, humans are being designed out of this landscape. Up in one of the glass towers on St George’s Terrace, on a disused floor, there are two desks scattered with empty bottles of water and expensive cold brew coffee next to a bank of controls. At one of the desks sits a guy in noise-cancelling headphones, facing the skyline. The room has a dystopian, end-of-the-mining-boom vibe about it. The man in the headphones is Tom Supple, one half of curatorial duo Supple Fox. Hannah Fox, the other half of Supple Fox, is nearby, as is collaborator Byron J Scullin. The team behind the ethereal sound art piece, Siren Song, that debuted at Dark Mofo last year, are staging a 10-day “reimagining” of the work for the Perth festival and this abandoned office floor is their control room. As in Hobart, there are around 500 speakers attached to buildings in the CBD that, at dawn and dusk, broadcast music made by human voices. The song plays for approximately seven minutes as a helicopter, also with speakers attached, circles the city. The song changes in each performance depending on the movement of the helicopter and where you are standing in the city, but it sounds like a series of chants and incantations that switch between singular notes and choral sounds. Vocalists include Noongar singers Kristal Kickett and Karla Hart, alongside Carolyn Connors, Deborah Cheetham, Tanya Tagaq and Tara Tiba. Their concert hall is the skyscrapers and canyons of the city. The work opened Perth festival on 9 February. Scullin describes the experience of hearing it as “intensity by stealth.” Supple, however, repeatedly describes the work as an “incursion”, a word usually used in war to describe an invasion or a hostile entrance to a territory. He compares the Perth Siren Song to the Tasmanian version: “Here you have people in their office blocks. People are listening to it from their towers. You see them come up to the glass,” he says. “There is something interesting about seeing businessmen [listening] at their windows, in their vertical prisons. ” In a way, Siren Song could be seen as the incursion of the feminine, through the voices of the female vocalists, into a very hard, male corporate space. There is also an added element of surprise here in Perth. “One guy said that he heard the sounds and came out of work and he told me, ‘I thought the rapture had come’,” says Fox. I saw the work last year in Hobart as part of Dark Mofo, and it is remarkable how much the canvas – in this case, a city – can change the actual experience of it. In Hobart, the helicopter approached from the water, before circling around the CBD. That city is physically more open than Perth – the buildings are lower, the harbour acts as a natural axis on which the city orients itself – and the sound bounced off the water more than the buildings. Perth’s architectural canyons change the nature of the sound: last Thursday night, standing in Perth’s St George’s Terrace, the sublime voices and a scratchy, piercing feedback echoed off the glass to great effect. The chopper hovering between the towers as the sun set seemed like some sort of apocalyptic portent. It was both beautiful and unsettling. Those people around me, waiting at the traffic lights in the heat, stopped, looked up and pointed at the chopper. I was lucky enough to ride in the helicopter with Rotorlift pilot and Siren Song co-collaborator Roger Corbin in Hobart last year. It remains a vivid, cherished memory, as much for the beauty of seeing Hobart at dusk from the air, the monumental and beautiful sounds coming in waves from the speakers attached to the bottom of the chopper and from the buildings around us, as for the avuncular company of Corbin himself. Corbin died in a helicopter accident in November last year, at the age of 57, the day before the Perth festival program was announced. He was to take part in this year’s Perth Siren Song. Instead, his colleagues from Rotorlift pilot the chopper in Perth, having flown the many thousands of kilometres there from Hobart, stopping in the desert along the way to refuel. Scullin becomes teary in the office block when talking about Corbin’s funeral. Corbin’s coffin was carried off by helicopter, joined by a platoon of other choppers. It finished with that single helicopter parting from its mates and flying off and away into the sky. The work lives on. The team are taking Siren Song to Ipswich, UK, next year as part of an ambitious project marking the centenary of the first world war. Once again female vocalists will feature. I joke to the team about a network of different Siren Songs around the world. What the world needs now is more incursions of this kind. • Guardian Australia was a guest of Perth festival

culture/2018/feb/20/perth-festival-siren-song-reimagined-with-an-end-of-mining-boom-vibe

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2018-02-19T17:00:18Z

Siren Song: the ethereal sound art reimagining Perth's brutal CBD

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/20/perth-festival-siren-song-reimagined-with-an-end-of-mining-boom-vibe

['thursday', 'one', 'hottest', 'days', 'summer', 'perth', 'beautiful', 'beaches', 'parks', 'cbd', 'little', 'shade', 'walking', 'streets', 'bright', 'canyons', 'office', 'towers', 'every', 'drop', 'moisture', 'extracted', 'skin', 'heritage', 'protection', 'laws', 'came', '1990s', 'many', 'perth', 'elegant', 'human-scale', 'buildings', 'destroyed', 'favour', 'high-rise', 'monuments', 'mining', 'money', 'reflect', 'sun', 'glare', 'provide', 'shade', 'developers', 'buildings', 'easy', 'cheap', 'construct', 'paying', 'little', 'attention', 'hot', 'sunny', 'climate', 'architecture', 'earlier', 'generations', 'former', 'executive', 'director', 'heritage', 'perth', 'richard', 'offen', 'said', 'architecture', 'started', 'going', 'mining', 'boom', '1980s', 'almost', 'eerie', 'bank', 'steel', 'glass', 'towers', 'rising', 'desert', 'dust', 'one', 'isolated', 'capital', 'cities', 'earth', 'scene', 'futurist', 'manner', 'jg', 'ballard', 'novel', 'boom', 'waning', 'homeless', 'appearing', 'streets', 'tone', 'less', 'triumphant', 'elegiac', 'seen', 'light', 'seems', 'apt', 'perth', 'chosen', 'one', 'cities', 'world', 'uber', 'driverless', 'cars', 'tested', 'whether', 'default', 'humans', 'designed', 'landscape', 'one', 'glass', 'towers', 'st', 'george', 'terrace', 'disused', 'floor', 'two', 'desks', 'scattered', 'empty', 'bottles', 'water', 'expensive', 'cold', 'brew', 'coffee', 'next', 'bank', 'controls', 'one', 'desks', 'sits', 'guy', 'noise-cancelling', 'headphones', 'facing', 'skyline', 'room', 'dystopian', 'end-of-the-mining-boom', 'vibe', 'man', 'headphones', 'tom', 'supple', 'one', 'half', 'curatorial', 'duo', 'supple', 'fox', 'hannah', 'fox', 'half', 'supple', 'fox', 'nearby', 'collaborator', 'byron', 'j', 'scullin', 'team', 'behind', 'ethereal', 'sound', 'art', 'piece', 'siren', 'song', 'debuted', 'dark', 'mofo', 'last', 'year', 'staging', '10-day', 'reimagining', 'work', 'perth', 'festival', 'abandoned', 'office', 'floor', 'control', 'room', 'hobart', 'around', 'speakers', 'attached', 'buildings', 'cbd', 'dawn', 'dusk', 'broadcast', 'music', 'made', 'human', 'voices', 'song', 'plays', 'approximately', 'seven', 'minutes', 'helicopter', 'also', 'speakers', 'attached', 'circles', 'city', 'song', 'changes', 'performance', 'depending', 'movement', 'helicopter', 'standing', 'city', 'sounds', 'like', 'series', 'chants', 'incantations', 'switch', 'singular', 'notes', 'choral', 'sounds', 'vocalists', 'include', 'noongar', 'singers', 'kristal', 'kickett', 'karla', 'hart', 'alongside', 'carolyn', 'connors', 'deborah', 'cheetham', 'tanya', 'tagaq', 'tara', 'tiba', 'concert', 'hall', 'skyscrapers', 'canyons', 'city', 'work', 'opened', 'perth', 'festival', 'february', 'scullin', 'describes', 'experience', 'hearing', 'intensity', 'stealth', 'supple', 'however', 'repeatedly', 'describes', 'work', 'incursion', 'word', 'usually', 'used', 'war', 'describe', 'invasion', 'hostile', 'entrance', 'territory', 'compares', 'perth', 'siren', 'song', 'tasmanian', 'version', 'people', 'office', 'blocks', 'people', 'listening', 'towers', 'see', 'come', 'glass', 'says', 'something', 'interesting', 'seeing', 'businessmen', 'listening', 'windows', 'vertical', 'prisons', 'way', 'siren', 'song', 'could', 'seen', 'incursion', 'feminine', 'voices', 'female', 'vocalists', 'hard', 'male', 'corporate', 'space', 'also', 'added', 'element', 'surprise', 'perth', 'one', 'guy', 'said', 'heard', 'sounds', 'came', 'work', 'told', 'thought', 'rapture', 'come', 'says', 'fox', 'saw', 'work', 'last', 'year', 'hobart', 'part', 'dark', 'mofo', 'remarkable', 'much', 'canvas', 'case', 'city', 'change', 'actual', 'experience', 'hobart', 'helicopter', 'approached', 'water', 'circling', 'around', 'cbd', 'city', 'physically', 'open', 'perth', 'buildings', 'lower', 'harbour', 'acts', 'natural', 'axis', 'city', 'orients', 'sound', 'bounced', 'water', 'buildings', 'perth', 'architectural', 'canyons', 'change', 'nature', 'sound', 'last', 'thursday', 'night', 'standing', 'perth', 'st', 'george', 'terrace', 'sublime', 'voices', 'scratchy', 'piercing', 'feedback', 'echoed', 'glass', 'great', 'effect', 'chopper', 'hovering', 'towers', 'sun', 'set', 'seemed', 'like', 'sort', 'apocalyptic', 'portent', 'beautiful', 'unsettling', 'people', 'around', 'waiting', 'traffic', 'lights', 'heat', 'stopped', 'looked', 'pointed', 'chopper', 'lucky', 'enough', 'ride', 'helicopter', 'rotorlift', 'pilot', 'siren', 'song', 'co-collaborator', 'roger', 'corbin', 'hobart', 'last', 'year', 'remains', 'vivid', 'cherished', 'memory', 'much', 'beauty', 'seeing', 'hobart', 'dusk', 'air', 'monumental', 'beautiful', 'sounds', 'coming', 'waves', 'speakers', 'attached', 'bottom', 'chopper', 'buildings', 'around', 'us', 'avuncular', 'company', 'corbin', 'corbin', 'died', 'helicopter', 'accident', 'november', 'last', 'year', 'age', 'day', 'perth', 'festival', 'program', 'announced', 'take', 'part', 'year', 'perth', 'siren', 'song', 'instead', 'colleagues', 'rotorlift', 'pilot', 'chopper', 'perth', 'flown', 'many', 'thousands', 'kilometres', 'hobart', 'stopping', 'desert', 'along', 'way', 'refuel', 'scullin', 'becomes', 'teary', 'office', 'block', 'talking', 'corbin', 'funeral', 'corbin', 'coffin', 'carried', 'helicopter', 'joined', 'platoon', 'choppers', 'finished', 'single', 'helicopter', 'parting', 'mates', 'flying', 'away', 'sky', 'work', 'lives', 'team', 'taking', 'siren', 'song', 'ipswich', 'uk', 'next', 'year', 'part', 'ambitious', 'project', 'marking', 'centenary', 'first', 'world', 'war', 'female', 'vocalists', 'feature', 'joke', 'team', 'network', 'different', 'siren', 'songs', 'around', 'world', 'world', 'needs', 'incursions', 'kind', 'guardian', 'australia', 'guest', 'perth', 'festival']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/19/when-good-tv-goes-bad-the-x-files

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment The X-Files jumped the shark as the whole show was so, well, shark-jumpy. It is much easier to point out the best ever spin-off episode: 1997’s The Springfield Files, in which Mulder and Scully arrived in The Simpsons to investigate a glowing alien that – SPOILER ALERT! – turned out to be a radioactive Mr Burns on his way home from the power plant. Perhaps the fact that The X-Files was happy to send itself up so early in its original run meant it was already partially aware of what a load of nonsense it was. It was a show that lived on the knife-edge. The first was its subject matter. Are we really expected to believe in the supernatural or are there rational explanations? We are never given an it-was-the-janitor-all-along, Scooby-Doo-style reveal. Nor did we find out that Mulder had ET living in his cupboard. Instead, all spooky shenanigans were left infuriatingly ambiguous. The second knife-edge was the relationship between the lead characters. When FBI agents Fox Mulder (loves all this weird shit) and Dana Scully (thinks it’s baloney) teamed up to investigate paranormal cases, they developed more than a platonic relationship. When would they finally get round to doing it? And would their offspring have three fingers and huge glowing eyes? Scully was left infertile after being kidnapped and experimented on in 1997, so kids looked off the table. But in season eight (2001), we learned that they had a son, William, who was later put up for adoption. William’s DNA tests revealed him as part alien, suggesting Mulder wasn’t the father. Of which more later. So, when did The X-Files jump the shark? There was the terrible werewolf episode in the first series; the rubbish voodoo one in series two; and the stupid one about evil water (yes, water) in series six. There is the fact that David Duchovny wasn’t even in series eight and nine properly. They said he’d been kidnapped by aliens, but he was actually having a row with the Fox network about money. There have been two X-Files films, both a bit meh. There is even an episode in series nine called Jump the Shark. DID THEY KNOW? The X-Files returned in 2016 for its 11th series, screening on Channel 5 to some fanfare, but season 12 opened to widespread criticism at a massive shark-jump moment that left even the Daily Mail feeling “violated” by the “worst plot twist ever”. Ready? The mysterious Cigarette Smoking Man confessed that he impregnated Scully using “alien science” to create “the first superhuman child”. He’s William’s father. Picked your jaw up off the ground yet? Will their alien/human teenage son have Spock-like ears and find everything “illogical”? Mulder and Scully only have nine episodes to find him, as Gillian Anderson has announced she will be quitting. Will we get answers? Will the level of ridiculousness in this (probable) final series simply be par for the course? Or was The X-Files just not much good in the first place? We still want to believe. But who knows what to believe any more?

culture/2018/feb/19/when-good-tv-goes-bad-the-x-files

pillar/arts

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culture

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article

2018-02-19T13:00:13Z

When good TV goes bad: the X-Files

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/19/when-good-tv-goes-bad-the-x-files

['difficult', 'pinpoint', 'exact', 'moment', 'x-files', 'jumped', 'shark', 'whole', 'show', 'well', 'shark-jumpy', 'much', 'easier', 'point', 'best', 'ever', 'spin-off', 'episode', 'springfield', 'files', 'mulder', 'scully', 'arrived', 'simpsons', 'investigate', 'glowing', 'alien', 'spoiler', 'alert', 'turned', 'radioactive', 'mr', 'burns', 'way', 'home', 'power', 'plant', 'perhaps', 'fact', 'x-files', 'happy', 'send', 'early', 'original', 'run', 'meant', 'already', 'partially', 'aware', 'load', 'nonsense', 'show', 'lived', 'knife-edge', 'first', 'subject', 'matter', 'really', 'expected', 'believe', 'supernatural', 'rational', 'explanations', 'never', 'given', 'it-was-the-janitor-all-along', 'scooby-doo-style', 'reveal', 'find', 'mulder', 'et', 'living', 'cupboard', 'instead', 'spooky', 'shenanigans', 'left', 'infuriatingly', 'ambiguous', 'second', 'knife-edge', 'relationship', 'lead', 'characters', 'fbi', 'agents', 'fox', 'mulder', 'loves', 'weird', 'shit', 'dana', 'scully', 'thinks', 'baloney', 'teamed', 'investigate', 'paranormal', 'cases', 'developed', 'platonic', 'relationship', 'would', 'finally', 'get', 'round', 'would', 'offspring', 'three', 'fingers', 'huge', 'glowing', 'eyes', 'scully', 'left', 'infertile', 'kidnapped', 'experimented', 'kids', 'looked', 'table', 'season', 'eight', 'learned', 'son', 'william', 'later', 'put', 'adoption', 'william', 'dna', 'tests', 'revealed', 'part', 'alien', 'suggesting', 'mulder', 'father', 'later', 'x-files', 'jump', 'shark', 'terrible', 'werewolf', 'episode', 'first', 'series', 'rubbish', 'voodoo', 'one', 'series', 'two', 'stupid', 'one', 'evil', 'water', 'yes', 'water', 'series', 'six', 'fact', 'david', 'duchovny', 'even', 'series', 'eight', 'nine', 'properly', 'said', 'would', 'kidnapped', 'aliens', 'actually', 'row', 'fox', 'network', 'money', 'two', 'x-files', 'films', 'bit', 'meh', 'even', 'episode', 'series', 'nine', 'called', 'jump', 'shark', 'know', 'x-files', 'returned', '11th', 'series', 'screening', 'channel', 'fanfare', 'season', 'opened', 'widespread', 'criticism', 'massive', 'shark-jump', 'moment', 'left', 'even', 'daily', 'mail', 'feeling', 'violated', 'worst', 'plot', 'twist', 'ever', 'ready', 'mysterious', 'cigarette', 'smoking', 'man', 'confessed', 'impregnated', 'scully', 'using', 'alien', 'science', 'create', 'first', 'superhuman', 'child', 'william', 'father', 'picked', 'jaw', 'ground', 'yet', 'alienhuman', 'teenage', 'son', 'spock-like', 'ears', 'find', 'everything', 'illogical', 'mulder', 'scully', 'nine', 'episodes', 'find', 'gillian', 'anderson', 'announced', 'quitting', 'get', 'answers', 'level', 'ridiculousness', 'probable', 'final', 'series', 'simply', 'par', 'course', 'x-files', 'much', 'good', 'first', 'place', 'still', 'want', 'believe', 'knows', 'believe']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/19/china-calls-on-us-to-punish-terracotta-warrior-thumb-thief

Chinese authorities are demanding exemplary punishment for an American man who allegedly stole a terracotta warrior’s thumb while it was on show at a Philadelphia museum. According to reports in US and Chinese media, Michael Rohana, 24, was attending a pre-Christmas party at the Franklin Institute when he went through an unlocked door into the Terracotta Warriors of the First Emperor exhibition. Using his smartphone as a torch, Rohana allegedly entered the exhibition at about 9.15pm on 21 December, embraced one of the ancient sculptures, and took a selfie before appearing to snap off a chunk of its left hand and pocket it. Museum staff did not notice the absent digit until 8 January. Five days later, having tracked down the suspect through surveillance footage and credit card transactions, investigators went to Rohana’s home. “Rohana admitted … he had stashed the thumb in his desk drawer,” China’s official news agency Xinhua reported. USA Today said a friend of Rohana had seen a photo of the missing thumb on Snapchat. Rohana was arrested, charged with concealment of a major artwork and bailed after surrendering his passport. On Monday, Wu Haiyun, the head of the group that loans the terracotta army to overseas museums, told Chinese television a “serious protest” had been lodged. “We ask that the US severely punish the perpetrator,” Wu added. According to the South China Morning Post, another official said: “The terracotta warriors are national treasures ... We express strong resentment and condemnation towards this theft and the destruction of our heritage.” Xinhua identified the affected warrior, one of 10 loaned to the Philadelphia museum, as a 2,000-year-old sculpture called Cavalryman. He is one member of the terracotta army, an 8,000-strong earthenware force commissioned to be buried alongside, and guard the tomb of, China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. The sculptures were unearthed in 1974 and have become one of China’s biggest tourist attractions.

culture/2018/feb/19/china-calls-on-us-to-punish-terracotta-warrior-thumb-thief

pillar/arts

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culture

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2018-02-19T09:59:00Z

China calls on US to punish terracotta warrior thumb thief

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/19/china-calls-on-us-to-punish-terracotta-warrior-thumb-thief

['chinese', 'authorities', 'demanding', 'exemplary', 'punishment', 'american', 'man', 'allegedly', 'stole', 'terracotta', 'warrior', 'thumb', 'show', 'philadelphia', 'museum', 'according', 'reports', 'us', 'chinese', 'media', 'michael', 'rohana', 'attending', 'pre-christmas', 'party', 'franklin', 'institute', 'went', 'unlocked', 'door', 'terracotta', 'warriors', 'first', 'emperor', 'exhibition', 'using', 'smartphone', 'torch', 'rohana', 'allegedly', 'entered', 'exhibition', '915pm', 'december', 'embraced', 'one', 'ancient', 'sculptures', 'took', 'selfie', 'appearing', 'snap', 'chunk', 'left', 'hand', 'pocket', 'museum', 'staff', 'notice', 'absent', 'digit', 'january', 'five', 'days', 'later', 'tracked', 'suspect', 'surveillance', 'footage', 'credit', 'card', 'transactions', 'investigators', 'went', 'rohana', 'home', 'rohana', 'admitted', 'stashed', 'thumb', 'desk', 'drawer', 'china', 'official', 'news', 'agency', 'xinhua', 'reported', 'usa', 'today', 'said', 'friend', 'rohana', 'seen', 'photo', 'missing', 'thumb', 'snapchat', 'rohana', 'arrested', 'charged', 'concealment', 'major', 'artwork', 'bailed', 'surrendering', 'passport', 'monday', 'wu', 'haiyun', 'head', 'group', 'loans', 'terracotta', 'army', 'overseas', 'museums', 'told', 'chinese', 'television', 'serious', 'protest', 'lodged', 'ask', 'us', 'severely', 'punish', 'perpetrator', 'wu', 'added', 'according', 'south', 'china', 'morning', 'post', 'another', 'official', 'said', 'terracotta', 'warriors', 'national', 'treasures', 'express', 'strong', 'resentment', 'condemnation', 'towards', 'theft', 'destruction', 'heritage', 'xinhua', 'identified', 'affected', 'warrior', 'one', 'loaned', 'philadelphia', 'museum', '2000-year-old', 'sculpture', 'called', 'cavalryman', 'one', 'member', 'terracotta', 'army', '8000-strong', 'earthenware', 'force', 'commissioned', 'buried', 'alongside', 'guard', 'tomb', 'china', 'first', 'emperor', 'qin', 'shi', 'huang', 'sculptures', 'unearthed', 'become', 'one', 'china', 'biggest', 'tourist', 'attractions']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/18/your-pictures-share-your-photos-on-the-theme-of-young

The next theme for our weekly photography assignment in the Observer New Review is ‘young.’ Share your photos of what young means to you – and tell us about your image in the description box. The closing date is Wednesday 21 February at 10am. We’ll publish our favourites in The New Review on Sunday 25 February and in a gallery on the Guardian site. You can share your ‘young’ pictures by clicking on the ‘Contribute’ button on this article. You can also use the Guardian app and search for ‘GuardianWitness assignments’ – and if you add it to the homepage – you can keep up with all our assignments. GuardianWitness is the home of readers’ content on the Guardian. Contribute your video, pictures and stories, and browse news, reviews and creations submitted by others.

culture/2018/feb/18/your-pictures-share-your-photos-on-the-theme-of-young

pillar/arts

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culture

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2018-02-18T09:00:40Z

Your pictures: share your photos on the theme of 'young'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/18/your-pictures-share-your-photos-on-the-theme-of-young

['next', 'theme', 'weekly', 'photography', 'assignment', 'observer', 'new', 'review', 'young', 'share', 'photos', 'young', 'means', 'tell', 'us', 'image', 'description', 'box', 'closing', 'date', 'wednesday', 'february', '10am', 'publish', 'favourites', 'new', 'review', 'sunday', 'february', 'gallery', 'guardian', 'site', 'share', 'young', 'pictures', 'clicking', 'contribute', 'button', 'article', 'also', 'use', 'guardian', 'app', 'search', 'guardianwitness', 'assignments', 'add', 'homepage', 'keep', 'assignments', 'guardianwitness', 'home', 'readers', 'content', 'guardian', 'contribute', 'video', 'pictures', 'stories', 'browse', 'news', 'reviews', 'creations', 'submitted', 'others']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/ng-interactive/2018/feb/18/simone-lia-on-butterfly-fashion-week

culture/ng-interactive/2018/feb/18/simone-lia-on-butterfly-fashion-week

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

interactive

2018-02-18T08:00:22Z

Simone Lia on butterfly fashion week

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/ng-interactive/2018/feb/18/simone-lia-on-butterfly-fashion-week

[]

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/17/five-things-you-probably-shouldnt-say-to-someone-who-has-had-a-miscarriage

When I asked my mum whether she had ever experienced a miscarriage, she said no. When I asked her a second time, she said yes. I spent the next four months trying to find out how a taboo can be so strong that even a doctor wouldn’t want to share the experience with her daughter. You can listen to what I discovered in the first episode of a new Guardian audio series, Strange Bird. Before I spoke to people about pregnancy loss, I had only the vaguest sense of the experience – a stock image of a woman looking sad. The reality is so much more complex than that. There are females who, like me, think they haven’t experienced a miscarriage but could be mistaken. There are those who knew about the miscarriage and felt a profound trauma and there are those who felt relief. For most people, miscarriage is a loss and it’s one that society is not great at talking about. To get concrete advice about how to change that conversation, I spoke to Ruth Bender Atik, the National Director of the Miscarriage Association. While emphasizing that everyone is different, Atik mentioned some of the things that are often unhelpful to say to someone who has experienced a pregnancy loss. Things like: “Well, there was something probably the matter with it anyway.” “At least it wasn’t later in the pregnancy.” “I know somebody who had 11 miscarriages, but she went on to have a baby, so you’ll be OK.” “You’re young. You can always try again.” “At least you’ve got a child already.” As Atik listed these responses, I thought about how, in a moment of panic, I could have said any one of these to my mum or a friend who has experienced pregnancy loss. So I asked what a more helpful response might be. Atik replied, “How are you feeling?” I called my mum and tried to have a new conversation with her about something that one in five females will experience in their lifetimes. You can hear what she said here, in the first episode of Strange Bird. If you have an experience you would like to share or want to suggest future topics for me to cover, please write to [email protected]. Or you can text me or leave a voicemail at +1 503 832 7563

culture/2018/feb/17/five-things-you-probably-shouldnt-say-to-someone-who-has-had-a-miscarriage

pillar/arts

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culture

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article

2018-02-17T11:00:13Z

Five things you probably shouldn't say to someone who has had a miscarriage

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/17/five-things-you-probably-shouldnt-say-to-someone-who-has-had-a-miscarriage

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/17/pop-cultures-re-awokening-is-this-political-shift-a-movement-or-moment

A quick quiz: what do these have in common? Katy Perry’s “purposeful pop”; the reboots of Party of Five and Ghostbusters; Macklemore; that Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad; and, most recently, Justin Timberlake’s video for his song Supplies, where the star surveys the ills of today’s world on TV screens before heading off to party at what looks like an Occupy-chic rave. The answer is: they are all, apparently, woke. But who isn’t woke these days? The term, once linked to the struggle of black people in the United States – to “stay woke”, or awake, to injustices committed daily – has now come to mean the awareness of ills done against oppressed groups, and often the willingness to do something about it. It has circled around mainstream parlance for at least 50 years, but in the past tweet-heavy decade, in which identity politics has gained dominance and extra currency – and, in some cases, a greater capacity for dilution – it has become ubiquitous. In early 2018, we are arguably at peak woke. A year into Trump’s presidency, he has become the nightmare for most minorities that he first suggested he might – and, as a result, culture has responded. From TV dramas such as The Handmaid’s Tale to the film Mudbound, Kendrick Lamar’s Damn (and even, to some extent, this year’s UK Celebrity Big Brother), rare is the art form that doesn’t now engage with a struggle, and common is the artist who is criticised for abstaining (see Taylor Swift, whose vocal feminism clashes with her silence on Trump). And it’s responding to a consumer need. From #MeToo to #TimesUp to #BlackLivesMatter, the hashtagging, among a generation educated and empowered by the rise of social media, has been intense. Yet suspicions linger. Is woke an easy pose? How far can it go when, as a commercial product, your No 1 benchmark of success is to sell? Not that it doesn’t have clout: see Beyoncé’s huge success with Lemonade, Get Out being the big movie hit of 2017, or the whole critical kudos accrued by Netflix and Amazon, which derives from their commissioning pretty socially conscious programming. However, mainstream culture has a tricky way of commodifying, then discarding trends. Is this a movement, or a moment? The Grammys last month were a prime example of the difference between acknowledging woke culture and taking it on board. At first, things looked promising: a more diverse set of nominations, a performance by Kendrick Lamar and a spotlight on Kesha, whose allegations of sexual abuse have become a cause celebre. Yet on the night, most of the awards went to the defiantly middle-of-the-road Bruno Mars, and only one woman performer, of the few nominated, won a major prize. The president of Grammys organisers The Recording Academy later tried to explain away the lack of female wins with the chirpy exhortation to women artists to “step up” (he later apologised). All in all, it looked like a clumsy bid to sweep everything under the carpet, which is pretty naive for an industry that has had nothing comparable yet to #MeToo. “And there are two reasons for that,” says writer Spencer Kornhaber, who has covered the topic extensively for The Atlantic. “One is that the music industry doesn’t have as much of a problem, or the other is that the music industry has a worse problem, and even more reasons why people wouldn’t be speaking about it. You would have to be pretty naive to think that it isn’t the latter.” The first step to a genuine woke culture is obviously to just have more diverse people on our screens and radios, and let them speak in their voice. In that sense, shows such as Issa Rae’s Insecure fill the brief gloriously. Yet there is also the problem of who is behind the scenes. Kornhaber points to a recent study published by USC, which flagged up an “insane” lack of women in the music industry at every level. For instance, a sample of 300 hit songs from the last three years found that only 2% of its producers were female. It’s grimly logical, then, that more than 90% of recent Grammy nominees have been male. “To that extent, the recording academy is reflecting its industry,” says Kornhaber, “and it’s the same thing with the Film Academy, and so on.” Hollywood is in a slightly different place, not least because it has very much had its #MeToo moment, and had the #OscarsSoWhite uproar of two years ago. The Academy does seem to have made some changes in order to make it less old, male and white, and the fruits of that could perhaps be seen in the best picture win for Moonlight last year. Then again, change is still slow: witness the cinematographer Rachel Morrison’s nomination for her work on Mudbound this year, the first ever for a woman in that category. David Hinojosa is a producer for Killer Films, which has made the likes of Boys Don’t Cry, Still Alice and Carol. An indie unit headed by queer executives, working in both film and TV, Killer doesn’t need any lessons in going woke; it has always worked with professionals from minority backgrounds. Talking to Hinojosa, he confirms that it’s still hard to sell projects with female, black or Latin leads, even if it’s maybe getting better, but that television now provides more opportunities for them, “pound for pound”, than film. Is he noticing the talent pool becoming more diverse? “I think so,” he says, “but it’s been incredibly incremental – very slow, very cautious. And now you’re feeling this huge swing to fix it all in one movie cycle.” This is technically great, he says, but he’s unsure if people have a plan. “My fear is that when you’re going to take on a huge existential problem, it requires a lot of thought. So an overreaction, or an attempt to fix it too quickly, is not doing anyone any good. Because if you fix it wrong, you’re gonna have people saying, ‘Well, we tried it and it didn’t work.’” Of course, there is woke, and the parody of woke. Katy Perry, for instance, may have believed every minute of the campaign for her last album, Witness, which was sold as a new-found awakening (“My intention is so pure these days”). But if she was trying to semaphore it subtly, it was too subtle for some. “With [her single] Chained to the Rhythm,” says Kornhaber, “she made a big deal of this ‘woke song’ – and then you listen to the song, the album, and it’s like, what are you talking about? You have to squint to get any message out of it at all.” That’s very cruel on her single Bon Appetit (with its line “Got me spread like a buffet”) surely? “Yeah, sure. It’s about GM foods!” For many, Witness was a textbook example of how not to do it, but it didn’t stop Justin Timberlake from offering his Supplies. It seems a little kamikaze, but it was probably worth a try: both Perry and Timberlake are examples of all-American pop saucebots who probably felt they had to somehow connect with this new audience. Also, each has been vigorously gone over for past instances of cultural appropriation, the great sin of the woke decade. In the 00s, Timberlake’s mimicking of an array of black superstars (Prince, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder) simply raised eyebrows. But in this decade, his actions set off a sequence of Twitter storms, because a new generation won’t give him a free pass. “There are millennials now who are really invested in popular culture, who understand how issues of representation in the media are a matter of social justice,” says Dr Anamik Saha of Goldsmiths, University of London. “They have been greatly enabled by social media, which is allowing them to talk back and to mobilise.” Timberlake’s response to all this has been another new song, Say Something, which bemoans his angst about having to say things – and then settles for keeping shtum. “Sometimes the greatest way to say something is to say nothing at all,” he broods. It actually is a very real type of philosophy, in that it suggests all his anxiety and awareness of what is going on, but intimates he can do nothing about it. In that sense, Timberlake may well be on to something. The great test for woke culture this year might be whether it can progress from something internal, an awakening and “righting” of the self, to something external, engaged with things that go beyond itself and its own sense of anger or panic. In the last few weeks, Kornhaber has noticed a slew of TV shows that dwell on liberal angst in the Trump era, but don’t offer much in the way of activism, say, or comment on policies that, after all, have more tangible effects on people’s lives than a Netflix drama. “It seems like the only thing a certain segment of pop culture is able to say right now is: ‘Ooh, gosh, isn’t it so crazy?’” he sighs. At the time of writing, Timberlake’s album is at No 1 on the top of the Billboard album charts, and Say Something is set to be its biggest hit.

culture/2018/feb/17/pop-cultures-re-awokening-is-this-political-shift-a-movement-or-moment

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-17T07:00:08Z

A-wokening: is pop culture’s political surge a movement or a moment?

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/17/pop-cultures-re-awokening-is-this-political-shift-a-movement-or-moment

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/17/isaac-julien-its-another-watershed-moment-for-history-of-queer-rights

The significance of this moment in time is not lost on the artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien. The London-born son of St Lucien parents, Julien, 57, has spent much of his career exploring sexuality, race and the iconography of queer history. Having just watched his home country celebrate 50 years since homosexuality was decriminalised, he has arrived in Sydney to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras – the first since Australia legalised marriage equality. And next year marks three decades since releasing his seminal film Looking for Langston, a documentary about Langston Hughes that was at the forefront of a queer film movement, winning the world’s most prestigious award for queer cinema, the Teddy award, when it premiered at the Berlin international film festival in 1989. When we speak over the phone, Julien is at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington, Sydney, where an exhibition honouring the film’s 2017 restoration – featuring screenings and large-scale photographic stills – is being held as a part of Mardi Gras. Julien is delighted to return to Looking for Langston amid the celebrations, at a time when mainstream culture appears to be finally catching up with the radicalism of his work and that of his contemporaries. Julien describes the late 80s and early 90s as “a queer watershed in cinema and aesthetics”. Out of it arose New Queer Cinema – an indie film movement that also included Derek Jarman, himself the subject of another of Julien’s documentaries, 2008’s Derek, starring Tilda Swinton. But Looking for Langston was an earlier proponent. Lush and heavily stylised – an inspiration for David Fincher’s music video for Madonna’s Vogue – it fused documentary and narrative to interpret the life of the American poet and was one of several films that gave a sudden voice to the historically ignored queer, black experience. Julien cites Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied, Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning and Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman – the first movie directed by an openly gay black woman – as works that, alongside his, offered a “multi-vocal queer aesthetic”. At the time, Aids and Reagan/Bush-era politics were ravaging both the black and queer communities. “The queer, black aesthetic was really alive,” he says, “and really mixed in with disco culture and house music ... There was a cultural revelation that was very exciting.” Last year’s best picture win by Moonlight at the Academy Awards was, for Julien, something of a vindication: a mainstream acceptance of themes he had explored with Looking for Langston and 1991’s Young Soul Rebels, his film about black DJs in the time of the Queen’s silver jubilee. “Moonlight was such a wonderful film and it was really interesting to have it become a real catalyst for what could be [in] independent cinema,” he says. “And of course at the centre of it were these two queer, black characters who, in a way, stole the thunder of the Oscars. There’s something really celebratory about that.” The popularity of Barry Jenkins’s film – particularly with queer, black audiences unfamiliar with seeing their stories on a mainstream screen – showed Julien that the time was right to bring his own film back, for a new generation. In Julien’s student days, queer black artists were not a part of the syllabus; his discovery of Hughes’s poetry and the debate around his sexuality was “serendipitous”, coming just as Julien was eager to find his own place as an artist. Thirty years later, Looking for Langston is widely taught in art schools, and he hopes the film’s revival can introduce more young people to the queer, black experience. “In the art world there’s a kind of zeitgeist,” Julien says, referring not just to Moonlight but to the surprise hit James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro, and the Black Lives Matter movement. “It’s wonderful that Looking for Langston can be shown at this moment and in a way show this trajectory.” Baldwin, like Hughes, is another name that lingers over Julien’s career. Looking for Langston was dedicated to the author and social commentator two years after his death from stomach cancer in 1987; and Julien has worked on adapting Baldwin’s classic 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room, a project Madonna was once circling. It never got made – but he hints it could be more viable now that Baldwin’s words are back in the public consciousness. And with Madonna, too? “Absolutely,” Julien says. “Yes, it would be fantastic.” Earlier this month, Julien was appointed a commander of the order of the British empire for his contributions to the arts. He says he will continue to seek new fusions of film, photography, music and art. “It’s another watershed moment for history of queer rights,” he says. “It all feels like a particular moment ... it’s really marking a time of acceptance, which we’ve wanted for some time”. • Isaac Julien: Looking for Langston 1989/2017 is at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery until 3 March, as part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras

culture/2018/feb/17/isaac-julien-its-another-watershed-moment-for-history-of-queer-rights

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

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2018-02-17T03:35:06Z

Isaac Julien: 'It's another watershed moment for history of queer rights'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/17/isaac-julien-its-another-watershed-moment-for-history-of-queer-rights

['significance', 'moment', 'time', 'lost', 'artist', 'filmmaker', 'isaac', 'julien', 'london-born', 'son', 'st', 'lucien', 'parents', 'julien', 'spent', 'much', 'career', 'exploring', 'sexuality', 'race', 'iconography', 'queer', 'history', 'watched', 'home', 'country', 'celebrate', 'years', 'since', 'homosexuality', 'decriminalised', 'arrived', 'sydney', 'help', 'celebrate', '40th', 'anniversary', 'gay', 'lesbian', 'mardi', 'gras', 'first', 'since', 'australia', 'legalised', 'marriage', 'equality', 'next', 'year', 'marks', 'three', 'decades', 'since', 'releasing', 'seminal', 'film', 'looking', 'langston', 'documentary', 'langston', 'hughes', 'forefront', 'queer', 'film', 'movement', 'winning', 'world', 'prestigious', 'award', 'queer', 'cinema', 'teddy', 'award', 'premiered', 'berlin', 'international', 'film', 'festival', 'speak', 'phone', 'julien', 'roslyn', 'oxley9', 'gallery', 'paddington', 'sydney', 'exhibition', 'honouring', 'film', 'restoration', 'featuring', 'screenings', 'large-scale', 'photographic', 'stills', 'held', 'part', 'mardi', 'gras', 'julien', 'delighted', 'return', 'looking', 'langston', 'amid', 'celebrations', 'time', 'mainstream', 'culture', 'appears', 'finally', 'catching', 'radicalism', 'work', 'contemporaries', 'julien', 'describes', 'late', '80s', 'early', '90s', 'queer', 'watershed', 'cinema', 'aesthetics', 'arose', 'new', 'queer', 'cinema', 'indie', 'film', 'movement', 'also', 'included', 'derek', 'jarman', 'subject', 'another', 'julien', 'documentaries', 'derek', 'starring', 'tilda', 'swinton', 'looking', 'langston', 'earlier', 'proponent', 'lush', 'heavily', 'stylised', 'inspiration', 'david', 'fincher', 'music', 'video', 'madonna', 'vogue', 'fused', 'documentary', 'narrative', 'interpret', 'life', 'american', 'poet', 'one', 'several', 'films', 'gave', 'sudden', 'voice', 'historically', 'ignored', 'queer', 'black', 'experience', 'julien', 'cites', 'marlon', 'riggs', 'tongues', 'untied', 'jennie', 'livingston', 'paris', 'burning', 'cheryl', 'dunye', 'watermelon', 'woman', 'first', 'movie', 'directed', 'openly', 'gay', 'black', 'woman', 'works', 'alongside', 'offered', 'multi-vocal', 'queer', 'aesthetic', 'time', 'aids', 'reaganbush-era', 'politics', 'ravaging', 'black', 'queer', 'communities', 'queer', 'black', 'aesthetic', 'really', 'alive', 'says', 'really', 'mixed', 'disco', 'culture', 'house', 'music', 'cultural', 'revelation', 'exciting', 'last', 'year', 'best', 'picture', 'win', 'moonlight', 'academy', 'awards', 'julien', 'something', 'vindication', 'mainstream', 'acceptance', 'themes', 'explored', 'looking', 'langston', 'young', 'soul', 'rebels', 'film', 'black', 'djs', 'time', 'queen', 'silver', 'jubilee', 'moonlight', 'wonderful', 'film', 'really', 'interesting', 'become', 'real', 'catalyst', 'could', 'independent', 'cinema', 'says', 'course', 'centre', 'two', 'queer', 'black', 'characters', 'way', 'stole', 'thunder', 'oscars', 'something', 'really', 'celebratory', 'popularity', 'barry', 'jenkins', 'film', 'particularly', 'queer', 'black', 'audiences', 'unfamiliar', 'seeing', 'stories', 'mainstream', 'screen', 'showed', 'julien', 'time', 'right', 'bring', 'film', 'back', 'new', 'generation', 'julien', 'student', 'days', 'queer', 'black', 'artists', 'part', 'syllabus', 'discovery', 'hughes', 'poetry', 'debate', 'around', 'sexuality', 'serendipitous', 'coming', 'julien', 'eager', 'find', 'place', 'artist', 'thirty', 'years', 'later', 'looking', 'langston', 'widely', 'taught', 'art', 'schools', 'hopes', 'film', 'revival', 'introduce', 'young', 'people', 'queer', 'black', 'experience', 'art', 'world', 'kind', 'zeitgeist', 'julien', 'says', 'referring', 'moonlight', 'surprise', 'hit', 'james', 'baldwin', 'documentary', 'negro', 'black', 'lives', 'matter', 'movement', 'wonderful', 'looking', 'langston', 'shown', 'moment', 'way', 'show', 'trajectory', 'baldwin', 'like', 'hughes', 'another', 'name', 'lingers', 'julien', 'career', 'looking', 'langston', 'dedicated', 'author', 'social', 'commentator', 'two', 'years', 'death', 'stomach', 'cancer', 'julien', 'worked', 'adapting', 'baldwin', 'classic', 'novel', 'giovanni', 'room', 'project', 'madonna', 'circling', 'never', 'got', 'made', 'hints', 'could', 'viable', 'baldwin', 'words', 'back', 'public', 'consciousness', 'madonna', 'absolutely', 'julien', 'says', 'yes', 'would', 'fantastic', 'earlier', 'month', 'julien', 'appointed', 'commander', 'order', 'british', 'empire', 'contributions', 'arts', 'says', 'continue', 'seek', 'new', 'fusions', 'film', 'photography', 'music', 'art', 'another', 'watershed', 'moment', 'history', 'queer', 'rights', 'says', 'feels', 'like', 'particular', 'moment', 'really', 'marking', 'time', 'acceptance', 'wanted', 'time', 'isaac', 'julien', 'looking', 'langston', 'roslyn', 'oxley9', 'gallery', 'march', 'part', 'sydney', 'gay', 'lesbian', 'mardi', 'gras']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/16/local-museums-have-a-funding-crisis-too

Mark Brown (‘Shocking lack of funds’ hits museum collecting as art market booms, 16 February) writes about inadequate funding for museums, focusing on their purchasing powers, implicitly those of national museums. But the true silent crisis is in regional museums countrywide. Their galleries are being turned into “fun” spaces, their curators are being sacked, if they haven’t been already, their lovingly gathered (often donated) collections removed from display, to be outhoused in distant stores. Or the museums are just shut down – look at Canterbury Heritage Museum, abruptly closed last autumn. It was council funded, like most local museums, and councils of course have mandatory responsibilities such as social care. Is it not time for central government to fund local museums? The nationals could surely spare some cash for local museums. Marian Campbell Oxford • Join the debate – email [email protected] • Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters

culture/2018/feb/16/local-museums-have-a-funding-crisis-too

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culture

Culture

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2018-02-16T16:24:52Z

Local museums have a funding crisis too | Letters

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/16/local-museums-have-a-funding-crisis-too

['mark', 'brown', 'shocking', 'lack', 'funds', 'hits', 'museum', 'collecting', 'art', 'market', 'booms', 'february', 'writes', 'inadequate', 'funding', 'museums', 'focusing', 'purchasing', 'powers', 'implicitly', 'national', 'museums', 'true', 'silent', 'crisis', 'regional', 'museums', 'countrywide', 'galleries', 'turned', 'fun', 'spaces', 'curators', 'sacked', 'already', 'lovingly', 'gathered', 'often', 'donated', 'collections', 'removed', 'display', 'outhoused', 'distant', 'stores', 'museums', 'shut', 'look', 'canterbury', 'heritage', 'museum', 'abruptly', 'closed', 'last', 'autumn', 'council', 'funded', 'like', 'local', 'museums', 'councils', 'course', 'mandatory', 'responsibilities', 'social', 'care', 'time', 'central', 'government', 'fund', 'local', 'museums', 'nationals', 'could', 'surely', 'spare', 'cash', 'local', 'museums', 'marian', 'campbell', 'oxford', 'join', 'debate', 'email', 'guardianletterstheguardiancom', 'read', 'guardian', 'letters', 'click', 'visit', 'gucomletters']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/15/uk-museum-collecting-risk-from-lack-funding-sir-david-cannadine-report-warns

Museum collections in the UK are at risk of becoming “inert and lifeless” unless more money is invested for them to buy objects, according to a report. An investigation by the historian Sir David Cannadine, published on Thursday, looks at museum collecting from the 1830s to the present day and paints a “deeply depressing” and “shocking” picture of the current funding landscape. Cannadine highlights the widening gap between “stratospheric” art market prices paid by the world’s new billionaires while “the museums of the United Kingdom have experienced a decade of diminishing funding, and there are fears that this austerity will not end any time soon”. The report says “the morale, the confidence and the numbers of curatorial staff” have been in “serious decline” for some time. The report was commissioned by the Art Fund charity and the Wolfson Foundation to mark 40 years of collaboration between them to help bring art and objects in to public collections. Cannadine’s report argues that not enough museums have any collecting strategy at all, and that they are reactive rather than proactive – only adding to collections when a gift or donation is made. He uses case studies to show the benefits of positive collecting. They include the purchase by Hull’s Ferens Art Gallery of Christ Between Saint Paul and Saint Peter, a 14th century panel by the Sienese artist Pietro Lorenzetti bought for £1.6m that helped to demonstrate “increased confidence and ambition” in the lead-in to the submission to be 2017 city of culture. Another is the Folkestone Creative Foundation and its art triennial, which has acquired or been loaned 27 public pieces including Cornelia Parker’s The Folkestone Mermaid. The report acknowledges that proactively collecting is difficult given public spending on museums and their collections has decreased by 13% in real terms over the last decade, from £829m in 2007 to £720m. The situation is worse for museums that rely on local authority money. It cites a recent study that shows the UK government spends less on culture in percentage terms than Denmark, France, Hungary or Latvia. “For museums to remain vibrant and vigorous institutions ... they must always be works in progress, which in turn means they should constantly be making new acquisitions, so that their collections remain dynamic and evolving rather than become inert and lifeless,” the report says. Cannadine’s report contrasts sharply with a government-commissioned report by Neil Mendoza published last year that presented a more positive picture of the museum sector. Cannadine acknowledges that “instead of giving comfort and reassurance” his report “expresses anxiety and concern”. The main conclusion is that more money needs to be invested in museums, particularly since the figures are only a tiny proportion of overall spending. Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund, called the report “timely and penetrating”. He added: “His concerns over the lack of public investment in the growth and care of our nation’s collections, and in the people responsible for them, should be heeded.” Cannadine’s report acknowledges that many millions of objects in museum collections are kept in storage, rarely or never seen, and explores the vexed topic of whether deaccessioning is good or bad. The report argues that a good case was the Imperial War Museum in London, which between 2010 and 2015 disposed of 69 firearms, 27,000 films and 40,000 books and pamphlets – all considered duplicates of what it had or which were in poor condition. The bad case, it says, was the sale by Northampton Museum and Art Gallery of the ancient Egyptian statue Sekhemka for £15.8m. At the launch of the Cannadine report Diane Lees, director-general of the Imperial War Museum, said Northampton “was a complete override of all of our professional standards ... it was an absolute tragedy in terms of damaging public trust for the rest of us. It will take a long time to forgive them.”

culture/2018/feb/15/uk-museum-collecting-risk-from-lack-funding-sir-david-cannadine-report-warns

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2018-02-15T15:56:22Z

UK museum collecting at risk from lack of funding, report warns

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/15/uk-museum-collecting-risk-from-lack-funding-sir-david-cannadine-report-warns

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/15/strange-bird-audio-mona-chalabi-podcast

Today the Guardian US mobile innovation lab is launching a web-based audio player that offers a new way to experience podcasts. The player debuts with episode one of Strange Bird, a show about the numbers that shape our lives hosted by Guardian US data editor Mona Chalabi. The pilot explores the extraordinarily common experience of miscarriage – and why we don’t talk about it. Once you hit play, you’ll find visual elements like photographs, charts, gifs, and links integrated into the listening experience – all sent in a chat-app-like display. The player is designed for mobile screens – and also works on desktop. On Android devices, listeners can sign up to receive the show’s visuals through notifications, and be alerted when new episodes are released. The player also allows you to subscribe to podcasts through the web, rather than exclusively in podcast apps. Based on Mona’s own questions, as well as those sent to her from readers, Strange Bird is a show that aims to help listeners understand one of life’s most fundamental questions: “Where do I fit in?” She uses data and conversation to unpack experiences, like sibling rivalry or religious rituals, that are rarely examined in public. The pilot episode, produced by Josie Holtzman, explores the fact that one in five women will have a miscarriage – yet the experience can feel remarkably lonely. Through interviews and a careful examination of available data, Mona explores the gap between the frequency of miscarriages versus how little they are discussed. She also calls her mum a lot. The Guardian US mobile innovation lab is a small multi-disciplinary team housed in the Guardian’s New York newsroom, exploring storytelling and the delivery of news on small screens. It is funded by the John S and James L Knight Foundation.

culture/2018/feb/15/strange-bird-audio-mona-chalabi-podcast

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2018-02-15T10:00:12Z

Introducing Strange Bird, an audio series on the things that make us feel lonely

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/15/strange-bird-audio-mona-chalabi-podcast

['today', 'guardian', 'us', 'mobile', 'innovation', 'lab', 'launching', 'web-based', 'audio', 'player', 'offers', 'new', 'way', 'experience', 'podcasts', 'player', 'debuts', 'episode', 'one', 'strange', 'bird', 'show', 'numbers', 'shape', 'lives', 'hosted', 'guardian', 'us', 'data', 'editor', 'mona', 'chalabi', 'pilot', 'explores', 'extraordinarily', 'common', 'experience', 'miscarriage', 'talk', 'hit', 'play', 'find', 'visual', 'elements', 'like', 'photographs', 'charts', 'gifs', 'links', 'integrated', 'listening', 'experience', 'sent', 'chat-app-like', 'display', 'player', 'designed', 'mobile', 'screens', 'also', 'works', 'desktop', 'android', 'devices', 'listeners', 'sign', 'receive', 'show', 'visuals', 'notifications', 'alerted', 'new', 'episodes', 'released', 'player', 'also', 'allows', 'subscribe', 'podcasts', 'web', 'rather', 'exclusively', 'podcast', 'apps', 'based', 'mona', 'questions', 'well', 'sent', 'readers', 'strange', 'bird', 'show', 'aims', 'help', 'listeners', 'understand', 'one', 'life', 'fundamental', 'questions', 'fit', 'uses', 'data', 'conversation', 'unpack', 'experiences', 'like', 'sibling', 'rivalry', 'religious', 'rituals', 'rarely', 'examined', 'public', 'pilot', 'episode', 'produced', 'josie', 'holtzman', 'explores', 'fact', 'one', 'five', 'women', 'miscarriage', 'yet', 'experience', 'feel', 'remarkably', 'lonely', 'interviews', 'careful', 'examination', 'available', 'data', 'mona', 'explores', 'gap', 'frequency', 'miscarriages', 'versus', 'little', 'discussed', 'also', 'calls', 'mum', 'lot', 'guardian', 'us', 'mobile', 'innovation', 'lab', 'small', 'multi-disciplinary', 'team', 'housed', 'guardian', 'new', 'york', 'newsroom', 'exploring', 'storytelling', 'delivery', 'news', 'small', 'screens', 'funded', 'john', 'james', 'l', 'knight', 'foundation']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/14/lena-dunham-total-hysterectomy-fight-against-endometriosis

Lena Dunham, the star and creator of the HBO comedy series Girls, has undergone radical surgery to remove her uterus and cervix in an attempt to rid herself of the debilitating disease endometriosis. The actor, 31, announced her total hysterectomy in an essay in Vogue. She hopes to end the chronic pain she has suffered as well as the “years of complex surgeries measuring in the double digits”. The decision was a tough one, Dunham said. “I never had a single doubt about having children,” she wrote. “As a child, I would stuff my shirt with a pile of hot laundry and march around the living room beaming.” But, she said, she knew just as intensely that there was something wrong with her uterus. And in August last year, the pain became unbearable. “With pain like this, I will never be able to be anyone’s mother. Even if I could get pregnant, there’s nothing I can offer.” In November, she checked into hospital and said she would not leave until doctors stopped the pain or gave her a hysterectomy. She wrote that she wanted to cry as she was wheeled towards the operating room. But, she said: “I gave up on more treatment. I gave up on more pain. I gave up on more uncertainty.” Endometriosis, which affects an estimated 176 million women worldwide, was for decades a taboo subject – a disease caused by tissue similar to the lining of the womb growing elsewhere, most commonly in the abdomen, ovaries, rectovaginal septum, bladder and bowel. The tissue behaves like the lining of the womb, bleeding every month, and it can cause such severe and chronic pain that women pass out or are admitted to hospital. Surgery is complex because the tissue grows around organs and fuses them together. Many women suffer every month for years, unable to attend school, college or their job because of the crippling pain. Doctors do not always recognise endometriosis, assuming it is period pain. If women are referred to a gynaecologist and diagnosed, they may still not get specialist treatment for a condition which is still not well understood. Dunham has been vocal about her suffering. She has tried every sort of alternative treatment, and lists “pelvic floor therapy, massage therapy, pain therapy, color therapy, acupuncture” and yoga among them. Neither those nor conventional medical interventions worked long-term. She has been admitted to hospital three times in less than a year. She thought it was all over last April, when she announced she was free of endometriosis after surgery to separate her ovaries from her rectal wall. During her appearance at the Met Gala in New York a few weeks later, however, she was rushed to hospital with complications. Dunham promptly cancelled her nationwide Lenny IRL tour of six cities. She told fans she was “in the greatest amount of physical pain that I have ever experienced” after doctors discovered more endometriosis. Experts say the lack of research and funding for a disease that affects one in 10 women of reproductive age is a scandal. “Endometriosis affects women in the prime of their life. It is not a lifestyle disease. It is not a disease you get later in life. It attacks teens, young women when they should be out being active, working, having children, having sex – 50% of them are struggling with sex because it is too painful,” Lone Hummelshoj, who heads the World Endometriosis Research Foundation and the World Endometriosis Society, told a Guardian investigation. Surgery can end a woman’s suffering if all the rogue tissue is removed. Dunham’s total hysterectomy will only be a cure if none is found elsewhere in her abdomen or bowel. Dunham is not the only celebrity to have tried to break the silence around endometriosis. Others affected include Emma Bunton, Dolly Parton, Anna Friel, Hilary Mantel, Susan Sarandon and Whoopi Goldberg. After the Guardian’s investigation, the former MP Oona King spoke out in the House of Commons about her experiences Dunham said she has found she can rejoice when her friends are pregnant, even though she never will be. “I may have felt choiceless before, but I know I have choices now,” she wrote. “Adoption is a thrilling truth I’ll pursue with all my might.”

culture/2018/feb/14/lena-dunham-total-hysterectomy-fight-against-endometriosis

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2018-02-14T14:27:32Z

Lena Dunham has total hysterectomy because of endometriosis

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/14/lena-dunham-total-hysterectomy-fight-against-endometriosis

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/12/chas-and-dave-how-we-made-rabbit-camilla-parker-bowles

Chas Hodges, singer-songwriter, piano We booked a cottage in the middle of nowhere to write some songs. Dave had this idea that involved an old phrase for someone who talked a lot: “jaw-me-dead”. I wanted something less obscure, so suggested “rabbit and pork” – cockney rhyming slang for “talk”. So we worked on that till we had our chorus: “Rabbit, rabbit.” We then wrote some verses about a girl who’s really beautiful but talks too much. I came up with the line: “You’ve got more rabbit than Sainsbury’s.” It was an expression a mate used to say. Apparently, it originated during the war. Meat was so scarce, people ate rabbit. They used to hang them over the butcher’s counter for people to inspect. They still had their heads and tails – so people knew they weren’t buying a cat. As we were getting ready to do the final mix, Dave suddenly started going: “Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.” It sounded great so I told the engineer: “Add that in!” But it was much too fast for Dave to do on his own in time with the song, so I suggested we both do it, singing “rabbit” alternately. It sounded like gibberish at first, but then it all came together and was the icing on the cake. We played the song on the kids’ TV show Tiswas. The presenter Sally James interviewed us wearing a rabbit costume, holding a giant carrot. Then it turned out that there was still time left before the end credits rolled, so Chris Tarrant asked us to play until they went off air. The place went wild: people in rabbit outfits were jumping up on each other’s shoulders, dancing around the studio. It was chaos. My wife phoned me afterwards. I thought that she was going to tell me it was terrible, but she said: “That was fantastic – a massive party!” The next day, Rabbit rocketed up the chart. Dave Peacock, singer-songwriter, bass I was in Spain on holiday and just had these lines in my head: “You won’t stop talking. Why don’t you give it a rest? You’re nothing to me but a jaw-me-dead.” Later, Chas came up with the Sainsbury’s line. He didn’t actually like it – he still doesn’t – but I said: “No, it’s great! Keep it in.” After that, the lyrics just poured out. We added the odd “jabber” and “yap-yap” to the chorus but, when we first sang it live, we couldn’t remember how it all went. So we wrote down a load of letters in order: R for rabbit, J for jabber, Y for yap-yap. But our mischievous roadie used to get a pen and add an extra R. In the end we just had to memorise it all, like a pair of parrots. One college we played at said they thought the song was sexist. There was going to be a demonstration to disrupt the concert. The protest never happened but we still got a lot of publicity out of it. The girl in Rabbit isn’t real, though – the song’s just a bit of a laugh, something that could apply to men as much as women. I know loads of blokes that can’t shut up. They drive me barmy. It’s our best-loved song. We’ve had letters from primary teachers saying: “The kids love Rabbit. Can we have a photo for the class?” Cliff Richard wanted to know how we did the double “rabbit” and when we played a Royal Variety Performance, Camilla Parker Bowles told me: “I do love that Rabbit song. We used to dance to it at parties.” At a show in Abu Dhabi, there was a man sitting there in the audience with his two wives, one on either side. Every time we sang “Rabbit, rabbit”, he’d point to them. Chas’n’Dave play the Royal Albert Hall, London, on 20 April. Full tour details: chasndave.net.

culture/2018/feb/12/chas-and-dave-how-we-made-rabbit-camilla-parker-bowles

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2018-02-12T14:50:32Z

Chas and Dave: how we made Rabbit

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/12/chas-and-dave-how-we-made-rabbit-camilla-parker-bowles

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/11/ruth-wilson-interview-dark-river-me-too-the-affair

Ruth Wilson shot the scene in which she nonchalantly skins a rabbit in the film Dark River on the day after the EU referendum, a coincidence of timing that turned out to be unexpectedly helpful. OK, so she had already watched a YouTube video showing how this task is most easily performed (to be blunt, once you’ve dealt with the legs, you simply peel the dead animal like a banana). And yes, she had also taken advice from a farmer called Hazel and a person I am going to describe as an on-set butchery adviser. All the same, when the moment finally arrived, something extra was required to see her through. “Basically, I took Brexit out on the rabbit,” she says, with a comic grimace. “I imagined it was Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson, and that… well, it kind of kept me focused.” Rabbit-skinning wasn’t the only skill she learned for Dark River, in which she plays Alice, a jobbing sheep shearer who has returned to the run-down Yorkshire farm where she grew up, following the death of her widowed father. “Clio [Barnard, its director] demands truth from her actors, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to fake it: I didn’t have any experience of the world I was stepping into. So once I was signed up, I spent three weeks staying with Malcolm and Hazel; Clio found them when she was first looking for places to shoot. They’re the last generation of tenants in their family, and their farm is all they’ve known, so they match the situation in the film.” Apparently, they gave her quite the education. “They were lovely,” she says. “But something gruesome and horrific happens every day on a farm. A sheep will break its leg, or you’ll have to lance a swelling on its neck that’s full of pus. It was disgusting, the stuff I saw; all that life and death and brutality.” She learned both to dip sheep and to shear them: “It’s amazing: you have to wear these special shoes, and then you get them between your legs, and there’s a way of turning them round and keeping the skin taut so that you don’t nick it. I was dead nervous, but you have to act like you know what you’re doing so they give in to you. Not that I was particularly quick. A real shearer takes about a minute, whereas I would take 10.” She also worked with a sheepdog, a red-haired collie with yellow eyes whose relish for work and suspicion of humans had something in common with the character of Alice. And when she wasn’t out in the fields and the barns? Then she was busy perfecting the accent. “I was out recording people. Getting it right was really important. You want to make it feel natural in the mouth, and it’s a very specific accent: we were in Embsay [a village near Skipton].” It thrilled her when people in the pub would ask if she was local. Dark River isn’t much like The Arbor or The Selfish Giant, Barnard’s previous feature films (the former told the story of the playwright Andrea Dunbar, and featured actors lip-syncing to interviews with Dunbar and her family; the latter was a Kes-like recasting of Oscar Wilde). Based loosely on Rose Tremain’s 2010 novel, Trespass, Dark River is almost, if not quite, a two-hander: also on the farm is Alice’s estranged brother, Joe (Mark Stanley, turning in a brilliant performance), who has let the place become a ruin in her absence. Alice would like it to be her name on the new tenancy agreement – her father promised the place to her, perhaps to make reparation for his own misdeeds – but Joe is resistant, still furious at her abandonment of him and their sick parent; when he makes a counter-claim, we know things are unlikely to end well. Punctuated by flashbacks to their childhood and the unending physical work both of them must do to keep the farm from going under, the film is marked by its extreme quietness: so much is left unsaid, so much withheld. The wind blowing through the grass seems at times more eloquent than these damaged siblings. How did Wilson come to be cast? Had she long wanted to work with Barnard? “Well, she is a fascinating film-maker, and I was drawn to the way she tells stories in different ways. But [she laughs] I wasn’t her first choice for this one. We were talking about something else entirely, and then she told me about Dark River: she’d had casting issues. I told her I would love to work with her, and then I read it, and I saw the poetry on the page – though in fact the final piece is a lot more sparse than the script, because it’s her way to pull so much out.” What was she like to work with? “She has a lovely energy. She has such compassion for characters. On set, she’s very quiet. She takes time to work out what she wants from the scene.” For Barnard, this film was a kind of homecoming: she grew up not too far away, in Otley. But it was hardly easy. “Sheep won’t necessarily do as they’re told,” says Wilson. “There was pressure, because this is a film with a lot of set-pieces.” She has seen it twice now. But if she knows how good her performance is – I think it’s very good – she gives no outward sign. “For about the first 20 minutes, there’s no one on screen but me. So when I first saw it, all I could think was, ‘Oh my God, please, someone else come on.’ I just couldn’t bear watching myself any longer. It was only the second time I saw it that I was able to think, ‘Wow, she’s such an adept film-maker. It doesn’t have a single extraneous shot.’” In a way, though, the finished film is of relatively little interest to Wilson, and not only because it’s now too late to put right anything that might be wrong. “It’s the preparation that’s my favourite part of the process,” she says. “I love meeting people, and analysing their world. I like having a puzzle to solve. That’s why I do so much work in advance. Even if it doesn’t affect my performance in the end, I just find it so much more interesting if I’ve got as wide as possible an understanding of the material. For me, the final film is just like a weird sense memory of all that happened on the day.” Wilson and I meet in a Bermondsey coffee shop, close to where she lives (luckily, the gentle types in the corner who were previously earnestly discussing hedgehogs, the protection of, leave before we get on to the dead rabbits). She is a tiny bit late and asks for a chai latte with oat milk, but it’s hard to hold either of these things against her; she pulls a this-is-so-embarrassing face when she orders the latte. Friendly and straightforward, if perhaps a little shy, she looks rather magnificent – Annie Hall striding through south London – in her high-waisted, wide-legged brown corduroys, her ruby knitted beret, her nearly black nails. Can she still, in spite of the hit TV series (Luther, The Affair), travel incognito? She thinks for a minute. “I do get recognised but, if I’m in a restaurant, I’ll get one person noticing me, not the whole place. It is uncomfortable when people try and sneak a picture; sometimes, I don’t feel like being seen. But I don’t stop myself doing stuff. I go to Barry’s Bootcamp and yoga just like anyone else.” Dark River feels far off now, almost distant; in the 18 months since she finished working on it, she has filmed two series of The Affair with Dominic West (the fourth will go out this summer, after which, well… we might just have reached the end of the affair) and Lenny Abrahamson’s forthcoming adaptation of Sarah Waters’s novel The Little Stranger. She has also starred in Belgian director Ivo van Hove’s production of Hedda Gabler at the National Theatre. And of course, so much else has changed, too, following the shaming of Harvey Weinstein. What does she think about #MeToo? Does this feel to her like a significant moment? “Yes, it does,” she says. “But while there are times when I feel incredibly excited by it, there are times when I feel a bit scared, too. It doesn’t surprise me that it has happened; it was bound to. There has been inequality for so long, and now that someone like Trump is in charge, we’re face to face with how much misogyny there is in the world. But things are moving quickly, and you just want to say, ‘Let’s think about this, because we don’t want to jeopardise real change.’” What pleases her most is that women are at last talking to one another. “They’re sharing stories and experiences, and in this industry you don’t get to talk much. It is competitive, and you’re often the only woman on set. So I hope that side of it continues – that women continue to support each other like this.” I sense a “but”. “But I would also say that there are grey areas. Every case of assault or feeling violated is different. It’s good to know how big the problem is, but this is not black or white, and we used to have this thing: innocent until proved guilty.” Has she had miserable experiences herself? “Not miserable miserable. But I’ve had times when I felt like I didn’t have a voice. That’s always been my frustration as a woman, even when I was a kid: that feeling of being shut down. As an actress, particularly, you’re treated like an idiot. They handle you with kid gloves, but they also treat you like a fool. When you’re feeling uncomfortable or exploited, they don’t want to listen; they think you’re being a bit difficult. Also, this is an industry that sells sex, and that’s… confusing. “More could definitely be done on set. With sex scenes, for instance, perhaps people could have a clearer idea of what is, and what isn’t, expected of them right from the start.” Sexual harassment exists in all worlds. But perhaps the actor’s life exaggerates the kind of insecurities that work in the favour of those likely to abuse their power. “It’s so fickle,” she says. “It’s an industry that’s built on making you feel not quite good enough, that you haven’t quite got to where you should, and it’s so mixed up with the media and selling stuff. The turnover of stars is silly, brutal. You have to be zen, and that’s why it’s vital to stay working in the theatre, which is more generous to older women and more collaborative. It’s the true form, for me.” She loved working with Van Hove, who expects his actors to arrive for rehearsals with their lines learned. “It’s basically a technical rehearsal on day one. You’re in your costume, you’re off book, and all the creatives are there, too: lighting, sound, the lot.” Van Hove’s directions aren’t psychological; he doesn’t ask his actors how their character might be feeling. “No, they’re entirely physical. ‘I want you like that dead flower next to you,’ he’ll say. Or: ‘I want you curled up on that couch as if your side really hurts’. Or: ‘Die like a fish!’” Was she a theatrical child? “Probably. I mean, I wasn’t a drama queen. But I did a theatre club outside of school, and my mum reminded me the other day that me and my brothers used to create these little shows with some kids down the road at Easter and Christmas, and they were awful and long; and I took a play to Edinburgh when I was 17.” Still, as a teenager (she grew up in Surrey, the daughter of a probation officer and an investment banker), she thought it wise to keep her ambitions in this direction to herself. “I didn’t want to say anything. I thought that would be embarrassing because everyone wants to be famous. So I decided just to choose a university with a good theatre on campus.” At Nottingham, where Wilson studied history, she put on plays with Carrie Cracknell and Michael Longhurst (both now acclaimed directors), and as a result she decided she had, after all, to give it a go. “I was really lucky. I got the part in [the BBC’s adaptation of] Jane Eyre nine months after I left Lamda, and Jane opened a lot of doors for me. I didn’t realise how big it was going to be until halfway through filming. I had to do some press, and there were a lot of people there. ‘Oh shit,’ I thought. But I gave it everything, that job. I’d never been able to cry on set before then, and it was for that part that I trained myself to do it. I used a Sigur Rós song, one that made me feel really sad. It’s an idea I still use. For Dark River, I used to listen to a lot of Björk – her album Vulnicura, which is all about the break-up of her relationship.” She’s shooting something she can’t talk about at the moment, and she would like to do more theatre as soon as the right thing comes along. But in April, she finally begins filming a long dreamed of project: a drama for the BBC and PBS in America that will tell the story of her paternal grandparents. In Mrs Wilson, which is written by Anna Symon and directed by Richard Laxton, she will play her grandmother, Alice, who only discovered after his death that her husband, Alexander Wilson, was a bigamist. (After Alice’s death, Wilson’s father found out that Alexander, an MI6 officer who wrote spy novels, had in fact been married not twice, but four times; none of his wives and various children knew of one another.) “It has been such a long process,” she says. “Getting a committed answer from the BBC took a while. But that might be a good thing. We’ve had time to talk to everyone, to make sure they feel OK with it.” It will, she says, be the greatest privilege to play her grandmother. “I think she would have liked it. She burned her diaries, but she wanted the memoir she wrote to be published. She knew she had to tell us, that she couldn’t keep the secret, so she gave us half of the story. She never expressed much of what she felt to us. But in her poetry and in the memoir, you see that she was a different woman inside. She had enormous amounts of passion both for her husband and for God. She had so many unanswered questions. We still don’t really know the truth about my grandfather. Was he a con man, or was he a hero? Did MI6 have to close him down for some reason? In the end, she had to find some other form of truth, and that was Jesus. It’s fascinating.” Her family have been “brilliant” about the project. “We’ve got lots of new members now – and some of them are in it, or their mothers or grandmothers.” By all accounts, Alexander Wilson was universally adored by those who knew him. On his headstone is a line from Othello: he loved not wisely, but too well. Has the project brought her closer to understanding what made him find it so difficult to tell the truth? “I’m not sure. His father was a military hero, who’d gone from being, in the first world war, a private, to joining the officer class. My grandfather was desperate to live up to him, but he had bad knees, and couldn’t serve himself.” Really, though, it’s her grandmother’s story, one she has been thinking about for the past 15 years, that seems most to fascinate her. “I am desperately scared by the idea of playing her,” she says, softly. “But I’m excited, too. It feels incredible that it is finally happening, and that has to be good.” Dark River opens on 23 February

culture/2018/feb/11/ruth-wilson-interview-dark-river-me-too-the-affair

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-11T09:00:42Z

Ruth Wilson: ‘The industry sells sex… and that’s confusing’

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/11/ruth-wilson-interview-dark-river-me-too-the-affair

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'easter', 'christmas', 'awful', 'long', 'took', 'play', 'edinburgh', 'still', 'teenager', 'grew', 'surrey', 'daughter', 'probation', 'officer', 'investment', 'banker', 'thought', 'wise', 'keep', 'ambitions', 'direction', 'want', 'say', 'anything', 'thought', 'would', 'embarrassing', 'everyone', 'wants', 'famous', 'decided', 'choose', 'university', 'good', 'theatre', 'campus', 'nottingham', 'wilson', 'studied', 'history', 'put', 'plays', 'carrie', 'cracknell', 'michael', 'longhurst', 'acclaimed', 'directors', 'result', 'decided', 'give', 'go', 'really', 'lucky', 'got', 'part', 'bbc', 'adaptation', 'jane', 'eyre', 'nine', 'months', 'left', 'lamda', 'jane', 'opened', 'lot', 'doors', 'realise', 'big', 'going', 'halfway', 'filming', 'press', 'lot', 'people', 'oh', 'shit', 'thought', 'gave', 'everything', 'job', 'would', 'never', 'able', 'cry', 'set', 'part', 'trained', 'used', 'sigur', 'ros', 'song', 'one', 'made', 'feel', 'really', 'sad', 'idea', 'still', 'use', 'dark', 'river', 'used', 'listen', 'lot', 'bjork', 'album', 'vulnicura', 'break-up', 'relationship', 'shooting', 'something', 'talk', 'moment', 'would', 'like', 'theatre', 'soon', 'right', 'thing', 'comes', 'along', 'april', 'finally', 'begins', 'filming', 'long', 'dreamed', 'project', 'drama', 'bbc', 'pbs', 'america', 'tell', 'story', 'paternal', 'grandparents', 'mrs', 'wilson', 'written', 'anna', 'symon', 'directed', 'richard', 'laxton', 'play', 'grandmother', 'alice', 'discovered', 'death', 'husband', 'alexander', 'wilson', 'bigamist', 'alice', 'death', 'wilson', 'father', 'found', 'alexander', 'mi6', 'officer', 'wrote', 'spy', 'novels', 'fact', 'married', 'twice', 'four', 'times', 'none', 'wives', 'various', 'children', 'knew', 'one', 'another', 'long', 'process', 'says', 'getting', 'committed', 'answer', 'bbc', 'took', 'might', 'good', 'thing', 'time', 'talk', 'everyone', 'make', 'sure', 'feel', 'ok', 'says', 'greatest', 'privilege', 'play', 'grandmother', 'think', 'would', 'liked', 'burned', 'diaries', 'wanted', 'memoir', 'wrote', 'published', 'knew', 'tell', 'us', 'could', 'keep', 'secret', 'gave', 'us', 'half', 'story', 'never', 'expressed', 'much', 'felt', 'us', 'poetry', 'memoir', 'see', 'different', 'woman', 'inside', 'enormous', 'amounts', 'passion', 'husband', 'god', 'many', 'unanswered', 'questions', 'still', 'really', 'know', 'truth', 'grandfather', 'con', 'man', 'hero', 'mi6', 'close', 'reason', 'end', 'find', 'form', 'truth', 'jesus', 'fascinating', 'family', 'brilliant', 'project', 'got', 'lots', 'new', 'members', 'mothers', 'grandmothers', 'accounts', 'alexander', 'wilson', 'universally', 'adored', 'knew', 'headstone', 'line', 'othello', 'loved', 'wisely', 'well', 'project', 'brought', 'closer', 'understanding', 'made', 'find', 'difficult', 'tell', 'truth', 'sure', 'father', 'military', 'hero', 'would', 'gone', 'first', 'world', 'war', 'private', 'joining', 'officer', 'class', 'grandfather', 'desperate', 'live', 'bad', 'knees', 'could', 'serve', 'really', 'though', 'grandmother', 'story', 'one', 'thinking', 'past', 'years', 'seems', 'fascinate', 'desperately', 'scared', 'idea', 'playing', 'says', 'softly', 'excited', 'feels', 'incredible', 'finally', 'happening', 'good', 'dark', 'river', 'opens', 'february']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/ng-interactive/2018/feb/11/simone-lia-all-you-need-is-love

culture/ng-interactive/2018/feb/11/simone-lia-all-you-need-is-love

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

interactive

2018-02-11T08:00:22Z

Simone Lia: All you need is love

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/ng-interactive/2018/feb/11/simone-lia-all-you-need-is-love

[]

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/11/you-are-not-my-friend-kim-cattrall-lashes-out-at-sarah-jessica-parker-over-brothers-deaht

An ongoing feud between the stars of Sex and the City has grown deeper, with Kim Cattrall accusing Sarah Jessica Parker of exploiting the death of her brother. Cattrall’s brother Chris, 55, was found dead last week after going missing from his home in Alberta, Canada. After announcing his death, Cattrall thanked both her fans and her Sex and the City colleagues for support. But four days after posting that message, the actor, who played Samantha on the hit HBO show, followed it up with a post directed at Parker, criticising her for “reaching out”, and saying she had been cruel. In the caption, Cattrall said Parker’s “continual reaching out” was “a painful reminder of how cruel you really were then and now”. She went on: “You are not my family. You are not my friend” and urged Parker to “stop exploiting our tragedy.” Cattrall’s post linked to an article in the New York Post from October 2017. It described an ongoing feud between the stars which culminated with a dispute over whether to produce a third Sex and the City movie, which Cattrall said she did not want to do. Parker has not publicly responded to the statement.

culture/2018/feb/11/you-are-not-my-friend-kim-cattrall-lashes-out-at-sarah-jessica-parker-over-brothers-deaht

pillar/arts

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culture

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2018-02-11T01:47:25Z

'You are not my friend': Kim Cattrall lashes out at Sarah Jessica Parker after brother's death

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/11/you-are-not-my-friend-kim-cattrall-lashes-out-at-sarah-jessica-parker-over-brothers-deaht

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/10/street-artists-fine-art-galleries-battle-trafalgar-square

It’s a mournfully grey day in the heart of London. Only a tiny number of tourists in heavy overcoats are braving the bitter wind cutting across Trafalgar Square. Even the pigeons have stayed away. Amid this bleak monochrome scene, the only flashes of colour are two floating Yodas, one dressed in bright green, the other in neon yellow, who are performing as “living statues” – although it has to be said neither is particularly stationary. “How’s business?” I ask Felix, the green Yoda. “No fun,” he mumbles from behind his mask. ”There are no tourists because it’s raining all day, every day.” Ah, the weather, that perennial British gripe. Yet copious precipitation is not the reason the National Gallery has seen a 20% drop in visitors in the last year. Nor why, just around the corner, the National Portrait Gallery is 42% down. One theory put about is that potential customers have been discouraged by the street performers, like Felix the green Yoda, that populate the pedestrianised space created in a major redevelopment in 2003. The halting of traffic on the north side of the landmark was an attempt to turn a busy roundabout into an elegant square along continental lines. But Sir Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery until 2015, came to lament the change, claiming that it had led to the “trashing of civic space”. Two years ago his successor Gabriele Finaldi also complained about buskers and living statues. “It would be nice for Trafalgar Square to become an attractive part of London,” he said. “It would be lovely to make it a place that works for us.” But is it a place that works for the public? “Yes,” says Adrian Robbins, from Wrexham. “I wouldn’t have stopped here if it wasn’t for the performers.” Would he be going into the National Gallery? “No, because I don’t have time.” Adrian and Martine Torjussen agree. “I think the performers and buskers add something,” says Adrian. The couple are up from Devon with their son, and have just been to the National Portrait Gallery. Martine draws an unfavourable comparison with the portrait gallery they had recently visited in Oslo. “They had an area where you could pick up pencils and papers and draw a portrait. And nice seating so that you could sit down and gaze at the pictures. Whereas here you feel like that you’re being processed through it as quickly as possible. That won’t bring us back in a hurry.” Just then a plangent voice and sweet guitar arrives on the icy wind. They belong to Wayne Aviri, a busker who’s been plying his trade on this concourse for the past three years. Did he think his streetcraft was getting in the way of great art? “No, I think if anything we attract people to the area. You’ve got people busking outside Tate Modern and it doesn’t stop people going there.” In fact, Tate Modern saw an 11% drop in visitors last year, but its sister institution Tate Britain recorded a 53% increase. The V&A also enjoyed a significant boost. Much of the variation is down to the popularity of particular exhibitions. For example, one reason the National Portrait Gallery seems to be in the doldrums is its bumper year in 2016, thanks to the Vogue exhibition. However the vast majority of exhibition-goers make a conscious decision to go to a specific show, rather than happen across a gallery and choose not to go in because of the quality of nearby street performers. A bearded artist on his knees, creating pavement graffiti constructed out of coins, makes the point with irrefutable logic: “Most people who are coming to visit the gallery are coming to visit the gallery.” Entranced by this gnomic street wisdom, I listen as he continues: “I would say that what goes on outside the building shouldn’t affect the experience inside the building.” Who is this towering sage? “I go by the name of Friend,” he says, sounding like a character from a morality play. But it turns out what he really wants to discuss is saving the planet. Reluctantly I excuse myself, and ask a security guard at the entrance to the National Gallery what she thinks about the idea that street perfomers are keeping visitors away. “I’m afraid I’m not allowed to talk to you,” she says. “You’ll have to speak to the press office.” Yes, but does she think it’s true? She shakes her head and pulls a face that seems to suggest that she’s never heard such nonsense. In any case, if some people had stayed away, would that be so bad? “To be honest,” Adrian said, “crowds would keep me away.” This, of course, is the holiday paradox: everyone wants to go to the deserted beach. And what most of us want from a gallery is a bit of space and time to appreciate the works. Later I spent a pleasurable hour taking in the National Gallery’s masterpieces, enhanced by the absence of throngs shouldering me along. Too often visiting a major exhibition is like filing past the tomb of a dictator a few days after his death. Perhaps, for art lovers, falling visitor numbers is to be celebrated. Emerging from my unhurried encounters with Caravaggio, Turner and Velázquez I could see David Shrigley’s giant sculpture of a human hand atop the fourth plinth. Its long thumb pointing triumphantly upwards. Suddenly even under the clouds, Trafalgar Square, street performers and all, looked really quite beautiful.

culture/2018/feb/10/street-artists-fine-art-galleries-battle-trafalgar-square

pillar/arts

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culture

Culture

article

2018-02-10T20:00:12Z

Street artists v fine art: the battle for Trafalgar Square

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/10/street-artists-fine-art-galleries-battle-trafalgar-square

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/10/the-surreal-success-of-mgmt-i-assumed-it-would-all-go-away-like-it-was-all-a-dream

MGMT were huge. The duo graced 2008 with three festival classics: Time to Pretend provided them with a manifesto, Kids an anthem and Electric Feel a floorfiller. Their synth-swathed astral indie seemed a logical progression from nu-rave’s MDMA epiphanies to tuning into the cosmos on LSD. They were part of a group of acts, which included Yeasayer, Passion Pit and Santogold, who went from Brooklyn warehouse infamy to suddenly proper on-David-Letterman famous. Along the way, they inspired a Gucci runway show and made hippy headbands a thing. Behind the scenes, however, the relationship between the two members was of complementary opposites: the analytical Ben Goldwasser and the free-spirited Andrew VanWyngarden. “It’s strange,” Simon O’Connor of fellow Brooklynites Amazing Baby told Rolling Stone in 2010. “There would be weeks where they didn’t even speak to each other. Then they’d spend a whole day writing in Ben’s room, and then go their separate ways again. They’re like a married couple that has really good sex but that’s it.” Despite the critical and commercial success of their debut, Oracular Spectacular, this odd couple didn’t want to play the rock star game. They refused to play Kids at their shows and followed that culture-shifting debut LP with two albums of purposefully oblique acid rock: Congratulations from 2010 featured a five-minute prog jam called Lady Dada’s Nightmare, while 2013’s MGMT was swiftly forgotten about. Now, after years of being out of sync, the oscillations of culture are again lining up with MGMT. On their new album, Little Dark Age, they have returned to the electro tinge of their debut at the moment the 00s are being revived (Electric Feel has endured a second life, being sampled by Frank Ocean and Beyoncé and covered by Katy Perry). And, crucially, the frosty relationship between band and audience has thawed. “On the last album, there was much more of a sense of laughing at, rather than with,” VanWyngarden tells me about their self-titled 2013 album, filled with ear-splitting production and washed-out Syd Barrett-esque melodies. “But we even say it on this one: ‘I’ll be laughing with you when you die.’” Exactly 10 years and one day since the release of Oracular Spectacular, we are sitting at Four & Twenty Blackbirds, the band’s favourite pie shop, a few blocks up from their Prospect Park rehearsal space. Goldwasser, who has arrived 15 minutes before his bandmate, adds shruggingly: “It wasn’t like we were in a bad mood making the [last album].” He lives in LA now and has flown into New York for rehearsals; VanWyngarden still lives in a house in Rockaway Beach, a far-off, terminally uncool quarter of the city, out near JFK. The pair don’t really greet each other. The body language is not overly moist. VanWyngarden, hunched on his stool, occasionally chews on a cuticle as he mulls over a question. He recommends the lemon chess pie (“It’s about half lemon and half chess”). Do you two ever hang out? “We’ve gone through different phases of hanging out and being, like, normal friends, and that’s not easy these days because Ben lives in LA,” says VanWyngarden. “He’s got a dog with a backyard, and I’m in Rockaway and so we’re not like staying together and walking through parking lots like we were at college. We’ve gone through times where we had disagreements or it’s been tense. But we rode it out and it seems good now.” If there’s one thing that unites them, they say, it’s a surreal sense of humour, “like, realising that some inanimate object looks like a face; I don’t know, something like that,” Goldwasser suggests, slightly mystifyingly. Still, a decade on from their debut there has been a fundamental crack in their relationship: they’re living three time zones apart and making albums by email. “Which is why we call our band the Postal Service,” VanWyngarden quips. It’s left to Beyoncé and Solange collaborator and former Chairlift member Patrick Wimberly, who co-produced their new album, to decode their functional dysfunctionality. “They’re not attached to each other because of contracts or obligations,” he explains via email. “They’ve tapped into a connection that encourages them both to dig deep into their own ideas. At times it seems like they have their own language.” In one way, their creative journey could be read as an ongoing attempt to get back to the Eden they shared as friends at Wesleyan, the famously liberal Connecticut college for brainiac artsy degenerates (also home to Vampire Weekend). They were both studying music and taking classes on esoteric sound design when an EP that included Kids and Time to Pretend made it into the hands of a label exec at Columbia. A month later, they were toasting their new contract with $24 bellinis in midtown Manhattan and demanding fur coats from their new bosses, and puppies on their rider, because “puppies are awesome”. Apt, given that Time to Pretend was a satirical yet wistful rubbishing of the rock star ideal (“Let’s make some music, make some money, find some models for wives,” they sang in unison. “I’ll move to Paris, shoot some heroin and fuck with the stars”). “That was the whole shtick of the band when we started,” Goldwasser says. “That we’d be playing in someone’s living room, wearing fur coats and drinking champagne in front of, like, 15 people.” (Not long after this piece of cosmic ordering, VanWyngarden dated two world-class models: Camille Rowe and Andreea Diaconu). The horizons were vast, but their success was so accidental that it seemed like one big mirage. “I was happy doing what we were doing,” Goldwasser recalls. “But I just … kind of, I didn’t think that it was going to turn into anything at that point. I kind of assumed it would all go away. Like it was all a dream.” Retreating to their own separate worlds on this new record seems to have helped creatively, carving a new comfort zone between pop and experimental. One song, TSLAMP, is a witty lament against “Time Spent Looking At My Phone”. VanWyngarden explains: “I’ve gotten so attached to my phone that it makes me really disappointed in myself. So it’s good to [not look at it].” Has he tried un-attaching himself? “I recently purchased a little coffin that fits a cellphone on eBay. I’ve tried to use that.” The state of the nation has also inspired their lyrics. “There’s a lot of stuff on the record relating to the last year,” VanWyngarden considers. “What Trump has done is just expose a whole lot of things that were there already. Like: is America bad? In When You Die, when we’re saying “I’m not that nice”, it’s owning up to existing in a modern United States of America: you’re kind of part of this evil whether you want to be or not.” The only question left is whether they can still include each other in their lives. They head up the block, to rehearsals for their short European tour, still not talking directly to each other but keen on getting back to work on the new material. There’s a sense of redemption. They’ve had their lemon chess pie. Now they may get to eat it, too. Little Dark Age is out now

culture/2018/feb/10/the-surreal-success-of-mgmt-i-assumed-it-would-all-go-away-like-it-was-all-a-dream

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-10T10:00:56Z

The surreal success of MGMT: 'I assumed it would all go away. Like it was all a dream'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/10/the-surreal-success-of-mgmt-i-assumed-it-would-all-go-away-like-it-was-all-a-dream

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/10/what-to-see-this-week-in-the-uk

Five of the best ... films Black Panther (12A) (Ryan Coogler, 2018, US) 134 mins With its African slant and huge expectations heaped upon it, this was always going to be more than just another superhero movie. It handles the burden responsibly with swagger, building its mythology around a secret, technologically advanced African nation whose king is faced with an epic, action-packed power struggle. Out from Tue. The Shape of Water (15) (Guillermo del Toro, 2017, US) 123 mins Del Toro crafts a lush, literally immersive, incurably romantic fantasia, riffing on vintage monster movies, Beauty and the Beast and, possibly, Free Willy. The setting is a cold war research lab, where Sally Hawkins’s mute cleaner forges an intimate bond with a captured fish-man creature. Out from Wednesday. Loveless (15) (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2017, Rus/Fra/Ger/Bel) 127 mins Russian heavyweight Zvyagintsev gives us another state-of-the-nation parable, whose interpretations will keep you engaged long after the film. At heart, it’s a portrait of an unhappy marriage. An upwardly mobile couple are completing an acrimonious divorce. Each has a new partner, and their young son is practically an inconvenience – even more so when he goes missing. The resultant search becomes a survey of a national spiritual crisis. Phantom Thread (15) (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017, US) 130 mins Gothic dread and haute couture mix beguilingly and give Daniel Day-Lewis another indelible character. His postwar-London dressmaker is fastidious and monstrously controlling, as his muse Vicky Krieps discovers. But she’s no compliant mannequin. Support from Lesley Manville and a Jonny Greenwood score complete the classy package. The Mercy (12A) (James Marsh, 2018, UK) 101 mins Colin Firth gives a sympathetic portrayal of yachtsman Donald Crowhurst, whose bid to win a round-the-world race in 1968 became an exercise in financial desperation, creative cheating and existential fragility. Rachel Weisz plays his loyal wife and a scene-stealing David Thewlis is his publicist. A Brexit metaphor? It’s a sobering deconstruction of British pluck. SR Five of the best ... rock & pop gigs Khalid Nineteen-year-old Khalid had a decent 2017: his debut album American Teen sold more than a million US copies; he toured and collaborated with Lorde; while his feature on rapper Logic’s 1-800-273-8255 earned him a UK Top 10 single. Sure, he missed out on the numerous Grammys he was nominated for, but this headline UK tour should help make up for it. Eventim Apollo, W6 Wednesday 14 & Thursday 15; touring to 18 February Anna of the North Despite appearances, Anna of the North is actually the work of two people (and, sadly, no cats): Norwegian singer-songwriter Anna Lotterud and New Zealand-born producer Brady Daniell-Smith. Last year’s debut album, Lovers, was a dreampop masterpiece while Lotterud has become an unexpected muse for the likes of Tyler, the Creator and Rejjie Snow. XOYO, EC2, Thursday 15 February Galantis Between them, Swedish dance duo Galantis, AKA producers Christian Karlsson and Linus Eklöw, have worked on gold-plated bangers for the likes of Britney, Charli XCX and Madonna. Together, they’ve not been too shabby in the bangers stakes either, as anyone who’s heard the ludicrous Peanut Butter Jelly at ear-splitting volume can confirm. If you fancy a night of sweaty EDM for Valentine’s, this could be ideal. Roundhouse, NW1, Wednesday 14; touring to 18 February Iron & Wine After dalliances with 70s MOR, jazz and blues on his last few albums, 2017’s Beast Epic saw the perma-bearded Sam Beam, AKA Iron & Wine (pictured, below), return to the folk flourishes of his earlier work. These shows all take place in mid-sized halls, hopefully with comfy chairs, warm cider and complimentary Aran knit cardigans. Birmingham, Tuesday 13; Dublin, Wednesday 14; Manchester, Thursday 15; London, Friday 16 February MC Matthew Read Trio When he won 2016’s classy Dankworth prize for jazz-orchestral composition, gifted UK newcomer Matthew Read confirmed he was the kind of double-bass player who gets the big picture. But Read’s formidable small-group skills are showcased on this long tour with Scofield/Frisell-influenced guitarist Benedict Wood and subtle drummer Arthur Newell. Maidstone, Saturday 10; Southampton, Sunday 11; Birmingham, Tuesday 13; London, Thursday 15; touring to 22 February JF Three of the best ... classical concerts Czech Philharmonic Orchestra The Czech Philharmonic was originally scheduled to tour this month under its much admired chief conductor Jiří Bělohlávek. But Bělohlávek died last year, and his place has been taken by one of the leading Czech conductors of the younger generation, Tomáš Netopil. Music by Dvořák predominates in the programmes, and the cellist Alisa Weilerstein appears as the soloist in most of them. Leeds Saturday 10; Bristol Sunday 11; Manchester Monday 12; Birmingham Wednesday 14; Nottingham Thursday 15; Basingstoke Friday 16; touring to 18 February Iolanthe Slowly but surely, English National Opera is working its way through the Gilbert and Sullivan canon. The new production of Iolanthe follows 2015’s Pirates of Penzance in being directed by an opera newbie: this time it’s theatre director Cal McCrystal, better known for his mastery of physical comedy. Samantha Price takes the title role, with Yvonne Howard as the Queen of the Fairies and Andrew Shore as the Lord Chancellor. London Coliseum, WC2, Tuesday 13 February to 7 April Principal Sound Two years ago, the first Principal Sound weekend focused on the works of Morton Feldman. There’s more Feldman in the latest series of concerts – Three Voices and Why Patterns? – but this time the featured composer is Luigi Nono. Several of Nono’s wonderfully spare late works get rare UK performances: A Pierre, for instruments and electronics, the solo piano …Sofferte Onde Serene…, and the string quartet homage to Hölderlin, Fragmente-Stille. St John’s Smith Square, SW1, Friday 16 to 18 February AC Five of the best ... exhibitions Mark Dion Natural history, archaeology and collecting inspire Dion’s installations. When Tate Modern was being created, he explored Bankside’s past to create the mudlarker’s cabinet of curiosities that appears here, along with a museum of surrealism and the ghosts of extinct species. Dion is Hirst with a conscience: his bizarre displays make us see our world. Whitechapel Gallery, E1 Wednesday 14 to 13 May Emil Nolde The intense landscapes of this early-20th-century German have a lurid sense of colour and a dark apocalyptic foreboding. Nolde is one of the giants of German expressionism but his life was twisted by the disasters of modern history. He both supported the Nazi party and saw his paintings mocked and banned by them. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, Wednesday 14 to 10 June Virginia Woolf Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse was inspired by a landscape near St Ives, Cornwall. Now, the pioneer of modernism is coming home in this exhibition that features artists including Gwen John, Dora Carrington (work pictured), Barbara Hepworth and Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell. Perhaps most suggestively, the surrealist masquerading of Claude Cahun is matched with Woolf’s novel of unstable gender, Orlando. Tate St Ives, Saturday 10 to 29 April The new Kettle’s Yard The collector Jim Ede created a uniquely intimate gallery of modern art where powerful abstract sculptures by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and mythic paintings by David Jones can be seen among the sofas, bookcases and kitchen of a cosy home. Kettle’s Yard also has a strong tradition of contemporary exhibitions and – reopening with expanded display spaces and public areas – it looks set to become an even more prominent presence. Cambridge, reopens Saturday 10 February David Milne There are hints of the 21st-century pastorals of Peter Doig in the woodland scenes and rustic dreams of this Canadian modern painter. Milne, who was born in 1882, seems to have been influenced by Edvard Munch in his distillation of nature into expressive images. His almost Scandinavian melancholy broods on tangled roots and winter forests. The experience of the first world war freights his art with broken meaning. Dulwich Picture Gallery, SE21, Wednesday 14 February to 7 May JJ Five of the best ... theatre shows The Ferryman Winner of best new play at the Critics’ Circle awards, and surely a shoo-in for the Oliviers in April, Jez Butterworth’s family drama, set in the farm kitchen of the Carney clan in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, is rich, dense and allusive. You feel as if you know every single one of these characters as well as your own family. Gielgud Theatre, W1 booking to 19 May The Brothers Size This debut play by Moonlight writer Tarell Alvin McCraney has lost none of its strange hypnotic power. It tells the story of two brothers: one solid, hard-working and dependable; the other, fresh out of jail and looking for a good time. This is starkly brilliant storytelling directed by Bijan Sheibani, exploring masculinity and blood ties. Young Vic, SE1, to Wednesday 14 February Jubilee Chris Goode’s stage version of Derek Jarman’s classic punk-era film stars Toyah Willcox, who played Mad in the original, as Elizabeth I. It is wildly entertaining, billing itself with a knowing leer as “an iconic film most of you have never heard of, adapted by an Oxbridge twat for a dying medium, spoiled by millennials, ruined by diversity, and constantly threatening to go interactive”. Not for the faint-hearted; definitely for the big of heart. Lyric Hammersmith, W6, Thursday 15 February to 10 March What If I Told You This remarkable show by Pauline Mayers is radical in every way. It gets us up on our feet, building the action both with and around us as Mayers tells of her life, entwining the autobiographical with a history lesson about 19th-century American gynaecologist J Marion Sims, who carried out experiments on female slaves without anaesthetic. Shockingly personal, searingly brave. West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, Tuesday 13 to 17 February Rita, Sue and Bob Too Plays are plastic: they change depending on the context. That’s the case with Andrea Dunbar’s 1980s piece, written when she was just 19, and telling of two schoolgirls’ relationship with a married man. Dunbar was that all too rare thing: a working-class female voice. Her play is beady-eyed and uncomfortably funny, particularly in the light of grooming scandals and the Harvey Weinstein revelations. Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, Tuesday 13 to 17 February LG Three of the best ... dance shows Phoenix Dance Theatre: Windrush – Movement of the People Marking the 70th anniversary of the arrival in Britain of the SS Windrush, Sharon Watson tells the story of Caribbean immigration. Set to an eclectic soundtrack, Watson’s first narrative dance work addresses not only the racism and poverty the Windrush generation encountered, but also their successes. West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds Sat; touring to 10 May Royal Ballet: The Winter’s Tale Christopher Wheeldon’s superbly visualised and sensitively reimagined setting of the Shakespeare play makes a welcome return to the London stage. The original cast open the run, with Edward Watson reprising his role as the tormented Leontes. Royal Opera House, WC2, Tue to 21 Mar Flamenco Festival London The Wells’s annual dose of Spanish fire returns with an intriguing lineup, including María Pagés’s anthem to liberated women, Yo, Carmen, and a collaboration between Isabel Bayón and Israel Galván exploring the dark side of flamenco. Sadler’s Wells, EC1, Wed to 25 Feb JM

culture/2018/feb/10/what-to-see-this-week-in-the-uk

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culture

Culture

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2018-02-10T09:00:55Z

What to see this week in the UK

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/10/what-to-see-this-week-in-the-uk

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/10/goodbye-lena-dunham-why-john-early-is-millennial-comedys-new-king

In one of the final episodes of subversive murder mystery series Search Party, John Early’s fantastically vainglorious character Elliott has an epiphany. He sits at the desk of his book publisher and addresses a room of staff who are impatiently waiting for a first draft of his autobiography. “Here’s the truth. I don’t want to work. I don’t like working. Work sucks,” he declares after a long, meditative sigh. “Working feels bad and I don’t ever want to work one more day in my entire life. Oh my God, it feels so good to say that!” Combined with his ridiculously contrarian outfit – a gaudy striped smock, a cream Sherlock cap and a pair of patterned swimming trunks – Elliott exudes the much-examined “millennial malaise”. A man exhausted by life, by expectations. Even the prospect of a ghostwritten book about his own life is a cruel distraction from the relaxation he believes he is entitled to. Early himself is far from the insolent fool he’s mastered so dexterously, even if the role was imagined by Search Party writers Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers with him specifically in mind. Elliott follows a succession of perversely entertaining performances from the standup and actor: cut-throat, body-rolling, amateur thespian Logan in Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later; the emotionally fraught, control-freak dinner party host in Netflix’s The Characters; the string of surreal, fame-hungry outliers in his Vimeo series 555; his short but scene-stealing appearances in Broad City, High Maintenance, 30 Rock and Judd Apatow’s Love. At a time when so much modern comedy is overwhelmed by coy stillness and naturalism (the most high-profile and influential example being Girls), Early’s cameos are bursts of joyful, elastic facial expressions and elaborate dance moves, an energy that follows in the footsteps of Amy Poehler and Kristen Wiig. It is because of his fresh approach to humour that the cult online comic, and now ever burgeoning mainstream presence, ushers in a new era of TV comedy. He is a reaction against the drifting mood that has engulfed screens for the past decade, and is, as Esquire neatly put it, “comedy’s secret weapon”. “In my 20s it was the dawn of the web series,” says a subdued Early over Skype from his apartment in LA. “I was watching people my age make mumblecore: gentle, gutless indie stuff with elegant framing and people with messy buns being like: ‘Hmm, I don’t know what to do today. I’m just going to eat a cupcake?’ That’s still happening today and it shocks me. There’s just a real lack of emotion in the content that my generation produces, and that’s what I have been reacting against.” Early was brought up in Nashville, Tennessee, by “really sweet, kind, liberal” parents; his father and mother both Presbyterian ministers. Although he went to church every week, it never did much for him. Early instead loved to perform. He believes he developed strong observational skills as a result of feeling quietly marginalised. “I grew up a sensitive, very nervous gay boy just observing the world as gay people do because they are often isolated and don’t understand why, so they are behind a wall watching straight people,” he says. “I grew up using comedy to express my rage. And discomfort with my situation and the world. God … ” he says drolly, “it’s a very earnest way of putting it all.” He also idolised huge comic characters such as John Waters and Amy Sedaris in Strangers With Candy, “things with real flair,” he says. “I always just assumed as I entered into my 20s and started making things with my friends that that’s the tradition we were going to continue in. At least gay people – aren’t we going to do that? I was shocked that show after show and web series after web series was the same thing: the urban life of people in their 20s and how they’re miserable and aimless. They have a bunch of nasty sex. They eat a bunch of pizza and talk about their guilt for eating pizza. It’s so boring!” In spite of his reticence towards millennial culture, Early certainly makes comedy that appeals to the switched-on, reference-heavy twentysomething demographic. He is wickedly on point when it comes to nuanced social commentary (“You look stunning,” he tells drag performer Hamm Samwich in one online video. “Do you think people get off on telling a drag queen they look stunning, as a way of proving how evolved and progressive they are? Because I certainly do”). His performances are digital catnip for a generation who spent their teen years flicking between MTV and trashy emotional dramas such as The OC; his deep-rooted preoccupation with pop culture from the 90s and 00s rippling through many of his funniest moments (perhaps his most impressive talent is his frighteningly accurate, extraordinarily nasal impression of Britney Spears). He also crunches his humour into Instagram posts: his over-enthused parodies of manic Republican supporters (sample: “Rest in peace Roger Ailes! Quite literally getting choked up thinking about your passing as well as your legacy of sexual violence!”) got him a spot on Jimmy Fallon. Michael Showalter, comedy linchpin and co-creator of Wet Hot American Summer and Search Party describes Early’s comedy as being so “funny and slightly off the wall” that it provides a welcome distraction from current events. “But he’s also very aware of what’s going on in the world,” he says. “It allows him this ability to comment on society in a tongue-in-cheek way that people are open to because they’re laughing so hard.” While many of his characters mirror the ugly side of reality, Early is keen to make his creations as aesthetically lush and fantastical as possible. He believes the autonomy of self-publishing has left comedy-makers less ambitious visually, when the liberation of the modern era should have allowed for imagination and risk-taking. It’s part of the reason why his new Hulu pilot sounds so exciting. After years of adding to a vault of DIY videos on YouTube (highlights include Paris, a video about the superiority of having visited Paris, and Sex, a nauseating black-and-white therapy session), he and his comedy wife Kate Berlant have made This Is Heaven, a sitcom he describes as “like Absolutely Fabulous, Romy and Michele … it’s like candy.” “It’s based on our very real friendship dynamic. Kate and I are true romantics and when we met each other it was like the closest thing I’ve ever had to a proper boyfriend,” Early explains. “We slept in the same bed for two years basically. [The show is] based on these two friends, Roger and Eva, who are inseparable and really love each other. It’s true musical comedy; one’s the leader and one’s the follower but we also look incredible. That was the goal: make something that’s deeply silly and accessible but we look like gods. Kate’s hair has diamonds in it and I have waves in my hair. It’s all very heightened. Everyone is glowing.” The show hasn’t been greenlit just yet, but amid the current sludge of whimsical, vignette-like shows such as Master of None and Easy, you hope Hulu makes the right decision. Before then, however, the slow-burning success of All4’s Search Party – and its plot about a group of hopeless hipsters who get embroiled in a murder and deal with the repercussions of being affiliated with something truly harrowing rather than just running late for bottomless brunch – should help push things forward. A discussion about millennial comedy would be incomplete without mentioning Girls, a show that was at the time boundary-pushing, but has since spawned multiple spin-offs. Some move the genre forward (Brown Girls, High Maintenance), others slump in a meandering netherworld (Be Here Nowish, Srsly), but all are entrenched in unflinching self-analysis. “Girls started a conversation about that,” says Early on the state of the narcissistic side of contemporary comedy. “It started a cultural obsession with that and it’s why it’s truly pioneering but I think part of Search Party’s job, whether they intended it or not, was to end it. I think there’s a larger allegory happening [in Search Party] which is putting these archetypes through a life-or-death situation where there are very real consequences and they are suffering. I think it’s really smart and brutal and I do think it ends the conversation.” Before our own conversation ends, discussion moves on to Early’s internet addiction, delving into toxic YouTube comments and, recently, his horror on receiving a 10-year anniversary notification from Facebook. “I got Facebook when I was 19. I’ve realised: oh cool! I spent the entirety of my 20s on Facebook, for six hours of my day. Ten years of my sexual prime. I took my sexual prime and I put it in a paper shredder. I donated my sexual prime to Facebook. This is horrifying.” Perhaps there is still room for a bit of millennial malaise after all. Search Party is available to watch on All4 now.

culture/2018/feb/10/goodbye-lena-dunham-why-john-early-is-millennial-comedys-new-king

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2018-02-10T07:00:52Z

Goodbye Lena Dunham! Why John Early is millennial comedy’s new king

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/10/goodbye-lena-dunham-why-john-early-is-millennial-comedys-new-king

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/09/late-night-hosts-on-rob-porter

Late-night hosts discussed the domestic violence accusations leveled against White House staff secretary Rob Porter and former West Wing staffer Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s appearance on Celebrity Big Brother. Stephen Colbert “Under Donald Trump, terrifying news comes from the darnedest places,” Stephen Colbert began. “The latest is from tonight’s new episode of Celebrity Big Brother.” “One of the celebrity roommates on this season of Celebrity Big Brother is former White House adviser and woman-with-some-notes-for-the-guy-making-her-salad, Omarosa Manigault-Newman,” the host continued, showing footage of Omarosa talking with Big Brother roommate Ross Matthews about the experience of working in Trump’s administration. In the clip, Omarosa confesses she was “haunted by tweets every single day”. “Oh, really?” Colbert said sarcastically. “But the most upsetting part was this exchange about the state of the nation.” In another clip, Omarosa tells Matthews that under Trump the country is “not going to be OK.” “Yeah, I believe you,” Colbert said. “I had an inkling things were not going to be OK when Trump hired Omarosa to work in the White House.” Trevor Noah Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah discussed the resignation of Rob Porter, who was accused by two ex-wives of domestic abuse. “Today, the thing we’ve got to talk about is this,” Noah said, showing news coverage of the allegations against Porter, which appeared in the Intercept and the Daily Mail and are corroborated by photos of one of Porter’s ex-wives, Colbie Holderness, showing her with a black eye shortly after a trip to Florence with Porter. Porter’s second wife, Jennifer Willoughby, also alleges he physically and verbally abused her. “You know, every time I think I’ve reached the highest level of disgust with this administration, I’m right, but then they invent another level,” Noah went on. “I miss the days when White House staffers got fired for fun stuff: Spicey couldn’t talk, the Mooch couldn’t shut up, Steve Bannon couldn’t shower.” Noah continued: “This story hits me hard because not only did the White House have a domestic abuser in its midst, a lot of the people there, especially chief of staff and alleged ‘adult in the room’ John Kelly, just ignored it for months.” The host then briefly explained Porter’s job as staff secretary, which was to oversee the flow of information and documents to Trump’s desk. “I’m sorry, man,” the host said. “If your job is to bring reading materials to a guy who doesn’t read, then that’s not much of a job. It’s like being Kevin Spacey’s agent.” “It seems like every day now someone else is leaving the Trump administration,” Noah concluded. “They either mistreated women or they were too racist or too crazy or just completely unqualified. Fortunately, there’s still one job in government where none of that seems to matter.” Seth Meyers Finally, NBC’s Seth Meyers discussed continuing negotiations over the legal status of the Dreamers and the White House’s defense of Porter. “You’ve got the president ordering military parades, calling his political opponents treasonous for not applauding him, and spreading conspiracy theories to undermine a federal investigation,” Meyers said, in a brief summary of the week’s headlines. “Leaders in the Senate yesterday reached a deal to keep the government open, but that agreement did not include a fix for Dreamers, the young undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children, and whose lives were cruelly thrown into limbo when Trump ended the program,” he continued. “To protest the fact that the deal doesn’t include a solution for Dreamers, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi took to the House floor yesterday to give an unprecedented eight-hour speech.” Meyers then discussed how Trump has made Pelosi his de facto opponent ahead of the 2018 midterms, attacking her at a speech in Ohio earlier this week and claiming she is the GOP’s “secret weapon”. He went on: “The Trump White House’s misogyny and hostility towards women were once again on display this week when administration officials initially defended the White House staff secretary, Rob Porter, after he was accused by two ex-wives of domestic abuse.” Meyers noted that Porter’s ex-wives approached the FBI about his misconduct and that the White House was aware of the accusations for months and proceeded to defend Porter. “This is a White House that’s repeatedly chosen the denials of men over the many corroborating stories of women,” Meyers said, “whether it’s in the case of Roy Moore, Cory Lewandowski, or Trump himself.”

culture/2018/feb/09/late-night-hosts-on-rob-porter

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2018-02-09T17:28:56Z

Late-night hosts on Rob Porter: 'Alleged adult-in-the-room John Kelly ignored it'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/09/late-night-hosts-on-rob-porter

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/09/from-avril-lavigne-to-justin-timberlake-what-do-pop-stars-mean-by-the-real-me

Avril Lavigne raised eyebrows recently when she described her forthcoming album as “personal, dear, intimate, dramatic, raw, powerful, strong and unexpected”. The only surprise, though, was how much Lavigne was underselling it. All albums are intimate and raw these days, and today’s pop stars will stop at nothing to convince you of it, using language that’s a strange mix of Instagram poetry, W1A set-piece and advert for unwearable perfume – preferably their own. Take the video trailer for Justin Timberlake’s latest, Man of the Woods. Billed as a return to his Tennessee roots, don’t you dare go thinking this is Justin cashing in on how white he is in the iffy goldmine that is Trumpian America, after spending the best part of two decades single-white-femaling Michael Jackson. It’s much, much less than that. “It feels like mountains, trees, campfires,” purrs Timberlake’s wife, Jessica Biel. “It feels so earthy!” croaks the inevitable Pharrell, over montages of Justin looking moody in plaid. Basically, it has all the pregnant promise of a good old-fashioned southern lynching, but co-sponsored by Jim Beam and Jack Wills. In fairness, Timberlake has got one thing right: nothing says “personal” more than drifting through bucolic fields. Last autumn, Jessie J uploaded a video featuring her wafting around in a sub-Terrence Malick meadow, a trailer for her latest effort, R.O.S.E.. This apparently stood for Realisations, Obsessions, Sex, Empowerment. Rose is also her mum’s name, which at least makes for one hell of a spicy Electra complex. Anyway, J spends a whole three minutes and 54 seconds explaining all this, which is quite impressive; the length of an actual song telling us about other proper songs, which we’ll presumably get to once she’s muttered lots of things like “I feel everything so deeply” and “I just gave someone my magic, and they didn’t look after it.” Sometimes, of course, less is so much more. A while back, Britney Spears promised that her eighth album Britney Jean was “going to be my most personal album ever :-)”. Fans knew it was coming: after all, her most recent release had been the excoriating Ooh La La, from the soundtrack to The Smurfs 2. Britney went on to explain further: “I am a performer. I am a mom. I am funny. I am your friend!” Never has one exclamation mark seemed quite so deeply Black Mirror. Bless Lavigne, in any case. Surely she knows that no one listens to full albums now anyway? It’s more likely one of her “unexpected” offerings will end up on some generic “Friday Bangers!” playlist, sandwiched between Ed Sheeran and a Kygo remix. And really, why be sad? For most of us, that’s the true emotional journey of 2018.

culture/2018/feb/09/from-avril-lavigne-to-justin-timberlake-what-do-pop-stars-mean-by-the-real-me

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2018-02-09T13:00:04Z

From Lavigne to Timberlake: what do pop stars mean by the ‘real me’

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/09/from-avril-lavigne-to-justin-timberlake-what-do-pop-stars-mean-by-the-real-me

['avril', 'lavigne', 'raised', 'eyebrows', 'recently', 'described', 'forthcoming', 'album', 'personal', 'dear', 'intimate', 'dramatic', 'raw', 'powerful', 'strong', 'unexpected', 'surprise', 'though', 'much', 'lavigne', 'underselling', 'albums', 'intimate', 'raw', 'days', 'today', 'pop', 'stars', 'stop', 'nothing', 'convince', 'using', 'language', 'strange', 'mix', 'instagram', 'poetry', 'w1a', 'set-piece', 'advert', 'unwearable', 'perfume', 'preferably', 'take', 'video', 'trailer', 'justin', 'timberlake', 'latest', 'man', 'woods', 'billed', 'return', 'tennessee', 'roots', 'dare', 'go', 'thinking', 'justin', 'cashing', 'white', 'iffy', 'goldmine', 'trumpian', 'america', 'spending', 'best', 'part', 'two', 'decades', 'single-white-femaling', 'michael', 'jackson', 'much', 'much', 'less', 'feels', 'like', 'mountains', 'trees', 'campfires', 'purrs', 'timberlake', 'wife', 'jessica', 'biel', 'feels', 'earthy', 'croaks', 'inevitable', 'pharrell', 'montages', 'justin', 'looking', 'moody', 'plaid', 'basically', 'pregnant', 'promise', 'good', 'old-fashioned', 'southern', 'lynching', 'co-sponsored', 'jim', 'beam', 'jack', 'wills', 'fairness', 'timberlake', 'got', 'one', 'thing', 'right', 'nothing', 'says', 'personal', 'drifting', 'bucolic', 'fields', 'last', 'autumn', 'jessie', 'j', 'uploaded', 'video', 'featuring', 'wafting', 'around', 'sub-terrence', 'malick', 'meadow', 'trailer', 'latest', 'effort', 'rose', 'apparently', 'stood', 'realisations', 'obsessions', 'sex', 'empowerment', 'rose', 'also', 'mum', 'name', 'least', 'makes', 'one', 'hell', 'spicy', 'electra', 'complex', 'anyway', 'j', 'spends', 'whole', 'three', 'minutes', 'seconds', 'explaining', 'quite', 'impressive', 'length', 'actual', 'song', 'telling', 'us', 'proper', 'songs', 'presumably', 'get', 'muttered', 'lots', 'things', 'like', 'feel', 'everything', 'deeply', 'gave', 'someone', 'magic', 'look', 'sometimes', 'course', 'less', 'much', 'back', 'britney', 'spears', 'promised', 'eighth', 'album', 'britney', 'jean', 'going', 'personal', 'album', 'ever', '-', 'fans', 'knew', 'coming', 'recent', 'release', 'excoriating', 'ooh', 'la', 'la', 'soundtrack', 'smurfs', 'britney', 'went', 'explain', 'performer', 'mom', 'funny', 'friend', 'never', 'one', 'exclamation', 'mark', 'seemed', 'quite', 'deeply', 'black', 'mirror', 'bless', 'lavigne', 'case', 'surely', 'knows', 'one', 'listens', 'full', 'albums', 'anyway', 'likely', 'one', 'unexpected', 'offerings', 'end', 'generic', 'friday', 'bangers', 'playlist', 'sandwiched', 'ed', 'sheeran', 'kygo', 'remix', 'really', 'sad', 'us', 'true', 'emotional', 'journey']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/09/dippy-dinosaur-unveiled-dorset-first-leg-uk-tour

For more than a century Dippy the dinosaur amazed and inspired visitors to the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London. On Friday, the diplodocus skeleton cast was unveiled 130 miles away near the Jurassic Coast at the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester on the first stage of an eight-stop tour of the UK. Five million people are expected to see Dippy over the next two years at venues ranging from the Welsh assembly to Norwich Cathedral. Sir Michael Dixon, the director of the NHM, said the idea was to make Dippy accessible to as many people as possible. “We wanted Dippy to visit unusual locations so he can draw in people who may not traditionally visit a museum,” he said. “Dippy has a special place in all our hearts – few museum objects are better known, and fewer still can better evoke the awesome diversity of species that have lived on earth.” It has been quite a journey already for Dippy. The plaster of paris cast was dismantled and removed from the NHM’s Hintze Hall in January 2017. It took just over three weeks for conservationists and engineers to carefully remove, label and clean each bone. It was decided that a new mount and base would allow engineers to quickly and easily dismantle and reassemble the dinosaur skeleton at each tour venue. A Canadian firm was chosen to carry out this work and Dippy’s 292 bones were shipped across the Atlantic in 13 crates. In December, Dippy returned to the UK and has been carefully put back together in Dorchester. It is no simple task – the full skeleton in its displayed pose is 26 metres (85ft) long, and more than 4 metres high and wide. It squeezed into the space at the Dorset museum with just 10cm to spare. The director of the Dorset County Museum, Jon Murden, said the town was agog with excitement. “As the birthplace of palaeontology, there is nowhere in the UK more appropriate for Dippy to start his tour than Dorset, and we’re thrilled to have been chosen as the first host venue.” Harry Swift, 11, from Eastleigh in Hampshire, completed the installation of the Dippy cast by putting a toe in place. He declared himself “excited and amazed” and declared the diplodocus his joint favourite dinosaur (along with the spinosaurus). Dippy will visit Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and five regions across England. In chronological order it will be shown at: · Dorset County Museum, Dorchester · Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery · Ulster Museum, Belfast · Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow · Great North Museum: Hancock, Newcastle upon Tyne · National Assembly for Wales, Cardiff · Number One Riverside, Rochdale · Norwich Cathedral Dippy arrived in London in 1905. During the second world war the skeleton was relocated to the basement to protect it from bomb damage. In 1979, the diplodocus made the move to Hintze Hall but in the summer of 2017, Hope, a blue whale skeleton, took centre stage in the hall. Dippy’s long-term future is unclear. The arrival of Hope is seen as a chance for the NHM to reposition itself from an institution that looks after dusty old bones to one that stresses the urgent need to conserve the natural world. A spokesperson said: “Dippy is a permanent part of the collection and therefore the museum will always have a duty of care for the cast. The museum is open-minded to future opportunities to displaying Dippy back in London, and elsewhere.”

culture/2018/feb/09/dippy-dinosaur-unveiled-dorset-first-leg-uk-tour

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2018-02-09T10:03:33Z

Dippy the dinosaur unveiled in Dorset on first leg of UK tour

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/09/dippy-dinosaur-unveiled-dorset-first-leg-uk-tour

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/08/part-of-monster-sewer-fatberg-goes-on-display-at-london-museum

Its aroma was once a mix of rotting meat and a toddler’s nappy that had been left out for months, but it has now, mercifully, calmed down. “At the moment it smells like dirty toilets,” said Sharon Robinson-Calver, who has led the conservation team at the Museum of London for one of its most challenging and unusual projects. The museum will on Friday unveil a display of the last remaining piece of a monster fatberg discovered last September in sewers under Whitechapel. It has been slowly air dried. While visitors will not be able to smell it they might get to see a drain fly, given that there is larvae still in the sample. “They seem quite happy,” said Robinson-Calver. “They’ve got a good food source. They pop out and fly around from time to time, which will be fascinating for visitors. It is part of the mystery of the fatberg, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.” The sample was part of a sewer-blocking fatberg that made headlines last year, weighing 130 tonnes, the equivalent of 11 double decker buses and stretching more than 250 metres, six metres longer than Tower Bridge. The solid calcified mass of fats, oils, faeces, wet wipes and sanitary products tells us something about how we live. “Here at the museum we are all about reflecting the real lived experience of Londoners and it is part of our season exploring the highs and lows of London city life,” said Vyki Sparkes, the curator of social and working history. “I don’t think you can get much lower than a fatberg.” She said it was like a “black mirror … it reflects the dark side of ourselves”. There are two cases of fatberg samples on display. One sample has crumbled into what resemble large truffles. The other is the size of a shoebox and is more intact because it was dried more slowly. It has an other-worldy look; it could be a piece of moon rock or debris from a meteor. Its alien nature is heightened by a strange purple and orange tag. “That’s a Double Decker wrapper,” said Robinson-Calver. “It is kind of the only thing which makes it recognisable and contemporary.” Curators and conservators have had to learn new skills to put the sample on display, choosing drying rather than pickling or freezing. “There are no guidelines for museums to work with sewage,” admitted Sparkes. “Nobody has conserved one of these before. We don’t really know how it is going to behave over the long term.” The Whitechapel fatberg was a colossal thing, giving off hydrogen sulphide and carbon monoxide, both toxic and flammable gases, and some visitors may be disappointed that the sample is not bigger. Sparkes said a larger piece would have been impossible. It had to be blasted off using high-powered jet hoses, carried through the sewer and lifted through a small manhole. “To be honest, I’m hoping people will come, realise the amount of work and the risks and be amazed that there is any of it.” The display also tells a more positive story, revealing that fatbergs can and have been converted into biodiesel, and is one of the fuels powering the No 24 London bus route between Pimlico and Hampstead. Sparkes admitted that the display may not be for all tastes. “Not everyone will want to come to see the fatberg, it will be too disgusting, too gross to think about,” she said. It has been deliberately put in a sewer-dark room that people can choose to enter or not. Either way, the museum is expecting lots of interest and has come up with fatberg merchandise, including T-shirts, tote bags and badges. There is also fatberg fudge – quite crumbly, with a piquant rum and raisin flavour. Fatberg! A free display at the Museum of London, London Wall EC2, 9 February - 1 July

culture/2018/feb/08/part-of-monster-sewer-fatberg-goes-on-display-at-london-museum

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2018-02-08T16:25:45Z

Part of monster sewer fatberg goes on display at London museum

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/08/part-of-monster-sewer-fatberg-goes-on-display-at-london-museum

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/08/late-night-hosts-trump-military-parade-bingo

Late-night hosts on Wednesday discussed reports that Donald Trump wants to hold a military parade and the rightwing media’s smear campaign against the FBI. Stephen Colbert: ‘He’s the Usain Bolt of stupid’ “We kid the president, but you’ve got to admit he is one of a kind,” Stephen Colbert began. “No one comes up with dumber ideas. He’s the Usain Bolt of stupid. His latest, record-setting dumb: Trump told the Pentagon to plan a military parade.” “Check your cards,” Colbert joked. “Who has dictator bingo?” “Traditionally, America doesn’t do military parades,” he continued. “When you’re the most powerful military in the world, you don’t need to show it off. The founding fathers didn’t want a standing army at all, and military parades were a European fetish. And not the kind that Ben Franklin got off on.” Trump reportedly got the idea after seeing last year’s Bastille Day celebration in Paris. “Oh my gosh, he’s like an exchange student who just got back from Europe and keeps calling gas petrol,” Colbert said. Colbert then further detailed the Washington Post report, which says Trump brought up the idea in the Pentagon’s “tank”, a room reserved for top-secret discussions. “Keep in mind this is a room where they make big decisions like, do we got to war,” Colbert said, before imagining the exchange between Trump and his advisers. “Sir, Kim Jong-un is fueling his rockets on the launchpad. Do we engage with a first strike to cripple his command and control?” “Uh huh, sounds good,” the host said, impersonating Trump. “General Kelly, I need you to go to Party City and get some red, white and blue streamers, some crazy stars, a hot glue gun, and some rickrack. We’re making a float.” Samantha Bee: ‘I assume he paid that memo $130,000’ Samantha Bee discussed rightwing media’s reaction to the release of the Nunes memo. She began: “While some of us were worried about the threat of having our faces melted off in a wave of nuclear heat, the media were distracted by the news cycle’s latest shiny, sweaty object, Republican congressman and first-guy-to-get-whacked-in-every-mafia-movie, Devin Nunes.” “None of the revelations in the three-and-a-half-page document were that shocking, but this kind of was,” Bee continued, noting a report that said, before its release, Trump was “left alone” with the memo to read it privately. “Left alone with the memo for several hours?” she said. “Then I assume he paid that memo $130,000, and no one but Donald and the memo will ever know what happened in that room.” Bee then detailed some of the responses to the memo on Fox News, including broadcasters that called it the biggest corruption scandal in American history and proof of an FBI conspiracy against Trump. “I haven’t heard Fox News be this anti-law enforcement since they had to grapple with The Mysteries of Laura,” the host joked. “But you know what? I’m glad you guys got woke. If you’re suddenly concerned about the FBI spying on American citizens, you are going to be outraged to learn that it’s not just Putin superfans like Carter Page. They also spy on other Americans.” The host then discussed the bureau’s crackdown on what they call “black identity extremists”, a new government classification for domestic terror threats. “Yes, there are people in the video saying reprehensible things about cops,” Bee said. “But as long as they’re not specific threats, our first amendment protects people who say horrible things. That’s why I can say the president fucked a memo, but I can’t say I’m going to fuck the president with a memo, and I never would.” “To recap, the FBI is criminalizing being black and angry, chilling free speech and ignoring reasonable requests for information from black congresswomen,” Bee concluded. “Hey guys, tell me again how the FBI is an organization of leftwing, Hillary Clinton-loving hippies. Because it sounds to me like they fit right in to the Trump administration.” Trevor Noah: ‘Trump’s really excited about getting to play with the army’ Trevor Noah of Comedy Central also weighed in on Trump’s desired military parade. “America doesn’t need a big parade to convince the world that it has a military,” he began. “Trust me, the world knows America has a military. It’s in their countries right now.” “Although Trump is really excited about getting to play with the army like they’re GI Joes, luckily most people are adults,” Noah continued, showing various lawmakers denouncing the idea and even a Fox News anchor calling it a waste of money. “You know it’s bad when even Fox News thinks it’s a waste of money,” Noah said. “They’re like: ‘You can’t spend that much on a parade, you need to save it for sexual harassment settlements!’” Noah continued: “Look, a military parade doesn’t mean Trump is going to be a dictator. But when you look at everything else, your spider-sense starts to tingle.” The host then invoked Trump’s firing FBI director James Comey, his accusations of voter fraud in the 2016 election, and his statement earlier this week that Democrats who didn’t applaud his State of the Union speech were “treasonous”. “He even gave top government jobs to his own kids. None of this took us by surprise. The whole time Trump as running for president he couldn’t stop talking about how much he admired strongmen around the world,” Noah said, showing footage of Trump applauding Rodrigo Duterte’s handling of drug users in the Philippines and calling Kim a “smart cookie”.

culture/2018/feb/08/late-night-hosts-trump-military-parade-bingo

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-08T16:23:12Z

Late-night hosts on Trump's military parade: 'Who has dictator bingo?'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/08/late-night-hosts-trump-military-parade-bingo

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https://content.guardianapis.com/society/2018/feb/08/rolex-mentor-and-protege-arts-initiative

The crowd wandering through Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie may look like any other bunch of gallery-goers keeping out of the snow on a Saturday afternoon. Seasoned culture vultures, however, would recognise that the lanky, shaven-headed man in an Adidas jacket is choreographer Wayne McGregor; that the Irishman in an overcoat is novelist Colm Tóibín; and that the energetic, white-haired woman in glasses is Joan Jonas, who this spring will show five decades’ worth of groundbreaking work in her first Tate Modern retrospective in London. Also in town are the likes of architect David Adjaye, cultural theorist Homi K Bhabha, theatre director Selina Cartmell, as well as the artist and opera director William Kentridge. Why are they all here? Well, most of them are currently looking at work by Thao-Nguyen Phan, a 30-year-old Vietnamese artist few, if any, will have previously heard of. Phan’s exhibition is the first of a weekend of events organised by Rolex, as part of its Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Every two years, after scouring the world for talent, the company pairs an established artist with an up-and-coming one, usually from a different country. An idea that would have been familiar to the old masters, the hope is that the younger artist can learn from – and perhaps collaborate with – the elder over the course of a couple of years. As well as those mentioned above, the current crop of mentors include Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón, composer Philip Glass, Mozambican writer Mia Couto, theatre director Robert Lepage, architect David Chipperfield and choreographer Ohad Naharin. Rolex’s only stipulation is that the artists spend a minimum of six weeks together. The firm gives 100,000 Swiss francs (£76,650) to each mentor and 40,000 to the proteges. It also funds travel and expenses, which all adds up to a hefty sum, given the global nature of the enterprise. “It’s very open,” says Kentridge, who mentored the Colombian artist Mateo López in 2012. “If we’d said, ‘Actually we want to spend three weeks in the Antarctic on a cruise’, Rolex would have done that.” Kentridge, like the 100 or so other mentors and proteges who have participated in the scheme so far, gets invited back every couple of years for weekends like the one I am attending in Berlin. Here, mentors introduce work they and their proteges have made, or discuss how the process worked if there’s nothing that can be shown. The event concludes with a lavish dinner ceremony as the proteges are sent off into the world. Many have gone on to achieve considerable success. Ben Frost, mentored by Brian Eno in 2010, has taken his particular brand of extreme noise terror everywhere from Netflix’s Dark to an opera adaptation of The Wasp Factory. Naomi Alderman, mentored by Margaret Atwood in 2012, won the Baileys prize five years later. The previous arts weekend was in Mexico City, while 2012’s took place in Venice. Given that everyone is flown in from around the world and put up at a five-star hotel, it’s easy to see the appeal of returning. But there are also opportunities to meet old friends and strike up new collaborations – with the incentive that Rolex will stump up another 30,000 for a follow-up project. Stephen Frears mentored the Peruvian film-maker Josué Méndez in 2006. “It’s a safe environment,” says Méndez. “There’s time, which is the most precious thing. They’re building this community. It’s a really nice family.” Though he has lost touch with Frears, Méndez is developing a TV script with the Colombian writer Antonio García Ángel, a protege who was mentored by the Peruvian Nobel-winner Mario Vargas Llosa. There’s no way of applying for the scheme: instead, experts amass a list of two dozen or so likely candidates in each genre, whittle this to three, then present the final trio to the relevant mentor, who spends time with them before reaching a decision. Cuarón stipulated that he wanted “a woman from the third world” to mentor, though he ended up with a man, the Indian film-maker Chaitanya Tamhane. Cuarón realised Tamhane was a better fit for his forthcoming film Roma, an arthouse black-and-white work that contains plenty of Cuarón’s famed technical aplomb. “One film-maker was doing stuff in Super 8. Her stuff is fantastic – it’s just her arrival to a set, with all the toys and tools I’m working with, was going to be a bit irrelevant for her process.” What made Jonas choose Phan? “I thought her paintings were really beautiful and interesting,” she says, adding that she was also “very happy to give a woman the opportunity to show her work outside of Vietnam, to be exposed. I know from experience that young artists who are men have a slightly easier time than women.” Rebecca Irvin, Rolex’s head of philanthropy, says the project’s diversity is largely due to the mentors and the international nature of the programme (artists have come from 34 countries to date). “Certain mentors will say, ‘I want to help young film-makers from Asia and Africa.’ We don’t have quotas, we’re not following some kind of political agenda, it’s happening organically.” Not everyone gets the memo, however: there are grumbles about the all-white, middle-aged and male panel led by Chipperfield to discuss urban planning, especially when at the end a woman in the audience gets up to ask a question and it’s decided that there isn’t time to squeeze it in. There’s also the question of what Rolex gets out of it. Palestinian film-maker Annemarie Jacir was mentored by Zhang Yimou in 2010 as he made The Flowers of War, which required trips to China and a translator, all provided by the firm. Nonetheless, Jacir says that – even after further support for her film Wajib, Palestine’s entry for best foreign-language film at this year’s Oscars – Rolex’s money comes without strings attached. “With other companies that do this kind of thing,” she says, “it’s all about putting their name out there, about branding. I have not had that feeling with Rolex.” So the lead character didn’t have to wear a big Rolex? “Exactly!” says Jacir. “They don’t ask that I wear one everywhere. When they supported my film, they didn’t have any conditions. I put a thank you in the credits, but they didn’t ask. That is very unusual. Everybody else – you get $1,000 and you have to have their logo.” Other projects shown over the Berlin weekend include a four-screen reinvention of Macbeth by Argentine theatre director Matías Umpierrez, starring his mentor Lepage; and a discussion between Mia Couto and his protege, the Brazilian Julián Fuks. The talks and performances conclude with the Peruvian musician Pauchi Sasaki, who emerges into the auditorium of the Deutches Theater wearing a dress covered in speakers, after an introduction by Philip Glass. What did the minimalist musical pioneer advise her about? “The practicalities of the music world, how to navigate the business part – how do you make a living?” Glass said he wanted a protege as he himself had once been in such a role, when as a young man he assisted sitar player and composer Ravi Shankar on a film score in the 60s: “He was very important to me.” With former mentors including Martin Scorsese and David Hockney, and Adjaye, Tóibín, Indian tabla master Zakir Hussain and choreographer Crystal Pite signed up for the next cycle, it’s no wonder that Umpierrez and Tamhane had for years hoped to get on to the scheme. Yet it’s not just the prestige and generous budgets that appeal to the mentors – or, indeed, the watch Irvin says they may be given as a gift “if they do a good job”. It’s the opportunity to engage with a younger generation. As Cuarón says, to remain relevant as an artist, “you have to connect with the young masters who teach you the new lessons of cinema”. Otherwise, he adds, you end up being like Billy Wilder, a once-transgressive film-maker who “could not jump into the revolution of the 60s, and the last few of his films were kind of irrelevant. He was completely out of touch.” The older artists also produce work during the process: Jonas made a video while travelling with Phan in Vietnam, which will form part of an installation in her Tate show. Phan is 50 years younger than Jonas, though the Vietnamese artist says: “I think she has more energy and more creativity than me.” The two will continue to collaborate after the scheme: Phan is in a collective of Vietnamese artists, and Jonas will make a work with them to show in Pittsburgh this year. Sitting with Umpierrez, Lepage says the scheme provides a “fountain of youth” for older artists who have inevitably lost the bullishness of their hungry years. “We’re all full of doubt,” he says. “The more you know, the less you’re sure of. At a younger age, you know less but you’re more confident, and that’s very uplifting. That’s why you hang on to younger people who say, ‘Go all the way.’”

society/2018/feb/08/rolex-mentor-and-protege-arts-initiative

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-08T06:00:19Z

Is this woman the next Philip Glass? And why is she wearing a loudspeaker?

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/feb/08/rolex-mentor-and-protege-arts-initiative

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'full', 'doubt', 'says', 'know', 'less', 'sure', 'younger', 'age', 'know', 'less', 'confident', 'uplifting', 'hang', 'younger', 'people', 'say', 'go', 'way']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/07/late-night-hosts-tv-trump-treason-racist

Late-night hosts on Tuesday addressed the White House’s defence of Donald Trump’s “treason” claim, and Donald Trump Jr’s response to critics who say his father is racist. Stephen Colbert: ‘Legal analysis from No, Shit and Sherlock’ “According to sources at the White House, Donald Trump’s lawyers are telling him to refuse an interview with Robert Mueller,” said Stephen Colbert, going on to quote a New York Times report that read “because the president, who has a history of making false statements and contradicting himself, could be charged with lying to investigators”. “Yes, it is a crack legal analysis from the law firm of No, Shit and Sherlock,” the host quipped, before making chicken noises at Trump to encourage him to sit down with Mueller. “Robert Mueller is not Trump’s only problem,” Colbert continued. “A lot of people have called Trump a racist, but only because of what he says and does. The charge has upset presidential son and man who KYs his scalp, Donald Trump Jr.” Colbert then showed footage from Trump Jr’s interview with the Daily Caller, in which he responded to charges of racism against his father by saying: “I know him, I’ve seen him my whole life, all the rappers, all the this.” “All the this? That’s as much as you know about black people?” Colbert responded. “In black history month, we celebrate all the achievements of African Americans, from all the rappers to all the this.” The host then showed another clip from the interview, where Trump Jr touts his father’s photos with black celebrities like Jesse Jackson and the Rev Al Sharpton. “Classic defense,” the host concluded. “How could I be racist? I have pictures with black people.” Trevor Noah: ‘Lighten up! The president was just joking!’ Trevor Noah of Comedy Central discussed how the White House responded to the fallout from one of Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks at a speech in Cincinnati. “Yesterday at a speech in Ohio, Trump took a moment to complain about the Democrats who didn’t clap for him during the State of the Union,” Noah said, showing a clip of Trump saying that “someone called it treasonous” before adding, “Yeah, I guess, why not?” “I’m still shocked that the president really will just repeat anything some random in a crowd shouts at him,” Noah joked. “Like, treason is not usually prosecuted in a call-and-response fashion. I wonder if that’s how we should get Trump to support better causes. We just go to his rallies and yell things out. ‘Ooh, Trump, Black Lives Matter!’” “Now, for some reason, people with a hard-on for democracy didn’t like the president casually accusing his political opponents of treason,” the host went on. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, at the podium on Monday, said “the president was clearly joking with his comments, but what isn’t a joke is that Democrats refuse to celebrate the accomplishments of last year that have helped all Americans.” “You guys, lighten up, the president was just joking about treason,” Noah said. “Just like when he was joking about Obama helping Isis, or when he joked about how the Russians should hack Hillary’s emails or, my favorite joke, when he said police should rough up people in custody.” Seth Meyers on Trump’s ‘cheeseburger naps’ Finally, Seth Meyers ran through a list of headlines involving Trump this week, including continued negotiations over immigration reform. “President Trump yesterday praised the Republican tax bill on Twitter, saying ‘America is once again open for business,” Meyers began. “The rest of the world said, ‘Cool, can we speak to your manager?’” Meyers went on: “According to reports, President Trump will release his $1.5tn infrastructure plan on Monday. Apparently, he wants to take the weekend to practice saying infrastructure.” Meyers then briefly discussed the negotiations over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (Daca), which Trump terminated last fall. Meyers said: “White House chief of staff John Kelly said today that some undocumented immigrants who are eligible for the Daca immigration program were ‘too lazy to get off their asses and sign up’. “‘You tell ’em, John,’ said his boss, between cheeseburger naps,” Meyers joked.

culture/2018/feb/07/late-night-hosts-tv-trump-treason-racist

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2018-02-07T15:50:23Z

Late-night hosts: 'People call Trump a racist, but only because of what he says and does'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/07/late-night-hosts-tv-trump-treason-racist

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/06/terracotta-army-to-go-on-display-in-liverpool-china

A regiment of 2,200-year-old terracotta warriors will go on show in Liverpool this week as part of a blockbuster exhibition showcasing the largest haul of early Chinese treasures to reach British shores. The show at the World Museum came to Merseyside partly because of the popularity in China of Liverpool Football Club, according to Wu Haiyun, the project manager at the Chinese government’s cultural heritage promotion centre. “There are more than 1 million Liverpool fans in China, more than in the UK,” he said in Liverpool on Tuesday, a few days after making a pilgrimage to Anfield, declaring himself a member of “the other Red Army”. Fewer of his compatriots were aware of Merseyside’s other great cultural export, he said. “The Beatles? They are not well known in China.” Liverpool’s other attraction was that it is home to one of the oldest Chinese communities in Europe, according to David Fleming, the director of National Museums Liverpool. The exhibition marks the first UK loan in more than 10 years of any of the 8,000 life-size soldiers and horses discovered in 1974 buried in the late third-century BC tomb of the first emperor of China. The show at the World Museum is more extensive than its predecessor at the British Museum, said Fleming. In 2007, 850,000 people visited a different selection of terracotta warriors in what remains the London museum’s second most successful show after Tutankhamun in 1972. Liverpool museum bosses expect 450,000 people will see their show over the next eight months, with 141,000 tickets already sold. More than 180 artefacts have been loaned from museums across Shaanxi province in north-west China, 5,000 miles from Liverpool. Many have never before been seen outside China, including 10 terracotta warriors. The objects reveal the emperor’s pursuit of immortality and show how he prepared for the afterlife, and help visitors to understand more about everyday life in China more than 2,200 years ago. Obsessed with the desire to live forever, Qin Shi Huang ordered 700,000 people to construct a city for the afterlife, with his mausoleum in the centre, surrounded by palaces, living quarters, offices and stables. His body was guarded by what has come to be known as the Terracotta Army: lifesize figures of 8,000 soldiers, each weighing 300kg, as well as 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses. The terracotta warriors usually live in a huge museum in China constructed around a number of excavated burial pits in the emperor’s sprawling 22 sq mile (56 sq km) mausoleum, which lies on the outskirts of Xi’an, the ancient capital city of Shaanxi. It is the biggest burial site on earth, nearly 200 times bigger than the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Since the army was discovered by a group of villagers digging a well in 1974, the warriors have become an important tool of soft power for the Chinese government, which lends out a number to two or three museums each year.

culture/2018/feb/06/terracotta-army-to-go-on-display-in-liverpool-china

pillar/arts

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2018-02-06T16:54:46Z

Terracotta Army to go on display in Liverpool

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/06/terracotta-army-to-go-on-display-in-liverpool-china

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/06/late-night-hosts-memo-stephen-colbert-trevor-noah-jimmy-kimmel

Late-night hosts on Monday discussed the stock market plunge, the release of the controversial Nunes memo, and the Philadelphia Eagles’ Super Bowl triumph. Stephen Colbert “Remember when Donald Trump told us we’d be tired of winning? Well, evidently, the stock market is exhausted,” Stephen Colbert began. “Because after losing 666 points on Friday, Monday said, ‘Hold my beer.’ Today posted the greatest single same-day drop in stock-market history: 1,600 points. By the end, the Dow closed down almost 1,200 points, erasing its gains for the entire year. “Now the speculation is that this happened because of fears the Fed will be raising interest rates,” Colbert explained. “That’s one explanation. Did anything else happen this afternoon that could have shattered national confidence? Oh, right: this afternoon Trump was in Cincinnati where he spoke to factory workers about how great the economy is doing.” The host went on to show footage from Trump’s speech, which began before the Dow Jones plunged. “It was an especially awkward moment because Trump was in town to tout the benefits of the Republican tax plan,” Colbert said. “And he knows exactly who deserves all the credit for the booming economy.” A clip from Trump’s speech showed the president saying “you can work hard, but if you don’t have the right leader setting the right tone …”, before trailing off and insisting he was “braggadocious”. “It turns out at the State of the Union Trump was pretty upset the Democrats weren’t clapping for him as much as the Republicans were,” Colbert continued, showing another clip from Trump’s Cincinnati speech in which he floated the idea that Democrats failing to applaud him were “treasonous”. “Not clapping for you isn’t treason,” Colbert replied. “But don’t worry, Mr President: you could find out the exact definition of treason pretty soon.” Trevor Noah Trevor Noah also discussed Trump’s suggestion that opposition to him amounts to treason, as well as the fallout from the Friday release of a memo authored by the House intelligence committee chairman, Devin Nunes. “President Trump was in a really good mood today, even though his beloved stock market took a knee,” Noah began. “Which is totally not his fault, because it’s only him when it goes up. Besides, he’s still riding his State of the Union high.” Showing Trump’s speech in Cincinnatti, Noah led in to Trump’s treason remark by saying, “When you watch him, there are moments when you’re starting to have a good time, and then he says something and you’re like, what?” “Sweet lord. Treason?” the host responded. “You realize you can get the death penalty for that. Even Ivan the Terrible would be like, ‘You killed them for what? Bad vibes?’” Noah then proceeded to discuss the “Nunes memo”, which Trump believes to have vindicated him in the ongoing Russia investigation by alleging that the Obama justice department improperly surveilled Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. “Here’s the thing: unlike Trump, some Republicans in Congress actually read the memo, which is why they didn’t come to the same conclusion,” Noah said, showing news clips in which one congressman says the memo “has nothing at all to do with the special counsel” and another where Republican Trey Gowdy, who says he was “pretty integrally involved in the drafting” of the memo, says it does not exonerate Trump. “Wow, even Trey Gowdy, Mr Benghazi Forever, says that this memo in no way exonerates Trump in the Russia investigation, and he wrote the memo,” Noah said. “But if you’re truly devoted to the church of Trump, then you know that the memo’s true reason for being is to discredit the FBI, right?” Jimmy Kimmel Finally, Jimmy Kimmel congratulated Philadelphia Eagles fans on the franchise’s first ever Super Bowl championship. “As you know, the day after the Super Bowl should be a national holiday,” Kimmel said. “They should swap President’s Day out for Super Bowl Monday. The fact that we have to work the morning after being required, as Americans, to watch a game, drunk no less, is really downright unpatriotic. “And I’m calling on President Trump to do something about it right now,” the host joked. “It was a sad night for New England Patriots fans, and an even sadder night for fans of This Is Us last night,” Kimmel said, referring to the episode of the NBC hit that aired directly after the game featuring a prominent character’s death. “After more than 50 years of failure, Eagles fans flooded the streets of Philadelphia to celebrate their team’s historic victory the old-fashioned way,” Kimmel continued, showing video of Philadelphians climbing lamp-posts, jumping from scaffolding, and even collapsing the awning of the Ritz Carlton. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that happy about anything in my whole life.”

culture/2018/feb/06/late-night-hosts-memo-stephen-colbert-trevor-noah-jimmy-kimmel

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2018-02-06T16:09:49Z

Late-night hosts say the memo's 'true reason for being is to discredit the FBI'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/06/late-night-hosts-memo-stephen-colbert-trevor-noah-jimmy-kimmel

['late-night', 'hosts', 'monday', 'discussed', 'stock', 'market', 'plunge', 'release', 'controversial', 'nunes', 'memo', 'philadelphia', 'eagles', 'super', 'bowl', 'triumph', 'stephen', 'colbert', 'remember', 'donald', 'trump', 'told', 'us', 'would', 'tired', 'winning', 'well', 'evidently', 'stock', 'market', 'exhausted', 'stephen', 'colbert', 'began', 'losing', 'points', 'friday', 'monday', 'said', 'hold', 'beer', 'today', 'posted', 'greatest', 'single', 'same-day', 'drop', 'stock-market', 'history', 'points', 'end', 'dow', 'closed', 'almost', 'points', 'erasing', 'gains', 'entire', 'year', 'speculation', 'happened', 'fears', 'fed', 'raising', 'interest', 'rates', 'colbert', 'explained', 'one', 'explanation', 'anything', 'else', 'happen', 'afternoon', 'could', 'shattered', 'national', 'confidence', 'oh', 'right', 'afternoon', 'trump', 'cincinnati', 'spoke', 'factory', 'workers', 'great', 'economy', 'host', 'went', 'show', 'footage', 'trump', 'speech', 'began', 'dow', 'jones', 'plunged', 'especially', 'awkward', 'moment', 'trump', 'town', 'tout', 'benefits', 'republican', 'tax', 'plan', 'colbert', 'said', 'knows', 'exactly', 'deserves', 'credit', 'booming', 'economy', 'clip', 'trump', 'speech', 'showed', 'president', 'saying', 'work', 'hard', 'right', 'leader', 'setting', 'right', 'tone', 'trailing', 'insisting', 'braggadocious', 'turns', 'state', 'union', 'trump', 'pretty', 'upset', 'democrats', 'clapping', 'much', 'republicans', 'colbert', 'continued', 'showing', 'another', 'clip', 'trump', 'cincinnati', 'speech', 'floated', 'idea', 'democrats', 'failing', 'applaud', 'treasonous', 'clapping', 'treason', 'colbert', 'replied', 'worry', 'mr', 'president', 'could', 'find', 'exact', 'definition', 'treason', 'pretty', 'soon', 'trevor', 'noah', 'trevor', 'noah', 'also', 'discussed', 'trump', 'suggestion', 'opposition', 'amounts', 'treason', 'well', 'fallout', 'friday', 'release', 'memo', 'authored', 'house', 'intelligence', 'committee', 'chairman', 'devin', 'nunes', 'president', 'trump', 'really', 'good', 'mood', 'today', 'even', 'though', 'beloved', 'stock', 'market', 'took', 'knee', 'noah', 'began', 'totally', 'fault', 'goes', 'besides', 'still', 'riding', 'state', 'union', 'high', 'showing', 'trump', 'speech', 'cincinnatti', 'noah', 'led', 'trump', 'treason', 'remark', 'saying', 'watch', 'moments', 'starting', 'good', 'time', 'says', 'something', 'like', 'sweet', 'lord', 'treason', 'host', 'responded', 'realize', 'get', 'death', 'penalty', 'even', 'ivan', 'terrible', 'would', 'like', 'killed', 'bad', 'vibes', 'noah', 'proceeded', 'discuss', 'nunes', 'memo', 'trump', 'believes', 'vindicated', 'ongoing', 'russia', 'investigation', 'alleging', 'obama', 'justice', 'department', 'improperly', 'surveilled', 'trump', 'campaign', 'adviser', 'carter', 'page', 'thing', 'unlike', 'trump', 'republicans', 'congress', 'actually', 'read', 'memo', 'come', 'conclusion', 'noah', 'said', 'showing', 'news', 'clips', 'one', 'congressman', 'says', 'memo', 'nothing', 'special', 'counsel', 'another', 'republican', 'trey', 'gowdy', 'says', 'pretty', 'integrally', 'involved', 'drafting', 'memo', 'says', 'exonerate', 'trump', 'wow', 'even', 'trey', 'gowdy', 'mr', 'benghazi', 'forever', 'says', 'memo', 'way', 'exonerates', 'trump', 'russia', 'investigation', 'wrote', 'memo', 'noah', 'said', 'truly', 'devoted', 'church', 'trump', 'know', 'memo', 'true', 'reason', 'discredit', 'fbi', 'right', 'jimmy', 'kimmel', 'finally', 'jimmy', 'kimmel', 'congratulated', 'philadelphia', 'eagles', 'fans', 'franchise', 'first', 'ever', 'super', 'bowl', 'championship', 'know', 'day', 'super', 'bowl', 'national', 'holiday', 'kimmel', 'said', 'swap', 'president', 'day', 'super', 'bowl', 'monday', 'fact', 'work', 'morning', 'required', 'americans', 'watch', 'game', 'drunk', 'less', 'really', 'downright', 'unpatriotic', 'calling', 'president', 'trump', 'something', 'right', 'host', 'joked', 'sad', 'night', 'new', 'england', 'patriots', 'fans', 'even', 'sadder', 'night', 'fans', 'us', 'last', 'night', 'kimmel', 'said', 'referring', 'episode', 'nbc', 'hit', 'aired', 'directly', 'game', 'featuring', 'prominent', 'character', 'death', 'years', 'failure', 'eagles', 'fans', 'flooded', 'streets', 'philadelphia', 'celebrate', 'team', 'historic', 'victory', 'old-fashioned', 'way', 'kimmel', 'continued', 'showing', 'video', 'philadelphians', 'climbing', 'lamp-posts', 'jumping', 'scaffolding', 'even', 'collapsing', 'awning', 'ritz', 'carlton', 'think', 'ever', 'happy', 'anything', 'whole', 'life']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/shortcuts/2018/feb/06/never-too-late-start-new-career-frasier-john-mahoney

One of the gifts the actor John Mahoney, who has died at the age of 77, gave us, along with his brilliant role in the sitcom Frasier, is the idea that it’s never too late to start a new career – and have success. Born in Manchester, he moved to the US as a young man, becoming an English teacher, then an editor of a medical journal. He became an actor in his late 30s. Although he had a reasonably successful stage career, he found fame when he got the job as Marty Crane, Frasier and Niles’s father, at the age of 53. Here are some other late bloomers who made it: Diana Athill After working as an influential editor in publishing for many years, Athill began writing at 43 and wrote a handful of books. It wasn’t until her memoir, Stet, was published, when she was 83, that Athill became a literary success. Now 100, she has written six more critically acclaimed books. “Success in old age, when things have stopped really mattering, has a frivolous sort of charm unlike anything one experiences in middle age,” she once wrote. Kathryn Joosten The actor played Martin Sheen’s presidential secretary in The West Wing and won two Emmys for her role as gossipy neighbour Mrs McCluskey in Desperate Housewives, but Kathryn Joosten only started trying to be an actor in her 40s. She became a Disney street performer in her 50s before moving to Hollywood, getting her big break in Aaron Sorkin’s political drama at 60. Robert Frost The US poet worked on a farm for several years, although he wrote throughout this time. He became an English teacher, before publishing his first book of poetry in 1913 at the age of 39. Vera Wang The fashion designer had an early career as a figure skater, then worked at Vogue for 17 years. After working for fashion designer Ralph Lauren for a couple of years, Wang set herself up as a bridalwear designer at the age of 40 and launched her ready-to-wear collection 10 years later, being named the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s womenswear designer of the year when she was in her mid-50s. Numerous comedians Greg Davies was in his mid-30s when he left teaching to become a comic; so was Romesh Ranganathan. Susan Calman was 34 when she left her job as a corporate lawyer to try comedy. Ricky Gervais was in a pop band and worked in radio before he started getting TV comedy jobs in his late 30s; he was 40 when the Office came out.

culture/shortcuts/2018/feb/06/never-too-late-start-new-career-frasier-john-mahoney

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2018-02-06T13:06:54Z

It’s never too late: Frasier’s John Mahoney and other older career bloomers

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/shortcuts/2018/feb/06/never-too-late-start-new-career-frasier-john-mahoney

['one', 'gifts', 'actor', 'john', 'mahoney', 'died', 'age', 'gave', 'us', 'along', 'brilliant', 'role', 'sitcom', 'frasier', 'idea', 'never', 'late', 'start', 'new', 'career', 'success', 'born', 'manchester', 'moved', 'us', 'young', 'man', 'becoming', 'english', 'teacher', 'editor', 'medical', 'journal', 'became', 'actor', 'late', '30s', 'although', 'reasonably', 'successful', 'stage', 'career', 'found', 'fame', 'got', 'job', 'marty', 'crane', 'frasier', 'niles', 'father', 'age', 'late', 'bloomers', 'made', 'diana', 'athill', 'working', 'influential', 'editor', 'publishing', 'many', 'years', 'athill', 'began', 'writing', 'wrote', 'handful', 'books', 'memoir', 'stet', 'published', 'athill', 'became', 'literary', 'success', 'written', 'six', 'critically', 'acclaimed', 'books', 'success', 'old', 'age', 'things', 'stopped', 'really', 'mattering', 'frivolous', 'sort', 'charm', 'unlike', 'anything', 'one', 'experiences', 'middle', 'age', 'wrote', 'kathryn', 'joosten', 'actor', 'played', 'martin', 'sheen', 'presidential', 'secretary', 'west', 'wing', 'two', 'emmys', 'role', 'gossipy', 'neighbour', 'mrs', 'mccluskey', 'desperate', 'housewives', 'kathryn', 'joosten', 'started', 'trying', 'actor', '40s', 'became', 'disney', 'street', 'performer', '50s', 'moving', 'hollywood', 'getting', 'big', 'break', 'aaron', 'sorkin', 'political', 'drama', 'robert', 'frost', 'us', 'poet', 'worked', 'farm', 'several', 'years', 'although', 'wrote', 'throughout', 'time', 'became', 'english', 'teacher', 'publishing', 'first', 'book', 'poetry', 'age', 'vera', 'wang', 'fashion', 'designer', 'early', 'career', 'figure', 'skater', 'worked', 'vogue', 'years', 'working', 'fashion', 'designer', 'ralph', 'lauren', 'couple', 'years', 'wang', 'set', 'bridalwear', 'designer', 'age', 'launched', 'ready-to-wear', 'collection', 'years', 'later', 'named', 'council', 'fashion', 'designers', 'america', 'womenswear', 'designer', 'year', 'mid-50s', 'numerous', 'comedians', 'greg', 'davies', 'mid-30s', 'left', 'teaching', 'become', 'comic', 'romesh', 'ranganathan', 'susan', 'calman', 'left', 'job', 'corporate', 'lawyer', 'try', 'comedy', 'ricky', 'gervais', 'pop', 'band', 'worked', 'radio', 'started', 'getting', 'tv', 'comedy', 'jobs', 'late', '30s', 'office', 'came']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/06/hacienda-nightclub-and-abbey-road-in-top-10-for-uk-historic-sites

Shakespeare’s birthplace, the austere parsonage where the Bronte sisters wrote Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, and The Haçienda, the Manchester nightclub which was a pillar of the 80s club scene, have all been included in the top 10 of a new UK heritage list. All three are being celebrated as part of a Historic England campaign titled A History of England in 100 Places. The 10 historic places for music and literature were nominated by the public and chosen by the novelist Monica Ali. “It is a fun exercise but also an important one,” said Ali. “First of all, it is an acknowledgement of how the arts have shaped our society, especially at a time when arts are becoming more and more marginalised. “Secondly, and no less importantly, these are not only places in which to learn about the past, they also invite contemplation, reflection and – just maybe – inspiration, thus passing the creative baton to future generations.” The list is strikingly diverse and contains the obvious as well as the more surprising. Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon is an example of the former. “How could it not be included?” said Ali. The West Yorkshire home of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë is also on the list, along with Chawton, the house in Hampshire where Jane Austen lived for the last eight years of her life and refined and finished her novels Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey and wrote Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. Ali said Austen might have her legions of fans, but was still “underrated”. “She is one of literature’s great innovators... and the inventor of the ‘free indirect’ style that is so commonly adopted by novelists today.” Other writers in Ali’s list are Charles Dickens and his former home in Doughty Street, London, where he wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby; and George Orwell, who moved to Canonbury Square in Islington in 1944 after a bomb destroyed the family home in Kilburn. Ali said Orwell’s work remained as fresh and urgent today as it ever was and the renewed interest in Nineteen Eighty-Four “since the beginning of the Trump administration, proves once again his prescience and assures his place in the country’s literary history”. Among the music sites are The Haçienda, the Manchester nightclub which opened on 21 May 1982. It was where the Smiths performed three times in 1982, the venue for Madonna’s first UK gig in 1984, and, in 1986, one of the first British clubs to play house music. By 1988, it was host to the Happy Mondays and Madchester and the second summer of love. The club closed in 1997 and Ali has fond memories. “The Haçienda was the first nightclub I ever went to in the 80s. No club ever topped that for me. It was the coolest place I’ve ever been.” Another club on the list is the 100 Club at 100 Oxford Street, London, which opened as the Feldman Swing Club in 1942 and is the world’s longest-surviving live music venue. It was a place after the second world war where you might catch BB King or Louis Armstrong, while in the 1970s it hosted the first UK punk festival, with bands including Sex Pistols and The Clash. The top 10 is completed by the Abbey Road Studios in London, a place which will always be associated with the Beatles; Chetham’s Library in Manchester, the oldest free public reference library in the English speaking world and a meeting place for Marx and Engels; and the neighbouring houses in Brook Street, London, where Handel and Jimi Hendrix lived, 200 years apart. All 10 places will be explored in podcasts presented by radio presenter Emma Barnett. Other categories include loss and destruction, which will be judged by Mary Beard, and science and discovery, which will be judged by Robert Winston. The full list Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon Abbey Road Studios, St John’s Wood, London Jane Austen’s House, Chawton, Hampshire The 100 Club, 100 Oxford Street, London George Orwell’s home, Islington, London The Haçienda, Manchester The Brontë parsonage, Haworth, West Yorkshire Handel & Hendrix in London, 23 and 25 Brook Street Charles Dickens’ former home in Doughty Street, London Chetham’s Library, Manchester

culture/2018/feb/06/hacienda-nightclub-and-abbey-road-in-top-10-for-uk-historic-sites

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2018-02-06T00:01:17Z

Haçienda nightclub and Abbey Road in top 10 for UK historic sites

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/06/hacienda-nightclub-and-abbey-road-in-top-10-for-uk-historic-sites

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/04/movie-tv-trailers-super-bowl

Aside from all that football and all that Justin Timberlake, this year’s Super Bowl also brought with it a stack of new trailers teasing some of the year’s biggest films and shows. Here’s a look back at what Hollywood dropped: Solo: A Star Wars Story A troubled production (the original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were removed late in the game and replaced with Ron Howard) has meant that the publicity machine for the Han Solo origin adventure has started up at a rather late stage. But this first, impressive spot suggests that we might have been worrying for nothing. The full trailer will be released tomorrow but this tease gives us a brief look at the stellar cast, including Woody Harrelson and Donald Glover, and some splashy action. Skyscraper Can someone go check on Dwayne Johnson? Is he eating all right, sleeping all right, gym-ing all right? The mega-star is coming off a schedule that has him top-lining three major movies in the space of seven months, making him a completely justified candidate for the oft-used celebrity affliction of “exhaustion”. The third (after Jumanji 2 and April’s video game-inspired actioner Rampage) is the oddly dated-looking Skyscraper, a film that would have starred Arnie or Sly back in the late 80s. That final stunt does look like quite the doozy though. Tom Cruise will be furious. Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan Once Transparent broke out and became an awards darling, Amazon focused its attention on other critic-courting comedy dramas from I Love Dick to Mozart in the Jungle to Crisis in Six Scenes. But while Netflix was managing to launch genuine blockbusters like Stranger Things and the Marvel shows, Amazon’s restrictive focus meant that it lagged behind. This summer, Amazon is making an unashamed bid for the mass market with Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, a small-screen take on the character we’ve seen played by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine. The latest spot sees Ryan, now played by John Krasinski, channeling 24’s Jack Bauer in a frantic globe-trot peppered with explosions and lots and lots and lots of running. Could this be the hit that Amazon so desperately needs? We’ll find out in August or given that it won’t release viewing figures, maybe we’ll never know ... Mission: Impossible – Fallout After his failed Dark Universe non-starter The Mummy, Tom Cruise is feeling the need, the need for the Mission: Impossible franchise to return like never before. The series continues to be a reliable money-maker (the most recent entry brought in $682m worldwide) and for the sixth instalment, Cruise is hoping his high-octane showing off will at least temporarily catapult him back to the top. The first trailer looks like more of the same, with some new recruits (hello, Angela Bassett and Henry Cavill) but the final stunt, typically what sells each film, doesn’t look quite as incredible as in previous attempts. But maybe they’re saving it for later sneak peeks. Just saying that the Rock’s Skyscraper antics are winning at the moment. Castle Rock Not that any of us can accurately remember a time when Stephen King adaptations weren’t toppling over one another to scare us first but the best-selling nightmare-giver is currently more in favor than ever. After the $700m success of It, King has teamed up with Hulu and JJ Abrams for Castle Rock, a new series which intertwines many of his stories and characters. The second teaser shows off the nifty cast, including Moonlight’s Andre Holland, Don’t Breathe’s Jane Levy, Melanie Lynskey and the King returnees Sissy Spacek and It’s Bill Skarsgård, and it gives us subtle teases of the spookiness to come as well as early clues of which familiar tales we might see later on (oh hey, Shawshank). Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom After the first trailer teased bigger dino action than ever before, this flashy new Super Bowl spot gives us a more horror-based look at the summer sequel. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are returning along with an island full of unwanted beasts and for those who worried the last preview focused on just the bigger action scenes, this one has some of the more intimate creepy sequences that made the original film so successful. The new spot also teases a new dinosaur created by scientists that looks rather nasty and also incredibly hateful of children. The Cloverfield Paradox One of the biggest shocks of the night came from Netflix, which used a spot to announce not only that they have the third Netflix movie but that it would premiere directly after the game. It’s an audacious move, given that not a single image of the film had even been released prior, and the trailer also confirms that it will link back to the 2008 original. Next year it will take quite the stunt to top this. Red Sparrow Coming off the back of the divisive Darren Aronofsky horror/comedy/drama/satire/experiment Mother!, Jennifer Lawrence is shifting gears yet again for this spy thriller from her Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence. Trailers have previously shown off her surprisingly effective Russian accent and what looks to be a dark, sexual tone and tonight’s new spot doesn’t add a whole lot more but suggests another unusual role for Lawrence. Westworld One of the most feverishly anticipated return seasons of 2018, the second chapter of Westworld carries with it a bucketload of expectation and is of huge importance for HBO, which hopes this will take over from Game of Thrones when it ends in 2019. There’s not a lot being given away here, which is probably for the best (the show benefits from secrecy), but it looks as stylish and fascinatingly twisty as ever. The Avengers: Infinity War One of the night’s most anticipated trailers offered up a look at the overdose of superheroes that will be teaming up in the next Avengers movie. Black Panther! Doctor Strange! Spider-Man! The Guardians lot! It’s a dream for anyone who thought that Captain America: Civil War could have done with a few more major Marvel characters. For everyone else, well, it might prove a bit of a headache. A Quiet Place The night also saw a new look at the John Krasinski-directed horror film that stars himself and his off-screen wife, Emily Blunt, as a couple protecting their kids from monsters that use sound to attack. Like the first, longer trailer, this suggests great things with a creepy gimmick that could make this a hugely unsettling watch. The film will kick off the SXSW festival next month.

culture/2018/feb/04/movie-tv-trailers-super-bowl

pillar/arts

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culture

Culture

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2018-02-05T09:51:19Z

Super Bowl: the biggest movie and TV trailers

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/04/movie-tv-trailers-super-bowl

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'sees', 'ryan', 'played', 'john', 'krasinski', 'channeling', 'jack', 'bauer', 'frantic', 'globe-trot', 'peppered', 'explosions', 'lots', 'lots', 'lots', 'running', 'could', 'hit', 'amazon', 'desperately', 'needs', 'find', 'august', 'given', 'release', 'viewing', 'figures', 'maybe', 'never', 'know', 'mission', 'impossible', 'fallout', 'failed', 'dark', 'universe', 'non-starter', 'mummy', 'tom', 'cruise', 'feeling', 'need', 'need', 'mission', 'impossible', 'franchise', 'return', 'like', 'never', 'series', 'continues', 'reliable', 'money-maker', 'recent', 'entry', 'brought', '682m', 'worldwide', 'sixth', 'instalment', 'cruise', 'hoping', 'high-octane', 'showing', 'least', 'temporarily', 'catapult', 'back', 'top', 'first', 'trailer', 'looks', 'like', 'new', 'recruits', 'hello', 'angela', 'bassett', 'henry', 'cavill', 'final', 'stunt', 'typically', 'sells', 'film', 'look', 'quite', 'incredible', 'previous', 'attempts', 'maybe', 'saving', 'later', 'sneak', 'peeks', 'saying', 'rock', 'skyscraper', 'antics', 'winning', 'moment', 'castle', 'rock', 'us', 'accurately', 'remember', 'time', 'stephen', 'king', 'adaptations', 'toppling', 'one', 'another', 'scare', 'us', 'first', 'best-selling', 'nightmare-giver', 'currently', 'favor', 'ever', '700m', 'success', 'king', 'teamed', 'hulu', 'jj', 'abrams', 'castle', 'rock', 'new', 'series', 'intertwines', 'many', 'stories', 'characters', 'second', 'teaser', 'shows', 'nifty', 'cast', 'including', 'moonlight', 'andre', 'holland', 'breathe', 'jane', 'levy', 'melanie', 'lynskey', 'king', 'returnees', 'sissy', 'spacek', 'bill', 'skarsgard', 'gives', 'us', 'subtle', 'teases', 'spookiness', 'come', 'well', 'early', 'clues', 'familiar', 'tales', 'might', 'see', 'later', 'oh', 'hey', 'shawshank', 'jurassic', 'world', 'fallen', 'kingdom', 'first', 'trailer', 'teased', 'bigger', 'dino', 'action', 'ever', 'flashy', 'new', 'super', 'bowl', 'spot', 'gives', 'us', 'horror-based', 'look', 'summer', 'sequel', 'chris', 'pratt', 'bryce', 'dallas', 'howard', 'returning', 'along', 'island', 'full', 'unwanted', 'beasts', 'worried', 'last', 'preview', 'focused', 'bigger', 'action', 'scenes', 'one', 'intimate', 'creepy', 'sequences', 'made', 'original', 'film', 'successful', 'new', 'spot', 'also', 'teases', 'new', 'dinosaur', 'created', 'scientists', 'looks', 'rather', 'nasty', 'also', 'incredibly', 'hateful', 'children', 'cloverfield', 'paradox', 'one', 'biggest', 'shocks', 'night', 'came', 'netflix', 'used', 'spot', 'announce', 'third', 'netflix', 'movie', 'would', 'premiere', 'directly', 'game', 'audacious', 'move', 'given', 'single', 'image', 'film', 'even', 'released', 'prior', 'trailer', 'also', 'confirms', 'link', 'back', 'original', 'next', 'year', 'take', 'quite', 'stunt', 'top', 'red', 'sparrow', 'coming', 'back', 'divisive', 'darren', 'aronofsky', 'horrorcomedydramasatireexperiment', 'mother', 'jennifer', 'lawrence', 'shifting', 'gears', 'yet', 'spy', 'thriller', 'hunger', 'games', 'director', 'francis', 'lawrence', 'trailers', 'previously', 'shown', 'surprisingly', 'effective', 'russian', 'accent', 'looks', 'dark', 'sexual', 'tone', 'tonight', 'new', 'spot', 'add', 'whole', 'lot', 'suggests', 'another', 'unusual', 'role', 'lawrence', 'westworld', 'one', 'feverishly', 'anticipated', 'return', 'seasons', 'second', 'chapter', 'westworld', 'carries', 'bucketload', 'expectation', 'huge', 'importance', 'hbo', 'hopes', 'take', 'game', 'thrones', 'ends', 'lot', 'given', 'away', 'probably', 'best', 'show', 'benefits', 'secrecy', 'looks', 'stylish', 'fascinatingly', 'twisty', 'ever', 'avengers', 'infinity', 'war', 'one', 'night', 'anticipated', 'trailers', 'offered', 'look', 'overdose', 'superheroes', 'teaming', 'next', 'avengers', 'movie', 'black', 'panther', 'doctor', 'strange', 'spider-man', 'guardians', 'lot', 'dream', 'anyone', 'thought', 'captain', 'america', 'civil', 'war', 'could', 'done', 'major', 'marvel', 'characters', 'everyone', 'else', 'well', 'might', 'prove', 'bit', 'headache', 'quiet', 'place', 'night', 'also', 'saw', 'new', 'look', 'john', 'krasinski-directed', 'horror', 'film', 'stars', 'off-screen', 'wife', 'emily', 'blunt', 'couple', 'protecting', 'kids', 'monsters', 'use', 'sound', 'attack', 'like', 'first', 'longer', 'trailer', 'suggests', 'great', 'things', 'creepy', 'gimmick', 'could', 'make', 'hugely', 'unsettling', 'watch', 'film', 'kick', 'sxsw', 'festival', 'next', 'month']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/05/laneway-festival-review-sonic-smorgasbord-swells-amid-controversy

A few weeks before Laneway festival’s national tour began, a minor controversy tore the local music community along some very fuzzy lines: Kirin J Callinan was quietly and unceremoniously removed from the lineup, after another act on the bill, rapper Miss Blanks, raised concerns with promoters. On the Aria red carpet late last year, a kilted Callinan needed little encouragement to briefly oblige a photographer’s request that he flash them. It was an especially poor decision amid the churning perma-scandal of #MeToo and the growing consensus that it’s good not to have to see people’s genitals if you haven’t asked to. Fans and commentators leapt to his defence after his axing from Laneway, some arguing essentially that pop musicians should be exempt from indecent exposure laws even outside of a performance context because all the world’s a stage, really, and the music industry cannot suffer the persecution of such brave provocateurs. The festival organisers were in a tight spot either way, particularly given their support of Camp Cope’s It Takes One anti-harassment initiative in 2017. Callinan’s only public statement on the matter – at least until he appears on ABC TV’s Tonightly on Thursday night – has been to support and defend Miss Blanks, a trans woman of colour, against the nastier corners of the online backlash, while expressing disappointment that he wouldn’t be playing Laneway. He could be spotted among the crowd (and sneaking onstage during Mac Demarco) at Sydney’s iteration of the festival on Sunday, in a relatively subdued mustard-hued ensemble that covered him neck to ankle – though the getup may have been too hot for him to catch Miss Blanks’ sweaty, sultry 1pm set, a precision barrage of brash, sex-positive fire with confidence and a C-word count almost as high as the UV index. In its 13th year as a multicity event, Laneway has become both the discerning fan’s sonic smorgasbord and the blockbuster one-dayer of the summer festival season. With lineups as wide ranging as the kitchen-sink bills of its closest ancestor, the Big Day Out (though much more tightly edited), it’s big enough to encompass the basic as well as the bougie. This year’s offering ranged from enigmatic pop prodigy Billie Eilish (born in LA, 2001) to cult shoegaze act Slowdive (formed in Reading, 1989); from the sludgy, galactic pulse of Austin electronic four-piece SURVIVE to the inexplicable soft-rock cult of Laneway regular Mac Demarco. Even the food options went all the way from pizza to seriously high-end meal deals from Restaurant Hubert and 10 William St with matched cocktails. But with tickets still available at the box office when gates opened, it was the first time since 2012 that the Sydney leg hasn’t sold out. Whether it was the $175+ price point or the lack of truly massive names (the previous couple of years have featured the likes of Flume and Tame Impala), it may have disappointed the organisers – though for the first time in years, there was actually some room to move. Rewards for early birds included a blistering set from British-Icelandic punk four-piece Dream Wife. There’s a little glam and a little 90s alt-pop in their art-school rock’n’roll, but it has a razor-sharp edge: Rakel Mjoll takes the call and response from the Spice Girls’ Wannabe and gleefully splices it into a screeching refrain of “I’m gonna fuck you up / I’m gonna cut you up”. The girl power sparked just as strongly one stage over with Eilish. For some reason she’s been plagued by technical issues on several stops of this tour already, and Sydney was no different – but she breezed through, mugging blithely for the supportive crowd, her velvety voice note-perfect from shadowy single Bellyache to a forlorn ukulele cover of Hotline Bling. Laneway’s sound and site logistics teams have struggled with the peculiar topography of Sydney College Of The Arts for as long as the venue has hosted the festival. They’ve finally got the layout really right, with barely any bottlenecks or awkward food/portaloo jostling. The sound, sadly, is still an issue. If you’re more than halfway back at the awkward little Future Classic stage, inside the college’s sandstone keep, all you’re getting is bass and drunken chatter: Sylvan Esso’s wry, wistful dance-pop suffers perhaps the worst here, which is a shame, as singer Amelia Meath’s bubbly energy is visible from the muffle zone. Things were clearer at Spinning Top – (Sandy) Alex G’s deceptively ramshackle slacker charm and Wolf Alice’s heavy, ethereal rock both carried well. On the main Park and Garden stages, the crowds swelled for The Internet and Anderson Paak – both world-class hip hop/R&B acts with impeccable live credentials, the latter in particular a perpetual motion machine with unbelievable charisma – but the sound was still patchy. While in some years the lineups have occasionally blurred into a slacker-chill fuzz of samey sounds, 2018’s Laneway revels in variety. Sated but worn out by the seething crowd at Paak, I found Aldous Harding was a perfect palate cleanser – though more molecular gastronomy than classic mint sorbet. With what seemed to be most of the festival watching Paak’s final number, I could pick my way to the front of the stage for Harding, stepping carefully between stock-still, silent audience members like a jewellery thief avoiding laser detectors. Her wonderfully weird stage presence, with the exaggerated, almost grotesque expressions, deep-set eyes and pencil brows of a silent film star, makes her otherworldly voice all the more absorbing. But while Slowdive’s colossal, glittering, dreamy return was a perfect way to close out the night – with responses to an apparently strobe-induced medical incident showcasing the best elements of the crowd, and a few ill-advised crowdsurfers the worst – the best part of the day was something on a smaller scale. The leafy, intimate Block Party mini-stage, curated by indie label and promoter I Oh You, was a joyful little oasis I found myself sneaking back to repeatedly. Just a minute’s duck-and-weave from the two main stages but with the sound surprisingly well isolated were some of the country’s most promising emerging artists – rapper Jesswar, Triple j Mix Up selector Andy Garvey, wildly talented electropop producer Basenji, New York hip hop ratbag Wiki. Even when it was full of punters who’d gone a little too hard too early, it captured an energy that felt just like the early years of Laneway, where you could see up-and-comers having the time of their lives in a tiny tent, almost close enough to touch. • Laneway festival continues in Brisbane and Fremantle this weekend

culture/2018/feb/05/laneway-festival-review-sonic-smorgasbord-swells-amid-controversy

pillar/arts

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culture

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2018-02-05T03:18:21Z

Laneway festival review – sonic smorgasbord swells amid controversy

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/05/laneway-festival-review-sonic-smorgasbord-swells-amid-controversy

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'little', 'oasis', 'found', 'sneaking', 'back', 'repeatedly', 'minute', 'duck-and-weave', 'two', 'main', 'stages', 'sound', 'surprisingly', 'well', 'isolated', 'country', 'promising', 'emerging', 'artists', 'rapper', 'jesswar', 'triple', 'j', 'mix', 'selector', 'andy', 'garvey', 'wildly', 'talented', 'electropop', 'producer', 'basenji', 'new', 'york', 'hip', 'hop', 'ratbag', 'wiki', 'even', 'full', 'punters', 'would', 'gone', 'little', 'hard', 'early', 'captured', 'energy', 'felt', 'like', 'early', 'years', 'laneway', 'could', 'see', 'up-and-comers', 'time', 'lives', 'tiny', 'tent', 'almost', 'close', 'enough', 'touch', 'laneway', 'festival', 'continues', 'brisbane', 'fremantle', 'weekend']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/04/justin-timberlake-super-bowl-halftime-show-review

Justin Timberlake took to the stage (and field) for the Super Bowl LII half-time show in Minneapolis armed with his extensive catalogue of hits, a cadre of scantily clad backup dancers, and an outfit culled from the latest Patagonia x Cézanne collection, in keeping with the singer’s clunky Americana rebrand. The performance was decent, and Timberlake sounded good and danced even better. As far as half-time shows go, it was satisfactory, a fun but forgettable display of the singer’s substantial talents. He began, in what looked like the basement of a nightclub but was really the labyrinthine underpinnings of the stage, with his new single Filthy. As was to be expected, Timberlake gyrated with his dancers and then finally emerged above ground with a medley of his early-2000s hits: Rock Your Body, Señorita, SexyBack, each of which are certified bangers and brought to mind the macaroni-haired Timberlake of yore. In this portion of the show he hit his stride. Timberlake has always been and remains an excellent dancer, and he moved lithely around the stage in perfect synchronicity with his back-ups. The sound quality was a bit flaky, and at times the extensive choreography came at the expense of his vocals, but Timberlake’s falsetto was squeaky-clean and it’s hard to fault a few errant notes when someone’s trying to squeeze a career’s worth of discography into what’s essentially a triple-stacked commercial break. The run-up to Timberlake’s performance was bumpy, to say the least. On Friday, he dropped his sixth studio album, Man of the Woods, which was promoted as a sort of laid back ode to the heartlands, a new chapter in the book of Timberlake, and amounted to a fairly standard, unnecessarily lengthy collection of funk-pop thumps that didn’t so much reinvent his mien as sell it woefully short. Then, rumors swirled that Timberlake was planning a musical tribute to Prince that would include a hologram of the “purple one”, the kind of homage Prince himself once called “the most demonic thing imaginable”. That idea was scrapped briskly when Sheila E, Prince’s former drummer, tweeted publicly that the hologram wouldn’t have received the singer’s blessing. JT opted instead for a more muted Prince paean, dedicating a cover of I Would Die 4 U to Prince’s hometown of Minneapolis while sitting at a white piano. Footage from Purple Rain projected on to a billowing sheet during the song, which faintly echoed Prince’s own 2007 half-time show, with which every one thereafter has been rightfully compared. The cameras panned back to show the cityscape shrouded in Prince purple, a color for which Pantone has its own shade, and most everyone breathed a sigh of relief that there were no holograms. We all know what happened the last time JT performed at the Super Bowl; the details of that snafu – unfortunately memorialized with its own “-gate” – need no retelling here. But there’s a kind of appropriate symmetry to the fact that the game-winning quarterback that year was a 26-year-old Tom Brady, improbably playing in his record eighth Super Bowl this year. Timberlake is effectively, if imprecisely, the Tom Brady of music, the boring, fail-safe pick to helm a half-time show. Both are creatures of the early aughts who’ve weathered the passage of time prosperously. They’re supremely talented, the poster-boys of their craft, and yet still lack a certain cultural cachet. And as filthy-rich, genetically blessed white dudes – one deigned to bring sexy back and the other poses for Ugg boots – they’re objects of widespread, not-entirely-unearned resentment who bear the burden of being too strait-laced for an era of outspokenness. So, there was no grand political statement, nor any subtext into which one could be read; Timberlake more or less went the Lady Gaga route, breaking out early hits, mid-career ones like Suit & Tie, Mirrors – accompanied by, you guessed it, a reflective mirror-show – and Until the End of Time, and his most recent radio smash, Can’t Stop the Feeling from the movie Trolls. The song is a notable drop-off in quality for someone who can lay claim to some of the century’s smoothest pop music, but it was an appropriate finale that got people clapping their hands and singing along. Timberlake’s co-headliners in Minneapolis were Leslie Odom Jr, who kicked things off before the game with a reliably great rendition of America the Beautiful, and Pink, who sang the national anthem boldly and impressively. In an age of streaming and hyper-curation, the Super Bowl is the last bastion of the monoculture, which makes the half-time show, the thing a large chunk of viewers tune in for, an intensely pressurized event. It’s impossible to please everyone, unless you’re Prince or Beyoncé, and performers are expected to make good on their massive platform and truncate their hits for 12 minutes of stage time. Timberlake did just that, and if I’ll have forgotten the performance by the end of the game I at least know I’ll be listening to FutureSex/LoveSounds for the next couple of days.

culture/2018/feb/04/justin-timberlake-super-bowl-halftime-show-review

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-05T02:58:59Z

Justin Timberlake's Super Bowl performance: a forgettable but flashy medley of hits

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/04/justin-timberlake-super-bowl-halftime-show-review

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/04/the-gospel-of-jack-guinness-the-queer-bible

If your guilty pleasure is scrolling through celebrity party photos, you’ll have seen the model Jack Guinness frowning through an immaculate beard, with one arm around Alexa Chung or Daisy Lowe or Pixie Geldof. And you’ll have expected him, as he so charmingly puts it: “To be a total arsehole.” In the flesh, though, he’s as slapstick as Benny Hill on a milk float. Watch his Instagram stories from backstage at fashion shows in Paris or Milan, where he pretends to be “David Fashionborough”, musing on the zoology of these rare species “without a single thought in their heads”, and you’ll wonder how he gets away with it, or why he doesn’t have his own TV show yet. Yet this is not the biggest disconnect in Guinness’s identity because, after 10 years becoming one of the best-known Brits in fashion (working with brands including Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Dunhill and Barbour), being described by GQ magazine as “the coolest man in London” and popularising the man bun (“for which I’d like to officially apologise”), he has launched a website called the Queer Bible. At the same time he came out. The Queer Bible is a beautiful online magazine, using mainly queer writers and illustrators to discuss their heroes. “I wanted to honour all the trailblazers who have fought for my rights on my behalf,” says Guinness. “The ones everybody has heard of, but also some of the overlooked characters.” So Robert Mapplethorpe and Oscar Wilde might be covered, but you’ve also got the choreographer Theo Adams discussing why a trans Turkish pop diva is so beloved of men in kebab shops. Guinness unveiled the Queer Bible in December 2017, revealing that, alongside the photoshoots and the parties, he had secretly been working on this project since 2016, when the singer Sam Smith was laughed at for thinking he was the first gay person to win an Oscar. “And he wasn’t even the first gay person to win that Oscar – then he got destroyed online for his ignorance and had to leave Twitter. But I took it as a challenge. I thought, well, it’s tempting to join in mocking the poor bloke, but do I know my own gay history? I looked at the resources online and I felt that there was a gap. And it was this.” You would have thought that, for Guinness, being a gay guy in fashion would hardly be revolutionary. And yet it really is. The advertising of mainstream male fashion, though somewhat homoerotic to some eyes, apparently all hinges on heteronormativity. Models such as Jack must, he says, “represent a certain kind of masculinity” in their private life. Perhaps it’s the facial hair that has led to so many photoshoots where he has to “sail boats, climb mountains, chop wood – basically whatever couldn’t be further from my natural interests”, but this public image has meant he had to keep quiet about having a boyfriend. He won’t name problematic brands, but insists that he was regularly told by agents and bookers “awful things that you wouldn’t believe, and always not to let the clients find out I was gay, not to mention it on a shoot, not to say anything to the press, or this would all end,” he says. “I remember one agent, who used to be a model booker, and she said: ‘Oh, if we found out a model was gay, we’d just drop him straightaway!’ Laughing like I was supposed to say, ‘Haha, great!’ “I just thought: ‘Wow, that’s insane that you think it’s OK to say that to me.’ It made me really angry. “I’ve been so excited by the fact that brands do still want to work with me,” he adds. It’s early days, though, and the backlash was almost immediate. The day after he launched the site and put a video on his own Instagram to tell his 50k followers about it, a client rang him, “and made insinuations that – well, let’s just say that if it was about my ethnic identity, it would definitely have been racist”. He is now represented by the model agency Elite, who are “incredibly supportive”, he says. “Whenever I’m hesitant about something they’re the ones going: ‘No, you have to really go for it.’ I cannot tell you how encouraging that’s been…” He interrupts himself. “This feels so silly to talk about, like we’re in the 1980s and coming out is still a thing. But it is still a thing.” What makes this kind of bible even more poignant to Guinness is that he was raised under the other one, as his dad is a vicar. “So this is also about the idea of gay people being squeezed out of religious spaces,” he says. “This isn’t just a guide to queer life – we’re creating something special.” He had held back on doing something like this publicly because, he says: “I had a lot of stuff to work through with my own family first.” He keeps stressing that he knows he’s a privileged white guy who has nothing to moan about. But he also admits, in a joking voice that belies something more serious, that “I have the weight of generations of priests upon me”. “At the start of my career everyone assumed I was one of the loaded Guinnesses,” he says. “But Arthur Guinness had five or six sons and the three strands of the family came down from there. There’s the brewing side, the banking side who got into trouble in the 1980s, then there’s the religious side. So my dad, my grandad and my great-grandad were all vicars, and all of their brothers were vicars, too.” He grew up first in a flat attached to a vicarage in Brixton, in a “really ethnically diverse church. It was during the Brixton riots. It was like a sitcom in our front room. On Christmas Day we would have 30 people in our house. When the hurricane hit, people lived with us for months after that. We didn’t have much money, but we were middle class, while the kids next door were in serious poverty – Marmite sandwiches for Christmas lunch. And then after that my dad moved to Belgravia and he became Margaret Thatcher’s vicar.” Sorry, what? Thatcher had left Downing Street and she worshipped in your church? “I don’t know if ‘worship’ is the right word,” he says, a wicked glint in his eye. “She stood up and sat down at the right times. Put her hands together.” The youngest of three children and dyslexic, Guinness went to a wide variety of schools and stopped altogether for some months due to anxiety. He failed half of his GCSEs, so his family were completely stunned when he aced his A-Levels and got into Cambridge to read English literature, which he found “pretty stressful, because I was still the same kid who wasn’t robust enough for school. Everyone at Cambridge has a slightly manic episode at some point. I don’t know anyone there who didn’t go a bit weird. But looking on the bright side,” he adds, the glint returning to his eye, “you do get to meet some really incredible people who can make you feel inadequate for the rest of your life!” Back in London, he moved into a shared flat with his friend, Clare. The other occupant was Alexa Chung. “I was the weird new house mate, like Spike in Notting Hill – I slept in the living room. Alexa was doing T4 and her work ethic was insane – people have no idea how hard she works. She’d come home from shooting, take her script up to her bedroom, memorise it and then be up at 5am to shoot again the next day. She’s one of the few people I phone up to ask advice from: she always knows what to do.” Now he lives in another shared flat, “a proper, actual warehouse, not a done-up bachelor pad. It’s a shithole. I’ve had to become amazing at DIY and I don’t mean putting up some nice shelves, I mean fixing boilers, and killing spiders the size of my head.” He’s thrown so many parties there, from behind a second-hand bar he bought from a junk seller he befriended on the street, that his friends have printed up T-shirts saying: “I Lost My Mind At Jack’s Bar.” This morning he bathed in hot water from the kettle, after the heating packed up again. “The flat might look great in photos, but in reality it’s falling apart.” He pauses for comic timing. “A bit like me.” Will the party be over now he’s launched the Queer Bible? He knows it’s all a risk, but remembers the words of George Michael. “His response to all that was: I don’t want anyone who has a problem with gay people buying my records, they can fuck off! If there are brands out there that have a problem with a gay guy, I don’t want to work with them.” thequeerbible.com

culture/2018/feb/04/the-gospel-of-jack-guinness-the-queer-bible

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-04T10:00:48Z

Jack Guinness and the queer bible: “If brands have a problem with a gay guy, I don’t want to work with them”

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/04/the-gospel-of-jack-guinness-the-queer-bible

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/04/fatberg-museum-london-display-pickling-age-waste

Nobody remembers exactly who coined the word, but it started off as a bit of slang used by the Thames Water “flushers” who work to keep the sewers flowing freely beneath London. Their word first surfaced from those Victorian tunnels and into the newspapers in August 2013, when a bus-sized “fatberg” – a solid mass of oil and grease and undisposable disposables – was removed from a sewer in Kingston upon Thames. After that the name caught on in the way that its rival “johnnyberg” (used by the flushers of Anglian Water, who had been struck by the preponderance of condoms in the ossified deposits) did not. “Fatberg” reached the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015 – at the same moment as “manspreading” and “Brexit” and “bantz” – and in the same year in which a record-breaking 10-tonne example broke a sewer in Chelsea costing Thames Water £400,000 to fix. But it wasn’t really until last year that “fatberg” went viral. The Whitechapel fatberg that made headlines in September was among our most infectious social media exports of 2017. The units in which it was routinely measured gave away its birthplace. This being a London phenomenon it was invariably described in local currency: at 820 feet, the fatberg was “longer than Tower Bridge” or “twice as long as Wembley Stadium” and “the weight of 11 double-decker buses”. Having once led the world in sewer engineering with Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s cavernous underground network of marvellous tunnels, London was now the undisputed global leader in sewer blockage. TV crews were dispatched from Moscow and Montreal and Madrid to stand above manhole covers along Whitechapel Road and hold their noses while Thames Water flushers in white protective suits used high-powered jet hoses and picks and shovels and vacuum pipes to break the fatberg up and then remove it in tankers at the rate of 20 to 30 tonnes per day. Ninety three per cent of its complex structure was said to consist of the element “wet wipe”. By the time the clean-up was over, and its notoriety had spread, lesser fatbergs were being unearthed in Belfast and Denver and Melbourne. It was in the first week of the discovery of the Whitechapel Monster (the hyperbole was part of the attraction, no nomenclature for the Subterranean Beast was too extreme) that the Museum of London, halfway through a series of exhibitions about modern city living, decided it must have a slice of it. Sharon Ament, the museum’s director had been thinking about the possibility of displaying a fatberg in the museum – whose collection includes a variety of valuable objects retrieved from drains and cess pits and sewers from Roman times on – since the previous big find in Chinatown in Soho. On that occasion the museum had not acted before the fatberg was destroyed; this time it was ready. (Apparently there was some talk that the Science Museum wanted a chunk of fatberg too, though when it discovered the Museum of London had first dibs there was, by some accounts, a collective sigh of relief among the curators there.) At the end of this week, a representative chunk of the Whitechapel Leviathan will be put on display at the Museum of London. It is likely that no lavatorial exhibit will have caused quite as much a splash since Marcel Duchamp invented conceptual art with his urinal a century ago. The woman charged with curating Fatberg! is Vyki Sparkes, who looks after social and working history at the museum. “It was like the finger of fate pointed at me,” she explains to me in the museum’s cafe, with well-scrubbed hands and a slightly rueful smile. She is unsure yet on how high up her CV “curator of 21st-century sewage” will appear, but she is confident that the exhibition will be a worthy addition to the museum. “If you went up to someone in the street and asked them to talk about what they put down their toilet they would tell you to bog off, basically,” she says. “But this is a way to open that conversation. We are not here to tell people how to behave, I am here to reflect how we live and to raise questions.” Those questions are welcomed above all by Thames Water, some of whose employees have begun to feel fatbergs looming over every part of their life, crowding in on them. Alex Saunders has been working on waste networks for four of his six years with the company, but on the Whitechapel Fatberg, and its ripple effects, for most of the past four months. The East End Mammoth was, he suggests to me, “kind of a perfect fatberg storm”. A fatberg needs two principal elements to evolve. The first is a large and regular amount of oil and grease poured into sewers; the second is a population that flushes wet wipes and tampons and condoms and nappies down the toilet. If you go and stand in Whitechapel Road, Saunders suggests, you could guess it was likely fatberg territory. It is a street lined with cafes and restaurants and takeaway outlets. Then there is the Royal London hospital, “which can lead to the flushing of some sanitary products”, and also a very high density of flats and houses. When you walk along that stretch of road it seems extraordinary that the fatberg could evolve to such a scale beneath your feet without Thames Water noticing it – or without the sewers backing up and flooding. Part of the reason for that is the sheer volume of the London network, Saunders suggests. The pipework is “hundreds of thousands of kilometres long” and “you cannot be sticking your head down the same bit of sewer every week”. The Whitechapel sewer, part of Bazalgette’s original brick-built labyrinth, has an inverted egg-shape cross-section; the bottom is narrower than the top so during a time of low flow there is a thin channel to keep it moving and when it rains the sewer amplifies. The fatberg had formed along the upper part of the tunnel. Below it there was still a good flow and therefore no warning signs. “Then suddenly,” Saunders recalls, “during our normal inspections the guys popped down there and found this thing that turned out to be bigger than Tower Bridge.” The Whitechapel Behemoth had hardened into a kind of concrete. The flusher teams have a variety of high-pressure jets, some revolving, some with chains and drill bits, to break up the bergs, which they try to use like keyhole surgery, careful not to damage the sewer itself. “We have lots of weapons at our disposal,” Saunders says, “but sometimes, as with the Whitechapel one, it is so impacted that a lot of it is the teams going down and chiselling away by hand.” In London, which has a magnified version of a universal problem because the sewers are so large, this work never stops. Thames Water has teams working full time; usually they are aware of five or six fatbergs that are growing. Some cause immediate blockages, others like the one in Whitechapel don’t. Saunders estimates the work costs £1m a month, but that doesn’t include the collateral damage of “sewage flooding living rooms and public spaces cordoned off and out of bounds because they are contaminated”. In many cases the job of flusher in London is a family occupation, the work traditionally passed down from father to son, much like the job of undertaker. Saunders was out with some second- and third-generation sewer flushers, the other evening, men who have been doing the job for 30 years themselves. In the past, they suggested, there was a good deal of job satisfaction in the work; it had a nice psychological trajectory: they started a shift with a blockage, and ended it with the sewer flowing freely. It is only in the last few years that they have found themselves routinely hacking away at fatbergs. When the Museum of London decided to take a chunk of the material the flushers raised an eyebrow, Sparkes recalls. The idea is that the world below street level does not invade the world above. The size of the sample was inevitably limited by what could come up through a manhole. The museum ended up with two sizeable chunks. To give a sense of its original serpentine scale they thought about installing it in a case with Victorian infinity mirrors which would extend it as far as the eye could see, but that idea was eventually abandoned. Because the substance itself is somewhat volatile though, and of an unusual consistency, they still had to rewrite procedure to work out how to deal with it. “We had our head of conservation look at it,” Sparkes says. “We initially thought about pickling it like one of Damien Hirst’s cows. The problem with that, we felt, was that it would likely make it liquid and runny.” What they did instead was to dry the samples. They did this at different rates, uncertain how it would respond. In the event, the one that was dried most quickly has crumbled into pieces; the other remains intact. Health and safety was an inevitable concern. “Worst case scenario if it is handled incorrectly is death,” Sparkes suggests. “It has come out of the sewer so it might contain Weil’s disease.” There was a fear it might also hide disposed needles – another hazard of the modern sewer – so it was x-rayed with that in mind. Museum staff still approach the fatberg with extreme caution, in full body protective suits and masks and disposable gloves, disinfecting as if they are in an operating room. The fatberg remains in quarantine ready to be encapsulated in a specially sealed case. “One of the problems is you get all sorts of things that live inside it,” Sparkes says. “One of our samples unexpectedly hatched loads of flies in store.” As well as breeding maggots, the fatberg breeds metaphors. It is hard not to think of it as a tangible symbol of the way we live now, the ultimate product of our disposable, out of sight, out of mind culture. One of the reasons this feels like a distinctly London story, is the horrible history of the city and its effluent, a history that until recently seemed happily confined to the past. Prior to autumn 2016, the last time we looked so hard at sewage was during the Great Stink of 1858, when a combination of a hot and dry summer and the practice of discharging the raw sewage of a fast-growing population directly into the Thames, turned the river brown and saw sewage 10ft-deep at the river’s margins. MPs were forced to debate in Parliament with handkerchiefs over their faces. Cholera and typhoid were epidemic. Like the burghers of Hamelin menaced by rats, the government charged the director of metropolitan works, Joseph Bazalgette, with solving the problem. With 318 million bricks and over the course of 16 years he did just that. The Observer reported on Bazalgette’s grand plan on 15 April, 1861, suggesting it was “the most extensive and wonderful work of modern times”. The paper noted how the network would carry waste to a cathedral-like treatment plant beyond the city margins, from where “the united sewage of three areas will be conveyed to Mucking Flats in that reach of the Thames called ‘The Lower Hope’.” It also bemoaned the fact that “the inhabitants of this metropolis seem to take little interest in the great undertaking”. It was the genius of Bazalgette to create a system designed to allow for enormous population explosion. His great underground caverns and diverted rivers, were designed to flow as 98% water. From the beginning, some of the city’s residents took advantage of the network as a rubbish disposal system, but it is only in recent years that the throwaway society has routinely clogged the network. Flushers report finds of motorbikes, prams, coins, phones and jewellery – and once a live hand grenade. The toxic nature of some of the industrial waste that finds its way into the sewers means that fewer animals survive than in the past; rats are in decline; beyond that there are occasional terrapins and the odd gasping goldfish. A decade ago the biggest problem facing Thames Water was cotton buds which blocked the mesh of sieving drums at treatment plants. It is only since the advent of the wet wipe that the blockages have consistently advanced upstream. Patented moistened close weave wipes first found a mass market at Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises in 1963 to obviate the need for so much finger lickin’. Moistened baby wipes became available in the 1990s, but it wasn’t really until Kimberly-Clark and Proctor and Gamble started marketing adult wipes as an alternative to loo roll in 2005 that sewage systems started to clog. The global sale of moistened wipes is now a $17.5bn (£12.4bn) business, growing globally at around 4% per year. Many “adult” wipes carry the tag “flushable”, a description which means that they will likely get around the U-bend, but not that they will biodegrade in the sewer. “There is not a single wet wipe on sale that has passed the UK standard,” Saunders says. “The companies are marking their own homework when they say they are flushable.” Wipes are particularly resistant to degrading in water, and when after many years they eventually do, their plastic content becomes part of the problem you winced at on Blue Planet II. Thames Water did some research last year with a sample of 2,000 people. A third said they put their wipes in the bin and never put fat down the sink. A third said they used to flush wipes down the loo and pour fat down the plughole but had changed their habits now after understanding the issues. And a third admitted they had no idea that you weren’t supposed to use the drains as a catch-all waste disposal. Thames Water tries to aim its education about the issue at fatberg hotspot areas, which has resulted in 20% fewer blockages. The other part of the great fatberg equation has been the rise and rise of fatty and fast food as part of our diets. In 1884, Nathaniel Whiting of San Francisco patented the first grease trap to catch “substances which would tend to choke and clog the sewers”. His design is still the simple standard model for commercial kitchens: wastewater drains into a box where fat settles out. The problem is that eventually, someone has to clean the box out and dispose of the fat according to guidelines. Increasingly, it appears, this is a practice easily sidestepped and a regulation often ignored. Saunders suggests a simple solution: “I think as well as giving those health ratings on the doors of cafes they need to be inspected for their waste management. If they couldn’t get more than a ‘one out of five’ rating if they had no fat trap under their sink, we could change a lot of this overnight.” With the Whitechapel Colossus, Thames Water tried to show an example of best practice. The tankers of fat and grease were filtered of sanitary products and refined into enough biofuel to power a London bus for a year. But that was an expensive one-off; a better plan is to have a system for recovering the fat before it goes into the sewage. The company is exploring the economics of a collection service. With Bazalgette-style organisation there is much potential. In the United States, there have been stories of gangs blowtorching their way into grease traps to steal used cooking oil that can be made into biofuels. In the meantime, Saunders still exists in a world of fatbergs. Having had a great deal of experience with the substance how would he describe it? He had a big lump in his gloved hands from Whitechapel. “It is browny, yellowy, greeny in colour, a bit slippery to hold but also very heavy and very hard, and when you cut into it you find a stitching of wet wipes holding it together.” He was with a team extracting a big lump the other week; it was like exhibit A: “there was a condom hanging out one side, a wet wipe the other, big globs of fat holding it together.” At the Museum of London, the curatorial challenge has centred on the question of whether the fatberg was more like a soap or more like a candle. On balance, they have decided it is more like a candle. The sample that broke up has been sent to experts at Cranfield University to run a “fatberg autopsy” to discover exactly what it is made of. Having worked with it for a few months, has Sparkes lost any of her sense of disgust? She suggests it has become one of those uncanny objects where it is not immediately apparent whether it is animal, vegetable or mineral. Somewhere between compost and coral and bin juice. “It is really hard to classify,” she says. “Bits of it were wet to start with, now it is more like a crust. It is going slightly mouldy. There is a risk it will deteriorate on display.” The only distinctly synthetic thing you can quickly identify on its surface is, fittingly, the tiny purple and orange of a Double Decker chocolate wrapper. When they first received it, it was hard to get the smell out of your nose. “It has calmed down a bit now,” Sparkes suggests. “It is like a damp basement smell now, like someone has lived in a house for 70 years and done nothing to it.” Though it clearly has some historical value, she views it very much as a one-off. “For us Whitechapel was the key moment in this story. We are not in the market every time there is a blocked pipe.” Why does she think it struck such a chord? “I think it is the grossness, and the size above all,” she says. “I was talking about the display to another curator and she suggested that basically I had designed the perfect exhibition for teenage boys.” The name is also critical; the Museum of London has added an exclamation mark for effect. “If you can’t use an exclamation mark with a fatberg, when can you?” I wonder if she would like to see the fatberg in the permanent collection, taking its place as a defining monument to our age of waste. She suggests it remains to be seen. “If it goes on display and ends up as a pile of dead flies then ultimately it has no display value obviously.” In the meantime, for five months, museum-goers can look on this unnatural wonder and perhaps reflect that a culture is most clearly understood from the things it makes and the traces that it leaves behind. As Ozymandias once observed: “Look on my Works, Ye mighty, And despair!” Fatberg! goes on display at the Museum of London from 9 Feb as part of the City Now City Future season This article was edited on 5 February 2018 to correct a typo in the penultimate paragraph, and on 6 February to remove an incorrect reference to Duchamp’s urinal having been displayed at the Tate a century ago.

culture/2018/feb/04/fatberg-museum-london-display-pickling-age-waste

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-04T09:30:23Z

London’s fatberg on show: ‘We thought of pickling it’

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/04/fatberg-museum-london-display-pickling-age-waste

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'synthetic', 'thing', 'quickly', 'identify', 'surface', 'fittingly', 'tiny', 'purple', 'orange', 'double', 'decker', 'chocolate', 'wrapper', 'first', 'received', 'hard', 'get', 'smell', 'nose', 'calmed', 'bit', 'sparkes', 'suggests', 'like', 'damp', 'basement', 'smell', 'like', 'someone', 'lived', 'house', 'years', 'done', 'nothing', 'though', 'clearly', 'historical', 'value', 'views', 'much', 'one-off', 'us', 'whitechapel', 'key', 'moment', 'story', 'market', 'every', 'time', 'blocked', 'pipe', 'think', 'struck', 'chord', 'think', 'grossness', 'size', 'says', 'talking', 'display', 'another', 'curator', 'suggested', 'basically', 'designed', 'perfect', 'exhibition', 'teenage', 'boys', 'name', 'also', 'critical', 'museum', 'london', 'added', 'exclamation', 'mark', 'effect', 'use', 'exclamation', 'mark', 'fatberg', 'wonder', 'would', 'like', 'see', 'fatberg', 'permanent', 'collection', 'taking', 'place', 'defining', 'monument', 'age', 'waste', 'suggests', 'remains', 'seen', 'goes', 'display', 'ends', 'pile', 'dead', 'flies', 'ultimately', 'display', 'value', 'obviously', 'meantime', 'five', 'months', 'museum-goers', 'look', 'unnatural', 'wonder', 'perhaps', 'reflect', 'culture', 'clearly', 'understood', 'things', 'makes', 'traces', 'leaves', 'behind', 'ozymandias', 'observed', 'look', 'works', 'ye', 'mighty', 'despair', 'fatberg', 'goes', 'display', 'museum', 'london', 'feb', 'part', 'city', 'city', 'future', 'season', 'article', 'edited', 'february', 'correct', 'typo', 'penultimate', 'paragraph', 'february', 'remove', 'incorrect', 'reference', 'duchamp', 'urinal', 'displayed', 'tate', 'century', 'ago']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/04/your-pictures-share-your-photos-on-the-theme-of-style

The next theme for our weekly photography assignment in the Observer New Review is ‘style.’ Share your photos of what style means to you – and tell us about your image in the description box. The closing date is Wednesday 7 February at 10am. We’ll publish our favourites in The New Review on Sunday 11 February and in a gallery on the Guardian site. You can share your ‘style’ pictures by clicking on the ‘Contribute’ button on this article. You can also use the Guardian app and search for ‘GuardianWitness assignments’ – and if you add it to the homepage – you can keep up with all our assignments. GuardianWitness is the home of readers’ content on the Guardian. Contribute your video, pictures and stories, and browse news, reviews and creations submitted by others.

culture/2018/feb/04/your-pictures-share-your-photos-on-the-theme-of-style

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-04T09:00:23Z

Your pictures: share your photos on the theme of 'style'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/04/your-pictures-share-your-photos-on-the-theme-of-style

['next', 'theme', 'weekly', 'photography', 'assignment', 'observer', 'new', 'review', 'style', 'share', 'photos', 'style', 'means', 'tell', 'us', 'image', 'description', 'box', 'closing', 'date', 'wednesday', 'february', '10am', 'publish', 'favourites', 'new', 'review', 'sunday', 'february', 'gallery', 'guardian', 'site', 'share', 'style', 'pictures', 'clicking', 'contribute', 'button', 'article', 'also', 'use', 'guardian', 'app', 'search', 'guardianwitness', 'assignments', 'add', 'homepage', 'keep', 'assignments', 'guardianwitness', 'home', 'readers', 'content', 'guardian', 'contribute', 'video', 'pictures', 'stories', 'browse', 'news', 'reviews', 'creations', 'submitted', 'others']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/04/jo-brand-bullies-are-lurking-around-every-corner-

Another Friday night, another comedy panel show, another biscuit, maybe two. And then suddenly, we sedentary viewers of Have I Got News For You sat up. It was early in November and, responding to a headline about an MP taking his personal trainer to the cinema, Ian Hislop had chuckled: “Some of this is not ‘high-level’ crime, is it?” But Jo Brand, hosting, didn’t smile. The temperature changed quite suddenly. “If I can just say,” she began, “as the only representative of the female gender here today – I know it’s not high-level, but it doesn’t have to be ‘high-level’ for women to feel under siege in somewhere like the House of Commons. Actually, for women, if you’re constantly being harassed, even in a small way, that builds up, and that wears you down.” There was a pause. Then the audience started cheering. Today, Brand, a woman who refuses to be described as a national treasure, preferring “national disgrace”, says she didn’t plan to say a word. “I’m a real hectorer usually – it was lucky I didn’t shout, because otherwise it wouldn’t have taken the wind out of everyone’s sails in the same way. It had an impact.” She says this as if it was a surprise but, of course, Brand, now 60, has been making an impact for decades, first with her monotone standup about men and weight (“I read that book Fat Is A Feminist Issue, got a bit desperate halfway through and ate it”) and today for her dry contributions to primetime TV where, as well presenting the sister programme to The Great British Bake Off, she is often the lone woman on a panel of men. She is so famous that a doctor asked for her autograph while she was in labour. And quietly, behind the panel shows and programmes about cats, Brand has been creating her own genre of sitcom, one that makes you cry. In an episode of Getting On, her award-winning BBC series set on a hospital ward, Brand (as nurse Kim Wilde) stands by as young doctors are introduced to a homeless patient whose “clothing has fused to the skin” and suffers from a perianal abscess. “Go on, have a root around,” insists the consultant, briskly. Another episode revolved around the hunt for the person who’d pooed on a chair. In its jolly mundanity the programme drew on Brand’s early career as a psychiatric nurse, and read as an unlikely love letter to the NHS. Her new show, Damned (now beginning its second series), has a similar feel, with its palette of mud and beige soundtracked by the endless ringing of phones, but is set in the office of a council’s children’s services department. Damned (as in, “Damned if you do… ”) is similarly respectful of those slogging through bureaucracy and government cuts to help people in need, and similarly happy to chuck a few more poo gags at them, too. Series two begins with Brand’s character hobbling into the office having stepped in a pile of it. There the shitty shoe sits, under her desk, as she squabbles with her fellow social worker Al (played by Alan Davies) who must simultaneously determine whether the children of a sex worker should be taken into care. They try putting the shoe in the freezer; against Al’s recommendation, the kids are taken away. “There are so many clichés about social workers,” Brand explains, “when actually they have these horrendous jobs. At a time when things are getting worse, when so many people are in a bad way, and when that inevitably rebounds on to their children, from housing troubles to drug problems to the huge number of men with undiagnosed depression who take it out on their families with violence, I wanted to show that social workers do their best. That they’re human.” Are things getting worse? “Of course they are,” she says, with some weariness. “Food banks exist. We’re seeing new extremes of poverty – this morning I heard about a woman who could only afford to feed her child, so all she had all day was tea. I mean, choices are made on what the country spends its money on, and I disagree with those choices.” Unexpectedly, she smiles: “But I sometimes feel like I have to make a case for being allowed to care – I can practically see that Rees-Mogg person mouthing ‘champagne socialist’.” That famous cackle. Brand consults a social worker when writing the scripts for Damned, but often they have to water down the horror of his stories; she wants you to have a chuckle while considering human suffering, not hang yourself with the HDMI lead. “There’s never enough sadness in sitcoms,” Brand says. “Which is a shame, because we need to laugh as a defence. Being a nurse you become aware of the extremities of human behaviour, and you need a tasteless and appalling sense of humour sometimes. When you see people at their absolute worst, the only thing you can do is joke.” She looks wistful, suddenly, and sits back. “I miss lots about nursing, actually. Mainly the feeling of being tightly connected to a group, because there’s a fair bit of violence on an emergency unit – I remember machetes, knives, a gun once. So you have to trust everyone completely, which makes for very good friendships. I try to repeat that now by choosing a cast of my mates.” Alan Davies has known Brand for 30 years – he’s seen her mature, he says. “But she’s still very naughty at heart. Her line-learning is hopeless, her continuity all over the shop, her listening is highly selective and she is normally eating sweets at exactly the wrong moment, but all of those cracks and fissures that would get you turfed out of drama school are the things that help her get through long days without feeling too tired and sad to continue.” One of Brand’s small pleasures is an hour on Mumsnet. Partly because of the usernames. “My favourite is ‘EatShitDerek’. I’m dying to know the story behind that one.” Partly because she’s a mother, of two teenage girls. And partly because she feels it’s a good reflection of people’s attitudes to controversial topics. “I understand the generational gap in feminist thinking, but the problem comes when the conversations are shut down – they need to be discussed. As a nurse, for instance, I learned that five times as many black people were diagnosed as schizophrenic than white people, and I wanted to know why. You can’t explore difficult questions without offending some people. So I had to admit I was coming from a point of ignorance, and then start a conversation.” She worries about “no-platforming”. “If older feminists’ opinions are suppressed, where do we go next? They did a lot of work to move women forward, they can’t be forgotten. But the anger that appears when people do try to talk – even around something as gentle as Caroline Criado-Perez’s plan to put a woman on the £10 note. She got death and rape threats. Who are these people threatening her, and why are they so angry?” One evening, she was compering an awards ceremony, and a single advertising agency was winning every prize. When they inevitably won the final award, Brand rolled her eyes into the microphone, and tutted: “Not them again.” The crowd laughed, but when the agency’s CEO arrived on stage to receive his trophy, he whispered in her ear: “I always knew you weren’t funny, but I never realised what a cunt you were.” “He did it to humiliate me, and it worked – I felt like I was shrinking. But then I took the microphone back and told the audience what he’d said. And I’d never heard 1,500 people gasp before. These bullies are lurking around every corner, but it’s worse when they’re anonymous online – at least in print you know where it’s coming from.” When Brand started doing comedy in the 80s, under the stage name The Sea Monster, she became used to sneery hecklers and angry reviews. “In fact, I found it hilarious to stand outside myself, and really see how the press saw me. It was slightly pantomimey, that man-hating lesbian thing, but it was mischievous, and the commentary didn’t always feel abusive.” While she believes it’s easier to be a female comic today than it was 30 years ago – there’s the choice now, she says, to be subtle, to not have to shout over all the blokes – the culture around the jokes is less welcoming. “We’re a crueller society than we were before. I think reality TV helped create this nasty edge, encouraging a Roman colosseum-style judgment.” She smiles almost nostalgically at the good old days, when all the rotten remarks about her talent and appearance would come with a byline. That issue of anonymity, of facelessness compared with openness and robust debate, is one Brand returns to a lot. Often, too, she’s shockingly generous. Where one might expect her to be a bit ranty, she’ll surprise you with quiet thoughtfulness. Perhaps it’s her tired wisdom, perhaps it’s that the Brand we see on telly is still “slightly pantomimey”, but she balances every thought with a care that, in a time of noisy opinion seems almost… radical. Does anything still make her angry? She considers it carefully. “One thing that does drive me mad is when women are called ‘ladies’. It implies a feminine subservience, an obsession with appearance, a waiting to be manoeuvred, a weakness, a quietness. I’ve had to stop myself from shouting, ‘It’s WOMEN!’ many times. It matters to me!” Apart from that, her life, one where her job regularly involves sitting next to a Jeremy Clarkson or Quentin Letts, is full of moments where she chooses to give rightwing men a chance. “Panel shows are not the forum for saying: ‘I hate these people’s values.’ In the long run, more hatred is not a good thing. And I don’t necessarily hate these men. I can’t, I’d spend my whole working life angry.” Though Ian Hislop has some quiet reservations about the editing of that Have I Got News For You moment, commenting on it for the first time, he says he’d been responding to a couple of different questions about the Westminster sexual harassment dossier, “Neither of which were about sexual harassment. I felt slightly miffed at how the story was misrepresented.” He, like many, is a huge fan of Brand’s. “What she said was eloquent and measured, and struck a chord. It was terrific.” He refuses to confirm a rumour he’s agreed to a pay cut for Have I Got News For You in moves for the BBC to try to close the gender gap, instead choosing to focus on Brand. “I do look forward to her hosting. I tease her that when we first met she was this radical feminist Sea Monster, and now she’s the country’s sweetheart, who goes on TV to talk about cakes. And through it all she’s retained a sense of who she is and what she believes in.” When John Humphrys’ conversation with Jon Sopel was leaked, and they appeared to joke about the BBC’s pay gap row, Brand “enjoyed that window into John Humphrys’ mind. Though we all take the piss when we think we’re safe. But it does show what they really think about the pay gap – that they don’t take it seriously. It pisses women off when we feel a genuine cause for anger, and are unsupported by men. Whether it’s something like the pay gap, or someone shouting, ‘Great knockers!’ at a woman in the pub, it’s really common that men will just look away. Things are only going to change when the majority of men step up and support women.” She understands, though, the inclination to stay quiet today, whether about the pay gap or harassment in the film industry. “I presume more people didn’t speak up because they felt ashamed. And now there’s this judgment about how early they spoke up, whether it was after other women had done the hard work, whether they simply turned up in a black dress. This question of guilt, of who’s more guilty than the others. But if there’s not a supportive network then, of course, people aren’t going to risk their careers, their families.” So often, she points out, people are made to choose between “having principles or earning a living”. When she was eight her headmaster in Kent explained politics to them. Conservatives, he said, want to keep everything the same, and Labour want everything to change. When she repeated this at home her parents corrected her, and it seems she’s been engaged ever since. Her mother, now in her 80s, is a social worker. There’s a YouTube clip of her being kicked out of a council meeting in Ludlow. “A minute later she returns, having forgotten her handbag, then on her way out she grabs the microphone and starts shouting into it.” Brand tells the story with pride – the genes are strong. Is she positive about the future? “Well, society goes in cycles, politics goes from left to right then back again, comedy goes from leftwing humour in the 80s to tax-dodging comics in the 90s, so I’m sure everything will turn again soon. Billy Connolly used to say: ‘The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever becoming one.’ People who go out to seek power are scary people.” Does that mean Brand has no plans to stand for the Labour party? Her fans will be disappointed. “I’ve spent a long time doing things other people want me to do. Now I’m going to be selfish. All I want to do is read and walk. Besides, I’m too knackered to be prime minister.” She shrugs. “Sorry.” Damned returns to Channel 4 this month

culture/2018/feb/04/jo-brand-bullies-are-lurking-around-every-corner-

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-02-04T09:00:23Z

Jo Brand: ‘Bullies are lurking around every corner'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/04/jo-brand-bullies-are-lurking-around-every-corner-

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'female', 'comic', 'today', 'years', 'ago', 'choice', 'says', 'subtle', 'shout', 'blokes', 'culture', 'around', 'jokes', 'less', 'welcoming', 'crueller', 'society', 'think', 'reality', 'tv', 'helped', 'create', 'nasty', 'edge', 'encouraging', 'roman', 'colosseum-style', 'judgment', 'smiles', 'almost', 'nostalgically', 'good', 'old', 'days', 'rotten', 'remarks', 'talent', 'appearance', 'would', 'come', 'byline', 'issue', 'anonymity', 'facelessness', 'compared', 'openness', 'robust', 'debate', 'one', 'brand', 'returns', 'lot', 'often', 'shockingly', 'generous', 'one', 'might', 'expect', 'bit', 'ranty', 'surprise', 'quiet', 'thoughtfulness', 'perhaps', 'tired', 'wisdom', 'perhaps', 'brand', 'see', 'telly', 'still', 'slightly', 'pantomimey', 'balances', 'every', 'thought', 'care', 'time', 'noisy', 'opinion', 'seems', 'almost', 'radical', 'anything', 'still', 'make', 'angry', 'considers', 'carefully', 'one', 'thing', 'drive', 'mad', 'women', 'called', 'ladies', 'implies', 'feminine', 'subservience', 'obsession', 'appearance', 'waiting', 'manoeuvred', 'weakness', 'quietness', 'stop', 'shouting', 'women', 'many', 'times', 'matters', 'apart', 'life', 'one', 'job', 'regularly', 'involves', 'sitting', 'next', 'jeremy', 'clarkson', 'quentin', 'letts', 'full', 'moments', 'chooses', 'give', 'rightwing', 'men', 'chance', 'panel', 'shows', 'forum', 'saying', 'hate', 'people', 'values', 'long', 'run', 'hatred', 'good', 'thing', 'necessarily', 'hate', 'men', 'would', 'spend', 'whole', 'working', 'life', 'angry', 'though', 'ian', 'hislop', 'quiet', 'reservations', 'editing', 'got', 'news', 'moment', 'commenting', 'first', 'time', 'says', 'would', 'responding', 'couple', 'different', 'questions', 'westminster', 'sexual', 'harassment', 'dossier', 'neither', 'sexual', 'harassment', 'felt', 'slightly', 'miffed', 'story', 'misrepresented', 'like', 'many', 'huge', 'fan', 'brand', 'said', 'eloquent', 'measured', 'struck', 'chord', 'terrific', 'refuses', 'confirm', 'rumour', 'agreed', 'pay', 'cut', 'got', 'news', 'moves', 'bbc', 'try', 'close', 'gender', 'gap', 'instead', 'choosing', 'focus', 'brand', 'look', 'forward', 'hosting', 'tease', 'first', 'met', 'radical', 'feminist', 'sea', 'monster', 'country', 'sweetheart', 'goes', 'tv', 'talk', 'cakes', 'retained', 'sense', 'believes', 'john', 'humphrys', 'conversation', 'jon', 'sopel', 'leaked', 'appeared', 'joke', 'bbc', 'pay', 'gap', 'row', 'brand', 'enjoyed', 'window', 'john', 'humphrys', 'mind', 'though', 'take', 'piss', 'think', 'safe', 'show', 'really', 'think', 'pay', 'gap', 'take', 'seriously', 'pisses', 'women', 'feel', 'genuine', 'cause', 'anger', 'unsupported', 'men', 'whether', 'something', 'like', 'pay', 'gap', 'someone', 'shouting', 'great', 'knockers', 'woman', 'pub', 'really', 'common', 'men', 'look', 'away', 'things', 'going', 'change', 'majority', 'men', 'step', 'support', 'women', 'understands', 'though', 'inclination', 'stay', 'quiet', 'today', 'whether', 'pay', 'gap', 'harassment', 'film', 'industry', 'presume', 'people', 'speak', 'felt', 'ashamed', 'judgment', 'early', 'spoke', 'whether', 'women', 'done', 'hard', 'work', 'whether', 'simply', 'turned', 'black', 'dress', 'question', 'guilt', 'guilty', 'others', 'supportive', 'network', 'course', 'people', 'going', 'risk', 'careers', 'families', 'often', 'points', 'people', 'made', 'choose', 'principles', 'earning', 'living', 'eight', 'headmaster', 'kent', 'explained', 'politics', 'conservatives', 'said', 'want', 'keep', 'everything', 'labour', 'want', 'everything', 'change', 'repeated', 'home', 'parents', 'corrected', 'seems', 'engaged', 'ever', 'since', 'mother', '80s', 'social', 'worker', 'youtube', 'clip', 'kicked', 'council', 'meeting', 'ludlow', 'minute', 'later', 'returns', 'forgotten', 'handbag', 'way', 'grabs', 'microphone', 'starts', 'shouting', 'brand', 'tells', 'story', 'pride', 'genes', 'strong', 'positive', 'future', 'well', 'society', 'goes', 'cycles', 'politics', 'goes', 'left', 'right', 'back', 'comedy', 'goes', 'leftwing', 'humour', '80s', 'tax-dodging', 'comics', '90s', 'sure', 'everything', 'turn', 'soon', 'billy', 'connolly', 'used', 'say', 'desire', 'politician', 'bar', 'life', 'ever', 'becoming', 'one', 'people', 'go', 'seek', 'power', 'scary', 'people', 'mean', 'brand', 'plans', 'stand', 'labour', 'party', 'fans', 'disappointed', 'spent', 'long', 'time', 'things', 'people', 'want', 'going', 'selfish', 'want', 'read', 'walk', 'besides', 'knackered', 'prime', 'minister', 'shrugs', 'sorry', 'damned', 'returns', 'channel', 'month']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/04/justin-timberlake-man-of-the-woods-album-review

We live in complicated times. Forbes, a website that counts the assets of the world’s richest 1%, has accused Justin Timberlake of “fake wokeness” on the occasion of his fourth solo album. Billed as something of a return to the singer’s Tennessee roots, Man of the Woods lands just as Timberlake’s working relationship with Woody Allen is under scrutiny, and his imminent appearance at the Super Bowl recalls his less-than-gallant role in Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction in 2004. Tunes-wise, Timberlake’s return to his roots is partial, as standout songs like Sauce and Filthy gyrate persuasively around Princely funk and bombastic, lubricious R&B. Midnight Summer Jam is the sort of busy party production that Timberlake has specialised in for years, abetted by the Neptunes (who produce again here). From here on in an uneasy fusion ensues, however, in which Timberlake “gets his flannel on” (Flannel) and mostly fails to combine the rural with an edgy digital aesthetic – a particularly gnomic duet with country star Chris Stapleton (Say Something) is produced by Timbaland. Sometimes, though, new ground is broken. Wave is , blithe, downright ear-pricking ska just on the “yes” side of “what?”.

culture/2018/feb/04/justin-timberlake-man-of-the-woods-album-review

pillar/arts

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culture

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article

2018-02-04T08:00:21Z

Justin Timberlake: Man of the Woods review – failed fusion of rural rhythms

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/04/justin-timberlake-man-of-the-woods-album-review

['live', 'complicated', 'times', 'forbes', 'website', 'counts', 'assets', 'world', 'richest', 'accused', 'justin', 'timberlake', 'fake', 'wokeness', 'occasion', 'fourth', 'solo', 'album', 'billed', 'something', 'return', 'singer', 'tennessee', 'roots', 'man', 'woods', 'lands', 'timberlake', 'working', 'relationship', 'woody', 'allen', 'scrutiny', 'imminent', 'appearance', 'super', 'bowl', 'recalls', 'less-than-gallant', 'role', 'janet', 'jackson', 'wardrobe', 'malfunction', 'tunes-wise', 'timberlake', 'return', 'roots', 'partial', 'standout', 'songs', 'like', 'sauce', 'filthy', 'gyrate', 'persuasively', 'around', 'princely', 'funk', 'bombastic', 'lubricious', 'rampb', 'midnight', 'summer', 'jam', 'sort', 'busy', 'party', 'production', 'timberlake', 'specialised', 'years', 'abetted', 'neptunes', 'produce', 'uneasy', 'fusion', 'ensues', 'however', 'timberlake', 'gets', 'flannel', 'flannel', 'mostly', 'fails', 'combine', 'rural', 'edgy', 'digital', 'aesthetic', 'particularly', 'gnomic', 'duet', 'country', 'star', 'chris', 'stapleton', 'say', 'something', 'produced', 'timbaland', 'sometimes', 'though', 'new', 'ground', 'broken', 'wave', 'blithe', 'downright', 'ear-pricking', 'ska', 'yes', 'side']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/ng-interactive/2018/feb/04/simone-lia-introducing-the-kitcoin

culture/ng-interactive/2018/feb/04/simone-lia-introducing-the-kitcoin

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

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interactive

2018-02-04T08:00:21Z

Simone Lia: introducing the kitcoin

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/ng-interactive/2018/feb/04/simone-lia-introducing-the-kitcoin

[]

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/03/youtube-peng-high-maintenance-kurupt-dapper-laughs-broad-city

Young people are losing touch with TV. An Ofcom survey last year found that Brits under 25 had reduced their consumption of broadcast television by a third since 2010. The rapid rise of YouTube stars proves the internet is now where new talent launches itself, but proper, traditional telly has the money and reach to attract online performers to the platform. The web is both an existential threat and the well of ideas that constitutes TV’s best hope of survival. “YouTubers’ chief threat to broadcasters is that they appear authentic and unmediated,” says Robin Parker, web editor at industry journal Broadcast. “They are found or recommended by peers. Low production values are part of that charm: a children’s TV producer once told me that the mix and match of YouTubers was today’s equivalent of the old Saturday-morning magazine shows.” Online does have a strong track record of discovering comedies with the chops for TV: High Maintenance and Broad City in the US, and BBC3’s People Just Do Nothing over here, grew out of homemade web series with tried and tested ensembles. But solo performers who don’t have a vehicle nailed down still struggle. Colleen Ballinger’s effort to convert her character Miranda Sings, a spoof of deluded pop wannabes, into a TV hit ended last year when Haters Back Off! was cancelled by Netflix after two seasons. Haters felt obscure and parochial, as if it still belonged on YouTube; Netflix viewers weren’t sure what to do with it. While Ballinger said she was devastated by the axing, it must have been some consolation to return to the lo-fi haven of a YouTube channel with 8.5 million subscribers. “Television holds the promise of mainstream exposure, but is that what YouTubers really want?” asks Parker. “With hundreds of thousands of followers online, control of what they put out there, an agent looking after their ‘brand’ and commercial partners beating a path to their door, they may ask: what does TV give me?” The next in-character performer to try to upgrade viral buzz to regular stardom is Branden Miller, whose creation Joanne the Scammer is an Instagram sensation with nearly 2 million followers. At first glance, Joanne is a caricature of white women as icy, grasping Ivankas – but she’s also a “messy bitch” whose addiction to “drama” gives her heroic qualities in the eyes of a nothing-to-lose millennial audience. They recognise her compulsion to overshare via selfie videos, support her endless quest to embezzle horny men, and got a kick out of her screaming “ICONIC!” during Alicia Keys’s earnest speech on equality at the 2016 VMAs. Despite Joanne’s faint echoes of Ali G, Cupid Stunt and Dame Edna, Miller – a gay Floridian of black Puerto Rican descent, brought up by white adoptive parents – feels like a new kind of talent who makes TV look old and in need of assistance. Joanne is rough, cathartic, hard to pin down. “There’s so much going on,” says Wolfgang Hammer, president of hybrid TV and internet production house Super Deluxe, who started working with Miller two years ago. “Class, consumerism, race, gender: it’s an endless array of themes our audience really cares about.” Miller’s loose creation looks suited to the creative collaboration a move to TV requires. “It’s amazing what comes out of his mind when he makes these things,” says Hammer, referring to Joanne the Scammer’s Instagram monologues, “but he’s not a writer per se, he’s a performer.” Miller has already moved towards longform content via extended online sketches produced by Super Deluxe, such as the Thelma & Louise spoof Khadi & Joanne, on which he didn’t receive a writing credit. “We know his voice. Performers always have things written for them.” The danger for someone such as Hammer, who is developing a full-blown Joanne TV series, is that an unadulterated Joanne could – like Haters Back Off! – be as baffling to a mainstream audience as the fluid meme culture it sprang from. Will he trim Joanne’s more modish edges? “No! The opposite! Our job is not to take what’s raw and unique and make it bland. Our job is the structure. I’d rather not do something [at all] than attenuate the impact of something we believe in.” Nevertheless, harnessing online phenomena can be dangerous. ITV2 poked a hornets’ nest in 2014 when it hired Dapper Laughs on the back of his 500,000 followers on Vine, the six-second video network that spawned a craze for comedy micro-sketches. In that case, the public were actively repulsed, rather than just nonplussed, by crude sexism that had attracted little attention when it was confined to an online fandom. “Dapper Laughs: On the Pull was an example of something rushed to screen without due care,” says Parker. “What might work in a tweet or short clip can pall over half an hour.” Hammer, however, thinks there is no need for Joanne the Scammer to court an elusive “wider” audience. Whichever network picks up the project will, instead, be grateful to plug a demographic hole. “Most of television doesn’t have an audience of that age group any more. You can be great at making shows, but if 25-year-olds don’t watch television, what good does it do?” Presenter Elijah Quashie’s upcoming Channel 4 debut is a similar story of a broadcaster tapping into something they can’t get elsewhere. “He has access to worlds that we might not necessarily go into,” says Becky Cadman, the channel’s factual entertainment commissioner. “That’s what excited us.” Quashie’s show, The Peng Life, is the TV version of The Pengest Munch, a YouTube series that blew up at the end of 2016. Its reviews of fried-chicken takeaways, expressed by the “Chicken Connoisseur” in a London street slang sprinkled with Wodehousian flair (“When it has its original peng seasoning: mad, mad, mad. Just succulent, juicy chicken. Piffington!”), garnered Quashie newspaper profiles and a million views per video. But continuing to rate chicken shops would, on national TV, be absurdly specific. “Just taking what he does and putting it on C4 doesn’t necessarily bring his YouTube viewers to C4,” says Cadman, arguing against the no-compromise approach. “They can get that on the internet.” Fronting factual entertainment isn’t wholly reliant on a creative vision, so someone such as Quashie is naturally more malleable than a character comic. The new show will see him assess fashion as well as food, and top-end items along with street staples. “Elijah’s brilliant at reviewing in a way that resonates with a youth audience,” says Peng Life executive producer Max Welch. “He’ll still be doing that, it’s just supercharged.” In any case, says fellow exec producer Duane Jones, as soon as Quashie went viral he was appealing to people outside the subculture The Pengest Munch represented. “We identified that Elijah does well at engaging a really broad audience. It wasn’t one particular type of person.” In other words, this isn’t a performer whose niche appeal might never widen. Quashie wasn’t niche in the first place. We are some way off the point when online performers won’t even feel the need to look for a TV gig. Telly is still the pinnacle. But online is the fastest way up. “You go into schools and community centres,” says Jones, “and the kids no longer want to be TV presenters. They want to be YouTube presenters.”

culture/2018/feb/03/youtube-peng-high-maintenance-kurupt-dapper-laughs-broad-city

pillar/arts

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culture

Culture

article

2018-02-03T10:00:55Z

LoseTube: Why online stars struggle on TV

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/03/youtube-peng-high-maintenance-kurupt-dapper-laughs-broad-city

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'shows', '25-year-olds', 'watch', 'television', 'good', 'presenter', 'elijah', 'quashie', 'upcoming', 'channel', 'debut', 'similar', 'story', 'broadcaster', 'tapping', 'something', 'get', 'elsewhere', 'access', 'worlds', 'might', 'necessarily', 'go', 'says', 'becky', 'cadman', 'channel', 'factual', 'entertainment', 'commissioner', 'excited', 'us', 'quashie', 'show', 'peng', 'life', 'tv', 'version', 'pengest', 'munch', 'youtube', 'series', 'blew', 'end', 'reviews', 'fried-chicken', 'takeaways', 'expressed', 'chicken', 'connoisseur', 'london', 'street', 'slang', 'sprinkled', 'wodehousian', 'flair', 'original', 'peng', 'seasoning', 'mad', 'mad', 'mad', 'succulent', 'juicy', 'chicken', 'piffington', 'garnered', 'quashie', 'newspaper', 'profiles', 'million', 'views', 'per', 'video', 'continuing', 'rate', 'chicken', 'shops', 'would', 'national', 'tv', 'absurdly', 'specific', 'taking', 'putting', 'c4', 'necessarily', 'bring', 'youtube', 'viewers', 'c4', 'says', 'cadman', 'arguing', 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'pinnacle', 'online', 'fastest', 'way', 'go', 'schools', 'community', 'centres', 'says', 'jones', 'kids', 'longer', 'want', 'tv', 'presenters', 'want', 'youtube', 'presenters']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/03/what-to-see-this-week-in-the-uk

Five of the best ... films Phantom Thread (15) (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017, US) 130 mins Another plum role for Daniel Day-Lewis, in a film as elegantly fastidious and gothically imposing as its subject. He plays Reynolds Woodcock, an elite London couturier who likes everything just so, including his women. But this season’s model – smart, resolute Vicky Krieps – has other ideas. As we have come to expect with Anderson, it’s a class act all round. Early Man (PG) (Nick Park, 2018, UK/Fra) 89 mins Good old Aardman brings its homely house style to bear on an amiably daft story of stone-age Britons and the beautiful game. Sports movie veterans will know where things are heading when our none-too-bright heroes (led by Eddie Redmayne) challenge their European invaders to a high-stakes football match but, as ever, the joy is in the details. Coco (U) (Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina, 2017, US) 105 mins As accessible a trip to the afterlife as you could wish for, Pixar’s latest fantasia crosses over to the other side, Mexican-style, as a village kid goes against his music-hating family and accidentally strands himself in the Land of the Dead as a result: a mirror-world of lively talking skeletons, many of whom he’s related to. Full of colour, song, dance, action and authentic cultural detail, it’s altogether life-affirming. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (15) (Martin McDonagh, 2017, UK/US) 115 mins Frances McDormand’s campaign for her murdered daughter doesn’t go like she planned, and there’s an unpredictability to McDonagh’s morality tale, which weighs up big questions in a small town. The criticisms of its glib race attitudes are valid, but there is a great deal to recommend, such as its foul-mouthed comedy and seasoned performers (Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell and Peter Dinklage). Darkest Hour (PG) (Joe Wright, 2017, UK) 125 mins Historians will find plenty to quibble with (Winston Churchill taking the tube?), and we’ve all heard this story before. But director Wright’s visual flair animates what could have been a talky political thriller, and Gary Oldman gives the performance of his late career playing Churchill at his most doggedly defiant and drunkenly difficult. SR Five of the best ... rock & pop gigs Kendrick Lamar The best rapper alive (soz Taylor) brings his Damn tour to the UK. Leaning heavily on last year’s critically adored album of the same name, as well as his canon of classic head-knockers, you can also expect a run-through of his many collaborations. Guests on the US leg have included SZA, J Cole and Chance the Rapper, so keep your eyes peeled. 3Arena, Dublin Wednesday 7; Genting Arena, Birmingham Friday 9; touring to 20 February PartyNextDoor Canada’s Jahron Anthony Brathwaite, AKA PartyNextDoor, can do it all: he can sing (that’s him crooning through Zayn’s Still Got Time); he can rap; he can write a banger (Rihanna’s Work); and he can produce if you need him to. If you’re wondering whether he can put on an exciting live show, too, now’s your chance to find out. Dublin, Sunday 4; Glasgow, Monday 5 ; London, Wednesday 7; Manchester, Thursday 8; touring to 10 February Jhené Aiko Last September’s 85-minute long Trip, an undulating, psychedelic song cycle about grief, may have been heavy going but take solace from the fact that these live shows will offer some lighter relief via tracks from 2014’s excellent Souled Out debut and the surprisingly intriguing Twenty88, Aiko’s collaborative album with rent-a-rapper Big Sean. Expect to cry, dance and, like, really feel stuff. London, Sunday 4 & Monday 5; Glasgow, Wednesday 7; Birmingham, Thursday 8; Manchester, Friday 9 February Jorja Smith February is a busy month for golden-voiced R&B newcomer and Drake’s bessie Jorja Smith (pictured, below). Not only is she heading out on her largest headline UK tour, including a night at London’s not-exactly-intimate O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, she’s also performing at the Brits (where she’s this year’s Critics’ Choice) with last year’s winner, Rag’n’Bone Man. Ah well, you can’t win them all. Edinburgh, Tuesday 6; Sheffield, Wednesday 7; Liverpool, Thursday 8; touring to 15 February MC Tim Berne’s Big Satan Influential New York saxist and composer Tim Berne likes Motown and funk almost as much as flamethrowing free jazz and tightly logical, rhythm-juggling composition. On these dates, Berne’s enthusiasms fiercely fuse, in his exciting Big Satan trio with French guitar wildman Marc Ducret and US drummer Tom Rainey. mac: Hexagon Theatre, Birmingham, Thursday 8; touring to 10 February JF Four of the best ... classical concerts Un Ballo in Maschera The centrepiece of Opera North’s spring season is a new production of Verdi’s middle-period masterpiece. Tim Albery’s production opts for the original Swedish-based version of the libretto. Richard Farnes returns to conduct; Rafael Rojas is Gustavus and Phillip Rhodes plays Anckarstroem. Grand Theatre, Leeds Saturday 3 February to 2 March; touring to 24 March Jansen/Maisky/Argerich Trio Although Martha Argerich no longer gives solo recitals, she has continued to play chamber music. Her recital here with violinist Janine Jansen and cellist Mischa Maisky features piano trios by Shostakovich and Mendelssohn, and sonatas by Beethoven and Schumann. Barbican Hall, EC2, Tuesday 6 February Carmen Barrie Kosky made his debut at Covent Garden in 2016 with Shostakovich’s farce The Nose. He’s back there now with a much more serious piece, a version of Carmen including music that is usually omitted. There are two casts, with Jakub Hrůša conducting the first, which features Anna Goryacheva. Royal Opera House, WC2, Tuesday 6 February to 16 March Irvine Arditti Irvine Arditti has been a leading contemporary music specialist for almost 40 years. He’s celebrating his 65th birthday with a pair of solo recitals, both featuring Sciarrino’s Sei Capricci for solo violin. In Leicester, he also plays pieces by Grunewald and Emmerson, while in London he’s the soloist for the Philharmonia in Cattaneo’s Violin Concerto. De Montfort University: The Gallery, Leicester, Wednesday 7; Royal Festival Hall, SE1, Thursday 8 February AC Five of the best ... exhibitions Ragnar Kjartansson An organ built in 1774 for the Welsh cultural patron Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn becomes the centrepiece of a performance devised by renowned Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. In The Sky in a Room, a team of organists will play the 1959 Italian pop song Il Cielo In Una Stanza for five hours a day in a gallery filled with 18th-century art. National Museum Cardiff, Saturday 3 February to 11 March Ocean Liners: Speed and Style The strange, lost world of 20th-century Atlantic liners is recreated in a feast of art deco design. Frocks, furniture, posters and photographs recall the upper-decks opulence of these titanic ships, while Stanley Spencer’s paintings of shipbuilding on the Clyde commemorate the workers who built them. Victoria & Albert Museum, SW7, Saturday 3 February to 17 June Bridget Riley The latest works of this octogenarian artist are scintillating miracles of eye-teasing optical magic. Riley returns to the hallucinatory black-and-white style of her famous works from the 1960s in murals and framed paintings that have the scope of Jackson Pollock and the scientific precision of a carefully calculated experiment. She also shows dots of just three colours that mix in your mind like a conceptualist Seurat. A phenomenon. David Zwirner, W1, to 10 March Cézanne Portraits I will say it one last time: don’t miss the final chance to see this outstanding exhibition. Cézanne has been a god of modern culture ever since Picasso revered him in the 1900s, but this superb survey of his anxious, mystifying attempts to understand himself and others reveals the radicalism and courage of his vision all over again. The unease and brilliance of the man who invented modern art blaze out. National Portrait Gallery, WC2, to 11 February Charles II : Art & Power While his decapitated daddy gets a blockbuster at the Royal Academy, this king who spent years in exile before taking the British throne in 1660 is given a smaller but arguably more intelligent examination by the Royal Collection itself. Prints and paintings reveal the scientific strides made in Charles II’s reign as well as the erotic antics of his licentious court, as portrayed by Peter Lely. The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, SW1, to 13 May JJ Five of the best ... theatre shows Hamlet Elsinore is transposed to an African state in Simon Godwin’s vibrant RSC production from 2016. There have been more starry Hamlets recently – Benedict Cumberbatch, Andrew Scott and Tom Hiddleston – but Paapa Essiedu’s compelling sulky, sarcastic boy-prince more than measures up. The Lowry, Salford Saturday 3; Theatre Royal: The Lyric, Plymouth Tuesday to 10 February; touring to 31 March Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 Anna Deavere Smith’s groundbreaking verbatim theatre piece charted the fallout after the policemen accused of assaulting black taxi driver Rodney King were acquitted. She interviewed many people close to the case. Nina Bowers holds the space, offering a multitude of different voices and vantage points. Timely and still urgent. Gate Theatre, W11, to 10 February The Birthday Party Sixty years young, Pinter’s play –dismissed by critics on its premiere in 1958 – is revealed as no dusty museum piece in Ian Rickson’s astute revival. Instead, it’s funny and frightening, as a rundown seaside boarding house is invaded by two thugs in search of Toby Jones’s birthday boy. A menacingly good evening, with Zoë Wanamaker sublime as the prattling, over-motherly boarding landlady. The Harold Pinter Theatre, SW1, to 14 April Heads Up How will you respond to the end of the world? Will we even notice the moment it arrives or will we have our eyes on our screens, blocking the real world out? Perhaps even watching clips from disaster movies? Kieran Hurley’s one-man show offers Cassandra-like prophecies of catastrophe in a city just like ours. Potent storytelling, awash with sorrow, anxiety, poetry and music. Dartington Hall, Totnes, Saturday 3; Theatre Royal: Ustinov Studio, Bath, Thursday 8 & Friday 9 February; touring to 1 March Network Sold out, but with tickets available via Friday Rush and day seats, Ivo van Hove’s staging of Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 movie script about media truth and lies is a visually dazzling, high-concept show, turning the space into a news studio. It’s hectic and at times almost overwhelming in its controlled chaos, but also damned effective, with Bryan Cranston superb as the mad-as-hell news anchor. National Theatre: Lyttelton, SE1, to 24 March LG Three of the best ... dance shows Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & Bunkamura Theatre Coccon: Pluto The excellent Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui returns to his beloved subject of manga in this new dance-theatre piece inspired by the character Astro Boy. Cherkaoui combines actors, dancers, puppetry and special effects to recreate the energy and fantasy of the original comic-book form. Barbican Theatre, EC2 Thursday 8 to 11 February Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch: Viktor This 1986 work was the first of Bausch’s “travelogue” dances, a portrait of Rome on a set flanked by 20ft walls of mud. The dancers act out their fantasies, compulsions and desires, creating a classic Bausch tapestry of brutal black comedy and whimsical beauty. Sadler’s Wells, EC1, Thursday 8 to 11 February Umanoove: The Knot Didy Veldman’s latest work for the Ipswich venue explores the place of marriage in present-day western society: playing with the rituals, the social expectations and the myth of happy-ever-after endings peddled by religion and popular culture. DanceEast, Ipswich, Friday 9; touring to 14 Feb JM

culture/2018/feb/03/what-to-see-this-week-in-the-uk

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2018-02-03T09:00:54Z

What to see this week in the UK

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/03/what-to-see-this-week-in-the-uk

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'overwhelming', 'controlled', 'chaos', 'also', 'damned', 'effective', 'bryan', 'cranston', 'superb', 'mad-as-hell', 'news', 'anchor', 'national', 'theatre', 'lyttelton', 'se1', 'march', 'lg', 'three', 'best', 'dance', 'shows', 'sidi', 'larbi', 'cherkaoui', 'amp', 'bunkamura', 'theatre', 'coccon', 'pluto', 'excellent', 'sidi', 'larbi', 'cherkaoui', 'returns', 'beloved', 'subject', 'manga', 'new', 'dance-theatre', 'piece', 'inspired', 'character', 'astro', 'boy', 'cherkaoui', 'combines', 'actors', 'dancers', 'puppetry', 'special', 'effects', 'recreate', 'energy', 'fantasy', 'original', 'comic-book', 'form', 'barbican', 'theatre', 'ec2', 'thursday', 'february', 'tanztheater', 'wuppertal', 'pina', 'bausch', 'viktor', 'work', 'first', 'bausch', 'travelogue', 'dances', 'portrait', 'rome', 'set', 'flanked', '20ft', 'walls', 'mud', 'dancers', 'act', 'fantasies', 'compulsions', 'desires', 'creating', 'classic', 'bausch', 'tapestry', 'brutal', 'black', 'comedy', 'whimsical', 'beauty', 'sadler', 'wells', 'ec1', 'thursday', 'february', 'umanoove', 'knot', 'didy', 'veldman', 'latest', 'work', 'ipswich', 'venue', 'explores', 'place', 'marriage', 'present-day', 'western', 'society', 'playing', 'rituals', 'social', 'expectations', 'myth', 'happy-ever-after', 'endings', 'peddled', 'religion', 'popular', 'culture', 'danceeast', 'ipswich', 'friday', 'touring', 'feb', 'jm']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/02/late-night-hosts-on-nunes-to-call-him-trumps-lapdog-is-an-insult-to-dogs-and-laps

Late-night hosts on Thursday discussed Donald Trump’s false claims about the number of viewers who tuned into his State of the Union speech and congressional Republicans’ efforts to discredit the Russia investigation. Stephen Colbert “The president today is still basking in the afterbirth of his State of the Union,” Stephen Colbert began, reading Trump’s tweet in which he claimed the 45.6 million who watched his address was the most ever. “First: that’s not true,” the host replied. “Second: it’s a lie. 45.6 million isn’t the record because Obama’s first State of the Union had 48 million viewers, and the most-viewed is Bill Clinton’s in 1993 which had 66.9 million viewers. “It doesn’t matter how many people watched,” Colbert continued. “But what does matter is that the president needs to lie about it. And then somehow get away with it. This is the new world we live in. So let me say in advance: congratulations to President Trump on winning the Super Bowl.” The host then showed footage from Trump’s speech in West Virginia following his address. There, he touted the number of people who watched, claimed that Senator Orrin Hatch called him the greatest president in history, and complained that Democrats failed to applaud when he mentioned low black unemployment numbers. “Yeah, you’d think the Democrats would applaud since that’s all because of Obama,” the host quipped, before impersonating Trump. “‘I don’t get why black people don’t like me. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to call Jay-Z a son of a bitch on Twitter.’” Trevor Noah Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah comprehensively detailed the GOP’s ongoing attempts to release a controversial memo intended to paint the FBI and DoJ as biased against Trump. “What Republicans have done is they’ve created a four-page memo accusing the FBI of improperly obtaining a warrant to wiretap a Trump campaign aide in 2016, a man by the name of Carter Page,” Noah began. “Mind you, this memo is not a report. It’s not a formal finding. It’s not even an official document. It’s like a sticky note from Congress.” “Four pages to discredit the entire FBI?” Noah asked. “That doesn’t seem like enough detail. I’ve had CVS receipts with more detail than this memo.” He then added that the memo was written by “House Intelligence Chairman and guy with resting middle-management face, Devin Nunes”, who had recused himself from the investigation after he was caught sneaking to the White House to show Trump secret evidence. “He’s as credible as a white man selling jerk chicken,” Noah joked. “But the Republicans don’t need credible to advance their narrative,” the host continued. “All Nunes has to do is say he has something important and damning, and the propaganda machine will do the rest.” Noah went on to explain how Nunes has eschewed the usual channels by which documents containing classified information are reviewed. Federal law enforcement officials, including Trump appointees Rod Rosenstein and Christopher Wray, are reportedly concerned the memo contains “inaccuracies” and a “slanted narrative”. Noah continued: “You see, it’s hard to argue that this is an ongoing FBI/DoJ conspiracy against Trump when the people in charge of the FBI and the Mueller investigation are people that Trump personally picked. Although, in Trump’s defense, just because he picked someone doesn’t mean that they don’t hate him,” the host joked as a photo of Melania Trump appeared on the screen. Jimmy Kimmel Jimmy Kimmel also addressed the memo imbroglio. “Devin Nunes is somehow still in charge of this Russia investigation in the House in spite of the fact that he recused himself from the investigation after he got caught sneaking to the White House to share information with the people he was supposed to be investigating,” the host explained. “To call Devin Nunes Donald Trump’s lapdog would be an insult to dogs and laps,” Kimmel said. “He’s more of a retriever: here boy, go write me a memo to smear the FBI.” Kimmel then launched into a broadside about Trump’s treatment of both the media and law enforcement: “Here’s how our government works now. If your party is in charge, you can lie, you can cheat, you can game the system to benefit your buddies. You can basically do whatever you want. And then when a newspaper digs whatever you did up and publishes a story about it, you don’t just attack the facts, you don’t just attack the story, you attack the newspaper.” “That Stormy Daniels story,” Kimmel noted. “The newspaper that published the report about Trump paying her off? That was the Wall Street Journal. Do you know who owns the Wall Street Journal? Rupert Murdoch. The guy who owns Fox News, and the first four hours of the president’s day every day. “Once the media is playing defense, you climb another rung,” Kimmel said. “When the FBI steps in and starts sniffing around and handing out subpoenas, what do you do? Same thing you ways do. You discredit the FBI. You discredit the special counsel. “Never mind the fact that most of the people you say are against you are lifelong Republicans,” Kimmel noted, “like Robert Mueller, who voluntarily enlisted in the marines to fight in Vietnam, who served as US attorney, who prosecuted John Gotti, who was named director of the FBI by President Bush.”

culture/2018/feb/02/late-night-hosts-on-nunes-to-call-him-trumps-lapdog-is-an-insult-to-dogs-and-laps

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

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article

2018-02-02T16:06:46Z

Late-night hosts on Nunes: 'To call him Trump's lapdog is an insult to dogs and laps'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/02/late-night-hosts-on-nunes-to-call-him-trumps-lapdog-is-an-insult-to-dogs-and-laps

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/feb/01/late-night-hosts-call-trumps-state-of-the-union-a-glass-half-full-of-cyanide

Late-night hosts on Wednesday discussed Donald Trump’s State of the Union address and congressional Republicans’ attempts to discredit the Russia investigation. Stephen Colbert “Everyone is still keenly aware that Donald Trump gave a speech last night,” Stephen Colbert began. “And good news for Trump: according to CNN, 70% of the people who watched the speech had either a very positive or somewhat positive reaction, which seemed good until you learned that it was the lowest net-positive rating for a State of the Union address since CNN first asked the question. “One person who thought Donald Trump did a great job was Donald Trump, at least judging from all the clapping he did during his own speech,” Colbert continued, showing video footage of the president applauding himself during breaks in his address. Colbert went on: “Of course, Democrats also responded to the State of the Union, and then responded, and responded. In fact, there were a total five Democratic responses. But the unified Democratic message was clear: ‘How about this one? You like this one? What do you want from us? We’ll say it!’” The host then noted that the official Democratic response came from Massachusetts representative Joe Kennedy III, the “lovechild of Superman and Conan O’Brien”. “Nothing says ‘party of new ideas’ more than deploying the latest model Kennedy,” Colbert quipped. “Kennedy gave a stirring, thoughtful speech about the importance of fighting for all Americans. In the end, hard to say if it was a good speech because Kennedy did not clap for himself once.” Samantha Bee Samantha Bee responded to Trump’s State of the Union and discussed the controversial Nunes memo, the publication of which Republicans are hoping helps discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation. “Last night in his State of the Union address, Donald Trump took a break from tweeting about immigrants to scream slightly more politely at lawmakers about immigrants,” Bee said, showing footage of the president stating “Americans are dreamers too”. “Oh my God, what a beautiful, proud, thoughtful way to say that you will only help white people,” the host replied. “Rumor had it this would be an optimistic, glass-half-full-type speech, and it was, assuming that glass is half-full of cyanide and I get to drink it.” Bee moved on: “This time last year we were taking cold comfort in the idea that checks and balances would keep Trump in line. So where did all that checky-balancy stuff go wrong?” The host then summarized the ways in which congressional Republicans have shilled for the president with regard to the Russia investigation, showing footage of Paul Ryan raising the possibility that the FBI abused its power in investigating Trump. Bee also mentioned Devin Nunes, the California congressman who authored a controversial and supposedly misleading memo alleging oversight abuses by the FBI and DoJ. “You remember Devin Nunes as the guy who already had to recuse himself from this very investigation for lying to protect the White House,” Bee explained. “And Nunes hasn’t even seen all the intelligence he based the memo on, so this so-called memo is more like a fun little fan fiction he wrote in his spare time.” “But House Republicans voted to release it anyway,” the host said, noting how the popularity of the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo, widely disseminated by Russian bots and trolls, was used as the basis for arguments to make the memo public. “Wow, the Russian interference investigation has itself been interfered with by Russians,” the host concluded. “It’s like a turducken of treason.” Seth Meyers Seth Meyers also took aim at the GOP for its efforts to malign law enforcement agencies. “While Trump managed to read off a teleprompter for 80 minutes, his White House and Republicans in Congress forged ahead with their attempts to discredit the Russia investigation and the law enforcement agencies conducting that investigation,” Meyers explained. “Now if it sounds to you like Trump is an urgent threat to the constitution, you’re not alone,” he continued. “Even Trump’s EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, used to agree with you, as we found out when old audio from a 2016 interview surfaced for the first time yesterday.” The host then played the audio, in which Pruitt said Trump would be “abusive to the constitution”. “Pruitt’s evolution from Trump critic to lackey very much captures the modern GOP in a microcosm,” Meyers said. “As Trump has become more authoritarian, more unhinged, more lawless, the GOP has only gotten more protective of him.” He then brought up the Nunes memo, explaining that, at just four pages, it is rumored to be “selectively cherry-picked for the purpose of discrediting the FBI”. “To be very clear, you do not have to revere the FBI to be concerned about what Trump and the GOP are doing,” Meyers concluded. “It is absolutely true that the FBI has abused its power many times throughout its history. But you can believe that and also be worried about Trump and the GOP attempting to purge law enforcement agencies for their own political ends.”

culture/2018/feb/01/late-night-hosts-call-trumps-state-of-the-union-a-glass-half-full-of-cyanide

pillar/arts

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culture

Culture

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2018-02-01T16:33:05Z

Late-night hosts call Trump's State of the Union a 'glass half-full of cyanide'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/01/late-night-hosts-call-trumps-state-of-the-union-a-glass-half-full-of-cyanide

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/31/just-another-pretty-face-should-hollywood-stop-giving-bad-guys-a-face-lift

One of Hollywood’s most time-honored traditions is praising actors in recognition of the physical transformation required for certain roles. The awards come flooding in, as do vague references to Stanislavski’s method, and the clickbaity headlines set the internet ablaze: Matthew McConaughey packs on 40lb for his turn as a gold-miner! Christian Bale ate a single can of tuna a day for The Machinist! Cameron Diaz uglies up in Being John Malkovich! Watching the spectacle of celebrity mutation excites us both as gossip-mongers and moviegoers, since we appreciate dedication to craft as much as we do a grainy on-set photo of Matthew McConaughey cradling his pot-belly like a stray dog he’s just encountered. But just as often as these good-looking people make themselves less so in the name of art, actors are cast as substantially less attractive real-life people and don’t undergo the same bodily metamorphosis. CGI, hair and makeup go a long way, but for every Charlize Theron-as-Aileen Wuornos or Robert De Niro-as-Jake LaMotta, there are times where we’re asked to accept a character as “ugly” because their hair is frizzy or their teeth imperfect. But let’s face it: sometimes, by no fault of their own, actors are simply too attractive for the role. This came to mind when the former Disney Channel star Ross Lynch played Jeffrey Dahmer last year, and when Zac Efron was cast as Ted Bundy in an upcoming biopic, and when Margot Robbie channeled Tonya Harding, and, most recently, as Taylor Kitsch and Darren Criss appear, respectively, in the new series Waco as Branch Davidian cult leader David Koresh, and as serial killer Andrew Cunanan in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. In Waco, Kitsch tries to expunge himself of Friday Night Lights heartthrob Tim Riggins to play Koresh, pseudo-prophet, alleged sexual abuser, and leader of the Branch Davidian religious movement. Kitsch plays the part formidably, but you can’t help but wonder how Waco would look if the camera weren’t so enamored by its lead, who broods and smizes so frequently it’s as if he’s been conditioned to play up his looks. Then you remember it’s Kitsch, and he probably has been. Although he shares something of a resemblance to Andrew Cunanan, Darren Criss’s performance in Versace is similarly gratuitous in the way only an excessively handsome person could make it, and the end result is a particularly doe-eyed brand of menace. I’ll hold off on any pre-emptive judgment of Efron’s turn in the new Joe Berlinger-directed Bundy biopic, but I’m not optimistic about that one, either. Hollywood is of course a business, one that’s in the business of prettification; often, our enjoyment of its product is incumbent on our suspension of disbelief. But that becomes more difficult with biopics, particularly those concerning subjects of ill repute. When serial killers and cult leaders and disgraced figure skaters are made more attractive – read: packaged for box office consumption – than they really were, is something lost in the process? Are the films forcing upon us a redemptive arc that hasn’t been earned? First, let’s look at the scholarship: there are, to put it mildly, competing schools of thought among academics about the conflation of beauty with evil. In a 1998 essay, the philosopher Mary Devereaux looked at the case of Leni Reifenstahl’s 1935 film Triumph of the Will, regarded by most cineastes as one of the most important, visually engrossing films ever made and, also, a heinous lionization of Adolf Hitler and the Nuremberg rallies (pardon the obeisance to Godwin’s Law). Devereaux argued that the film’s valuable insofar as it makes you question the Platonic notion that beauty and moral goodness proceed from one another. “Indeed, one of the most shocking things about Triumph of the Will is that it so clearly demonstrates that beauty and goodness can come apart,” she wrote, “not just in the relatively simple sense that moral and aesthetic evaluation may diverge, but in the more frightening sense that it is possible for art to render evil beautiful.” Some scholars are purists, and others still feel that the moral can’t be divorced from the aesthetic, and that the gussying up of reprehensible people amounts to a reappraisal, a muddying of the ethical waters. Triumph of the Will is of course a loftier, more high-stakes case study than the ones at hand; Hollywood has so far stopped short of casting a preternatural beauty to play Hitler. But there’s something to be said about the industry’s insistence on endearing us to crummy people by making them sexy. If it’s not manipulative and cynical, it is disingenuous; these casting decisions are oriented around bankability, not believability. In the best-case scenario, the performance, like Robbie’s in I, Tonya, is still gutsy and commendable, even as the film itself lazily deploys scrunchy hairbands and braces to sell its version of Harding (her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly also gets a not-insignificant sprucing up at the hands of the uber-handsome Sebastian Stan). At worst, they result in tone-deaf marketing, like how Jennifer Aniston, in Cake, was meant to be “ugly”. “This isn’t about culling conventionally attractive people from your TV screens,” wrote Lindy West in a Jezebel piece called Why We Need More Ugly People on TV. “It’s not about telling you who you ‘can’ and ‘can’t’ find attractive. It’s about decoupling women’s value from their desirability, and embracing the idea that people are more complicated than that.” Maybe this is why, when we talk about the lengths actors go for roles, the reverse facelifts they execute in the name of authenticity, we so readily wax poetic about their commitment and artistic zeal. Because, most of the time, studios are actually quite lazy in this regard. It’s a point of fact that when we watch a movie or television show the actors therein are considerably better-looking than us laymen. But Ted Bundy was no centerfold, and it seems just a bit unscrupulous to reimagine him as one.

culture/2018/jan/31/just-another-pretty-face-should-hollywood-stop-giving-bad-guys-a-face-lift

pillar/arts

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culture

Culture

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2018-01-31T18:26:19Z

Just another pretty face: should Hollywood stop giving bad guys a face-lift?

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/31/just-another-pretty-face-should-hollywood-stop-giving-bad-guys-a-face-lift

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'aniston', 'cake', 'meant', 'ugly', 'culling', 'conventionally', 'attractive', 'people', 'tv', 'screens', 'wrote', 'lindy', 'west', 'jezebel', 'piece', 'called', 'need', 'ugly', 'people', 'tv', 'telling', 'find', 'attractive', 'decoupling', 'women', 'value', 'desirability', 'embracing', 'idea', 'people', 'complicated', 'maybe', 'talk', 'lengths', 'actors', 'go', 'roles', 'reverse', 'facelifts', 'execute', 'name', 'authenticity', 'readily', 'wax', 'poetic', 'commitment', 'artistic', 'zeal', 'time', 'studios', 'actually', 'quite', 'lazy', 'regard', 'point', 'fact', 'watch', 'movie', 'television', 'show', 'actors', 'therein', 'considerably', 'better-looking', 'us', 'laymen', 'ted', 'bundy', 'centerfold', 'seems', 'bit', 'unscrupulous', 'reimagine', 'one']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/31/couldnt-banksy-be-called-a-vandal-too

Your report (Report, 30 January) says a Banksy mural was “defaced by vandals”. But why is Banksy’s work “art” while its erasure is merely the work of vandals? That one man can paint anything he likes on any property in the country, and have it unquestioningly praised simply because he’s famous, is a great example how our celebrity-obsessed inequality has become normalised. Maybe that’s the real message of his art. Phil Gyford London • Diane Abbott’s piece (G2, 31 January) on the 1980s rang a bell. I was given the same advice – “don’t learn to type” – by my headmistress in 1956 on leaving school to go to Oxford, so obviously nothing much changed in 20 years. I originally worked as a research chemist so certainly avoided being “shunted into a secretarial role” but eventually had to struggle to find my way round a keyboard when I retired and acquired a home computer. Barbara Young Bury, Lancashire • Melanie Wood (Letters, 30 January) could reuse Saturday Guardian’s plastic wrapper. Pleased to say Waitrose fish counter was a bit dubious, but agreed. Saved three layers of in-house plastic bags. Ros Clayton York • What the whale (Whale able to imitate English, 31 January) is actually saying is: “Set me free!” Ann Newell Thame, Oxfordshire • Jazz may not be getting any reviews in the new-look Guardian, and there have been two letters pointing this out. Folk music has been similarly neglected with regard to CD reviews, but no letters about it. Yet. Derek Schofield Wistaston, Cheshire • I would just like to say how much I am enjoying the increase in pop and rock music reviews each Friday. I hope it continues. Dave Hill Exeter • Join the debate – email [email protected] • Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters

culture/2018/jan/31/couldnt-banksy-be-called-a-vandal-too

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2018-01-31T18:01:48Z

Couldn’t Banksy be called a vandal too? | Brief letters

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/31/couldnt-banksy-be-called-a-vandal-too

['report', 'report', 'january', 'says', 'banksy', 'mural', 'defaced', 'vandals', 'banksy', 'work', 'art', 'erasure', 'merely', 'work', 'vandals', 'one', 'man', 'paint', 'anything', 'likes', 'property', 'country', 'unquestioningly', 'praised', 'simply', 'famous', 'great', 'example', 'celebrity-obsessed', 'inequality', 'become', 'normalised', 'maybe', 'real', 'message', 'art', 'phil', 'gyford', 'london', 'diane', 'abbott', 'piece', 'g2', 'january', '1980s', 'rang', 'bell', 'given', 'advice', 'learn', 'type', 'headmistress', 'leaving', 'school', 'go', 'oxford', 'obviously', 'nothing', 'much', 'changed', 'years', 'originally', 'worked', 'research', 'chemist', 'certainly', 'avoided', 'shunted', 'secretarial', 'role', 'eventually', 'struggle', 'find', 'way', 'round', 'keyboard', 'retired', 'acquired', 'home', 'computer', 'barbara', 'young', 'bury', 'lancashire', 'melanie', 'wood', 'letters', 'january', 'could', 'reuse', 'saturday', 'guardian', 'plastic', 'wrapper', 'pleased', 'say', 'waitrose', 'fish', 'counter', 'bit', 'dubious', 'agreed', 'saved', 'three', 'layers', 'in-house', 'plastic', 'bags', 'ros', 'clayton', 'york', 'whale', 'whale', 'able', 'imitate', 'english', 'january', 'actually', 'saying', 'set', 'free', 'ann', 'newell', 'thame', 'oxfordshire', 'jazz', 'may', 'getting', 'reviews', 'new-look', 'guardian', 'two', 'letters', 'pointing', 'folk', 'music', 'similarly', 'neglected', 'regard', 'cd', 'reviews', 'letters', 'yet', 'derek', 'schofield', 'wistaston', 'cheshire', 'would', 'like', 'say', 'much', 'enjoying', 'increase', 'pop', 'rock', 'music', 'reviews', 'friday', 'hope', 'continues', 'dave', 'hill', 'exeter', 'join', 'debate', 'email', 'guardianletterstheguardiancom', 'read', 'guardian', 'letters', 'click', 'visit', 'gucomletters']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/31/late-night-hosts-on-state-of-the-union

Late-night hosts on Tuesday addressed Donald Trump’s first official State of the Union address. “We are live right now, and barely conscious following a 90-minute speech,” said Stephen Colbert, whose show aired directly following Trump’s speech. “There were some bright spots. There were some really heartwarming moments. Some amazing people were there in the gallery.” Colbert then listed some of them, including Congressman Steve Scalise, who was shot last June, and police officer Ryan Holets, who adopted a child born to a heroin addict. “Honestly some of the most beautiful, impressive Americans you can imagine,” the host said. “And the president was there too.” Colbert noted how Trump began with a message to those still suffering from the aftermath of recent natural disasters. “To everyone still recovering in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, we are with you, we love you, and we always will pull through together,” Trump said. “That is going to be a comforting message to the people of Puerto Rico once they have electricity to turn on their TVs,” Colbert shot back. The host also showed a clip of the parts of the address intended to inspire, including one in which Trump said: “If there is a mountain, we climb it; if there is a frontier, we cross it; if there is an opportunity, we seize it.” Colbert, impersonating the president, replied: “If there is a burger, we eat it. If there is a porn star, we bone it. If there is an immigrant, we deport it. If there is an investigation, we undermine it.” Trevor Noah also reacted to the address, “which started,” the host said, in reference to the GOP’s tax legislation which Trump called the biggest cut in history, “with Donald Trump praising himself for the one thing he actually got done this year.” “Needless to say, like most of Trump’s biggest things, these tax cuts were not in fact the biggest tax cuts in American history,” the host explained. “This is a lie. It’s nowhere near it. But this wasn’t a night for facts. If you came here for facts, you came here for the wrong thing.” “Tonight was all about celebrating President Trump,” Noah continued. “And he was in such a good mood that he even reached across the aisle, and not just to grope someone, but to try and get things done. “Working together sounds beautiful, but almost every single time Democrats and Republicans have managed to agree on an idea, Trump has come back from the golf course just in time to screw it up,” he explained. “He did it on immigration, Obamacare, but again, I’m getting caught up on the facts. Tonight’s not about the facts.” Noah showed a clip of the president vouching for a path to citizenship for 1.8 million Dreamers, but also an end to what he calls “chain migration” and to the visa lottery system. “Although earlier in his speech, Trump talked about finding common ground on immigration reform, what he was really saying was ‘I’ll give you the Dreamers and then we shut everything else down,” Noah said. “Basically: Dreamers, close the door behind you.” Jimmy Kimmel interviewed Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who Trump reportedly paid off to keep silent about their affair. “I know Trump supporters are upset about us booking Stormy Daniels on the show,” he began. “They say it’s disrespectful to the president and I get that, I guess.” “But let’s jump in the time machine to go back to October of 2016, to the presidential debate in St Louis, Missouri, when then-candidate Donald Jennifer Trump showed up at Washington University two hours before the debate with three women who accused Bill Clinton of inappropriate sexual behavior,” Kimmel responded fiercely. “He live-streamed a press conference with those women and then sat them in the audience for the debate in the front row so they could be directly in the eye-line of Bill Clinton’s wife, Hillary.” “So for those of you whose magical thinking allows them to say it’s disrespectful for me to have Stormy Daniels on the show, I give you exhibit A,” the host said, showing a photo from the Washington University debate before discussing Trump’s address. “The speech comes at a difficult time for the president,” said Kimmel. “His approval rating is below 40% and that was before his speech preempted a new episode of This is Us.” Kimmel then discussed reports that Melania Trump was unhappy with her husband over the Stormy Daniels story, which caused her to cancel her trip to Davos. “If there was any question about the first lady’s enthusiasm for her husband, she put those rumors to rest tonight,” Kimmel quipped, showing Melania applauding unenthusiastically during her husband’s speech. “That was Melania wearing a tasteful white pantsuit in tribute to the president she voted for.”

culture/2018/jan/31/late-night-hosts-on-state-of-the-union

pillar/arts

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culture

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2018-01-31T16:16:06Z

Late-night hosts on State of the Union: 'This wasn't a night for facts'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/31/late-night-hosts-on-state-of-the-union

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/31/star-trek-discovery-is-reminding-me-of-everything-i-loved-about-enterprise

Star Trek: Discovery is the sixth live-action series of television’s most beloved, and enduring, cult franchise – and it is fun, oh my. We’re not even a full season into its story of an experimental spaceship in an interstellar war and yet, already: Mutinies! Drunken sex! Space rhinos! Alien face surgery! Mushrooms! And Michelle Yeoh turning up – twice, and in two guises – to smack the crap out of some bad guys! Critics are nicknaming the series “Disco”, and it’s not hard to see why. So many lights; so many frantic steps. And with the ship under the present command of a talking, bald, bipedal horse, there’s more than a little disco-biscuit aesthetic to the whole shebang. The bright colours of madness have always been inherent to Star Trek’s appeal, certainly since its original 1960s series shot a spaceship commanded by Kirk, Spock and the rest into the far corners of the universe, with a lot of fetching velour but nary a thought for a seatbelt. The series was created and first went into syndication during the instabilities and tensions of the old Cold War, which perhaps contextualises the obsessive love invested in it by a fanbase so loyal it has marched in the street to keep it on air. To my mind, it’s not the escapism of dashing heroics or snazzy space guns that’s made Star Trek so popular. It’s the gentle moral premise it shares with its British cult counterpart, Doctor Who; no matter how grave the danger or lurid the monster suit, once you clarify the human ethics of a situation, reason and science can solve any problem in the universe – and usually in under an hour. This thread runs through each series of Star Trek, guiding a chronology in which humanity and its galactic neighbours form a federation to fight against common enemies, and for mutual prosperity. The different series have navigated permutations of the challenges therein. Star Trek: The Next Generation busies itself shoring up alliances and resolving diplomatic conflicts close to home, while Star Trek: Voyager abandons a Federation ship into a region of space where there are no allies, no maps and a confronting ethical polarity between retaining collective values and surviving dangerous isolation. (That’s why Voyager’s Captain Janeway is the best captain. Don’t even argue.) But amid the happy hoo-ha that’s surrounded the small-screen return of Star Trek after 13 years, my recommendation is old fans and new make time between its episodes to revisit the franchise’s most recent televised outing: the maligned, uneven and surprisingly touching Enterprise series. Broadcast in 2001-2005, the show is set at the time of Earth’s first interstellar voyages, before the Federation is even a notion, and before key items of Star Trek’s signature space-tech are invented. Enterprise made departures from the established formula that rankled fans, such as ditching the orchestral sweeps of previous theme tunes for a “hipper” Rod Stewart cover, and experimenting with something like a serial narrative instead of traditionally more self-contained episodes. And so the Enterprise made its maiden voyage much like the overarching storyline: not entirely sure where its was going. Made in the days before Netflix, perhaps it was an inability to fast-forward the theme song, or to more easily binge on its episodes, but after a decent viewership for its initial season, the audience for Enterprise fell away. The show was never a hit with critics, the franchise was declared tired and it was cancelled just before the end of its fourth season. It ended with a hurriedly – badly – scripted final episode that one of its stars deemed, quite publicly, as “appalling”. Revisiting the show now, its possible to see that more than the song, or the unsure storyline, it may have been its premise that alienated potential fans. The alien Vulcans – made beloved in the franchise by the friendly Spock – are, in Enterprise, far more cautious toward the earthlings, with whom inter-species contact is still new. The Vulcans withhold their technological insight from Earth’s space pioneers, very aware humanity has not long emerged from a nuclear war, and they insist on attaching an observer to Enterprise’s initial explorations. This is how secretive Vulcan science officer T’Pol finds herself in a command team with a Kirk-style captain, Jonathan Archer, and his twangy Southerner sidekick, Trip Tucker, the ship’s engineer – both of whom resent the Vulcan supervision and are openly racist towards her. Progressive, intersectional race politics have always been central to Star Trek, and overt since the unprecedented inclusion of black Uhura and Asian-American Mr Sulu in the original series. The unique contribution of Enterprise to the franchise is the complication it offers to the utopian, uncomplicated assumptions of the previous series. Here, Earth may have outgrown domestic racism but prejudice and hostilities dog and undermine encounters with new species, leading the earthlings into ongoing, avoidable catastrophe. When the characters’ experiences expand their own moral understanding, they’re attuned – with very painful consequences – to the effects of the prejudice around them, and there’s something very refreshing in the series’ sly critique of the cultural arrogance of its careless space cowboys. When Archer’s deference to his own principle over realpolitik results in the destruction of a sacred site, the repercussions he engenders far down the line affect his own crew in devastating, personal ways. One memorable episode sees Tucker’s idealistic intervention in the dynamics of an alien family result in a horrific suicide. As a show that took much design inspiration from American military services to bring the series closer to the reality of the audience, it may have brought other resonances with that military far too close. In the third season, Enterprise’s mission to avenge a 9/11-style attack on the Earth becomes complicated when, amid the horrific moral compromises Archer finds himself making, the Captain grows more aware of the humanity inherent in his perceived enemies, even those who look unlike him. In the wake of America’s contemporaneous incursions in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was perhaps a realisation the viewership as a whole was unready to make. But Enterprise’s most delicate arc is a clever metaphor it makes of tension between the unalike, expressed in a love story that, in another act of misjudgment, perhaps came just a shade too late to save the series’ popularity. In this, T’Pol and a crewmate fight a mutual attraction that makes no logical sense to her and no emotional sense to the him – and, to the all-too-human surprise of both lovers, not even sex is able to resolve it. It’s the casual, loveless conclusion to this story in particular that condemns the hated last episode – one that I’m sure I’m not the only fan who wishes to see stricken from its episode lists, erased from its box sets, banished to exist only in YouTube’s darkest fanbase corners. Enterprise fans once crowdsourced $32m to fund a continuation of the series but the producers did not take up the offer. As Discovery sails through fresh territories of the franchise with apparently no limits on time, space, characterisation or material possibility, the opportunity to in some way complete Enterprise’s history – to remind both its own universe and ours of the painful lessons learnt when cultural cavaliers explore – is certainly there. At very least, Discovery might repair the trajectory of Enterprise’s long-lost lovers – I mean, the new ship has a captive space rhino, so anything is possible. And if Star Trek’s taught me anything, it’s that it if the ethics are right and the science thought out, there’s no problem in the universe that humanity can’t solve. It should, realistically, only take just under an hour. Star Trek Discovery is on CBS All Access in the US and Netflix in the UK and Australia.

culture/2018/jan/31/star-trek-discovery-is-reminding-me-of-everything-i-loved-about-enterprise

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2018-01-31T05:47:49Z

Star Trek: Discovery is reminding me of everything I loved about Enterprise | Van Badham

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/31/star-trek-discovery-is-reminding-me-of-everything-i-loved-about-enterprise

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/30/how-celebrities-are-protesting-trumps-state-of-the-union

Celebrities and activists gathered in New York City for a “People’s State of the Union” on Monday night – a prebuttal to Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address. Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Nixon and Michael Moore spoke at the event, in a fiery rejection of Trump’s first year in office. On Tuesday night the actor and activist Alyssa Milano is hosting her own response to Trump: a “State of the Dream” initiative which will highlight real people’s hopes and dreams for the US. A further distraction will come after the State of the Union, when Jimmy Kimmel interviews Stormy Daniels, the porn actor who allegedly had an affair with Trump. The People’s State of the Union, at the Town Hall Theater in Manhattan, also featured Common and Rosie Perez. It was organized with key activist organizations including the Women’s March, Planned Parenthood, MoveOn and Indivisible. “We wanted to hear from the people who are actually working really hard for the positive vision of America – marching, rallying, organizing, calling, writing, tweeting, Facebooking, educating and caring for our country,” Ruffalo told the crowd. “I know you haven’t been at a country club for half a year, huffing down cheeseburgers, sitting on a golden toilet waiting for someone to bring you a chocolate cake.” Organizers aimed to celebrate the achievements made by the resistance movement in the past year – and to outline a plan of action for the coming year. “We must fight daily for our democracy, which requires more grunt work from all of us in this auditorium and all of you out there watching online. Because the truth is our democracy is not just under attack from overseas,” Nixon told the audience. “We also need to fight for it here at home against corporate interests and billionaires that hold our democracy in a ferocious death grip.” Many of the progressive speakers linked Trump with the wider issue of money in politics. Moore was among the most vehement. “We must remove and replace the system and the culture that gave us Trump in the first place. He did not just fall out of the sky and land in Queens,” Moore said. “He is the result of a decades-long corporate takeover of our democracy and of us, never correcting the three original sins of America: a nation founded on genocide, built on the backs of slaves, and maintained by the subjugation of women.” On Tuesday night Milano, one of the most prominent figures in the #MeToo movement, will run her own anti-Trump action during the president’s speech to Congress. Milano plans to share short videos submitted by people from across America – focussing on: “What you hope for. What inspires YOU. (We especially encourage those running for office and those already serving to do so!)”. She elaborated her plans in a post on Twitter and in a Google Document. “Our digital #StateOfTheDream address will support our dreamers and immigrants, call for a Dream Act, lean into the Senate, fundraise for United We Dream, and express our vision for a more inclusive, progressive America,” Milano said. Kimmel will sit down with Daniels around an hour after Trump’s speech. InTouch magazine published a 2011 interview with Daniels earlier this month. The interview featured specific claims about the president’s love-making. Melania Trump cancelled a planned trip to Davos with Trump in the wake of the reporting. Her office cited unspecified scheduling and logistical issues. “I got a number of emails from a number of very envious fellow late night hosts about this booking,” Kimmel said of the Daniels interview on Monday. “I have a lot of questions for Stormy.”

culture/2018/jan/30/how-celebrities-are-protesting-trumps-state-of-the-union

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2018-01-30T17:45:07Z

How celebrities are protesting at Trump's State of the Union

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/30/how-celebrities-are-protesting-trumps-state-of-the-union

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/30/late-night-hosts-state-of-the-union-trump

Late-night hosts on Monday discussed Trump’s State of the Union address, Sean Hannity’s attempts not to cover unflattering news about the president, and a report about Hillary Clinton’s failure to fire a staffer accused of sexual harassment. “Since we all last met, we learned that Trump tried to fire Robert Mueller last June,” Stephen Colbert began. “Ultimately, Trump did not fire Mueller because White House counsel Don McGahn refused to ask the justice department to dismiss the special counsel, saying he would quit instead.” “There was a time when I thought nobody in the White House had scruples,” the host continued. “But we found a scruple. A scrap of scruple.” Colbert then explained the significance of Trump’s desire to fire Mueller, most notably its historical parallels to Richard Nixon’s attempt to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox. “Luckily, Trump could count on backup from his friend on TV, Fox News commentator and final hole at the world’s worst putt-putt course, Sean Hannity,” Colbert said. Colbert then showed footage from a recent Hannity broadcast when he claimed his sources were not confirming reports that Trump tried to fire Mueller. Hannity then returned from a commercial break and begans: “We have sources confirming that, yeah, maybe Donald Trump wanted to fire the special counsel for conflict. Does he not have the right to raise those questions? You know, we’ll deal with this tomorrow night.” Hannity then quickly moved on to cover a high-speed car chase ending in a violent collision. Colbert concluded: “Sean, one broadcaster to another, if you want to change the subject away from Donald Trump, don’t go to footage that is so clearly a metaphor for his administration.” Jimmy Kimmel previewed Trump’s state of the union address, to be given at 9.10pm Tuesday night. Kimmel began: “The state of the union is the one day of the year presidents are supposed to brag about their accomplishments, so he’s been training for this really for his whole life.” “The theme of this speech is safe, strong, proud, based on the three words he never heard form his father,” Kimmel quipped, before explaining that the hard tickets sold for the event misspelled union as “uniom.” “If I’m not mistaken, the Uniom was the side that won the civil war,” Kimmel joked, before imagining the White House response to the gaffe. “We’re real Americans, not some pansy-ass spellers.” “There’s a good chance Trump thinks the state of the union means he gets to present the award for his favorite state tomorrow,” the host continued. “And the state of the union is: Florida.” Finally, Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah discussed Hillary Clinton’s appearance at the 2018 Grammys, which came just days after reports surfaced that she declined to fire a staffer accused of sexual harassment during the 2008 democratic primaries. “This year’s Grammys were very political, and the bit that got most people talking was a set where James Corden got celebrities to ‘audition’ to read the audiobook for Fire and Fury, the tell-all book about Trump,” Noah explained. The host then showed Clinton’s Grammys cameo, alongside John Legend and Cardi B, and UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s disapproving response to the broadcast’s “politics”. “Hillary’s Grammy cameo came at a weird moment for her,” said Noah. “Because last night’s theme was #MeToo and Time’s Up, which is a message Hillary found herself on the wrong side of over the weekend.” Noah then showed news coverage of the New York Times report detailing how Burns Strider, a 2008 campaign adviser, was accused by a young staffer of sexual harassment. Rather than firing him, Clinton docked Strider’s pay and reassigned his accuser to a new job. “There are a few areas where I don’t necessarily expect Hillary Clinton to nail it: managing emails, visiting Wisconsin,” Noah joked. “But I expected standing up for a woman on her staff to be one of her strengths.” Noah then showed Clinton’s tweet about the matter, in which she stopped short of apologizing and praised the woman for making her voice heard. Noah went on to chastise Clinton for not admitting culpability, asking: “Women deserve to be heard, and then quietly reassigned?” “It feels like Hillary’s not only trying to dodge the blame, she wants to present herself as having always been on this woman’s side, which doesn’t fly,” the host continued. “Because not only did the woman get reassigned, but this guy, Burns Strider, went on to get another job in Democratic politics, where he got fired for doing the same thing to other women. “So you could argue that if Hillary had fired him, she would’ve been protecting many women, instead of just herself.”

culture/2018/jan/30/late-night-hosts-state-of-the-union-trump

pillar/arts

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2018-01-30T16:52:48Z

Late-night hosts on SOTU: 'Trump thinks he gets to present the award for his favorite state'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/30/late-night-hosts-state-of-the-union-trump

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/30/selfies-smoking-snogging-why-pop-stars-love-a-house-party

The house party has been a pop video staple since the Beastie Boys’ 1986 classic (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!). While fads come and go, nothing ticks all the boxes like chucking a pop star and a bunch of elegantly wasted extras into a fancy house. Here are six cliches of the genre... Video brought to you by ... If anyone claims to have seen Beats headphones or those mini speakers that look like sex toys out in the wild then they’re lying because they only exist in music videos, especially ones featuring large gaggles of rent-a-friends. They appear alongside Miley Cyrus and her band of heavily stylised misfits in every other frame of the We Can’t Stop promo, share space with Akon in Lady Gaga’s Just Dance and crop up near a zombie in Charli XCX’s undead twist on the genre for After the Afterparty. It’s not just Dr Dre’s headgear, either; Katy Perry drunk dances to Last Friday Night (TGIF) on Nintendo’s Just Dance game, while Alexandra Burke uses a chunky Sky remote to turn on a TV displaying the always available Pitbull during her All Night Long house party. Do go chasing waterfalls Be it people jumping off roofs into swimming pools (Robbie Williams’s Come Undone; Janet Jackson’s Go Deep), couples snogging fully clothed in showers (the xx’s On Hold), or extras having a nice bath (Take That’s Sure), water crops up a lot in nocturnal, house-based videos. The genre’s end-of-the-working-week aesthetic is also a little less opulent, which might explain the regular appearance of paddling pools. Zayn’s mansion-destroying party in Still Got Time features the humble inflatable, as does Beyoncé’s Party, while Lady Gaga writhes around on the back of a PVC whale in one while trying to avoid Colby O’Donis in Just Dance. Up on the roof In a house party narrative the ultimate act of rebellion isn’t smoking weed (Still Got Time), tonguing a doll (We Can’t Stop) or wearing sunglasses made of crayons (All Night Long); it’s climbing on the roof. Syco-signed, Simon Cowell-created rebels PrettyMuch spend the majority of the PG-13 house party setting for No More draped casually over some expertly laid roof tiles. Bad Boy for Life by Love (née Puff Daddy, Puffy, P Diddy and Diddy) features a house-cum-garden party and him hitting a Bad Boy-branded golf ball off the roof and through Ben Stiller’s window. We’ve all been there. Watch me on your video phone A house party music video might seem like a cheaper option but it takes a lot to make them look that way. Zayn’s Still Got Time utilises a sepia filter to make it look like grainy Super 8, while PrettyMuch go one step closer to the “vintage” motherlode by combining old-school film effects and camcorder footage. Meanwhile, the premise of Alexandra Burke’s All Night Long is “50 cameras, one party”, which involves her waggling a diamante-encrusted pink phone in various people’s faces. Apparently house parties are also an excuse to attach spotlights to cameras (Drake’s Started from the Bottom, Fiona Apple’s Criminal), accentuating the idea of catching people doing naughty things. My red cup runneth over In the US, the iconic red plastic cup signifies frat parties, college freedom and the American Pie trilogy. In the UK, however, they just come bagged with a ball and sold as Beer Pong kits at the front bit of Urban Outfitters. So it’s our US chums that show them off the most, from Beyoncé’s Party to Jimmy Eat World’s The Middle, while both Lady Gaga and Katy Perry favour some pastel-coloured ones in Just Dance and Last Friday Night (TGIF), respectively. British style-goths the xx feature them a lot in On Hold’s editorialised house party (DJed by Jamie xx, natch) but it’s filmed in the States so they just about get away with it. Rebel yell What better way to suggest you’ve tasted alcohol than to manufacture a house party. Not by accident was Miley’s controversy-baiting We Can’t Stop video set in one, and the London-based, pint-swilling, kebab-scoffing portion of Taylor Swift’s typically heavy-handed End Game video also features a lavish house party scene in which she hits a balloon with a cane while wearing a top hat. Back in 1993, Take That unveiled a daring new look: Mark got his nose pierced; Robbie shaved his head; Howard got dreadlocks; Jason learned some new breakdancing moves; and Gary looked more uncomfortable than normal. For the video for the harder-edged Sure they got some friends round, awkwardly danced in black mesh tops and briefly seemed one iota cooler than they did in the Pray video.

culture/2018/jan/30/selfies-smoking-snogging-why-pop-stars-love-a-house-party

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-01-30T09:00:12Z

Selfies! Smoking! Snogging! Why pop stars love a house party

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/30/selfies-smoking-snogging-why-pop-stars-love-a-house-party

['house', 'party', 'pop', 'video', 'staple', 'since', 'beastie', 'boys', 'classic', 'gotta', 'fight', 'right', 'party', 'fads', 'come', 'go', 'nothing', 'ticks', 'boxes', 'like', 'chucking', 'pop', 'star', 'bunch', 'elegantly', 'wasted', 'extras', 'fancy', 'house', 'six', 'cliches', 'genre', 'video', 'brought', 'anyone', 'claims', 'seen', 'beats', 'headphones', 'mini', 'speakers', 'look', 'like', 'sex', 'toys', 'wild', 'lying', 'exist', 'music', 'videos', 'especially', 'ones', 'featuring', 'large', 'gaggles', 'rent-a-friends', 'appear', 'alongside', 'miley', 'cyrus', 'band', 'heavily', 'stylised', 'misfits', 'every', 'frame', 'ca', 'stop', 'promo', 'share', 'space', 'akon', 'lady', 'gaga', 'dance', 'crop', 'near', 'zombie', 'charli', 'xcx', 'undead', 'twist', 'genre', 'afterparty', 'dr', 'dre', 'headgear', 'either', 'katy', 'perry', 'drunk', 'dances', 'last', 'friday', 'night', 'tgif', 'nintendo', 'dance', 'game', 'alexandra', 'burke', 'uses', 'chunky', 'sky', 'remote', 'turn', 'tv', 'displaying', 'always', 'available', 'pitbull', 'night', 'long', 'house', 'party', 'go', 'chasing', 'waterfalls', 'people', 'jumping', 'roofs', 'swimming', 'pools', 'robbie', 'williams', 'come', 'undone', 'janet', 'jackson', 'go', 'deep', 'couples', 'snogging', 'fully', 'clothed', 'showers', 'xx', 'hold', 'extras', 'nice', 'bath', 'take', 'sure', 'water', 'crops', 'lot', 'nocturnal', 'house-based', 'videos', 'genre', 'end-of-the-working-week', 'aesthetic', 'also', 'little', 'less', 'opulent', 'might', 'explain', 'regular', 'appearance', 'paddling', 'pools', 'zayn', 'mansion-destroying', 'party', 'still', 'got', 'time', 'features', 'humble', 'inflatable', 'beyonce', 'party', 'lady', 'gaga', 'writhes', 'around', 'back', 'pvc', 'whale', 'one', 'trying', 'avoid', 'colby', 'odonis', 'dance', 'roof', 'house', 'party', 'narrative', 'ultimate', 'act', 'rebellion', 'smoking', 'weed', 'still', 'got', 'time', 'tonguing', 'doll', 'ca', 'stop', 'wearing', 'sunglasses', 'made', 'crayons', 'night', 'long', 'climbing', 'roof', 'syco-signed', 'simon', 'cowell-created', 'rebels', 'prettymuch', 'spend', 'majority', 'pg-13', 'house', 'party', 'setting', 'draped', 'casually', 'expertly', 'laid', 'roof', 'tiles', 'bad', 'boy', 'life', 'love', 'nee', 'puff', 'daddy', 'puffy', 'p', 'diddy', 'diddy', 'features', 'house-cum-garden', 'party', 'hitting', 'bad', 'boy-branded', 'golf', 'ball', 'roof', 'ben', 'stiller', 'window', 'watch', 'video', 'phone', 'house', 'party', 'music', 'video', 'might', 'seem', 'like', 'cheaper', 'option', 'takes', 'lot', 'make', 'look', 'way', 'zayn', 'still', 'got', 'time', 'utilises', 'sepia', 'filter', 'make', 'look', 'like', 'grainy', 'super', 'prettymuch', 'go', 'one', 'step', 'closer', 'vintage', 'motherlode', 'combining', 'old-school', 'film', 'effects', 'camcorder', 'footage', 'meanwhile', 'premise', 'alexandra', 'burke', 'night', 'long', 'cameras', 'one', 'party', 'involves', 'waggling', 'diamante-encrusted', 'pink', 'phone', 'various', 'people', 'faces', 'apparently', 'house', 'parties', 'also', 'excuse', 'attach', 'spotlights', 'cameras', 'drake', 'started', 'bottom', 'fiona', 'apple', 'criminal', 'accentuating', 'idea', 'catching', 'people', 'naughty', 'things', 'red', 'cup', 'runneth', 'us', 'iconic', 'red', 'plastic', 'cup', 'signifies', 'frat', 'parties', 'college', 'freedom', 'american', 'pie', 'trilogy', 'uk', 'however', 'come', 'bagged', 'ball', 'sold', 'beer', 'pong', 'kits', 'front', 'bit', 'urban', 'outfitters', 'us', 'chums', 'show', 'beyonce', 'party', 'jimmy', 'eat', 'world', 'middle', 'lady', 'gaga', 'katy', 'perry', 'favour', 'pastel-coloured', 'ones', 'dance', 'last', 'friday', 'night', 'tgif', 'respectively', 'british', 'style-goths', 'xx', 'feature', 'lot', 'hold', 'editorialised', 'house', 'party', 'djed', 'jamie', 'xx', 'natch', 'filmed', 'states', 'get', 'away', 'rebel', 'yell', 'better', 'way', 'suggest', 'tasted', 'alcohol', 'manufacture', 'house', 'party', 'accident', 'miley', 'controversy-baiting', 'ca', 'stop', 'video', 'set', 'one', 'london-based', 'pint-swilling', 'kebab-scoffing', 'portion', 'taylor', 'swift', 'typically', 'heavy-handed', 'end', 'game', 'video', 'also', 'features', 'lavish', 'house', 'party', 'scene', 'hits', 'balloon', 'cane', 'wearing', 'top', 'hat', 'back', 'take', 'unveiled', 'daring', 'new', 'look', 'mark', 'got', 'nose', 'pierced', 'robbie', 'shaved', 'head', 'howard', 'got', 'dreadlocks', 'jason', 'learned', 'new', 'breakdancing', 'moves', 'gary', 'looked', 'uncomfortable', 'normal', 'video', 'harder-edged', 'sure', 'got', 'friends', 'round', 'awkwardly', 'danced', 'black', 'mesh', 'tops', 'briefly', 'seemed', 'one', 'iota', 'cooler', 'pray', 'video']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/30/toto-how-we-made-africa

David Paich, vocals, keyboards, songwriter I’d just got a new keyboard. It made this brassy sound and the moment I started playing it, I had what would become the opening riff to Africa. Then I hummed a melody and by the time I got to the chorus, I had words. “Hang on,” I thought. “I’m a talented songwriter but I’m not this talented!” It was as if a higher power was writing through me, because this stuff was coming out like magic. One of the reasons I was in a rock band was to see the world. As a kid, I’d always been fascinated by Africa. I loved movies about Dr Livingstone and missionaries. I went to an all-boys Catholic school and a lot of the teachers had done missionary work in Africa. They told me how they would bless the villagers, their Bibles, their books, their crops and, when it rained, they’d bless the rain. That’s where the hook line – “I bless the rains down in Africa” – came from. They said loneliness and celibacy were the hardest things about life out there. Some of them never made it into the priesthood because they needed companionship. So I wrote about a person flying in to meet a lonely missionary. It’s a romanticised love story about Africa, based on how I’d always imagined it. The descriptions of its beautiful landscape came from what I’d read in National Geographic. In the late 1990s, we finally played Africa, performing in Cape Town and Johannesburg. I went on a safari through a game reserve. People had heard the song and asked: “So when were you in Africa?” I admitted I’d never been there till now. They said: “But you describe it so beautifully!” That just warms my heart. Steve ‘Luke’ Lukather, guitarist “If this is a hit,” I said, “I’ll run naked down Hollywood Boulevard.” I thought the song had a brilliant tune, but I remember listening to the lyrics and going: “Dave, man, Africa? We’re from north Hollywood. What the fuck are you writing about? ‘I bless the rains down in Africa?’ Are you Jesus, Dave?” Then we made a video that was so full cheese. They built this stage that looked like a pile of giant books and stood us on top of it. You can see me laughing. I hated videos and I hate the 80s for the mullet I used to have – and the clothes they put us in to make us look androgynous. We are not that band. On the cover of the single I have a look on my face that says: “I’m gonna kill you.” And now I have to sit here and eat my words because Africa has become a standard and I’m very proud of David for it. The track has actually started a huge Toto resurgence. I was watching South Park and suddenly this character came on. I realised it was me – with a goatee, holding a guitar and playing Africa. I laughed for an hour and called the band. Africa was on Family Guy next, then there were piss-takes on American Dad and Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. Jimmy and Justin Timberlake were dressed as 80s boys scouts singing Africa in their tent. People would tell me: “I hate that fucking song.” And I’d say: “Sometimes I hate that fucking song too.” I mean, I’d been playing it since 1982. But we’ve outlived our haters and it’s been very good to me. We’re very happy and we’ve got a new young audience, partly thanks to EDM guys playing Africa to end their sets. It mixes well with Skrillex. I never did run naked down Hollywood Boulevard. These days, I’d be lucky to hobble down it. • Toto’s new album, 40 Trips Around the Sun, is released on Sony/Legacy on 9 February. The band tour the UK 1-9 April.

culture/2018/jan/30/toto-how-we-made-africa

pillar/arts

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culture

Culture

article

2018-01-30T06:00:10Z

Toto: how we made Africa

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/30/toto-how-we-made-africa

['david', 'paich', 'vocals', 'keyboards', 'songwriter', 'would', 'got', 'new', 'keyboard', 'made', 'brassy', 'sound', 'moment', 'started', 'playing', 'would', 'become', 'opening', 'riff', 'africa', 'hummed', 'melody', 'time', 'got', 'chorus', 'words', 'hang', 'thought', 'talented', 'songwriter', 'talented', 'higher', 'power', 'writing', 'stuff', 'coming', 'like', 'magic', 'one', 'reasons', 'rock', 'band', 'see', 'world', 'kid', 'would', 'always', 'fascinated', 'africa', 'loved', 'movies', 'dr', 'livingstone', 'missionaries', 'went', 'all-boys', 'catholic', 'school', 'lot', 'teachers', 'done', 'missionary', 'work', 'africa', 'told', 'would', 'bless', 'villagers', 'bibles', 'books', 'crops', 'rained', 'would', 'bless', 'rain', 'hook', 'line', 'bless', 'rains', 'africa', 'came', 'said', 'loneliness', 'celibacy', 'hardest', 'things', 'life', 'never', 'made', 'priesthood', 'needed', 'companionship', 'wrote', 'person', 'flying', 'meet', 'lonely', 'missionary', 'romanticised', 'love', 'story', 'africa', 'based', 'would', 'always', 'imagined', 'descriptions', 'beautiful', 'landscape', 'came', 'would', 'read', 'national', 'geographic', 'late', '1990s', 'finally', 'played', 'africa', 'performing', 'cape', 'town', 'johannesburg', 'went', 'safari', 'game', 'reserve', 'people', 'heard', 'song', 'asked', 'africa', 'admitted', 'would', 'never', 'till', 'said', 'describe', 'beautifully', 'warms', 'heart', 'steve', 'luke', 'lukather', 'guitarist', 'hit', 'said', 'run', 'naked', 'hollywood', 'boulevard', 'thought', 'song', 'brilliant', 'tune', 'remember', 'listening', 'lyrics', 'going', 'dave', 'man', 'africa', 'north', 'hollywood', 'fuck', 'writing', 'bless', 'rains', 'africa', 'jesus', 'dave', 'made', 'video', 'full', 'cheese', 'built', 'stage', 'looked', 'like', 'pile', 'giant', 'books', 'stood', 'us', 'top', 'see', 'laughing', 'hated', 'videos', 'hate', '80s', 'mullet', 'used', 'clothes', 'put', 'us', 'make', 'us', 'look', 'androgynous', 'band', 'cover', 'single', 'look', 'face', 'says', 'gonna', 'kill', 'sit', 'eat', 'words', 'africa', 'become', 'standard', 'proud', 'david', 'track', 'actually', 'started', 'huge', 'toto', 'resurgence', 'watching', 'south', 'park', 'suddenly', 'character', 'came', 'realised', 'goatee', 'holding', 'guitar', 'playing', 'africa', 'laughed', 'hour', 'called', 'band', 'africa', 'family', 'guy', 'next', 'piss-takes', 'american', 'dad', 'late', 'night', 'jimmy', 'fallon', 'jimmy', 'justin', 'timberlake', 'dressed', '80s', 'boys', 'scouts', 'singing', 'africa', 'tent', 'people', 'would', 'tell', 'hate', 'fucking', 'song', 'would', 'say', 'sometimes', 'hate', 'fucking', 'song', 'mean', 'would', 'playing', 'since', 'outlived', 'haters', 'good', 'happy', 'got', 'new', 'young', 'audience', 'partly', 'thanks', 'edm', 'guys', 'playing', 'africa', 'end', 'sets', 'mixes', 'well', 'skrillex', 'never', 'run', 'naked', 'hollywood', 'boulevard', 'days', 'would', 'lucky', 'hobble', 'toto', 'new', 'album', 'trips', 'around', 'sun', 'released', 'sonylegacy', 'february', 'band', 'tour', 'uk', '1-9', 'april']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/29/database-burial-grounds-england-wales-created

The first national database to record all the natural and manmade treasures of burial grounds, from the giant Victorian urban cemeteries to little country churchyards, is to be created with a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The grant will be announced on Monday to help record and preserve rare plants and animals in danger of extinction across most of Britain, threatened by development and modern agriculture, but still flourishing among the gravestones in an estimated 20,000 burial grounds in England and Wales. The gravestones themselves are home to 700 of the 2,000 species of lichens in the UK, many found nowhere else, as well as slowworms, voles, toads, bees and butterflies and myriad bird species. “So much work has been done, by many different organisations, charities, churches and volunteers, from counting grass and flower species to archaeological work, recording tombstone inscriptions and photographing ancient churches – but there is no one place you can go to find all this information,” said Harriet Carty, director of the Shropshire-based Caring for God’s Acre, which will receive almost £600,000. “In many parishes burial grounds are the only patch of unimproved species-rich grassland, full of wild flowers that have almost vanished from our gardens and hedges. Many people just don’t realise what a resource these burial grounds are – bird watchers think of heading for the nearest wildlife reserve; they don’t think of picking up their binoculars and sitting on a tombstone in the nearest graveyard.” The tiny charity, which has just four part-time volunteer workers, will work with dozens of partner organisations including the churches, Historic England and Natural England, to link together information that has already been compiled, and recruit volunteers to collect more. “These are precious places,” Carty said. “They deserve to be celebrated and cherished.”

culture/2018/jan/29/database-burial-grounds-england-wales-created

pillar/arts

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culture

Culture

article

2018-01-29T10:17:03Z

First database of burial grounds in England and Wales to be created

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/29/database-burial-grounds-england-wales-created

['first', 'national', 'database', 'record', 'natural', 'manmade', 'treasures', 'burial', 'grounds', 'giant', 'victorian', 'urban', 'cemeteries', 'little', 'country', 'churchyards', 'created', 'grant', 'heritage', 'lottery', 'fund', 'grant', 'announced', 'monday', 'help', 'record', 'preserve', 'rare', 'plants', 'animals', 'danger', 'extinction', 'across', 'britain', 'threatened', 'development', 'modern', 'agriculture', 'still', 'flourishing', 'among', 'gravestones', 'estimated', 'burial', 'grounds', 'england', 'wales', 'gravestones', 'home', 'species', 'lichens', 'uk', 'many', 'found', 'nowhere', 'else', 'well', 'slowworms', 'voles', 'toads', 'bees', 'butterflies', 'myriad', 'bird', 'species', 'much', 'work', 'done', 'many', 'different', 'organisations', 'charities', 'churches', 'volunteers', 'counting', 'grass', 'flower', 'species', 'archaeological', 'work', 'recording', 'tombstone', 'inscriptions', 'photographing', 'ancient', 'churches', 'one', 'place', 'go', 'find', 'information', 'said', 'harriet', 'carty', 'director', 'shropshire-based', 'caring', 'god', 'acre', 'receive', 'almost', 'many', 'parishes', 'burial', 'grounds', 'patch', 'unimproved', 'species-rich', 'grassland', 'full', 'wild', 'flowers', 'almost', 'vanished', 'gardens', 'hedges', 'many', 'people', 'realise', 'resource', 'burial', 'grounds', 'bird', 'watchers', 'think', 'heading', 'nearest', 'wildlife', 'reserve', 'think', 'picking', 'binoculars', 'sitting', 'tombstone', 'nearest', 'graveyard', 'tiny', 'charity', 'four', 'part-time', 'volunteer', 'workers', 'work', 'dozens', 'partner', 'organisations', 'including', 'churches', 'historic', 'england', 'natural', 'england', 'link', 'together', 'information', 'already', 'compiled', 'recruit', 'volunteers', 'collect', 'precious', 'places', 'carty', 'said', 'deserve', 'celebrated', 'cherished']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/28/justin-timberlake-man-of-the-woods-review-from-plain-bad-to-bewitching

In the world of mainstream pop, Justin Timberlake cuts a curiously restless figure. No sooner had he established himself as something more substantial than a former boyband pin-up than he started making noticeably more adventurous records than was strictly necessary. It was as if he were taking risks in order to keep himself interested in music, rather than acting, fashion design, golf course ownership or any of the multitude of other things his latter-day career involves. The shadow of Prince, Kraftwerk and David Bowie’s album Diamond Dogs hung over at least some of 2006’s FutureSex/LoveSounds, while 2013’s The 20/20 Experience offered the sound of visionary hip hop and R&B producer Timbaland at his most exploratory and audacious. But Man of the Woods may be Timberlake’s riskiest musical venture to date. Its USP is “Americana with 808s”, an attempt by the singer and producers Timbaland and the Neptunes to meld the country and western and southern rock of his native Tennessee with latterday R&B. Cue songs with names such as Livin’ Off the Land, guest appearances from the Nashville star Chris Stapleton, a songwriting credit for Toby Keith and so much lyrical boosting of Timberlake’s southern roots that it’s hard not to feel he may be laying it on a bit thick. This is obviously ambitious, but it’s not entirely without precedent: in the late 60s and early 70s, the lines between R&B and country were frequently blurred. If you wanted to give a certain kind of heritage rock mag-reading music fan a case of the vapours, you might suggest that what Timberlake is trying to do is a kind of 21st-century answer to the country-soul hybrid peddled by Tony Joe White, Dan Penn or Jim Ford. The big difference is that joining the sonic dots between the two genres is far more difficult today than it was 40 years ago: the kind of R&B in which Timbaland and the Neptunes specialise is boldly futuristic, while the country and southern rock Timberlake wants to evoke is entirely traditional. Melding the two is a tough call, and the finished product is of decidedly mixed quality. At one extreme, there’s some fantastic music here. Midnight Summer’s Jam is skeletal, hyperactive disco, with a chorus you could imagine Earth Wind And Fire singing, lightly dressed with harmonica and fiddle. The Hard Stuff offers a bewitching haze of acoustic guitar, pedal steel and electronics. The single Supplies is utterly thrilling: spectral, vaguely psychedelic mandolin, Pharrell Williams growling and barking words, and lyrics which, improbably, use backwoods survivalism as a metaphor for sex. At the other, there’s stuff that sounds awkward – Sauce’s ungainly lurches from funk-rock to Nashville and back again – or flatly awful: you can see what they’ve tried to do on Wave – stick a perky walking-bassline country song over a half-speed R&B slow jam beat – but the overall effect is just horrible, while Flannel deals in one of country’s least appealing aspects, schmaltz. Some tracks don’t recall country, southern rock or R&B so much as the surfer-friendly, reggae-tinged acoustic pop of Jack Johnson, which is a pretty peculiar end result, given the intention. But for all its flaws, it’s hard not to be impressed by Man of the Woods. You can hear the effort that went into making it: Timberlake could more easily have churned out an identikit pop album using the same writing and production teams that every identikit pop album calls on, and relied on his celebrity to make it a massive hit. The good bits are great, the bad bits best avoided, but in a pop world where originality isn’t much encouraged, there’s something really laudable about the intention behind it, and its author’s willingness to think outside the box.

culture/2018/jan/28/justin-timberlake-man-of-the-woods-review-from-plain-bad-to-bewitching

pillar/arts

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culture

Culture

article

2018-01-28T23:00:09Z

Justin Timberlake: Man of the Woods review – from plain bad to bewitching

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/28/justin-timberlake-man-of-the-woods-review-from-plain-bad-to-bewitching

['world', 'mainstream', 'pop', 'justin', 'timberlake', 'cuts', 'curiously', 'restless', 'figure', 'sooner', 'established', 'something', 'substantial', 'former', 'boyband', 'pin-up', 'started', 'making', 'noticeably', 'adventurous', 'records', 'strictly', 'necessary', 'taking', 'risks', 'order', 'keep', 'interested', 'music', 'rather', 'acting', 'fashion', 'design', 'golf', 'course', 'ownership', 'multitude', 'things', 'latter-day', 'career', 'involves', 'shadow', 'prince', 'kraftwerk', 'david', 'bowie', 'album', 'diamond', 'dogs', 'hung', 'least', 'futuresexlovesounds', 'experience', 'offered', 'sound', 'visionary', 'hip', 'hop', 'rampb', 'producer', 'timbaland', 'exploratory', 'audacious', 'man', 'woods', 'may', 'timberlake', 'riskiest', 'musical', 'venture', 'date', 'usp', 'americana', '808s', 'attempt', 'singer', 'producers', 'timbaland', 'neptunes', 'meld', 'country', 'western', 'southern', 'rock', 'native', 'tennessee', 'latterday', 'rampb', 'cue', 'songs', 'names', 'livin', 'land', 'guest', 'appearances', 'nashville', 'star', 'chris', 'stapleton', 'songwriting', 'credit', 'toby', 'keith', 'much', 'lyrical', 'boosting', 'timberlake', 'southern', 'roots', 'hard', 'feel', 'may', 'laying', 'bit', 'thick', 'obviously', 'ambitious', 'entirely', 'without', 'precedent', 'late', '60s', 'early', '70s', 'lines', 'rampb', 'country', 'frequently', 'blurred', 'wanted', 'give', 'certain', 'kind', 'heritage', 'rock', 'mag-reading', 'music', 'fan', 'case', 'vapours', 'might', 'suggest', 'timberlake', 'trying', 'kind', '21st-century', 'answer', 'country-soul', 'hybrid', 'peddled', 'tony', 'joe', 'white', 'dan', 'penn', 'jim', 'ford', 'big', 'difference', 'joining', 'sonic', 'dots', 'two', 'genres', 'far', 'difficult', 'today', 'years', 'ago', 'kind', 'rampb', 'timbaland', 'neptunes', 'specialise', 'boldly', 'futuristic', 'country', 'southern', 'rock', 'timberlake', 'wants', 'evoke', 'entirely', 'traditional', 'melding', 'two', 'tough', 'call', 'finished', 'product', 'decidedly', 'mixed', 'quality', 'one', 'extreme', 'fantastic', 'music', 'midnight', 'summer', 'jam', 'skeletal', 'hyperactive', 'disco', 'chorus', 'could', 'imagine', 'earth', 'wind', 'fire', 'singing', 'lightly', 'dressed', 'harmonica', 'fiddle', 'hard', 'stuff', 'offers', 'bewitching', 'haze', 'acoustic', 'guitar', 'pedal', 'steel', 'electronics', 'single', 'supplies', 'utterly', 'thrilling', 'spectral', 'vaguely', 'psychedelic', 'mandolin', 'pharrell', 'williams', 'growling', 'barking', 'words', 'lyrics', 'improbably', 'use', 'backwoods', 'survivalism', 'metaphor', 'sex', 'stuff', 'sounds', 'awkward', 'sauce', 'ungainly', 'lurches', 'funk-rock', 'nashville', 'back', 'flatly', 'awful', 'see', 'tried', 'wave', 'stick', 'perky', 'walking-bassline', 'country', 'song', 'half-speed', 'rampb', 'slow', 'jam', 'beat', 'overall', 'effect', 'horrible', 'flannel', 'deals', 'one', 'country', 'least', 'appealing', 'aspects', 'schmaltz', 'tracks', 'recall', 'country', 'southern', 'rock', 'rampb', 'much', 'surfer-friendly', 'reggae-tinged', 'acoustic', 'pop', 'jack', 'johnson', 'pretty', 'peculiar', 'end', 'result', 'given', 'intention', 'flaws', 'hard', 'impressed', 'man', 'woods', 'hear', 'effort', 'went', 'making', 'timberlake', 'could', 'easily', 'churned', 'identikit', 'pop', 'album', 'using', 'writing', 'production', 'teams', 'every', 'identikit', 'pop', 'album', 'calls', 'relied', 'celebrity', 'make', 'massive', 'hit', 'good', 'bits', 'great', 'bad', 'bits', 'best', 'avoided', 'pop', 'world', 'originality', 'much', 'encouraged', 'something', 'really', 'laudable', 'intention', 'behind', 'author', 'willingness', 'think', 'outside', 'box']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/28/your-pictures-share-your-photos-on-the-theme-of-middle

The next theme for our weekly photography assignment in the Observer New Review is ‘middle.’ Share your photos of what middle means to you – and tell us about your image in the description box. The closing date is Wednesday 31 January at 10am. We’ll publish our favourites in The New Review on Sunday 4 February and in a gallery on the Guardian site. You can share your ‘middle’ pictures by clicking on the ‘Contribute’ button on this article. You can also use the Guardian app and search for ‘GuardianWitness assignments’ – and if you add it to the homepage – you can keep up with all our assignments. GuardianWitness is the home of readers’ content on the Guardian. Contribute your video, pictures and stories, and browse news, reviews and creations submitted by others.

culture/2018/jan/28/your-pictures-share-your-photos-on-the-theme-of-middle

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culture

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article

2018-01-28T09:00:14Z

Your pictures: share your photos on the theme of 'middle'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/28/your-pictures-share-your-photos-on-the-theme-of-middle

['next', 'theme', 'weekly', 'photography', 'assignment', 'observer', 'new', 'review', 'middle', 'share', 'photos', 'middle', 'means', 'tell', 'us', 'image', 'description', 'box', 'closing', 'date', 'wednesday', 'january', '10am', 'publish', 'favourites', 'new', 'review', 'sunday', 'february', 'gallery', 'guardian', 'site', 'share', 'middle', 'pictures', 'clicking', 'contribute', 'button', 'article', 'also', 'use', 'guardian', 'app', 'search', 'guardianwitness', 'assignments', 'add', 'homepage', 'keep', 'assignments', 'guardianwitness', 'home', 'readers', 'content', 'guardian', 'contribute', 'video', 'pictures', 'stories', 'browse', 'news', 'reviews', 'creations', 'submitted', 'others']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/ng-interactive/2018/jan/28/simone-lia-on-veganuary

culture/ng-interactive/2018/jan/28/simone-lia-on-veganuary

pillar/arts

Arts

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Culture

interactive

2018-01-28T08:00:13Z

Simone Lia on veganuary

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/ng-interactive/2018/jan/28/simone-lia-on-veganuary

[]

https://content.guardianapis.com/film/2018/jan/27/what-to-see-this-week-in-the-uk

Five of the best ... films Early Man(PG) (Nick Park, 2018, UK/Fra) 89 mins Like its stone-age subjects, Aardman’s homely claymation formula hasn’t particularly evolved, nor does it need to. This is another witty, gag-stuffed, agreeably hand-crafted family treat, which is essentially a prehistoric sports movie. Eddie Redmayne voices the sharpest of an insular and dimwitted tribe who must beat their European invaders on the football pitch. Coco (PG) (Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina, 2017, US) 105 mins This vibrant and culturally respectful Pixar outing seamlessly combines family drama with accessible comedy and colourful fantasy. The plot follows a musically inclined Mexican kid who becomes stranded in the land of the dead. There’s rarely a dull moment with his bickering skeleton ancestors, who reveal a hidden family history. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (15) (Martin McDonagh, 2017, UK/US) 115 mins This small-town drama’s flaws are outweighed by its strengths, not least the switches of plot, tone and its assortment of characters – played by the likes of Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Peter Dinklage and, most of all, Frances McDormand. Her no-nonsense single mother wages war against the police over their handling of her child’s killer, but things don’t pan out as intended. Darkest Hour (PG) (Joe Wright, 2017, UK) 125 mins Gary Oldman is scooping up the awards for his portrayal of Winston Churchill, a wide-ranging take on a figure who is often reduced to a caricature. This handsome drama works hard to tell an old story in new ways, rendering Churchill’s early prime ministerial career as a minefield of political peril, and considering the women in his life, particularly his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) and secretary (Lily James). The Cinema Travellers (tbc) (Shirley Abraham, Amit Madheshiya, 2016, Ind) 96 mins Here’s one for the cineastes: a charming documentary following some of India’s very last travelling cinema shows, whose old-school technology has brought joy to many but whose days are numbered in the digital era. There is no attempt to force a storyline; we’re happy to just sit back and watch these lovable characters go about their business. SR Five of the best ... pop and rock gigs Lady Gaga After delaying the European leg of her tour in support of her country-hued album Joanne due to an ongoing hip issue, Lady Gaga gets back in the pop saddle this week. While the record smoothed off some of her more outre edges, the tour – which has already made its way around the United States – ramps up the spectacle, bringing back the ludicrous outfits, inflatable stage props and eyebrow-singeing pyrotechnics. Birmingham Wednesday 31 January & Thursday 1 February; touring to 8 February Jeff Tweedy Wilco founder Jeff Tweedy shuffles into the UK and Ireland for his first solo shows since 2010. In support of last year’s critically lauded Together at Last album, expect songs from Wilco’s extensive back catalogue as well as some proper fans-only deep cuts from his side projects Loose Fur and Golden Smog. Dublin, Tuesday 30 January; Edinburgh, Wednesday 31 January; Manchester, Thursday 1 February; touring to 3 February Sofi Tukker Even if you don’t know their name you will likely recognise the music of Sofi Tukker, AKA lead vocalist Sophie Hawley-Weld and DJ-producer Tucker Halpern (did you see what they did there?). Last year, their elasticated electropop soundtracked the iPhone X ad, while that song, Best Friend, also appeared in Fifa 18. Watch them do it live in the UK and Ireland this week. Dublin, Saturday 27 January; Glasgow, Sunday 28 January; London, Wednesday 31 January KPop Knight While a full K-pop crossover hit has yet to materialise in the UK, there is enough of an appetite for it to warrant this all-day celebration of all things tightly choreographed and eye-wateringly DayGlo. Acts on offer include seven-headed boyband Monsta X, Korean great Se7en, rising boyband 7 O’Clock and girlband Tahiti, who were formed via their own sitcom-style reality TV show called Ta-Dah! It’s Tahiti. The SSE Arena, Wembley, Saturday 27 January MC Christine Tobin Christine Tobin (pictured) is not only an imaginative genre-bridging singer-songwriter, she’s a gifted interpreter of others’ lyrics (notably Leonard Cohen, Dylan and Carole King) and literary giants including WB Yeats. On this tour, Tobin illuminates the Pulitzer-prize-winning poetry of Paul Muldoon, her guest for the trip’s Exeter show. Torrington, Saturday 27 January; Exeter, Sunday 28 January; Southampton, Thursday 1 February; Derby, Friday 2 February; touring to 8 February JF Four of the best ... classical concerts The Threepenny Opera Northern Ireland Opera’s recently installed artistic director, Walter Sutcliffe, makes his debut with the company directing a staging of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s ground-breaking music-theatre piece. It’s sung in Marc Blitzstein’s English version, with Mark Dugdale as Macheath and Jayne Wisener as Polly Peachum; Sinead Hayes conducts. Lyric Theatre, Belfast Saturday 27 January to 10 February Das Rheingold Vladimir Jurowski marks his 10th anniversary as principal conductor of the London Philharmonic with a semi-staging of the first part of Wagner’s Ring cycle. The cast is led by Matthias Goerne, singing Wotan in London for the first time, with Robert Hayward as Alberich, Adrian Thompson as Mime and Michelle DeYoung as Fricka. Royal Festival Hall, SE1, Saturday 27 January Celebrating Carter Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducts Birmingham Contemporary Music Group for the first time in a programme devoted to late pieces by Elliott Carter. It includes his very last work, Epigrams for piano trio from 2012, played by the musicians who gave its premiere: Alexandra Wood, Ulrich Heinen and Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Birmingham Town Hall, Sunday 28 January Michael Tippett premiere As an appendix to his cycle of Tippett’s numbered symphonies with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins unearths the early Symphony in B Flat. It was completed in 1934, but rejected by the composer as “too Sibelian” after a handful of performances; this will be the first chance in 80 years to hear the score. City Halls, Glasgow, Thursday 1 February AC Five of the best ... exhibitions Charles I: King and Collector The Stuart king who got his head chopped off in 1649, after fighting a civil war against his own parliament, also happened to be Britain’s greatest royal art collector. His treasures were sold after his death, but this show brings many back together – including masterpieces by Titian, Rubens and Van Dyck – to reveal the glory of baroque Britain. Royal Academy of Arts, W1 Saturday 27 January to 15 April The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind This homage to the rural has works ranging from Californian reprobate Paul McCarthy and slide-making provocateur Carsten Höller to the beloved illustrations of Beatrix Potter and the radical crafts of Edward Carpenter. And no morris dancers at all. Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton, to 7 May Tara Donovan Banal things that we never give a thought to, such as paper cups and sticky tape, are mutated by Donovan into cosmic and microcosmic expanses of magical stuff. She creates sprawling evocations of molecules and cells, the tiny invisible structures of things, spinning spectacular galaxies from bits of rubbish. In this show, the artist uses framed works to explore stratification. Pace Gallery, W1, to 9 March Pots With Attitude Would you piss on a picture of Nigel Farage? I pluck that name out of the air at random but, in the Georgian age, satirical art really did include images on the inside of chamber pots. Pioneering transfer techniques allowed caricatures to be reproduced on jugs, bowls and other ceramics, piss pots included, taking the scabrous art of Gillray and his contemporaries to a popular audience in alehouses and inns. It’s like Grayson Perry on snuff. British Museum, WC1, to 11 March Transvangarde In our age of biennials and art fairs, art has never been more cosmopolitan. Say what you like about the art market, it provides a stage for art in which there are no borders. The flourishing state of global art is surveyed in this exhibition, with work by celebrated Ghanaian redeemer of found stuff El Anatsui, China-born painter Tian Wei, and Beninois mask-maker Romuald Hazoumè. October Gallery, WC1, Thursday 1 February to 3 March JJ Five of the best ... theatre shows Out of Love The achievements of the past can all too quickly be swept away, particularly when it comes to women, feminism and opportunity. It is the latter that separates Lorna and Grace, who become firm friends despite very different backgrounds. Elinor Cook’s play is a warm celebration of female friendship but also a beady-eyed look at social mobility. Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond Saturday 27 January to 3 March Guys and Dolls It is your last chance this week for Michael Buffong’s all-black staging of one of the 20th century’s greatest musicals. This exuberant evening, featuring Ashley Zhangazha as Sky Masterson, successfully relocates the action from Broadway to Harlem and is stuffed full of Frank Loesser’s showstoppers and psychological acuity. Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, to 3 February Imperium: The Cicero Plays You need to get your skates on for Mike Poulton’s seven-hour, two-part version of Robert Harris’s trilogy about the rise and fall of Cicero, the Roman lawyer and politician (Harris described it as “like the West Wing in togas”). There is a mighty central performance from Richard McCabe, who captures the charisma and flaws of Cicero in an experience that is big in every way but never bloated. Royal Shakespeare Theatre: Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, to 10 February Things I Know to Be True All parents have dreams and expectations for their children and want the best for them. But what happens when, despite the sacrifices made by the parents, their grownup children’s lives don’t turn out quite as planned? Frantic Assembly offers a physical dimension to emotional inarticulacy in Andrew Bovell’s poignant, tender play about one unhappy family trying to forge new futures for themselves. Lyric Hammersmith, W6, to 3 February Brief Encounter A production to make you long to swing from the chandeliers, director Emma Rice’s staging of the famous love story for Kneehigh and Birmingham Rep playfully and wittily negotiates the boundaries between theatre and film. Noël Coward’s story is best known for the 1945 movie with Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as the stiff-upper-lip marrieds who fall for each other, and Rice’s staging is suffused in achingly suppressed passion. Birmingham Rep, Friday 2 to 17 February LG Three of the best ... dance shows Sampled The Wells’s annual taster programme is always a classy showcase of different dancers and different styles. This year’s lineup includes virtuoso flamenco star Jesús Carmona, street dancer Jodelle Douglas, Zenaida Yanowsky – former ballerina with the Royal – performing the Dying Swan, and a duet from Alexander Whitley’s ballet Kin. Sadler’s Wells, EC1 Friday 2 & Saturday 3 February Mark Bruce Company: Macbeth Mark Bruce moves on from his coruscating reinventions of Dracula and The Odyssey to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, set in a world of supernatural and psychological menace. The excellent Jonathan Goddard takes the title role, and Bruce’s own music is featured. Frome, Saturday 27 January; Winchester, Wednesday 31 January & Thursday 1 February; touring to 18 May Birmingham Royal Ballet: The Sleeping Beauty Peter Wright’s enduring production of the Petipa-Tchaikovsky classic goes out on its spring tour, with Wright’s meticulous staging for BRB given magnificence and drama by Philip Prowse’s designs. Mayflower Theatre, Southampton, Wednesday 31 January to 3 February; touring to 24 March JM

film/2018/jan/27/what-to-see-this-week-in-the-uk

pillar/arts

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culture

Culture

article

2018-01-27T09:00:46Z

What to see this week in the UK

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/27/what-to-see-this-week-in-the-uk

['five', 'best', 'films', 'early', 'manpg', 'nick', 'park', 'ukfra', 'mins', 'like', 'stone-age', 'subjects', 'aardman', 'homely', 'claymation', 'formula', 'particularly', 'evolved', 'need', 'another', 'witty', 'gag-stuffed', 'agreeably', 'hand-crafted', 'family', 'treat', 'essentially', 'prehistoric', 'sports', 'movie', 'eddie', 'redmayne', 'voices', 'sharpest', 'insular', 'dimwitted', 'tribe', 'must', 'beat', 'european', 'invaders', 'football', 'pitch', 'coco', 'pg', 'lee', 'unkrich', 'adrian', 'molina', 'us', 'mins', 'vibrant', 'culturally', 'respectful', 'pixar', 'outing', 'seamlessly', 'combines', 'family', 'drama', 'accessible', 'comedy', 'colourful', 'fantasy', 'plot', 'follows', 'musically', 'inclined', 'mexican', 'kid', 'becomes', 'stranded', 'land', 'dead', 'rarely', 'dull', 'moment', 'bickering', 'skeleton', 'ancestors', 'reveal', 'hidden', 'family', 'history', 'three', 'billboards', 'outside', 'ebbing', 'missouri', 'martin', 'mcdonagh', 'ukus', 'mins', 'small-town', 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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/27/difference-bad-date-wild-night-aziz-ansari

“Ask a man for his worst date story, and he’ll tell you something that will make you laugh,” a female friend said to me a few years ago. “Ask a woman, and she’ll tell you a story that will make you want to change the locks.” For various reasons we’ll get to in a tick, this conversation has stayed with me. But it wasn’t until recently that I realised the man and the woman in these scenarios could be talking about the exact same date. A few weeks ago, as by now everyone knows, a woman using the pseudonym Grace published an account of her date with US comedian Aziz Ansari, a date that he thought was “fun” with “completely consensual sexual activity”, and that she described as “the worst night of her life”, riddled with “assault”. How, you may well wonder, can two people have such polar opposite takes on the same evening? Ask more than one person their opinion on this story, and you’ll probably get an idea. Ever since it was reported, I have spoken of little else with my friends, and those conversations have gone one of two ways: “This story is horrific – I can’t stop talking about it!” Or: “This story is such a nothing burger but, oh my God, I can’t stop talking about it.” Our outsider take is as divided as that of the insiders. It reminds me of a very different viral sensation: the great blue-or-gold dress controversy of 2015, in which two people could look at the same thing and see two totally different objects. After Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, I thought a celebrity would have to be caught assaulting victims with barn animals to get people talking any more. And yet the reason the Aziz Ansari story caught the public’s attention was because it was so ordinary. Almost everyone can imagine an Ansari situation, because so many of us have been on one side or the other. “Bloody hell, I’ve been on worse dates than that!” was my initial snorted reaction, as though that wasn’t part of the problem. I was extraordinarily lucky during my long dating years, and by “lucky” I mean I was never raped, which apparently is the bar (“I mean, it’s not like he raped her,” has been one of the more telling defences of Ansari). There was the guy who put his hand around my throat and squeezed as we were making out on my sofa on our first date. “I can tell you like that,” he whispered, wrongly. And there was the man who begged to come up to my flat after giving me a lift home from a party, and I let him, because I was too embarrassed to argue about it in front of the cab driver. As the door shut behind us, he grabbed me between my legs as if he was squeezing an orange for juice. Were these incidents assault? They certainly felt grim. But I’m sure to the men involved they seemed entirely consensual. Is the dress blue or gold? This is what happens when you enter the weird world of modern dating: on one side, you have people (men mainly, but women, too) increasingly getting their moves from internet porn; and on the other, too many people (women mainly, but also men) still thinking it is more important to be amenable than to be themselves. If dating is a job interview plus sex, and all your focus is on avoiding rejection, then desire and pleasure can quickly seem beside the point. Ansari, who wrote an entire book about how hard dating is after a woman didn’t text him back, has often presented a decidedly narcissistic view of romance. On his Netflix series Master Of None, women are either unreadable Manic Pixie Dream Girls or inexplicable heartbreakers, while he is just a nice guy trying to find love in the big city. But only someone who sees women as generic objects can think it’s acceptable to put their hand around a woman’s neck or, as Grace alleged Ansari did, down her throat; only someone who thinks of sex as a solo pursuit can be so unaware of their partner’s reactions. Is this really enough for a lot of men? I’d love to know, but public discussion of this saga has, predictably, been dominated by women, just as all conversations about harassment are – as though it’s up to women to fix this problem. Meanwhile, the men I’ve asked nervily insist that Ansari has been exploited by a woman who expected him to be “a mind reader”. And, honestly, I understand why they feel this way. But dating involves more than one person, so instead of treating this story as a gladiatorial battle between snowflakes and people who enable rape culture, a more conducive approach would be to rethink the whole hook-up narrative: stop thinking of it as a game; get your head out of your libido when there’s someone else in the room; and when someone says no, they mean no, not, “Mmm, persuade me by sticking your hand down my throat.” The Ansari story has shone a light on the awkward fault lines in modern dating – fault lines so common that many of us just took them for granted. It turns out that the dress is neither blue nor gold, but grey.

culture/2018/jan/27/difference-bad-date-wild-night-aziz-ansari

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-01-27T09:00:45Z

How can a man and a woman have such polar opposite takes on the same date? | Hadley Freeman

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/27/difference-bad-date-wild-night-aziz-ansari

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/27/ive-gone-full-witch-the-fire-and-fury-of-tv-satirist-samantha-bee

Samantha Bee is recounting how she landed her first major job in TV on the seminal US late-night news parody, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. “They were having trouble finding a woman who they thought was funny,” she says – and she’s being deadly serious. This was 2003, and Bee, then 34 years old, was part of a female sketch comedy troupe in her native Toronto. Their audiences sometimes barely reached double figures. “I was at the point of giving it all up; I was done with being impoverished,” she recalls. Then producers from The Daily Show arrived in the city to scope the Canadian comedy scene. “Even as I was auditioning for them, I thought it was ridiculous,” Bee admits. “Really? In all of America, you can’t find a woman that you think is funny? You have come to another country to find one?” Fast-forward 15 years and, far from having given it all up, the 48-year-old comedian is at the helm of her very own giant-slaying late-night show, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee. Since its launch in February 2016, her weekly show, with its excoriating, unfiltered, firmly feminist take on politics and current affairs – like Joan Rivers crossed with Armando Iannucci – has won an Emmy and earned multiple further nominations. Last spring, Bee was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. No demographic is safe from the biting wit of Bee, who is as quick to call out hypocrisy from white, liberal America (for example on voter turnout, she asked: “How many times do we expect black people to build our country for us?”) as she is to eviscerate cornerstones of the right, such as Fox News (“A nightmare factory powered by white resentment and relentless misinformation ... making family Thanksgivings unbearable for 20 years.”) During the presidential election, she gave Hillary Clinton anything but an easy ride, too, calling her “a barely contained cluster of frustration”, and likening Bernie Sanders to Doc Brown from Back to the Future: “the elderly lunatic whose well-intentioned meddling screws things up for everyone”. Despite being the face of political satire in the age of identity politics, Bee is not wholly comfortable with my labelling the show “liberal”. “I guess that’s how people would characterise it,” she says, in her office in midtown Manhattan, after some hemming and hawing. “But on a personal note, I’m a much more complicated human being than just a liberal or a conservative.” The show does have a necessarily strong point of view, though: hers. “You can’t make a show like this by committee,” she reasons. “I care a lot about people who are committed fans of the show, but I don’t really make the show for other people.” Off-air, Bee is more composed and contained than her potty-mouthed, sarcastic on-screen persona, who machine-guns creative, colourful insults that would make Malcolm Tucker proud, in passionate, impressively slick seven-minute monologues. It is hard to imagine the thoughtful and considered woman sitting behind her large, busy desk today calling Rupert Murdoch a “sentient liver spot”. “That’s the loudest, most unfiltered version of me that exists,” she says. “In my private life, I’m not like that at all. I don’t kick doors in and walk into meetings wowing everybody with my Entertainment Personality. It’s a wonderful 21-minute catharsis, once a week, but I don’t need to be that person in my day-to-day life.” Her 65-strong team of writers, producers, technicians and graphic designers is notable for its diversity: half of the staff are female and a third are non-white. “It’s not like we have solved the world’s diversity problem, but we do think about it all the time,” she says. “When we need to hire people, we think: let’s try to find a woman for this.” Bee has stormed her way into what had been a televisual late-night gentlemen’s club (“Why there aren’t more female comedians? Maybe it’s because every time a woman opens her mouth to tell a joke, someone tries to put their dick in it,” she once suggested), outgunning the likes of Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver and James Corden, in both the ratings and her relentless condemnation of Trump (“The Fyre festival of presidents”; “The thrice-married, foul-mouthed tit judge ... who thinks Corinthians is a type of car upholstery”; “A crotch-fondling slab of rancid meatloaf”). “I imagine a fan might call it joyful rage,” says executive producer Miles Kahn, when asked to characterise the show’s savage tone. “Whereas someone who is not a fan of the show would just call it ‘Shrill lady yelling at me’. We don’t have to steep ourselves in fake irony. That’s a great way to do satire, too, but we just call out the thing that we want to say in a way that is funny and cathartic.” The nature of the news cycle over the past 12 months must also present a punishing challenge. A week has never felt such a long time in politics. “It’s insanely fast. We have whiplash every single day, and we definitely all have stomach cancer,” she says, reaching for the oversized bottle of antacid tablets beside her computer and giving it a rattle. “We’re all just one big peptic ulcer.” Despite the pressures of the job, Bee is making efforts to occasionally disconnect. “I do have to know what’s happening, it’s my job,” she shrugs. “But my children [she has three, all under 12, with her husband, fellow writer and producer Jason Jones] are always telling me to get off my phone.” Even more helpfully, on the night of the presidential election, she resigned from participating in social media. She has not checked Facebook since, and she switched off her notifications on Twitter, a deliberate move to dodge the trolls. “It has made the most profound difference,” she says, earnestly. “The amount of hatred and anger just wore me down.” Bee’s smart, savvy brand of humour would likely have flourished in any political climate, but Full Frontal is manna for many in an unprecedented moment of freshly revealed misogyny. “I’m leaning so hard into feminism that I’ve gone full witch,” she says. One of the most prominent topics over the past few months has, of course, been the dramatic downfall of countless prominent men in positions of power. “Some woman could just do a show exclusively and only about that, four nights a week, and that would be just fine,” Bee observes. When she does riff on the topic in the show, she says: “If you don’t want to tune into your partner’s feelings throughout sex maybe you shouldn’t be fucking a person at all. May I suggest a coin purse or a Ziploc bag full of grape jelly?” She also agrees that, horrific though the nature and extent of the allegations are, a fire has been lit under many women (and men) too. “I definitely feel an excitement in the air, I feel this drumbeat that is unique,” she nods. “I would not have predicted what happened in the presidential election; I would not have predicted the turnout at the Women’s March. And I do feel that in the midst of all of this garbage, a phoenix is rising from these ashes. “I think there are so many stories left to be told,” she says. “This is just the tip of the flag on top of the iceberg. This is so far from being over.” Episodes of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee are online at samanthabee.com

culture/2018/jan/27/ive-gone-full-witch-the-fire-and-fury-of-tv-satirist-samantha-bee

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-01-27T07:00:43Z

'I’ve gone full witch': the fire and fury of TV satirist Samantha Bee

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/27/ive-gone-full-witch-the-fire-and-fury-of-tv-satirist-samantha-bee

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/26/southbank-director-jude-kelly-saying-youre-a-feminist-is-not-enough

After 12 years as the Southbank Centre’s artistic director, Jude Kelly is leaving to devote herself to the Women of the World (Wow) festival she founded eight years ago. The 63-year-old’s resignation could be misconstrued as professional downsizing, but she describes the move as more like leaving a long and happy marriage for a more compelling mistress. “I realised I was just falling more and more in love with Wow. I’ve had a passionate relationship with the Southbank Centre for all these years – but when I started the Wow festival, that was really me coming out as a woman.” In 2010, Kelly felt feminism was in a lull. “Women were being told they’d never had it so good – which was a terrible injustice.” Since then she has staged 49 festivals in 23 countries over five continents, featuring talks, debates, performances and activism involving more than two million people, among them Malala Yousafzai, Christine Lagarde and Salma Hayek. How Kelly has managed this while running Britain’s biggest arts centre is a mystery that begins to become clearer over a lunch of fish pie and diet coke near the Royal Festival Hall. Although petite in stature, Kelly crackles with spry energy and formidable ambition. “I’d always been a feminist, but I’d reached a point where I looked at the amazing things I was curating and thought, ‘The reality is, the majority of the canon is created by men, and if the culture keeps on reiterating over and over again this idea that creativity is male, then it permeates absolutely everything else. And you have to do something. Saying you’re a feminist is not enough.” Eight years on, the world is catching up with Kelly. The #MeToo and Time’s Up movements are bringing a global focus on feminism not seen in decades, and Kelly is well aware that this year’s festival in London in March will attract unprecedented interest. “To be able to say: ‘Here’s a vehicle for many different people from many different backgrounds to debate and be creative and have fun’ – that’s a very handy thing to offer.” Wow is billed as bringing “people together from all corners of society”, so I’m curious to know if there are any Kelly would not want to see on stage. Catherine Deneuve, for example, provoked the wrath of the #MeToo movement recently, for signing an open letter denouncing it as a “witch-hunt”. Would the French actor be welcome at Wow? “Yes, absolutely. I think that’s an interesting discussion.” How about Marine Le Pen? “No.” Ivanka Trump? Kelly falls silent for 12 seconds while she thinks. “We-ll, I think it’s a very good question. I think you’d have to put Ivanka Trump in the context of a genuine drilling-down interview. I’d have to be sure that she was prepared to look at how she squares being a feminist, as she calls herself.” Kelly doesn’t dispense a neat definition of her brand of feminism, but as she talks, it becomes clear that it is more radical than Ivanka Trump’s – or indeed the version promoted by Tina Brown’s US festival, Women in the World, with which Kelly’s is often confused. When I ask her to characterise the difference between the two festivals, Kelly considers her answer carefully before offering: “Well, it’s $900 (£630) a ticket for Women in the World. That’s the difference. So I think that changes the nature of something. What I’ve tried to do in Wow is make it look like the women of the world. People arriving shouldn’t look round and think, ‘Oh, this is my tribe.’ Tribalism doesn’t help. So it isn’t useful to simply applaud women who have ‘made it’ in the conventional sense. That’s implying that that’s the gold standard of success. We’ve got so many things to solve and we’re not going to solve them by just mimicking where society’s got up to so far. You’d be billing the women who have ‘made it’ as the most important – whereas I think we should be looking at change, and who’s making change happen. That’s the most exciting thing. The status quo is not what we’re after. So, going back to Ivanka Trump – yes, I’d invite her, but only if the conversation’s interesting. Not if someone is simply there to grandstand who they are. Wow doesn’t do a PR campaign for individual women.” Last year, she was forced to postpone the appearance of two speakers, Thordis Elva and Tom Stranger, co-authors of a remarkable book called South of Forgiveness, about Stranger’s rape of Elva and the enduring impact of his crime on them both. From Kelly’s expression when I bring this up, I get the impression she’s still bruised by the uproar. “The gender equality debate is complex. And most people don’t want complexity, we have to grapple with that fact.” She had invited the pair to speak after seeing their TED Talk. “There is a real need to get men to talk about rape and sexual harassment. They have to start considering, ‘Well, what does entitlement mean?’ I don’t want to put these things exactly side by side, but white racism has had horrific effects for centuries, and at a certain point white people have got to go, ‘Why have we felt that we’re entitled like that?’ So men have got to have that conversation. And I thought, ‘Here’s an opportunity for a man to make the clear statement that it was entitlement that made him do it.’” But protesters demanded Stranger be no-platformed, and the pair’s appearance at the Southbank Centre had to be rescheduled to a later date. I ask Kelly if she has ever been sexually assaulted. “Oh yes,” and reels off the incidents casually. “In the workplace, when I was a waitress. And I’ve been flashed at, several times and put in situations of real danger. And I’ve been stalked. Of course.” She wasn’t at all surprised by the results released this week by the Stage of its survey of sexual harassment, bullying and assault within the industry. A third of respondents reported experiencing harassment, and almost one in 10 had been sexually assaulted. “When you have a dynamic that is so much about, ‘Are you pleased with what I do?’ and ‘Do you like what I do?’, these things are very exploitable.” Notwithstanding this, women have made more inroads into the professional hierarchy of theatre than in film. The first female director of a major London theatre was appointed in 2012; the number grew to five within as many years, and Kelly runs the Southbank Centre with an all-female leadership team – but when I ask why she thinks theatreland has been more porous than the film industry for women, she offers a wry smile. “Well, mainly because theatre is poorer. Traditionally, the more money there is, the less porous it is. That is absolutely the reason, I’m sure.” Does she share the now common complaint that the workplace rules of gender relations are mystifyingly elusive? “No,” she says briskly. “One of the things I say to people at work is: ‘Anything you wouldn’t do to your boss, don’t do.’ So would you suddenly fling your arm around your boss’s shoulder and tickle her on the ear? You probably wouldn’t do that, would you? Would you wolf-whistle your boss? Probably not. So don’t do it to anyone else either. Women don’t want to have to defend women’s dignity on their own. We need men and women together to do it. Men need to be accomplices in change, not just a bit supportive. They have to want it as well.” Kelly is not without sympathy, though. “Men have been taught that they might be considered a bit dull if they’re not laddish. I have a daughter, but I also have a son, I have a partner, I have a dad, I have lots of men in my life who I love, and I can see if you put women in a prison and say, ‘This is what you are, this is what you have to be,’ there’s also a prison for men. And just because they are socially more powerful, it doesn’t mean that each individual man has the individual power.” Technically, she remains married to the father of her children, now both grown up, but they have been separated for 16 years and she lives with the author Andrew Cracknell, who has three daughters. Kelly herself came of age in the late 60s, during the second wave of feminism; she and her sisters were the first generation in her working class Liverpool family to go to university, and her younger self might have marvelled at the freedoms her daughters and stepdaughters enjoy today. When I ask if their generation of young women face anything harder than hers did, she doesn’t need to pause to think. “Social media. And pornography. And body image. The notion of perfection – female perfection – that wasn’t there back then.” Does any bit of her share the view of some that the #MeToo movement has gone “too far”? After another 12-second pause: “We-ell, I don’t believe it’s good for women – or anybody – to troll other women with crude and violent statements. I think that’s really a huge mistake. That’s too far for me. I think we should be trying to operate from love.” The venom unleashed against Lena Dunham, for example, after her public posts in defence of a male colleague accused of assault, was “unhelpful” and ugly. “It makes people feel that the argument has gone too far. But actually, it’s the reaction to the argument” – the harsh, judgmental condemnation – “that’s gone too far”. If Kelly had any doubts about her decision to leave the Southbank Centre, the manner in which it was reported would have settled her mind. “If you look at the reporting of me stepping down, it was something like, ‘Another woman leader leaves the arts’.” She rolls her eyes. “Nobody writes headlines saying, ‘Another man has left the arts’. So we still see [female directors] as special; there’s still a tally going on. We haven’t reached a tipping point yet when it’s just normal. And until we stop believing that patriarchy is the correct default place, we still haven’t changed that fundamental mindset.” Wow festival runs at Southbank Centre from 7 to 11 March. • This article was amended on 29 January 2017. An earlier version said the first female director of a major British theatre was appointed in 2012. This has been corrected to say London theatre.

culture/2018/jan/26/southbank-director-jude-kelly-saying-youre-a-feminist-is-not-enough

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-01-26T17:46:35Z

Southbank director Jude Kelly: ‘Saying you’re a feminist is not enough’

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/26/southbank-director-jude-kelly-saying-youre-a-feminist-is-not-enough

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'leaves', 'arts', 'rolls', 'eyes', 'nobody', 'writes', 'headlines', 'saying', 'another', 'man', 'left', 'arts', 'still', 'see', 'female', 'directors', 'special', 'still', 'tally', 'going', 'reached', 'tipping', 'point', 'yet', 'normal', 'stop', 'believing', 'patriarchy', 'correct', 'default', 'place', 'still', 'changed', 'fundamental', 'mindset', 'wow', 'festival', 'runs', 'southbank', 'centre', 'march', 'article', 'amended', 'january', 'earlier', 'version', 'said', 'first', 'female', 'director', 'major', 'british', 'theatre', 'appointed', 'corrected', 'say', 'london', 'theatre']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/26/late-night-hosts-on-fbi-texts-the-fbi-has-a-secret-society-they-call-the-secret-society

Late-night hosts on Thursday addressed Donald Trump’s trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos and the latest bombshell report that the president attempted unsuccessfully to fire special counsel Robert Mueller last summer. “It’s day two of Donald Trump’s trip to Davos,” Stephen Colbert began. “Today, Trump sat down with British prime minister Theresa May, which could have been awkward because they’ve had some sharp words for each other over the past year.” The host then showed a video clip of Trump and May’s meeting, in which he talked up the special relationship between the US and the UK and said of his personal relationship with May, “the feeling is mutual from the standpoint of liking each other a lot”. “Are you allowed to just say how the other person feels about you? Because I’m not sure that feeling is all that mutual,” Colbert said. Impersonating Trump, he continued: “Yeah, she’s doing such a good job, they’re already calling this place ‘Great Britain.’” “Before Trump left for Davos, he surprised reporters, they were waiting by John Kelly’s office and he gave them an unplanned press conference,” Colbert continued. “There were no cameras there, but we did get to hear the president make a stunning promise about the Russia investigation.” The host proceeded to play audio from the impromptu press conference, in which the president says he “would do it under oath” in response to a question about being interviewed by special counsel Mueller. “Doing it under oath is my favorite Stormy Daniels movie,” Colbert joked. Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah analyzed republican attempts to discredit Mueller’s investigation by drumming up skepticism over text messages exchanged between two former investigators. “From almost the beginning of the investigation, Republicans have tried to find any reason to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller,” Noah said, referencing various GOP talking points alleging Mueller’s partiality. “But the thing Republicans are focusing on right now is a group of text messages sent by someone formerly on Mueller’s team.” Noah went on to show news coverage of the texts, in which Peter Strzok, who was fired from Mueller’s investigation last year, calls Trump an “idiot”. “Okay, I kind of understand what the Republicans are saying,” Noah responded. “If someone thinks Trump’s an idiot, you don’t want that person investigating him. On the other hand, if you don’t think Trump’s an idiot, then you’re the idiot.” Noah went on: “So an FBI agent calling Trump an idiot wasn’t the bombshell that some had hoped for. But this week more texts sent between FBI staff emerged and, for many Republican conspiracy theorists, Christmas came early.” The host then explained how conservative media focused on text messages between Strzok and FBI colleague Lisa Page in which the words “secret society” were used, which convinced pundits that an FBI conspiracy existed to remove Trump from office. “The FBI has a secret society that they call the secret society?” Noah joked, before showing additional footage of the message’s contents, in which the words “secret society” seemed to have been used in jest. “Wait, you want me to believe that friends just text each other jokes?” the host said. “Look people, we all know what’s happening here. Republicans are just trying to discredit the FBI and the justice department as much as possible, so that when Robert Mueller comes out with his findings, you’ll see them in a different light.” Finally, Jimmy Kimmel discussed the New York Times’ late-breaking report from Thursday night, stating that in June 2017 Trump attempted to fire Robert Mueller but reneged when White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to quit. “The New York Times has a big bombshell story tonight,” he said. “They reported that the president ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller, who of course is running the Russia investigation. Then the president backed off when McGahn said if you make me do that I’m going to quit.” “You can’t just fire every guy who investigates you,” Kimmel continued. “He’s running the White House by the exact same rules as The Apprentice. He doesn’t understand. He’s like, ‘Nobody had a problem when I fired Meatloaf.’” “According to this report, Trump said Mueller has a conflict of interest because years ago there was a dispute over fees and Mueller cancelled his membership at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia,” the host explained. Referencing the impunity which which Trump’s fired James Comey, Sally Yates and others, Kimmel concluded: “Richard Nixon must be rolling around in his grave right now saying. ‘How does he do it?’”

culture/2018/jan/26/late-night-hosts-on-fbi-texts-the-fbi-has-a-secret-society-they-call-the-secret-society

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2018-01-26T15:52:52Z

Late-night hosts on FBI texts: 'The FBI has a secret society they call the secret society?'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/26/late-night-hosts-on-fbi-texts-the-fbi-has-a-secret-society-they-call-the-secret-society

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/26/andreas-gurskys-amazon-exposing-the-mindlessly-cruel-forces-of-global-capitalism

The big time… Andreas Gursky’s huge photos have made him the world’s most famous and financially successful art photographer. From afar, the rows of goods that fill this 2016 picture of the Amazon warehouse in Phoenix, Arizona, conjure the ghosts of 19th- and 20th-century art, be it pointillism or geometric abstraction. Modern romantic… It is also a kind of 21st-century Romanticism, wowing us with the immensity of both the image and the enterprise, the way JMW Turner or Caspar David Friedrich did. Shock and awe… Gursky is typically drawn to spectacular sites where tiny details, be it architecture, packaging or people, make up an overwhelming mass. He has also trained his camera on the stock exchange, raves, housing developments and Formula One. Massive attack… They might inspire awe, but the after-effect of such works is shock. What Gursky gets at are the unyielding, mindlessly cruel forces of global capitalism. In spite of the promise of individualism through consumerism, people are lost in the crowd, in a world of excess and waste. Southbank Centre: Hayward Gallery, SE1, to 22 April

culture/2018/jan/26/andreas-gurskys-amazon-exposing-the-mindlessly-cruel-forces-of-global-capitalism

pillar/arts

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culture

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2018-01-26T10:00:43Z

Andreas Gursky’s Amazon: immensity of the image and the enterprise

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/26/andreas-gurskys-amazon-exposing-the-mindlessly-cruel-forces-of-global-capitalism

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/25/late-night-hosts-tv-trump-stephen-miller

Late-night hosts on Wednesday discussed Donald Trump’s visit to Davos, Stephen Miller’s hand in immigration talks, and partisan gerrymandering. Stephen Colbert: ‘Lex Luthor would point his space laser at Davos’ Stephen Colbert began: “As we speak, the president is jetting to Davos for the World Economic Forum, an annual gathering that draws the world’s elites from the worlds of business, finance, politics, and public affairs. Basically, it’s what Lex Luthor would point his space laser at.” Colbert joked that the summit is “a bunch of fancy people who think they can solve the world’s problems at an unlimited fondue bar”. Colbert quipped: “Trump initially didn’t want to got to Davos but then he got a friendly nudge from French president and your-wife’s-tennis-instructor-who-straight-up-tells-you-he’s-going-to-have-sex-with-her Emmanuel Macron.” Macron clinched the deal for Trump by making Davos sound “fun”. Colbert said: “That’s all you have to do? Sir, have you heard about this happening place called federal prison? It’s all cheeseburgers, very, very few stairs, and your family won’t have to visit because they will already be there.” Samantha Bee: ‘Stephen Miller, enterprising slime mold’ Samantha Bee discussed White House adviser Stephen Miller’s part in hindering immigration reform. Bee said: “Why has governing ground to a halt over protections for Dreamers that 86% of Americans support? “Don’t get me wrong, Potus hates him some immigrants, but his specific policy proposals are as empty as his Oval Office desk. They come from his senior policy adviser and political smallpox blanket Stephen Miller. So what’s the problem with Stephen Miller, besides the fact that his skull looks like it’s trying to escape his head?” Bee then noted Republican Lindsey Graham and Democrat Dick Durbin spearheaded an immigration compromise that Trump was prepared to sign before Miller said no. Graham told reporters: “As long as Stephen Miller’s in charge of negotiating immigration we are going nowhere.” “This isn’t the Trump shutdown or the Schumer shutdown,” Bee said. “It’s the Stephen Miller shutdown. So who is this enterprising slime mold on the Wonder Bread of democracy?” Bee went on to explore his ideological origins: “By high school, Miller was a practiced rightwing provocateur appearing on conservative talk radio and running for class president on a platform of screw janitors,” she explained, showing a video clip of Miller fuming about being asked to pick up trash. She continued: “After high school Miller fled liberal California for Duke University, presumably because he thought it was founded by David. There he was captain of Duke’s competitive balding team and found his niche at the college newspaper, railing against feminism, multiculturalism, immigration, liberal professors, the war on Christmas and, once again, janitors.” “He published a screed against giving his dorm janitor a birthday card. You know what, buddy? I’m getting the feeling that you think janitors are an ethnic group.” Trevor Noah: ‘This shit is way bigger than Russia’ Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah discussed the drawing of state districts to favor one party over another. He said: “As much as Russia may have influenced how Americans voted, America already has a system that invalidates many people’s votes before they’re even cast.” Noah continued: “Constitutionally, the power to draw district lines belongs to the state governments. If the legislature wanted to rig the system for Democrats, they could draw the lines so that with 60% of the votes the Democrats could get 100% of the seats.” “This has been happening in America in real life,” Noah said, noting that in North Carolina, with 50% statewide support, Republicans secured a 10-3 lead in the legislature. “You don’t need to be an expert to see that something is not quite right with these districts.” Noah then explained that Pennsylvania state courts recently declared unconstitutional the state’s congressional map. “It would be one thing if it was just Pennsylvania, but federal courts have also struck down blatantly biased district maps in Wisconsin and in North Carolina.” Noah concluded: “For me, this shit is way bigger than Russia, because while Russia is sending a bunch of misleading memes, legislatures in America are predetermining actual election results. That’s your election hacking right there.”

culture/2018/jan/25/late-night-hosts-tv-trump-stephen-miller

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2018-01-25T16:29:54Z

Late-night hosts: Trump ally Stephen Miller 'the slime mold on the Wonder Bread of democracy'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/25/late-night-hosts-tv-trump-stephen-miller

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/24/late-night-hosts-shutdown-trump-tolling

Late-night hosts discussed the state of affairs after both sides came to an agreement to stop a shutdown. Stephen Colbert: ‘Just ask his tennis shorts’ On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert spoke about what’s happened since those in the government have been able to get back to their jobs. “Trump got back to the important work of trolling a CNN reporter,” he said while talking about the president’s tweet calling Jim Acosta “crazy”. It’s been reported that a major aim of the Republican party is to now keep Trump contained. “That’s not easy,” he said. “Just ask his tennis shorts.” One of the strangest stories to have come out in the past few days is that of Senator Susan Collins’ talking stick which was used to help restore order during heated discussions. In an interview on CNN, Collins claimed it was from Africa. “As lawmakers discussed immigration and the future of our government, the only minority in the room was a stick,” Colbert joked. But apparently at one moment, the stick was thrown and almost shattered a glass elephant. “A heated discussion almost destroyed the symbol of the Republican party,” he said. “I think the full details are in this month’s issue of Heavy-Handed Metaphor Magazine.” Trevor Noah: ‘What the hell, Susan Collins?!’ On The Daily Show, Trevor Noah was also fascinated by news of the talking stick. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. You had a magic stick that made senators work together the whole time, and then you only bring it out after the shutdown? What the hell, Susan Collins?” he said. “You could have saved everyone so much stress.” Noah then went on to make a strange comparison. “You know who Susan Collins reminds me of?” he said. “The Power Rangers. They spend the whole episode getting their ass kicked and then they become the giant robot. Just be the robot from the beginning!” He also took issue with Collins’ statement about the stick’s heritage. “We don’t use talking sticks in Africa,” he said. “I feel like Susan Collins just got bamboozled by some guy on the street.” Seth Meyers on Jeff Sessions’ ‘pot of gold’ On Late Night with Seth Meyers, the host spoke about Robert Mueller’s investigation finally reaching a member of Trump’s inner circle: Jeff Sessions. “Despite Mueller’s tenacity, he said he wouldn’t disclose the location of ‘my pot of gold’,” he joked. Meyers also brought up recent reports that the president had an affair with a porn star called Stormy Daniels. “Following reports that Trump carried on an affair with a porn star following the birth of his youngest son, the head of the Conservative Family Research Council said in a new interview that Trump deserves a ‘do-over’,” he said. “OK, but I doubt she’d still be into it.” It’s been reported that Netflix lost $39m last year from costs incurred over Kevin Spacey projects that had to be cancelled because of allegations over sexual abuse. “And that’s not even including all of the money they lost on the Jerry Sandusky Christmas Special,” he said.

culture/2018/jan/24/late-night-hosts-shutdown-trump-tolling

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-01-24T15:52:06Z

Late-night hosts post-shutdown: 'Trump got back to the important work of trolling'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/24/late-night-hosts-shutdown-trump-tolling

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/24/mona-foma-festival-2018-a-tale-of-two-cities-told-in-parties-and-protest

Every festival has its own personality and vibe. If the Mona’s big summer festival Mona Foma (Mofo) was a person it would be a rich, eccentric uncle who leaves his house open for a big party and wanders around the grounds looking amused while guests try to dance with peacocks. So it will be sad to see Mona’s very own rich uncle, the Museum of Old and New Art’s owner, David Walsh, retire this particular party, which has been going in Hobart since 2009. The festival is relocating to Launceston for the next four years so Walsh can build a hotel on the museum site and the north of the state can reap some of its economic benefits. At Mona Foma’s final Hobart festival the lineup was eclectic, and the loose theme this year was protest music. So-called “world music” featured strongly – as did heavier, darker stuff including Saturday night’s headliner, Mayhem – Scandinavia’s masked black metal band. But first, to the 11-day festival’s final gig – the Violent Femmes with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. The TSO has been in talks with Mona Foma’s curator, Brian Ritchie – also the Violent Femmes’ bass player and a Tasmania resident – for some years about a potential collaboration. It would be the Milwaukee acoustic-punk trio’s first with an orchestra. They agreed, and the orchestra’s tuba player Tim Jones committed a year to arranging the Femmes’ music. Over two nights the band and the TSO played Hobart’s Federation Concert Hall, much to the delight of locals who, on the night I went, gave the performance a long, rapturous standing ovation. They jumped straight into it at the start with a fast and furious Add it Up, probably the weakest song of the set – with sound jarring. Would the orchestra’s sound be too big for the songs and wash them out? Thankfully, on other numbers the band and orchestra complemented rather than competed with one another. The concert included some of the Femmes’ best-known pop-punk songs including Blister in the Sun, American Music, Please Do Not Go and Gone Daddy gone. The final song – Good Feeling – may as well have been written for the TSO’s string section. It was slowed right down, full of yearning. It was the arrangement with the lightest touch – and the most affecting. Some of the Femmes’ lyrics – reminiscent of teenage parties and wild crushes – sound slightly weird coming from middle-aged mouths and accompanied by a full orchestra (“I need a date to the prom, would you like to come along? But nobody would go to the prom with me, baby”), but you could sing Good Feeling when you’re 90 and it would still sound so right. The Femmes themselves look as if they could keep going into their 90s. At the start of the night, Ritchie led the band into the concert hall like a piped piper, playing a bamboo flute. He carved up the bass acoustic guitar and then, with Confessions, started blowing on an instrument like looked like a shell. Could it be a conch?! And Gordon Gano’s voice hasn’t aged – in fact it sounds richer than it did on the band’s 1983 debut album. John Sparrow on drums kept an infectious rhythm that had many in the concert hall wriggle-dancing in their seats. In addition to the two shows with the TSO, the Violent Femmes played a free concert during Mona Foma’s first weekend in Launceston at a free community block party. The three-day event in Tasmania’s second city kicked off on 11 January and featured performances by Gotye and the Canadian contemporary dance troupe Monumental. Ritchie, wearing his Mona Foma curator hat, says the festival was a great success. As well as 6,000 people attending the block party, “our farewell to Hobart saw our usual 3,000 per day onsite at Mona over three days, plus two sold-out performances of Violent Femmes with the TSO”. He said more than 5,000 people had partied over three nights at the festival’s afterparty, Faux Mo, “with plenty more enjoying free events across the city”. Highlights were many. Brian Jackson and the local Southern Gospel Choir delivered a powerful set, with Mona’s operations manager, Maria Lurighi, also on vocals. Jackson – who has collaborated with Nina Simone and Gil Scott-Heron – delivered The Revolution Will Not Be Televised less as a song and more as a wake-up call. Over on the Turrell stage the eclectic Breadwoman drew a curious crowd. The performance artist Lilian Steiner played with a loaf of bread on her face and wielded a breadstick as if it was a lightsaber. It was music without borders, with some of the best sets of the weekend coming from far away, including the Iraqi oud player Rahim AlHaj and cellist Karim Wasfi, the Tunisian singer Emel Mathlouthi, the Argentinian folk hip-hop trio Femina and the Indonesian/Catalan combo Filastine & Nova. Godspeed You! Black Emperor finished off the first night of the festival with a set that lacked energy at the start but built to a beautiful crescendo. The backdrop to the concert – looming, brutalist tower blocks on a large screen – added to the end-of-days vibe. The Faux Mo parties – held after the festival each night in a large warehouse on the pier – were lots of fun, although older hands were nostalgic for parties of yore, which were held in abandoned office towers or at the old Odeon. The festival organisation was, again, very smooth. There were plenty of buses and ferries to get people to and from the festival site and – with Mona sharing its site with a winery – there was loads of high-quality booze and food for sale (although some of the food I had at the weekend was not well-cooked). You could also suck on a sauvignon blanc icy pole in the shape of Donald Trump’s head. Seeing a Trump head melt in the sun is quite captivating. It was almost too good to lick.

culture/2018/jan/24/mona-foma-festival-2018-a-tale-of-two-cities-told-in-parties-and-protest

pillar/arts

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culture

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2018-01-24T02:29:56Z

Mona Foma festival 2018: a tale of two cities told in parties and protest

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/24/mona-foma-festival-2018-a-tale-of-two-cities-told-in-parties-and-protest

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'festival', 'night', 'large', 'warehouse', 'pier', 'lots', 'fun', 'although', 'older', 'hands', 'nostalgic', 'parties', 'yore', 'held', 'abandoned', 'office', 'towers', 'old', 'odeon', 'festival', 'organisation', 'smooth', 'plenty', 'buses', 'ferries', 'get', 'people', 'festival', 'site', 'mona', 'sharing', 'site', 'winery', 'loads', 'high-quality', 'booze', 'food', 'sale', 'although', 'food', 'weekend', 'well-cooked', 'could', 'also', 'suck', 'sauvignon', 'blanc', 'icy', 'pole', 'shape', 'donald', 'trump', 'head', 'seeing', 'trump', 'head', 'melt', 'sun', 'quite', 'captivating', 'almost', 'good', 'lick']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/23/late-night-hosts-on-shutdown-america-gets-caught-in-the-stairwell-by-the-landlord

Late-night hosts on Monday night discussed the end of the three-day government shutdown after Democrats and Republicans agreed to fund the government for three weeks. Stephen Colbert “As of this taping, America has a government,” began Colbert. “Here’s what happened: this afternoon, after intense closed-door negotiations, Republicans and Democrats reached a deal to reopen the government. “We don’t have to think about that again until February 8th,” the host said, noting the date until which the continuing resolution will last. “Today, in exchange for voting for the short-term funding, Democrats got six years of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which everybody, including the Republicans wanted, and they got an agreement by Mitch McConnell to hold a vote on Daca by February 8th.” “Senate minority leader and man-whose-cheeks-are-farsighted Chuck Schumer is very confident that’s going to happen,” Colbert explained, showing footage of Schumer saying he expected the majority leader to fulfill his commitment to the Senate. “Why would you expect that? Mitch McConnell’s proved he will lie to anyone about anything,” Colbert replied, noting unfulfilled promises McConnell made to senators Susan Collins and Jeff Flake in exchange for their vote on the tax bill. “The leverage that Schumer thinks he got? Schumer thinks that voters will all remember Mitch McConnell maed this promise 17 days from now,” Colbert said. “Can you remember what happened 17 days ago? I can’t. I’m guessing in two days we’re all going to forget the name Stormy Daniels. That was the hurricane that spanked the Gulf coast?” Trevor Noah Noah also addressed the shutdown, which forced Trump to cancel his planned trip to Mar-a-Lago. Noah explained that Democrats wanted a continuing resolution that included a provision to protect Dreamers, while Republicans wanted enhanced border security measures. “After a night of failed negotiations, lawmakers left the Capitol unsatisfied like it was a salad night at Paula Deen’s house,” the host joked, before noting that Trump was unable to attend a party at his Palm Beach gold club celebrating the first anniversary of his inauguration. “Donald Trump wasn’t the only one that the shutdown affected. There were real Americans faced with real consequences,” Noah added, poking fun at lawmakers who reportedly complained that the congressional gym was short on towels. “You laugh, but it’s not funny to people in Congress. Without towels, everyone at the gym has to see Bernie Sanders naked,” Noah said. “So whether it’s because of Bernie’s naked ass or the threats of voter backlash, Democrats and Republicans reached a deal this afternoon to end the shutdown. The deal was: Republicans would promise to hold a vote on immigration, and in exchange, Democrats would agree to keep the government open for three more weeks.” Showing self-congratulatory speeches given after the vote by senators Susan Collins and Jim Clyburn, Noah concluded: “American lawmakers are priceless. They want credit for fixing the thing that they broke. And not like, really fixing it. Like, barely fixing it. Because the government is only going to be funded for three weeks. America gets caught in the stairway by the landlord, like, ‘Oh hey, I’m going to get you man. Don’t cash that till Friday.’” Jimmy Kimmel Kimmel talked about this past weekend’s women’s marches. “It was not a good weekend for Donald Trump,” he said. “Millions of protesters, mostly women, marched in cities all across the country on the one-year anniversary of his presidency. There were more than 200,000 protesters in New York, more than 300,000 in Chicago, and 600,000 here in LA.” “Donald Trump got more women to exercise than Michelle Obama ever did,” Kimmel joked. “And with all these protesters marching in all these cities, the president delivered, during the marches, perhaps his most breathtaking tweet of all time.” Kimmel then read the tweet aloud, which said: “Beautiful weather all over our great country, a perfect day for all Women to March. Get out there now to celebrate the historic milestones and unprecedented economic success and wealth creation that has taken place over the last 12 months. Lowest female unemployment in 18 years!” “He’s really bad at reading women,” the host quipped. “Only Donald Trump can find a way to make a protest that’s about him even more about him.”

culture/2018/jan/23/late-night-hosts-on-shutdown-america-gets-caught-in-the-stairwell-by-the-landlord

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culture

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2018-01-23T16:11:50Z

Late-night hosts on shutdown: 'America gets caught in the stairwell by the landlord'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/23/late-night-hosts-on-shutdown-america-gets-caught-in-the-stairwell-by-the-landlord

['late-night', 'hosts', 'monday', 'night', 'discussed', 'end', 'three-day', 'government', 'shutdown', 'democrats', 'republicans', 'agreed', 'fund', 'government', 'three', 'weeks', 'stephen', 'colbert', 'taping', 'america', 'government', 'began', 'colbert', 'happened', 'afternoon', 'intense', 'closed-door', 'negotiations', 'republicans', 'democrats', 'reached', 'deal', 'reopen', 'government', 'think', 'february', '8th', 'host', 'said', 'noting', 'date', 'continuing', 'resolution', 'last', 'today', 'exchange', 'voting', 'short-term', 'funding', 'democrats', 'got', 'six', 'years', 'children', 'health', 'insurance', 'program', 'everybody', 'including', 'republicans', 'wanted', 'got', 'agreement', 'mitch', 'mcconnell', 'hold', 'vote', 'daca', 'february', '8th', 'senate', 'minority', 'leader', 'man-whose-cheeks-are-farsighted', 'chuck', 'schumer', 'confident', 'going', 'happen', 'colbert', 'explained', 'showing', 'footage', 'schumer', 'saying', 'expected', 'majority', 'leader', 'fulfill', 'commitment', 'senate', 'would', 'expect', 'mitch', 'mcconnell', 'proved', 'lie', 'anyone', 'anything', 'colbert', 'replied', 'noting', 'unfulfilled', 'promises', 'mcconnell', 'made', 'senators', 'susan', 'collins', 'jeff', 'flake', 'exchange', 'vote', 'tax', 'bill', 'leverage', 'schumer', 'thinks', 'got', 'schumer', 'thinks', 'voters', 'remember', 'mitch', 'mcconnell', 'maed', 'promise', 'days', 'colbert', 'said', 'remember', 'happened', 'days', 'ago', 'guessing', 'two', 'days', 'going', 'forget', 'name', 'stormy', 'daniels', 'hurricane', 'spanked', 'gulf', 'coast', 'trevor', 'noah', 'noah', 'also', 'addressed', 'shutdown', 'forced', 'trump', 'cancel', 'planned', 'trip', 'mar-a-lago', 'noah', 'explained', 'democrats', 'wanted', 'continuing', 'resolution', 'included', 'provision', 'protect', 'dreamers', 'republicans', 'wanted', 'enhanced', 'border', 'security', 'measures', 'night', 'failed', 'negotiations', 'lawmakers', 'left', 'capitol', 'unsatisfied', 'like', 'salad', 'night', 'paula', 'deen', 'house', 'host', 'joked', 'noting', 'trump', 'unable', 'attend', 'party', 'palm', 'beach', 'gold', 'club', 'celebrating', 'first', 'anniversary', 'inauguration', 'donald', 'trump', 'one', 'shutdown', 'affected', 'real', 'americans', 'faced', 'real', 'consequences', 'noah', 'added', 'poking', 'fun', 'lawmakers', 'reportedly', 'complained', 'congressional', 'gym', 'short', 'towels', 'laugh', 'funny', 'people', 'congress', 'without', 'towels', 'everyone', 'gym', 'see', 'bernie', 'sanders', 'naked', 'noah', 'said', 'whether', 'bernie', 'naked', 'ass', 'threats', 'voter', 'backlash', 'democrats', 'republicans', 'reached', 'deal', 'afternoon', 'end', 'shutdown', 'deal', 'republicans', 'would', 'promise', 'hold', 'vote', 'immigration', 'exchange', 'democrats', 'would', 'agree', 'keep', 'government', 'open', 'three', 'weeks', 'showing', 'self-congratulatory', 'speeches', 'given', 'vote', 'senators', 'susan', 'collins', 'jim', 'clyburn', 'noah', 'concluded', 'american', 'lawmakers', 'priceless', 'want', 'credit', 'fixing', 'thing', 'broke', 'like', 'really', 'fixing', 'like', 'barely', 'fixing', 'government', 'going', 'funded', 'three', 'weeks', 'america', 'gets', 'caught', 'stairway', 'landlord', 'like', 'oh', 'hey', 'going', 'get', 'man', 'cash', 'till', 'friday', 'jimmy', 'kimmel', 'kimmel', 'talked', 'past', 'weekend', 'women', 'marches', 'good', 'weekend', 'donald', 'trump', 'said', 'millions', 'protesters', 'mostly', 'women', 'marched', 'cities', 'across', 'country', 'one-year', 'anniversary', 'presidency', 'protesters', 'new', 'york', 'chicago', 'la', 'donald', 'trump', 'got', 'women', 'exercise', 'michelle', 'obama', 'ever', 'kimmel', 'joked', 'protesters', 'marching', 'cities', 'president', 'delivered', 'marches', 'perhaps', 'breathtaking', 'tweet', 'time', 'kimmel', 'read', 'tweet', 'aloud', 'said', 'beautiful', 'weather', 'great', 'country', 'perfect', 'day', 'women', 'march', 'get', 'celebrate', 'historic', 'milestones', 'unprecedented', 'economic', 'success', 'wealth', 'creation', 'taken', 'place', 'last', 'months', 'lowest', 'female', 'unemployment', 'years', 'really', 'bad', 'reading', 'women', 'host', 'quipped', 'donald', 'trump', 'find', 'way', 'make', 'protest', 'even']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/23/zosia-timothee-how-to-say-the-names-of-hollywoods-superstars

I am very Irish, and I have an extremely Irish name,” announced Saoirse Ronan as she guest-hosted Saturday Night Live last year. “It means ‘freedom’. But I’ve got a little problem: it’s spelled wrong. It’s a full typo …” Ronan then went on to sing a ditty about how her name should be pronounced. Not Circei, not Sushi, but SIR-Sha. Since her charming turn as the lead in Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s latest indie wisecrack-marathon (coming to the UK on 16 February), Saoirse has been the inconvenient name on many lips. But it certainly isn’t the first to flub underprepared interviewers. Even fellow actors can struggle when it comes to pronouncing the names of their peers. In 2014, Hollywood’s Scientology overlord and occasional actor John Travolta awkwardly introduced Let It Go hitmaker Idina Menzel to the Oscars stage via a mumbled “Adele Dazeem”. To save your blushes, we’ve compiled a rundown of the tricksiest names in Tinseltown. Timothée Chalamet Almost deliberately deceptive, with a first name that makes it look as if he’s trying to create purely phonetic versions of English names. The fleck above the first “E” is a clue, though; his last name follows the French, as per his father’s heritage: Tim-o-thee Shall-uh-may. Charlize Theron The Afrikaans pronunciation is actually “Tron”, as in “big 80s laser-bike films”, with a nice hard trill on the “R”. Yet for the sake of an easy life, South African Charlize seems to have simply gone along with the American take on her last name. Joe Manganiello The Magic Mike XXL actor has one of those names so long that the eyes go squiffy midway through reading it. He reports that Js routinely turn up in obscure places. Manja-nello? Manjan-Jello? The solution, though, is a simple “I” removal: Manga-nello. Téa Leoni A name best pronounced on the way back from the dentist – the vowels are mainly wide “E” sounds. TAY-ah LAY-oh-ni. Zosia Mamet The Girls actor and daughter of playwright David Mamet pronounces her first name “Zah-shah”. Just think of Zsa-Zsa Gabor naming the Persian king, and you’ve got it. Matt Czuchry It’s pronounced “Matt”, like the carpet. Ralph Fiennes Not content with confusing us by having a cousin whose name is a longer version of his own, Ralph-not-Ranulph Fiennes also has a first name that is a shibboleth of his aristocratic background. It’s pronounced “Rayf”, exhibiting the upper-class’s habitual boredom with the middle of words. Gal Gadot Wonder Woman is just an ordinary “Gal”, but instead of rhyming with Bardot, her Israeli surname is actually pronounced “Guh-doht”. The “T” shouldn’t be hit particularly hard, either. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau Also known as Game of Thrones’ Jaime Lannister. The secretly Danish actor’s first name ends in “lie”, not “lay”. And his last ends in “Dow” as in Jones, not “dough” as in scones. Nee-ko-LY COS-ter Wall-DOW. Milo Ventimiglia An open-and-shut “G”-removal job for the This Is Us actor. Everything else checks out phonetically: Venti-Mi-Lia. Quvenzhané Wallis The youngest ever best supporting actress Oscar nominee is a human portmanteau (“Port-Man-TOW”) – “Quven”, the first part of her name, combines the first syllables of her parents’ first names. Kuh-VEN-zhu-Nay. Think of a giant “Q” saying “no” to “revenge” in a medieval style, and bam, you’ve got it. Domhnall Gleeson By the standards of the nation that also produced Niamh (“Neev”), Aoife (“Ee-fa”) and Caoilfhionn (“?!*?@!?”), this is a doozy. It’s DOH-nall. “The ‘M’ is just there to confuse Americans,” as Doh-nall freely admits. Mia Wasikowska Vash-ee-KOV-Ska. Despite being born and raised in the Australian suburbs, the Alice in Wonderland star’s last name still follows the Polish habit of substituting”v” for “w”. Chloë Sevigny Over-Frenchifying her last name, as if ordering a bouillabaisse in the Dordogne, spelled social death for many a 90s hipster. It’s simply Seven-E.

culture/2018/jan/23/zosia-timothee-how-to-say-the-names-of-hollywoods-superstars

pillar/arts

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culture

Culture

article

2018-01-23T09:01:05Z

Zosia? Timothée? How to say the names of Hollywood’s superstars

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/23/zosia-timothee-how-to-say-the-names-of-hollywoods-superstars

['irish', 'extremely', 'irish', 'name', 'announced', 'saoirse', 'ronan', 'guest-hosted', 'saturday', 'night', 'live', 'last', 'year', 'means', 'freedom', 'got', 'little', 'problem', 'spelled', 'wrong', 'full', 'typo', 'ronan', 'went', 'sing', 'ditty', 'name', 'pronounced', 'circei', 'sushi', 'sir-sha', 'since', 'charming', 'turn', 'lead', 'lady', 'bird', 'greta', 'gerwig', 'latest', 'indie', 'wisecrack-marathon', 'coming', 'uk', 'february', 'saoirse', 'inconvenient', 'name', 'many', 'lips', 'certainly', 'first', 'flub', 'underprepared', 'interviewers', 'even', 'fellow', 'actors', 'struggle', 'comes', 'pronouncing', 'names', 'peers', 'hollywood', 'scientology', 'overlord', 'occasional', 'actor', 'john', 'travolta', 'awkwardly', 'introduced', 'let', 'go', 'hitmaker', 'idina', 'menzel', 'oscars', 'stage', 'via', 'mumbled', 'adele', 'dazeem', 'save', 'blushes', 'compiled', 'rundown', 'tricksiest', 'names', 'tinseltown', 'timothee', 'chalamet', 'almost', 'deliberately', 'deceptive', 'first', 'name', 'makes', 'look', 'trying', 'create', 'purely', 'phonetic', 'versions', 'english', 'names', 'fleck', 'first', 'e', 'clue', 'though', 'last', 'name', 'follows', 'french', 'per', 'father', 'heritage', 'tim-o-thee', 'shall-uh-may', 'charlize', 'theron', 'afrikaans', 'pronunciation', 'actually', 'tron', 'big', '80s', 'laser-bike', 'films', 'nice', 'hard', 'trill', 'r', 'yet', 'sake', 'easy', 'life', 'south', 'african', 'charlize', 'seems', 'simply', 'gone', 'along', 'american', 'take', 'last', 'name', 'joe', 'manganiello', 'magic', 'mike', 'xxl', 'actor', 'one', 'names', 'long', 'eyes', 'go', 'squiffy', 'midway', 'reading', 'reports', 'js', 'routinely', 'turn', 'obscure', 'places', 'manja-nello', 'manjan-jello', 'solution', 'though', 'simple', 'removal', 'manga-nello', 'tea', 'leoni', 'name', 'best', 'pronounced', 'way', 'back', 'dentist', 'vowels', 'mainly', 'wide', 'e', 'sounds', 'tay-ah', 'lay-oh-ni', 'zosia', 'mamet', 'girls', 'actor', 'daughter', 'playwright', 'david', 'mamet', 'pronounces', 'first', 'name', 'zah-shah', 'think', 'zsa-zsa', 'gabor', 'naming', 'persian', 'king', 'got', 'matt', 'czuchry', 'pronounced', 'matt', 'like', 'carpet', 'ralph', 'fiennes', 'content', 'confusing', 'us', 'cousin', 'whose', 'name', 'longer', 'version', 'ralph-not-ranulph', 'fiennes', 'also', 'first', 'name', 'shibboleth', 'aristocratic', 'background', 'pronounced', 'rayf', 'exhibiting', 'upper-class', 'habitual', 'boredom', 'middle', 'words', 'gal', 'gadot', 'wonder', 'woman', 'ordinary', 'gal', 'instead', 'rhyming', 'bardot', 'israeli', 'surname', 'actually', 'pronounced', 'guh-doht', 'hit', 'particularly', 'hard', 'either', 'nikolaj', 'coster-waldau', 'also', 'known', 'game', 'thrones', 'jaime', 'lannister', 'secretly', 'danish', 'actor', 'first', 'name', 'ends', 'lie', 'lay', 'last', 'ends', 'dow', 'jones', 'dough', 'scones', 'nee-ko-ly', 'cos-ter', 'wall-dow', 'milo', 'ventimiglia', 'open-and-shut', 'g-removal', 'job', 'us', 'actor', 'everything', 'else', 'checks', 'phonetically', 'venti-mi-lia', 'quvenzhane', 'wallis', 'youngest', 'ever', 'best', 'supporting', 'actress', 'oscar', 'nominee', 'human', 'portmanteau', 'port-man-tow', 'quven', 'first', 'part', 'name', 'combines', 'first', 'syllables', 'parents', 'first', 'names', 'kuh-ven-zhu-nay', 'think', 'giant', 'q', 'saying', 'revenge', 'medieval', 'style', 'bam', 'got', 'domhnall', 'gleeson', 'standards', 'nation', 'also', 'produced', 'niamh', 'neev', 'aoife', 'ee-fa', 'caoilfhionn', 'doozy', 'doh-nall', 'confuse', 'americans', 'doh-nall', 'freely', 'admits', 'mia', 'wasikowska', 'vash-ee-kov-ska', 'despite', 'born', 'raised', 'australian', 'suburbs', 'alice', 'wonderland', 'star', 'last', 'name', 'still', 'follows', 'polish', 'habit', 'substitutingv', 'w', 'chloe', 'sevigny', 'over-frenchifying', 'last', 'name', 'ordering', 'bouillabaisse', 'dordogne', 'spelled', 'social', 'death', 'many', '90s', 'hipster', 'simply', 'seven-e']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/22/lois-sieff-obituary

Lois Sieff, who has died aged 94, was a lifelong enthusiast and supporter of the arts. She was also an irresistibly bright and warm friend. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, daughter of a second-generation Romanian-Jewish construction worker, William Ross, and a factory worker, Lydie Wagner, the descendant of immigrants from Yorkshire and Germany. Lois was brought up as a Methodist. At John Adams high school in Queens she developed a keen interest in music and dance, learning to play the piano and the French horn. She paid for dancing classes by selling eggs from her mother’s chickens. Lois went to Adelphi College on Long Island, became interested in theatre and got a scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse school (home of the Meisner acting technique). She worked in radio and became part of a group of actors, artists and musicians among whom was a British composer, Richard (“Tony”) Arnell. Their wedding, in 1947, was held in Mark Rothko’s studio. They moved to London, and had a daughter, Jennifer, but their marriage ended when Arnell left Lois in 1951. A year later, she met Teddy Sieff of the Marks and Spencer dynasty (and future chairman of the company). She converted to Judaism, married him and they had a son, Adam. Teddy’s brother-in-law, Neville Blond, was the chairman of the English Stage Company, which was started in 1956 by George Devine and Tony Richardson at the Royal Court theatre. Lois joined the board and was at the first night of their opening production, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Later, she was instrumental in turning the attic space above the theatre, then used as a restaurant, into the Theatre Upstairs. Later still, she ran the English Stage Society, a fundraising and supporters’ group. In 1973 Teddy was shot in the face by the terrorist Carlos the Jackal in their house in St John’s Wood, north-west London. Though understandably unnerved, she characteristically had the presence of mind to lock herself in the bedroom and call the police. Her husband survived the attack, saved, he said, by his “Milk Marketing Board teeth”. Lois was on numerous boards and committees: the National Theatre, the South Bank Foundation, the Royal Opera House, the London Sinfonietta, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the Stephen Spender Trust. She chaired the Fulbright Arts Fellowship, the Anna Freud Centre and the Jerusalem Foundation UK. She was so much more than a good committee woman: at the NT she argued, successfully, that every staff member should be part of a pension scheme and she virtually invented the euphemism “development” for persuading individuals and companies to part with their cash. She had a strong belief in access through education and in touring nationally and internationally. She was full of fun and full of gossip, and knew where all the bodies were buried. She became a close friend of Mary Soames when Mary became chair of the National Theatre. “She’s a game gal,” said Lois. It took one to know one. Teddy died in 1982. Lois is survived by Jennifer and Adam.

culture/2018/jan/22/lois-sieff-obituary

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-01-22T16:34:48Z

Lois Sieff obituary

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/lois-sieff-obituary

['lois', 'sieff', 'died', 'aged', 'lifelong', 'enthusiast', 'supporter', 'arts', 'also', 'irresistibly', 'bright', 'warm', 'friend', 'born', 'brooklyn', 'new', 'york', 'daughter', 'second-generation', 'romanian-jewish', 'construction', 'worker', 'william', 'ross', 'factory', 'worker', 'lydie', 'wagner', 'descendant', 'immigrants', 'yorkshire', 'germany', 'lois', 'brought', 'methodist', 'john', 'adams', 'high', 'school', 'queens', 'developed', 'keen', 'interest', 'music', 'dance', 'learning', 'play', 'piano', 'french', 'horn', 'paid', 'dancing', 'classes', 'selling', 'eggs', 'mother', 'chickens', 'lois', 'went', 'adelphi', 'college', 'long', 'island', 'became', 'interested', 'theatre', 'got', 'scholarship', 'neighborhood', 'playhouse', 'school', 'home', 'meisner', 'acting', 'technique', 'worked', 'radio', 'became', 'part', 'group', 'actors', 'artists', 'musicians', 'among', 'british', 'composer', 'richard', 'tony', 'arnell', 'wedding', 'held', 'mark', 'rothko', 'studio', 'moved', 'london', 'daughter', 'jennifer', 'marriage', 'ended', 'arnell', 'left', 'lois', 'year', 'later', 'met', 'teddy', 'sieff', 'marks', 'spencer', 'dynasty', 'future', 'chairman', 'company', 'converted', 'judaism', 'married', 'son', 'adam', 'teddy', 'brother-in-law', 'neville', 'blond', 'chairman', 'english', 'stage', 'company', 'started', 'george', 'devine', 'tony', 'richardson', 'royal', 'court', 'theatre', 'lois', 'joined', 'board', 'first', 'night', 'opening', 'production', 'john', 'osborne', 'look', 'back', 'anger', 'later', 'instrumental', 'turning', 'attic', 'space', 'theatre', 'used', 'restaurant', 'theatre', 'upstairs', 'later', 'still', 'ran', 'english', 'stage', 'society', 'fundraising', 'supporters', 'group', 'teddy', 'shot', 'face', 'terrorist', 'carlos', 'jackal', 'house', 'st', 'john', 'wood', 'north-west', 'london', 'though', 'understandably', 'unnerved', 'characteristically', 'presence', 'mind', 'lock', 'bedroom', 'call', 'police', 'husband', 'survived', 'attack', 'saved', 'said', 'milk', 'marketing', 'board', 'teeth', 'lois', 'numerous', 'boards', 'committees', 'national', 'theatre', 'south', 'bank', 'foundation', 'royal', 'opera', 'house', 'london', 'sinfonietta', 'academy', 'st', 'martin', 'fields', 'stephen', 'spender', 'trust', 'chaired', 'fulbright', 'arts', 'fellowship', 'anna', 'freud', 'centre', 'jerusalem', 'foundation', 'uk', 'much', 'good', 'committee', 'woman', 'nt', 'argued', 'successfully', 'every', 'staff', 'member', 'part', 'pension', 'scheme', 'virtually', 'invented', 'euphemism', 'development', 'persuading', 'individuals', 'companies', 'part', 'cash', 'strong', 'belief', 'access', 'education', 'touring', 'nationally', 'internationally', 'full', 'fun', 'full', 'gossip', 'knew', 'bodies', 'buried', 'became', 'close', 'friend', 'mary', 'soames', 'mary', 'became', 'chair', 'national', 'theatre', 'game', 'gal', 'said', 'lois', 'took', 'one', 'know', 'one', 'teddy', 'died', 'lois', 'survived', 'jennifer', 'adam']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/22/when-good-tv-goes-bad-the-moment-dont-tell-the-bride-got-over-its-honeymoon-phase

In the first flush of love you believe it will last for ever. It was 2007 when we first laid eyes on Don’t Tell the Bride and it felt like the real thing. The BBC Three reality show dragged a salt-of-the-earth couple out of obscurity and gave them a tidy sum to get married, on the (legally binding) understanding that the groom would organise the event in three weeks. He then scurried around, barking into his phone like some doomed Apprentice contestant while the woman contemplated the ruination of her big day. It was low-stakes, high-reward paydirt. Anyone expecting the brawling, dress tearing and cake smashing of Bridezillas was to be disappointed. There were no slanging matches descending into wild west free-for-alls. This was definitively British drama where the angst came from the invitations being insufficiently rococo or the dresses making the bridesmaids look like bananas. Its analogue was the gentle comedy of Butterflies or Ever Decreasing Circles, the pathos found in disappointment. There was joy, too. As a rule, among all the things he’d ballsed up, the groom would get at least one thing bang-on. That mixed bag in the win/loss columns reflected the messiness of real-life relationships. So, even as he tried to pass muster in his Primark cummerbund, he’d generally stumble into the good-enough zone. The audience was smitten and it became one of the flagship shows of the then-ailing channel. It was when the show was forced to leave BBC Three that trouble began. A disappointing outing on BBC One performed well below the average for its time slot. A Guns N’ Roses-themed wedding complete with a tribute band and appalled bride didn’t help. Welcome to the bungle. Sensing discord, Sky1 swooped and decided to push the envelope further. It was as if producers were nudging the grooms into increasingly daft decisions. They debuted in 2016 with Adam marrying his pregnant fiancee Bianca alongside neon bridesmaids, 17,000ft in the air in an aeroplane circling Bristol. It was a play for the title “worst wedding evah!” and few disagreed with Bianca’s assessment that it was “proper shit”. The show bounced to E4 in 2017 for more of the same. A groom alleged the producers rejected his first 10 ideas before finally accepting his cornball Kylie and Jason wedding theme. Above all else, reality TV fears a desensitised public and diminishing returns; the mountain of half-chewed kangaroo dongs decaying in the Australian jungle bears mute witness to that. So mild exasperation at the best man turning up in loafers is now scorned. Now it’s a smash cut to a horrified bride as she is wed by Axl Rose as Izzy and Duff try their luck with the bridesmaids. It’s gone from enjoyably uncomfortable to predicament bondage. It’s hard to admit you’re in a dysfunctional relationship with a TV show. Familiarity may have blinded you to its faults but the reckoning is inevitable. For Don’t Tell the Bride viewers, it’s time for that awkward conversation about seeing other people.

culture/2018/jan/22/when-good-tv-goes-bad-the-moment-dont-tell-the-bride-got-over-its-honeymoon-phase

pillar/arts

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culture

Culture

article

2018-01-22T13:00:24Z

When good TV goes bad: the moment Don’t Tell The Bride got over its Honeymoon phase

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/when-good-tv-goes-bad-the-moment-dont-tell-the-bride-got-over-its-honeymoon-phase

['first', 'flush', 'love', 'believe', 'last', 'ever', 'first', 'laid', 'eyes', 'tell', 'bride', 'felt', 'like', 'real', 'thing', 'bbc', 'three', 'reality', 'show', 'dragged', 'salt-of-the-earth', 'couple', 'obscurity', 'gave', 'tidy', 'sum', 'get', 'married', 'legally', 'binding', 'understanding', 'groom', 'would', 'organise', 'event', 'three', 'weeks', 'scurried', 'around', 'barking', 'phone', 'like', 'doomed', 'apprentice', 'contestant', 'woman', 'contemplated', 'ruination', 'big', 'day', 'low-stakes', 'high-reward', 'paydirt', 'anyone', 'expecting', 'brawling', 'dress', 'tearing', 'cake', 'smashing', 'bridezillas', 'disappointed', 'slanging', 'matches', 'descending', 'wild', 'west', 'free-for-alls', 'definitively', 'british', 'drama', 'angst', 'came', 'invitations', 'insufficiently', 'rococo', 'dresses', 'making', 'bridesmaids', 'look', 'like', 'bananas', 'analogue', 'gentle', 'comedy', 'butterflies', 'ever', 'decreasing', 'circles', 'pathos', 'found', 'disappointment', 'joy', 'rule', 'among', 'things', 'would', 'ballsed', 'groom', 'would', 'get', 'least', 'one', 'thing', 'bang-on', 'mixed', 'bag', 'winloss', 'columns', 'reflected', 'messiness', 'real-life', 'relationships', 'even', 'tried', 'pass', 'muster', 'primark', 'cummerbund', 'would', 'generally', 'stumble', 'good-enough', 'zone', 'audience', 'smitten', 'became', 'one', 'flagship', 'shows', 'then-ailing', 'channel', 'show', 'forced', 'leave', 'bbc', 'three', 'trouble', 'began', 'disappointing', 'outing', 'bbc', 'one', 'performed', 'well', 'average', 'time', 'slot', 'guns', 'n', 'roses-themed', 'wedding', 'complete', 'tribute', 'band', 'appalled', 'bride', 'help', 'welcome', 'bungle', 'sensing', 'discord', 'sky1', 'swooped', 'decided', 'push', 'envelope', 'producers', 'nudging', 'grooms', 'increasingly', 'daft', 'decisions', 'debuted', 'adam', 'marrying', 'pregnant', 'fiancee', 'bianca', 'alongside', 'neon', 'bridesmaids', '17000ft', 'air', 'aeroplane', 'circling', 'bristol', 'play', 'title', 'worst', 'wedding', 'evah', 'disagreed', 'bianca', 'assessment', 'proper', 'shit', 'show', 'bounced', 'e4', 'groom', 'alleged', 'producers', 'rejected', 'first', 'ideas', 'finally', 'accepting', 'cornball', 'kylie', 'jason', 'wedding', 'theme', 'else', 'reality', 'tv', 'fears', 'desensitised', 'public', 'diminishing', 'returns', 'mountain', 'half-chewed', 'kangaroo', 'dongs', 'decaying', 'australian', 'jungle', 'bears', 'mute', 'witness', 'mild', 'exasperation', 'best', 'man', 'turning', 'loafers', 'scorned', 'smash', 'cut', 'horrified', 'bride', 'wed', 'axl', 'rose', 'izzy', 'duff', 'try', 'luck', 'bridesmaids', 'gone', 'enjoyably', 'uncomfortable', 'predicament', 'bondage', 'hard', 'admit', 'dysfunctional', 'relationship', 'tv', 'show', 'familiarity', 'may', 'blinded', 'faults', 'reckoning', 'inevitable', 'tell', 'bride', 'viewers', 'time', 'awkward', 'conversation', 'seeing', 'people']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/22/move-over-meryl-is-it-final-curtains-for-hollywood-award-heavyweights

We all got Seth Meyers’s joke about The Post on Golden Globes night. The moment he said: “Directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks”, an assistant strode on stage, her arms laden with awards. “No, not yet, we have to wait,” Meyers told her, and she shuffled back off. Streep has nine Globes and three Oscars; Hanks four Globes and two Oscars. Other acting nominees that night included Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench and Helen Mirren. They’re the usual suspects, each already multiple award-winners and default frontrunners every season. But here’s the thing: none of them won! The heavyweights all left the ceremony empty-handed that night. The armful of awards instead went to the likes of Saoirse Ronan, Gary Oldman, Frances McDormand and James Franco. The Post received no Bafta nominations, either. Let’s see what happens when the Oscar nominations are announced on Tuesday but if Streep and Hanks aren’t there, you’ll know things have really changed. As we all know, Hollywood has been repeatedly, earnestly shaking itself up over the past few years, from #OscarSoWhite to #MeToo, and the ejection of a generation of sexually predatory sleazeballs. Could this momentous changing of the guard affect the acting order, too? As a consequence of the #OscarSoWhite debacle, Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs pledged to increase diversity in an institution whose members in 2016 were 91% white and 76% male. Last year, she brought in 683 new members, 46% female, 41% non-white. Just as it has wielded (and abused) power in other sectors of the industry, so this white, male contingent has overwhelmingly decided what constitutes good acting and who should be awarded for it (which are not necessarily the same thing). Through no fault of their own, actors such as Streep and Hanks have been the beneficiaries. Had the awards bodies been more diverse all along, the list of past winners might look a little different. Who would put money on Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump beating Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption for starters? Even Meryl Streep’s trophy room might be a little emptier. Streep’s day is not done, surely, - brace yourselves for the Mamma Mia! sequel - but it would be a cruel irony if she turned out to be the victim of a movement she helped start. Streep was one of the first to put her head above the parapet, at last year’s Golden Globes, and call out Donald Trump’s bullying. Her first movie experience included being slapped without warning by Dustin Hoffman, in Kramer Vs Kramer, which she diplomatically described as “overstepping”. Few could disagree that she’s a great actor, even if The Post is not her greatest role. She has used her position in the best possible way: to fight for others. Now she, and her feted generation, might have to make way for them.

culture/2018/jan/22/move-over-meryl-is-it-final-curtains-for-hollywood-award-heavyweights

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

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2018-01-22T10:00:14Z

Move over Meryl: is it final curtains for Hollywood award heavyweights?

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/move-over-meryl-is-it-final-curtains-for-hollywood-award-heavyweights

['got', 'seth', 'meyers', 'joke', 'post', 'golden', 'globes', 'night', 'moment', 'said', 'directed', 'steven', 'spielberg', 'starring', 'meryl', 'streep', 'tom', 'hanks', 'assistant', 'strode', 'stage', 'arms', 'laden', 'awards', 'yet', 'wait', 'meyers', 'told', 'shuffled', 'back', 'streep', 'nine', 'globes', 'three', 'oscars', 'hanks', 'four', 'globes', 'two', 'oscars', 'acting', 'nominees', 'night', 'included', 'daniel', 'day-lewis', 'judi', 'dench', 'helen', 'mirren', 'usual', 'suspects', 'already', 'multiple', 'award-winners', 'default', 'frontrunners', 'every', 'season', 'thing', 'none', 'heavyweights', 'left', 'ceremony', 'empty-handed', 'night', 'armful', 'awards', 'instead', 'went', 'likes', 'saoirse', 'ronan', 'gary', 'oldman', 'frances', 'mcdormand', 'james', 'franco', 'post', 'received', 'bafta', 'nominations', 'either', 'let', 'see', 'happens', 'oscar', 'nominations', 'announced', 'tuesday', 'streep', 'hanks', 'know', 'things', 'really', 'changed', 'know', 'hollywood', 'repeatedly', 'earnestly', 'shaking', 'past', 'years', 'oscarsowhite', 'metoo', 'ejection', 'generation', 'sexually', 'predatory', 'sleazeballs', 'could', 'momentous', 'changing', 'guard', 'affect', 'acting', 'order', 'consequence', 'oscarsowhite', 'debacle', 'academy', 'president', 'cheryl', 'boone', 'isaacs', 'pledged', 'increase', 'diversity', 'institution', 'whose', 'members', 'white', 'male', 'last', 'year', 'brought', 'new', 'members', 'female', 'non-white', 'wielded', 'abused', 'power', 'sectors', 'industry', 'white', 'male', 'contingent', 'overwhelmingly', 'decided', 'constitutes', 'good', 'acting', 'awarded', 'necessarily', 'thing', 'fault', 'actors', 'streep', 'hanks', 'beneficiaries', 'awards', 'bodies', 'diverse', 'along', 'list', 'past', 'winners', 'might', 'look', 'little', 'different', 'would', 'put', 'money', 'tom', 'hanks', 'forrest', 'gump', 'beating', 'morgan', 'freeman', 'shawshank', 'redemption', 'starters', 'even', 'meryl', 'streep', 'trophy', 'room', 'might', 'little', 'emptier', 'streep', 'day', 'done', 'surely', '-', 'brace', 'mamma', 'mia', 'sequel', '-', 'would', 'cruel', 'irony', 'turned', 'victim', 'movement', 'helped', 'start', 'streep', 'one', 'first', 'put', 'head', 'parapet', 'last', 'year', 'golden', 'globes', 'call', 'donald', 'trump', 'bullying', 'first', 'movie', 'experience', 'included', 'slapped', 'without', 'warning', 'dustin', 'hoffman', 'kramer', 'vs', 'kramer', 'diplomatically', 'described', 'overstepping', 'could', 'disagree', 'great', 'actor', 'even', 'post', 'greatest', 'role', 'used', 'position', 'best', 'possible', 'way', 'fight', 'others', 'feted', 'generation', 'might', 'make', 'way']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/21/john-robins-interview-darkness-of-edinburgh

Bristol comedian and Radio X DJ John Robins, 35, won the 2017 Edinburgh comedy award for his standup show, The Darkness of Robins, about the breakup of his four-year relationship with fellow comic Sara Pascoe. He takes it out on the road this week. You’re about to embark on your biggest tour yet. How are you feeling? A mix of dread and excitement. There’s been a five-month gap since I did the show in Edinburgh, so there’s mild anxiety. I’m worried people will stare at me, going: “Why is this guy just talking about himself?” But as soon as I’m on stage and they start laughing, all that stops instantly. And then it begins again when I walk off stage. It’s a real confidence rollercoaster. What kind of tourer are you? A thrifty tourer. I spend as little time as possible in hotels, although I often berate myself for that at 3am on a motorway, thinking “Why didn’t you just stay over?” But I don’t mind long drives and I embrace that Alan Partridge attitude towards service stations, taking pleasure in small things. You’ve described this show as: “My life fell apart and I won an award for talking about it”… Did I? That’s a decent way of putting it. Well done me. My shows have always been about what I’ve been doing the preceding year. This one’s just more honest. And with that honesty comes an ability to talk about men’s mental health issues – not by giving a lecture but by displaying them. The best way to deal with slightly taboo topics is to give very subjective examples. If you stand on stage and say, “Hey everyone, this is a show about mental health”, everyone tenses up. If you just tell a story about having a panic attack in Ikea, the audience can go: “Yeah, I had that once. I shouted at myself in a traffic jam too. I heard a certain song and was suddenly in bits.” By being more personal, you can connect more. Are you comfortable with how intimate it is? I’ve been telling embarrassing stories about my own failings for 12 years now, so I don’t feel as exposed. Although when you rehearse it aloud in your living room to no one and there’s no laughs for an hour, it does seem pretty heavy. Sara Pascoe’s Edinburgh show, LadsLadsLads, was also about the breakup too. Have you seen each other’s shows? We haven’t had a chance. But our shows weren’t about each other, they were about ourselves. Mine is less about our breakup, more about me going nuts afterwards. Hers is the same and I’m sure it’s excellent. What’s your reaction to the Louis CK and Aziz Ansari scandals? The early stages of all sexual relationships are a series of signals. Men need to reassess how they read those signals and act on them. After justice for people who have suffered abuse, the most important thing to come out of #MeToo is for men to examine their own history and be honest with themselves about times when their actions were unacceptable. Sara said something to me which is so true: “These people are you and your mates once.” Every man, somewhere in their back catalogue of drunken nights, flirtations and exploits, has a memory where they go: “Do you know what? That wasn’t cool.” If you dismiss men who have been accused as monsters, it stops you checking your own behaviour. You don’t really do topical material. How come? I guess my stuff is topical but about me. It’s not about what’s in the newspapers, unless you’re reading the John News, which has just gone tabloid and is quite leftwing. But I will never, ever tell a Donald Trump joke. It’s just not my world. There are people who do those far better than I can. You’re a big snooker fan. Who’s your favourite player? I’m dangerously obsessed with Ronnie O’Sullivan. My tour starts a few days after the Masters final and finishes just before the World Championship final. That’s no accident. You used to be pescetarian but lapsed. Where are you at now, diet-wise? I am – I’m careful on the wording of this – broadly vegan. Broadly in capital letters. There’s no area more contentious than ethical diets, so I don’t nail my flag to any mast too firmly. Because the next thing you know, there’s a photo of you eating a prawn. What else is in the pipeline? I’ve written a draft sitcom script with Elis [James, his Radio X co-host]. Just a speculative thing but we’re very pleased with it. What’s remarkable in our industry is that I can write something in two days which then takes a year to be read. It’s a long and winding road. The Darkness of Robins tour runs from 25 January to 4 May

culture/2018/jan/21/john-robins-interview-darkness-of-edinburgh

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

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2018-01-21T11:00:19Z

John Robins: ‘Men need to be honest with themselves’

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/21/john-robins-interview-darkness-of-edinburgh

['bristol', 'comedian', 'radio', 'x', 'dj', 'john', 'robins', 'edinburgh', 'comedy', 'award', 'standup', 'show', 'darkness', 'robins', 'breakup', 'four-year', 'relationship', 'fellow', 'comic', 'sara', 'pascoe', 'takes', 'road', 'week', 'embark', 'biggest', 'tour', 'yet', 'feeling', 'mix', 'dread', 'excitement', 'five-month', 'gap', 'since', 'show', 'edinburgh', 'mild', 'anxiety', 'worried', 'people', 'stare', 'going', 'guy', 'talking', 'soon', 'stage', 'start', 'laughing', 'stops', 'instantly', 'begins', 'walk', 'stage', 'real', 'confidence', 'rollercoaster', 'kind', 'tourer', 'thrifty', 'tourer', 'spend', 'little', 'time', 'possible', 'hotels', 'although', 'often', 'berate', '3am', 'motorway', 'thinking', 'stay', 'mind', 'long', 'drives', 'embrace', 'alan', 'partridge', 'attitude', 'towards', 'service', 'stations', 'taking', 'pleasure', 'small', 'things', 'described', 'show', 'life', 'fell', 'apart', 'award', 'talking', 'decent', 'way', 'putting', 'well', 'done', 'shows', 'always', 'preceding', 'year', 'one', 'honest', 'honesty', 'comes', 'ability', 'talk', 'men', 'mental', 'health', 'issues', 'giving', 'lecture', 'displaying', 'best', 'way', 'deal', 'slightly', 'taboo', 'topics', 'give', 'subjective', 'examples', 'stand', 'stage', 'say', 'hey', 'everyone', 'show', 'mental', 'health', 'everyone', 'tenses', 'tell', 'story', 'panic', 'attack', 'ikea', 'audience', 'go', 'yeah', 'shouted', 'traffic', 'jam', 'heard', 'certain', 'song', 'suddenly', 'bits', 'personal', 'connect', 'comfortable', 'intimate', 'telling', 'embarrassing', 'stories', 'failings', 'years', 'feel', 'exposed', 'although', 'rehearse', 'aloud', 'living', 'room', 'one', 'laughs', 'hour', 'seem', 'pretty', 'heavy', 'sara', 'pascoe', 'edinburgh', 'show', 'ladsladslads', 'also', 'breakup', 'seen', 'shows', 'chance', 'shows', 'mine', 'less', 'breakup', 'going', 'nuts', 'afterwards', 'sure', 'excellent', 'reaction', 'louis', 'ck', 'aziz', 'ansari', 'scandals', 'early', 'stages', 'sexual', 'relationships', 'series', 'signals', 'men', 'need', 'reassess', 'read', 'signals', 'act', 'justice', 'people', 'suffered', 'abuse', 'important', 'thing', 'come', 'metoo', 'men', 'examine', 'history', 'honest', 'times', 'actions', 'unacceptable', 'sara', 'said', 'something', 'true', 'people', 'mates', 'every', 'man', 'somewhere', 'back', 'catalogue', 'drunken', 'nights', 'flirtations', 'exploits', 'memory', 'go', 'know', 'cool', 'dismiss', 'men', 'accused', 'monsters', 'stops', 'checking', 'behaviour', 'really', 'topical', 'material', 'come', 'guess', 'stuff', 'topical', 'newspapers', 'unless', 'reading', 'john', 'news', 'gone', 'tabloid', 'quite', 'leftwing', 'never', 'ever', 'tell', 'donald', 'trump', 'joke', 'world', 'people', 'far', 'better', 'big', 'snooker', 'fan', 'favourite', 'player', 'dangerously', 'obsessed', 'ronnie', 'osullivan', 'tour', 'starts', 'days', 'masters', 'final', 'finishes', 'world', 'championship', 'final', 'accident', 'used', 'pescetarian', 'lapsed', 'diet-wise', 'careful', 'wording', 'broadly', 'vegan', 'broadly', 'capital', 'letters', 'area', 'contentious', 'ethical', 'diets', 'nail', 'flag', 'mast', 'firmly', 'next', 'thing', 'know', 'photo', 'eating', 'prawn', 'else', 'pipeline', 'written', 'draft', 'sitcom', 'script', 'elis', 'james', 'radio', 'x', 'co-host', 'speculative', 'thing', 'pleased', 'remarkable', 'industry', 'write', 'something', 'two', 'days', 'takes', 'year', 'read', 'long', 'winding', 'road', 'darkness', 'robins', 'tour', 'runs', 'january', 'may']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/21/ben-whishaw-intervew-julius-caesar-trump-brexit-paddington-bear

Ben Whishaw made headlines in 2004, when as a recent Rada graduate he was cast by director Trevor Nunn in the title role of Hamlet at the Old Vic. He has worked extensively in film, television and on stage, and since 2012 has played the part of Q in the James Bond film series. You’re about to play Brutus in a new Nicholas Hytner production of Julius Caesar – what’s your take on that role? Well, I’m finding it really difficult at the moment. Shakespeare wrote the play just before Hamlet, and it’s got a Hamlet-like quality. What I’m finding quite difficult is that Brutus can make what turns out to be a bad decision – to assassinate Julius Caesar – and yet he never entertains the idea that he could have been wrong. He has such faith and self-belief. It’s interesting, because lots of politicians behave that way. Do you ever doubt yourself as a performer at these times? Start thinking: why have they cast me? Deeply. I’m in the middle of a crisis right now. I really am. Sorry to hear that… But it is normal. You go through it every time. But you still feel wretched. Why do you think Hytner, the former director of the National Theatre, wanted Julius Caesar to be one of the first productions at his new London theatre, the Bridge? Nick is obsessed with the way it seems to be suddenly so incredibly relevant again. We talk a lot about Trump obviously, Brexit and the rise of the populist movement. And I suppose in our production, the conspirators are what we would call now the metropolitan elite. They’re the conservative people; they want things to stay as they are. It’s Julius Caesar who’s leading the Trump‑like revolution. Each night, there will be 250 “promenading” tickets. How will this affect the staging? Nick is setting the play in a very contemporary world and we’ve got a woman playing Cassius, so it should feel quite different. And members of the audience will be standing, they’ll be the mob, really. So it will be pretty interactive, but not in a scary way: no one will be singled out for audience participation, but their presence is part of the performance. You work a lot in film and TV as well as theatre. Is it very different to perform in front of a live audience? I do find theatre harder work. When you finish a film or a television series, you know it’s going to be a solid thing that you can look back at and watch. But theatre leaves nothing behind and I’ve never finished and felt: “We did that well.” You just feel a continual feeling of slightly failing. And then it’s gone and it’s like: “Did we even do anything?” In 2004, straight from drama school, you were cast as Hamlet by Trevor Nunn at the Old Vic. Do you feel like you haven’t had the struggle that a lot of actors have? Well, I do recognise that was an amazing thing to happen. And I’ve been very lucky, but I mean, I don’t know what I’m doing after this. So you never know. But if it all ended it would have been really good to have had this much of an experience and I’d do something else. When you started speaking out about being gay a couple of years ago, did it cross your mind that it might limit the roles you’d get? No, I really didn’t care about that. I just wanted to be honest. And I still don’t care. I don’t feel it’s something that defines me, it’s just a part of who I am. And the world has changed so much in the last maybe five or six years, I think it is a less homophobic world, generally speaking. Is it really only in the past handful of years that it has become more acceptable? For me, I’ve felt a big change. When I did Hamlet, when I was first in the public eye, certainly there was no one my age who was an actor and out as gay. Nobody at all. And if you mentioned it to people it was a bit like: “Maybe don’t talk about that.” Or: “I hope you’ve got a good agent.” But I also recognise it was me as well. I hadn’t dealt with it, so I can’t blame it on the world. But certainly it was compounded by the fact that it seemed like not necessarily a good idea to be honest about it at that point. As the voice of Paddington, how much do you engage with the rest of the cast? Very little. They’ve done it all, they’ve filmed everything and I just work with Paul King, the director and writer. Well, that makes it sound like it’s just me and Paul. There are 2,000 people making that bear, who are extraordinary and working so hard. But yeah it happens entirely in the post-production, and it’s not that much fun until the bear starts to appear. Are Paddington’s expressions your expressions then? It’s a mixture. They film my face and my mouth, and sometimes we do little bits of physical work to start building the animation around. But they also have mime artists and it’s really cobbled together from lots of different things. It’s quite mysterious, even to me. You’re not going to tell us anything about the next Bond film, are you? I honestly know absolutely nothing. I think I’m going to be in it, but they haven’t told me anything. I don’t even know when we’re filming, haven’t read a script, don’t know who’s directing it. That’s the honest truth. It’s a funny process; I suspect they just haven’t written it yet. Julius Caesar runs at the Bridge theatre, London SE1 until 15 April

culture/2018/jan/21/ben-whishaw-intervew-julius-caesar-trump-brexit-paddington-bear

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

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2018-01-21T09:00:16Z

Ben Whishaw: ‘Julius Caesar is leading the Trump‑like revolution’

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/21/ben-whishaw-intervew-julius-caesar-trump-brexit-paddington-bear

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/ng-interactive/2018/jan/21/simone-lia-squirrel-appreciation-day

culture/ng-interactive/2018/jan/21/simone-lia-squirrel-appreciation-day

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

interactive

2018-01-21T08:00:15Z

Simone Lia: squirrel appreciation day

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/ng-interactive/2018/jan/21/simone-lia-squirrel-appreciation-day

[]

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/20/british-top-art-galleries-investigate-sexual-misconduct

At least 10 investigations into sexual misconduct have taken place at Britain’s largest galleries and museums over the past four years. The inquiries included two at the V&A, in 2011-12 and 2015-16, which were accompanied by police investigations. They led to the dismissal of two staff members after one verdict of sexual misconduct and another of “stalking and gender violence”. The UK art world has come under the spotlight following allegations, published in the Observer last Sunday, against the powerful British dealer and philanthropist Anthony d’Offay. The gallerist, who gave a £125m art collection to the nation, denies three women’s allegations of sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour dating from 1997 to 2004. In answer to a freedom of information request, the Tate, which manages the d’Offay collection, said it had received no formal allegations of sexual harassment or other forms of sexual misconduct over the past four years. Its catering division did receive three formal complaints, one in 2015 and two in 2017, all from female workers about male colleagues. The Science Museum awarded two members of staff payments in relation to cases, while two staff left as a result of the investigations. The National Gallery has received three allegations, resulting in the departure of three of its staff. The National History Museum referred to one incident, but withheld details. Royal Museums Greenwich said it had carried out a disciplinary investigation in 2015-16, resulting in one dismissal. The British Museum, National Museums Scotland, and the Imperial War Museum said they had received no such allegations in that period. Sarah McCrory, the director of Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art and a signatory to a recent letter denouncing sexual harassment and abuses of power in the art world, said: “These are the well-funded institutions with dedicated HR departments, as opposed to the huge number of smaller organisations, commercial galleries and other art spaces that have no system to support staff if issues arise. The art world is still a difficult place to have open and frank conversations about workplace bullying, harassment, sexual misconduct and other types of inappropriate behaviour, andPeople in positions of power need to do more to support their artists and employees.”

culture/2018/jan/20/british-top-art-galleries-investigate-sexual-misconduct

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-01-20T21:03:45Z

Top British art galleries investigate sexual misconduct

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/20/british-top-art-galleries-investigate-sexual-misconduct

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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/20/stetsons-beards-and-good-honest-sweat-why-pop-stars-are-going-back-to-basics

One of the new year’s biggest surprises has been the appearance of a pensive son of the soil by the name of Justin Timberlake. In a short teaser video announcing his fifth solo album, Man of the Woods, the former ‘NSync star went a-wanderin’ through forests, fields, mountains and streams, lookin’ fer answers to this big ol’ riddle we call life. Bearded and rugged, he looked like a man who wouldn’t think twice about climbing into the body of a dead horse for warmth. This on-the-nose rebrand inspired rather more hilarity than Timberlake might have expected, resembling as it did a commercial for a cologne that smells of cattle, woodsmoke and good, honest sweat. For pop stars, the tropes of country music, and rural America in general, are alluring shorthand for maturity and sincerity. In 2016, Lady Gaga reversed out of a club-pop cul-de-sac with the relatively earthy Joanne. Last year, Miley Cyrus mothballed her twerking pants and revisited her country roots on Younger Now. Kylie is promising a new album, Golden, inspired by Dolly Parton, the hot-pink intersection of country and camp. Even Beyoncé turned to country on 2016’s Daddy Lessons, her riff on inheritance, religion and the second amendment. In various ways, pop has never been so country-curious. “I think when pop stars get rich, there is an instinctive move to buy a farm,” says Chris Willman, music critic and author of Rednecks & Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music. “And once you’re out there, you may wonder why you aren’t making records as folksy as your new off-the-grid lifestyle. I’d maybe call it ‘ranch hypnosis’. But I find it reassuring that country does still read as authenticity to some degree, long after some of us have given up on it being anything other than southern ex-urban lifestyle music.” Artists have been heading down to Tennessee to avail themselves of crack session musicians and rootsy ambience since Bob Dylan and Neil Young almost 50 years ago. Nashville is both a thriving music industry hub and an abstract ideal; a factory that turns out myths as well as hits. “When a major artist comes (or comes back to) this region, it’s not just an act,” says Ann Powers, a critic and author who lives in Nashville. “It also usually signals a genuine attempt to tap into a rich musical resource.” At this stage, the extent of Timberlake’s interest is unclear. When he solemnly claims that Man of the Woods is inspired by “where I’m from”, he isn’t whistling Dixie. He was born in Memphis and now owns a decent chunk of Leiper’s Fork, an hour outside of Nashville. But the snow-covered landscapes in the video suggest Montana, where he owns a ranch, rather than Tennessee. By eliding the deep south with the old west, he isn’t so much exploring his roots as creating a moodboard of heartland Americana. How that manifests itself in the music remains to be seen. The album promises a duet with Nashville crossover star Chris Stapleton, and the tracklisting reads like an Apprentice team’s whiteboard after a long morning brainstorming names for an air freshener: Breeze Off the Pond, Livin’ Off the Land, Flannel. But its first single, Filthy, is Timbaland-produced electro-funk with a video in which Timberlake dances with a robot. Neither he nor the robot look like they could erect a sturdy cabin afore winter comes. Lady Gaga also played it both ways on Joanne, co-writing songs with country hitmaker Hillary Lindsey but hiring Mark Ronson as producer. Pop has always been about dressing up. Stars adopt new guises to refresh the narrative for another album cycle. It gets tricky, though, when the new identity reads as a statement of authenticity. Is this incarnation the “real” one or just another costume? “Country imagery has been played for comedy so much, there’s a danger of seeming self-parodic if you put on the Stetson or go romping in the trees,” says Willman. “I don’t think Lady Gaga meant to seem campy or patronising with her Joanne look but she just did. And I think Miley desperately wanted to convey authenticity to the world, yet maybe it was that very thirst for authenticity that read as inauthentic.” As the Tennessee-born daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus and goddaughter of Dolly Parton, Cyrus has country credentials; even her eye-poppingly postmodern Bangerz tour included a throaty rendition of Jolene. But Younger Now retrospectively underscored criticisms that her interest in urban music was just a calculated phase, especially when, in a Billboard interview, she caricatured mainstream hip-hop as: “Lamborghini, got my Rolex, got a girl on my cock”. Pivoting from an urban identity to a rural one attracts an awful lot of racial baggage, especially under the current administration. Ann-Derrick Gaillot at news and comment site the Outline criticised Timberlake for “pandering to a whiter America”, while Buzzfeed’s Anne-Helen Petersen went so far as to compare the singer’s new aesthetic to Donald Trump Jr’s Park Avenue frontiersman shtick. Powers, whose new book Good Booty explores the sexual and racial politics of US popular music, points out that the history of country music is racially complex. It’s always been informed by black music – blues, rock’n’roll, soul – and now young country artists such as Sam Hunt and Maren Morris are absorbing hip-hop and R&B into their sound. “While the culture and business of country music remains overwhelmingly white and male-dominated, the sound is not so monochromatic,” says Powers. “In fact, many singers sound like they’re influenced by Justin Timberlake or Beyoncé.” But in the popular imagination, and the tourist traps of Nashville’s main drag, country codes as culturally conservative and blindingly white. For pop stars who built their success on assimilating – some would say appropriating – black music, a new engagement with country music raises thorny questions. “These moves suggest that these artists are aiming for racially unconfined sounds and images,” says Powers. “Maybe their invocations of the south or the west are meant as a form of acknowledgment: we are white, they seem to be saying, we know it, and we’re not going to fake our racial identities any more. If that’s the intention, it seems to be failing.” Pop stars don’t necessarily ponder racial politics when crafting a new direction but they do consider the bottom line. On that front, the wisdom of turning to country is uncertain. Younger Now flopped and Joanne was no hit machine but those albums may prove to be canny routes to longevity. With rock in decline, country is the new epicentre of traditional instrumentation, midtempo ballads and other ingredients that appeal to older listeners. “Justin Timberlake is 36 years old,” says Powers. “He’s a dad. Who can blame him for being inspired by Chris Stapleton, who had his commercial breakthrough at 37? Country fans are loyal, they support live music, they even still buy recordings.” Rock or pop artists who court the country audience know that if they can connect with these fans they will likely have them for life. Pop’s biggest star may be travelling in the opposite direction but she knows the territory better than most. Don’t be surprised if, after the celeb-saturated urban pop of Reputation, Taylor Swift finds her way back to Nashville. And she won’t have to stand in the woods lookin’ thoughtful to do it.

culture/2018/jan/20/stetsons-beards-and-good-honest-sweat-why-pop-stars-are-going-back-to-basics

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-01-20T10:00:49Z

Stetsons, beards and good, honest sweat: why pop stars are going back to basics

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/20/stetsons-beards-and-good-honest-sweat-why-pop-stars-are-going-back-to-basics

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'powers', 'maybe', 'invocations', 'south', 'west', 'meant', 'form', 'acknowledgment', 'white', 'seem', 'saying', 'know', 'going', 'fake', 'racial', 'identities', 'intention', 'seems', 'failing', 'pop', 'stars', 'necessarily', 'ponder', 'racial', 'politics', 'crafting', 'new', 'direction', 'consider', 'bottom', 'line', 'front', 'wisdom', 'turning', 'country', 'uncertain', 'younger', 'flopped', 'joanne', 'hit', 'machine', 'albums', 'may', 'prove', 'canny', 'routes', 'longevity', 'rock', 'decline', 'country', 'new', 'epicentre', 'traditional', 'instrumentation', 'midtempo', 'ballads', 'ingredients', 'appeal', 'older', 'listeners', 'justin', 'timberlake', 'years', 'old', 'says', 'powers', 'dad', 'blame', 'inspired', 'chris', 'stapleton', 'commercial', 'breakthrough', 'country', 'fans', 'loyal', 'support', 'live', 'music', 'even', 'still', 'buy', 'recordings', 'rock', 'pop', 'artists', 'court', 'country', 'audience', 'know', 'connect', 'fans', 'likely', 'life', 'pop', 'biggest', 'star', 'may', 'travelling', 'opposite', 'direction', 'knows', 'territory', 'better', 'surprised', 'celeb-saturated', 'urban', 'pop', 'reputation', 'taylor', 'swift', 'finds', 'way', 'back', 'nashville', 'stand', 'woods', 'lookin', 'thoughtful']

https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/20/what-to-see-this-week-in-the-uk

Five of the best ... films Coco (U) (Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina, 2017, US) 105 mins Pixar gets everything right with this wondrous Mexican family story: richly filled with magic, music and sensitivity – cultural and otherwise. It’s also a movie about death: our boy hero’s defiance of the family taboo against music strands him in the Land of the Dead, with only his skeleton ancestors to help him get home. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (15) (Martin McDonagh, 2017, UK/US) 115 mins Frances McDormand’s crusade for justice riles up her close-knit small town, including cops Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell, in a morality drama that’s humane, heartfelt and often hilarious. McDonagh constantly upends expectations. Apart from a questionable handling of race issues, it’s almost perfect. The Post (12A) (Steven Spielberg, 2017, US) 115 mins Spielberg dashes off a classy 1970s newsroom procedural that’s a timely defence of press freedom and practically a prequel to All the President’s Men. Meryl Streep plays Kay Graham, new publisher of the Washington Post, and Tom Hanks its veteran editor, Ben Bradlee, both of whom are put in a dilemma by the Nixon administration’s attempt to quash reporting of the Pentagon Papers, revealing deception over the Vietnam war. Darkest Hour (PG) (Joe Wright, 2017, UK) 125 mins The world hardly needs another Churchill story, but Gary Oldman gives a robust, rich portrayal of the prime minister at his most politically embattled in this drama. Faced with enemies at home as well as abroad, he ranges between defiance, drunkenness and despondency. His wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) and secretary (Lily James) provide support The Final Year (12A) (Greg Barker, 2017, US) 89 mins In contrast to Michael Wolff’s Trump tell-all Fire and Fury, this fly-on-the-wall doc exposes the Obama White House as a harmonious team of committed grownups trying to do the right thing. There are fascinating details and characters to enjoy (Obama himself rarely appears). Warning: side effects may include nostalgia, despair and uncontrollable weeping. RS Five of the best ... pop and rock gigs Steve Aoki Famed for his acrobatic crowdsurfing exploits, as well as his catch-all attitude to collaboration (everyone from Migos to Fall Out Boy), EDM overlord Aoki brings his live show to the UK this week. His recent single with 1D’s Louis Tomlinson has helped shuffle him closer to mainstream recognition, but expect the focus to still be on lasers and organ-displacing drops. O2 Academy Brixton, SW9 Friday 26 January; touring to 30 January Cults Brooklyn bedroom-pop duo Cults, AKA Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion, first came to attention with 2010’s undeniably lovely internet hit Go Outside. Lily Allen was a fan; she signed them to her now-defunct label and released their 2011 debut. Since then their sound has grown brighter and more robust, showcased on new album, Offering. Manchester, Wednesday 24 January; London, Thursday 25 January Louise The rash of 90s pop comebacks continues with the return of ex-Eternal chanteuse Louise who, like Madonna and Beyoncé, has no need for a surname (Redknapp, née Nurding, obvs). Having scored nine UK Top 10 singles between 1995 and 2003 (Naked being the highlight), Louise returned for a one-off London show last year and follows that up with a proper tour entitled – get the candles ready – Intimate. Manchester, Saturday 20 January; Glasgow, Sunday 21 January; Birmingham, Monday 22 January; London, Wednesday 24 January Donae’o Not content with nurturing a solo career that started in 2002, UK rapper-singer Donae’o has also built up a pretty impressive production discography with recent additions including the likes of Ms Banks, Dizzee Rascal and Giggs. Last December’s surprise mixtape Sixteen suggests he’s keen to switch the focus back to his own output and quite right, too. Islington Assembly Hall, N1, Thursday 25 January MC Scottish National Jazz Orchestra The internationally acclaimed SNJO, led by delicately eloquent saxophonist Tommy Smith, play three diverse sets, devoted respectively to the music of Gershwin, Bernstein and Ellington (Thu); Henry Mancini and Johnny Mandel (Fri); and gospel-fuelled genius Charles Mingus (Fri late). Ronnie Scott’s, W1, Thursday 25 January & Friday 26 January JF Four of the best ... classical concerts Time Phase Percussionist Colin Currie and his group devote an evening to their particular specialism: Steve Reich. The programme ranges across Reich’s career, from early minimalist classics such as Music for Pieces of Wood, Mallet Quartet and Drumming right up to the 2013 Quartet, which was written for Currie. Kings Place, N1, Saturday 20 January London Sinfonietta at 50 On the precise anniversary of its very first concert, the Sinfonietta celebrates its half century with three conductors: David Atherton, George Benjamin and Vladimir Jurowski. The programme looks forward and back, with classics by Stravinsky and Ligeti, new works from Deborah Pritchard and Samantha Fernando, and a celebratory set of variations from 14 composers. Royal Festival Hall, SE1, Wednesday 24 January Welsh National Opera Orchestra & BBC National Orchestra of Wales Cardiff’s two resident orchestras and their conductors share a programme as part of the Association of British Orchestras conference. Tomáš Hanus conducts a suite from Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier with the WNO, before handing over to Thomas Søndergård and the BBC NOW for Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. BBC Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff, Wednesday 24 January Turangalîla Symphony Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic tackle one of the 20th century’s most opulent and ambitious orchestral masterpieces, Messiaen’s celebration of human and divine love, conceived on an epic scale. Here, the soloists are pianist Steven Osborne and ondes martenot player Nathalie Forget. Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, Thursday 25 January AC Five of the best ... exhibitions Glenn Brown Painting is a perverse art that creates a sensual world outside time and remote from reality. Anyway, that’s how British artist Glenn Brown makes it look. From his early pastiches of Frank Auerbach and Salvador Dalí, which got him shortlisted for the Turner prize in 2000, this technically brilliant painter has evolved into a suggestive and poetic explorer of art’s unknown pleasures. Gagosian Gallery, Grosvenor Hill, W1 Wednesday 24 January to 17 March Andreas Gursky This great German photographer’s epic studies of modern life bemuse and delight in their sheer sublime detail. From libraries to supermarkets to trading floors, Gursky stands far back to survey the scope of human activity and even reveal the underlying economic structures that shape it. His art is nothing less than a visual analysis of capitalism. Hayward Gallery, SE1, Thursday 25 January to 22 April The Enchanted Room Italy at the dawn of the 20th century had barely begun its industrial revolution. Modern art offered a dream of the new. FT Marinetti led the futurist movement on a madcap dash in praise of speed. The clash between old and new struck other artists as melancholy. Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà (work pictured) and others explore Italy’s modern dream in this exhibition loaned from Milan’s celebrated Brera Gallery. Estorick Collection, N1, Wednesday 24 January to 8 April The Business of Prints From the moment printing took off in 15th-century Europe, this new technology allowed images to be reproduced and circulated as never before. This exhibition looks at printmaking as a media business instead of a fine art. How were images made, sold and used? From Reformation propaganda to Georgian printshops, this fascinating cultural history also happens to include masterpieces by the likes of Dürer, Rembrandt and Goya. British Museum, WC1, to 28 Jan Turner in January Every winter, like a blast of snow speeding over the Highlands, the National Gallery gets out its Turner watercolours. Turner’s art is the embodiment of weather: he translates the dynamic forces of nature – from searing sunlight to crashing waves – directly into surging colour. The earth moves in his art. His watercolours are not gentle views but concentrated shots of power. Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, to 31 January JJ Five of the best ... theatre shows The Believers Are But Brothers Javaad Alipoor’s clever Edinburgh hit takes us into a shadowy internet world where sites used by the “alt-right”, such as 4Chan, or Isis recruitment videos are only a click away. A fascinatingly constructed and unsettlingly disturbing play about different kinds of extremism, it deploys WhatsApp technology to worm its way into your mind, using theatre as a forum to examine how we live now. Bush Theatre, W12 Wed to 10 Feb The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk The life and times of Marc and Bella Chagall are explored in a show about creativity, which is directed by Emma Rice with such a light touch that you really do believe these lovers can fly. It is uplifting stuff as it considers how somebody has to look after the baby, and it’s usually the woman. Wilton’s Music Hall, E1, to 10 February; touring to 5 May Beginning One of 2017’s sleeper hits, David Eldridge’s quiet two-hander follows Danny, played by Sam Troughton, and Laura (Justine Mitchell) in the early, tentative moments of a relationship as they start to forge a connection amid the detritus of a drunken party in a Crouch End flat. Directed with care by Polly Findlay, this painful, tender and funny play is an unassuming and truthful pleasure. Long may it continue in the West End. Ambassadors Theatre, WC2, booking to 24 March Greater Belfast Absence makes the heart grow fonder in Matt Regan’s piece, first seen at the Traverse in Edinburgh in 2016, which smashes the boundaries between theatre and gig as it explores notions of home. An unvarnished, unsentimental love letter to Belfast, it considers how sometimes you have to leave somewhere to find yourself and the way they draw you back. Part of the Celtic Connections festival, this is complex music-theatre memorably evoking place and space. Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Wednesday 24 January to 27 January The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe It is your last chance to find Narnia at the back of the wardrobe for now and it’s well worth pushing your way through the coats to meet the terrifying White Witch. If you fail, undoubtedly Sally Cookson’s much admired and hugely inventive staging of CS Lewis’s story will be picked up by another theatre before you can say Cair Paravel. West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, to 27 Jan LG Three of the best ... dance shows Richard Alston Dance Company Alston’s superb company of dancers perform his latest work, set to Schumann’s expressively coloured piano score Carnaval. This musically inspired mixed bill is completed by two older Alston pieces: Chacony, featuring scores by Purcell and Britten; and the intoxicatingly rhythmic Gypsy Mixture, inspired by Romanian and Macedonian Gypsy bands. Theatre Royal, Bath Friday 26 & Saturday 27 January Tilted Productions: Constructions of Thin Air Tilted’s artistic director Maresa von Stockert makes a long-awaited return to the stage with this new work, in which she uses an intergenerational cast, ranging from their 20s to their 60s, to explore the private and the public logic of feeling at home. DanceEast, Ipswich, Friday 26 January; touring to 10 Mar Company Wayne McGregor: Autobiography A welcome return for McGregor’s cleverly layered investigation into the nature of identity, first seen at Sadler’s Wells last October. It’s a mix of science, beautiful visuals and sometimes intimately personal dance. Laban Theatre, SE8, Friday 26 & Saturday 27 January

culture/2018/jan/20/what-to-see-this-week-in-the-uk

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-01-20T09:00:48Z

What to see this week in the UK

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/20/what-to-see-this-week-in-the-uk

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'admired', 'hugely', 'inventive', 'staging', 'cs', 'lewis', 'story', 'picked', 'another', 'theatre', 'say', 'cair', 'paravel', 'west', 'yorkshire', 'playhouse', 'leeds', 'jan', 'lg', 'three', 'best', 'dance', 'shows', 'richard', 'alston', 'dance', 'company', 'alston', 'superb', 'company', 'dancers', 'perform', 'latest', 'work', 'set', 'schumann', 'expressively', 'coloured', 'piano', 'score', 'carnaval', 'musically', 'inspired', 'mixed', 'bill', 'completed', 'two', 'older', 'alston', 'pieces', 'chacony', 'featuring', 'scores', 'purcell', 'britten', 'intoxicatingly', 'rhythmic', 'gypsy', 'mixture', 'inspired', 'romanian', 'macedonian', 'gypsy', 'bands', 'theatre', 'royal', 'bath', 'friday', 'amp', 'saturday', 'january', 'tilted', 'productions', 'constructions', 'thin', 'air', 'tilted', 'artistic', 'director', 'maresa', 'von', 'stockert', 'makes', 'long-awaited', 'return', 'stage', 'new', 'work', 'uses', 'intergenerational', 'cast', 'ranging', '20s', '60s', 'explore', 'private', 'public', 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https://content.guardianapis.com/culture/2018/jan/20/we-had-death-threats-the-defiant-return-of-will-grace

When it debuted on TV, Will & Grace was revolutionary. Not only was it the first mainstream LGBTQ sitcom on TV, but it was one in which gay life was portrayed in a naturalistic way; where the characters weren’t walking cliches but just … existed. The arrival of Will & Grace in 1998 – a year after Ellen had come out on her self-titled sitcom – was political by its very presence on primetime. The success of its eight-season run was significant: in 2012 Joe Biden, Obama’s vice president, commented that the show “probably did more to educate the American public” on LGBTQ issues “than almost anything anybody has ever done so far”. It opened the doors for gay characters on TV, paving the way for the likes of Modern Family’s Cam and Mitch. Comedian Billy Eichner (Difficult People, Billy on the Street) recently said: “If it wasn’t for [Jack, played by Sean Hayes] I wouldn’t be able to have a television show.” Still, no one could have expected the reaction when the sitcom’s classic quartet (Will, Grace, Jack and Karen) resurfaced in September 2016 with a 10-minute reunion video. The Trump-baiting clip found the foursome sparring in classic Will & Grace style on themes such as Jamie Dornan using a “butt double” in 50 Shades of Grey, Brangelina, and the revelation that Karen is a good mate of the Trumps. “Donny’s one of my oldest friends,” she says, “I helped him pick out Melania.” Released hours before the first presidential debate, the clip’s political humour felt like a two-fingered salute to the right, not just a viral hit but a call to arms. Its success (7m views and counting) also led to the show being recommissioned for a ninth season. “This reincarnation was born out of all of the turmoil in America,” Eric McCormack, who plays Will, explains. “It was born because we did that video. It started from a pure need to say something, on behalf of Hillary and on behalf of sanity.” “It came out and was getting millions of hits,” adds Megan Mullally (Karen). “And then, all of a sudden, NBC was like: ‘Hey guys, about that video … ’” The first episode of the new season, 11 Years Later, continues the mood of political defiance. In it, the gang end up in the White House, where Grace has been hired to do an interior design job on the Oval Office (when she needs to colour match the space to Trump’s colouring she pulls out a bag of Cheetos). Although she spends the episode in a moral quandary about the potential gig, she ends the show with a definitive “F-you”: his office remains untouched except for a Make America Gay Again cap that she leaves on his presidential chair. When it was first on the air, the comedy – which mixed slapstick with scathing insults – felt bitingly fresh. Not only were Will and Jack both gay, but the love/hate dynamics between the dysfunctional characters (Karen v Jack, Karen v Grace, Jack v Grace, Jack v Will) were like a primetime punch to the face: delivered with wit, a musical cadence and a specific knowing humour that felt unique. As the show returns, McCormack believes the United States may need a reminder of that particular brand of “gay de vivre”. “We, as a nation, advanced under Obama, and now that has been wiped away,” he says. “The Republicans would love to undo marriage equality, just as they would love to undo everything that Obama achieved. So it’s not like everything is safe now, it’s not like everyone has a gay best friend. If we are so advanced, how the hell did he [Trump] get elected?” While there was clearly a public appetite for the show to return (Jack and Karen, the two characters considered the heart of the show by fans, had a much talked-about spin-off that never got to pilot stage) it wasn’t the obvious choice for a reboot compared to other revered sitcoms. In the period since its last season, all the characters have matured but are essentially the same: caustic, barbed, kept-woman Karen has softened only a little in the intervening years. “She is still horrible, and still says terrible things to people,” says Mullally. “But she’s a little more three-dimensional. There is an episode this season, about Rosario [Karen’s housekeeper] which is the greatest episode they’ve ever written for my character.” Elsewhere in the show, both Will and Jack are dealing with the ageing process and how it affects their dating lives. The second episode of the new season, Who’s Your Daddy, tackles getting older in the gay world with a hilarious Death Becomes Her angle; Jack meets a much younger, millennial suitor and can’t sit down because his Spanx are too tight (plus he has magnets stuck to his neck to pull his face back), while Will’s date barely acknowledges the importance of former guest star Madonna (“He should be beaten with a VHS tape of Evita,” says Jack). “I think that, at the core, every person is pretty much the same as they have been since high school or college,” believes Hayes. “Yes, they are a little older, and we talk about that, but Jack will always be Jack, because people are generally always the same.” Perhaps surprisingly, Hayes was not out publicly until after the show had come off air. “We would get death threats to the show and I was scared,” he recalls. “I didn’t have the tools at such a young age to deal with the ramifications of coming out as gay in a huge public way. “But wisdom comes with age, and you realise, oh, I was doing more damage in not coming out sooner. I should have been more fearless, like my character.” Television – particularly on cable and streaming sites – has changed exponentially in the 20 years since the show began, with a myriad of diverse representations of the LGBTQ community, in shows such as Orange Is the New Black and Transparent. With long-standing comments that Will & Grace only ever presented a narrow, white, male version of gay life (Vox called out its tendency to “make a punchline out of any LGBTQ person who isn’t a white gay man”), is there pressure to break more boundaries second time around? “We are not responsible for representing gay America or gay culture; we are only responsible for writing the characters of Jack, Karen, Will and Grace as responsibly and funnily as we can,” says producer Max Mutchnick. Although the show has always felt poignant, this new season takes more explicit stabs at society. As well as the Trump baiting, the fourth episode, Grandpa Jack, follows Jack as he discovers he’s a grandfather, and visits a summer camp where his grandson has been sent to “straighten” him out. The camp, at which Girls actor Andrew Rannells guest stars as a member of staff, features a subtly placed photograph of evangelical Christian vice president Mike Pence above the fireplace. “Any creative choice you make feels more highly politicised in these highly politicised times,” explains co-producer David Kohan. He is determined that the show not attempt to emulate the edginess of much of the new comedy that has flourished in the intervening years. “Either people will take to it or they won’t, but to try to change it and modify it, to conform with whatever this new landscape is, would have been a big mistake,” he says. “It would fly in the face of fans who want to be comforted by their old friends. At a time when things are very much in flux, and many people are very anxious, this is a dose of comfort every week.” Levels of comfort among audiences may have shifted, too. In the first incarnation, there was seemingly very little actual sex happening for Will or Jack. “We were hyper-aware that we were walking a tightrope,” says Debra Messing (who plays Grace). “We wanted to talk about Will and Jack’s sex lives, but it had to be done in a way that was non-threatening, in a way that would not make people uncomfortable and turn off the TV.” That concern has apparently been eradicated in the past decade. “We have a joke in the episode we are rehearsing today that is about gay sex,” reveals McCormack. “It is a conversation that two gay men might have about what they like and what they don’t like. It’s a ‘tops and bottoms’ conversation, and we actually can’t believe that the network is allowing us to do it.” Will & Grace is on Friday 26 January, 10pm, Channel 5

culture/2018/jan/20/we-had-death-threats-the-defiant-return-of-will-grace

pillar/arts

Arts

culture

Culture

article

2018-01-20T07:00:45Z

'We had death threats': the defiant return of Will & Grace

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/20/we-had-death-threats-the-defiant-return-of-will-grace

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