Category Archives: Culture

Pixies frontman Black Francis: ‘Kim Deal? We’re always friends – but nothing is for ever’

Posted on by

As the alt-rockers release a live box set, their frontman answers your questions on Bowie, his 40 new Pixies songs and the alarming sexuality of his pets

Come on Pilgrim is the greatest debut album by anyone, ever. Discuss. mungoslut

I will partially agree, at least to appear humble. But seeing as I’m not so humble … I was listening to Murmur by REM a lot just before Come on Pilgrim and that was hugely influential on me as a songwriter. I’m going to be cocky and say: we were even better than Murmur.

Continue reading...

James McAvoy: ‘Play Hamlet? Nah – he’s always seemed a bit of a moaner to me’

Posted on by

He came blazing out of Glasgow like a rocket, scoring hits and acclaim. As he returns to the stage in a hard-rapping, homoerotic Cyrano de Bergerac, the star talks about partygate, snout size – and tackling Lear when he hits 100

James McAvoy is talking about Cyrano de Bergerac, the long-nosed, lovestruck poet he first played on stage in 2019, and is now about to reprise. But every now and again he interrupts himself with off-piste observations that have nothing to do with 17th-century libertines and doomed love triangles. It slowly becomes clear that he is inside his car, which is parked at the stage door of the Harold Pinter theatre in London, ready to jump into rehearsals after our chat.

“What’s this guy doing?” he says, in his meta commentary of people-watching. “Oh my God. There’s a labourer walking down the road and he doesn’t have any trousers on. He’s just in long johns and he has got the biggest penis I think I’ve ever seen.” Wait, how can he tell? “Because he’s wearing long johns! And he’s packing a nine-inch –”

Continue reading...

The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan review – who tipped off the Nazis?

Posted on by

Despite controversy surrounding its findings, the work of a ‘cold case team’ powerfully illuminates what it was like to live under a genocidal regime

On 4 August 1944 Gestapo officer Karl Josef Silberbauer, together with three Dutch policemen, marched into a spice merchant’s on Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht and demanded: “Where are the Jews?” It was a piercing moment in 20th-century history, one that never becomes dulled by retelling. Within minutes Silberbauer and his accomplices had located a dummy bookshelf, behind which lay a secret suite of rooms where two families had been hiding for two years. Placed under arrest, these eight men and women were subsequently sent to concentration camps in the east from which only one, the business’s owner, Otto Frank, returned.

We know all this because one of Frank’s first postwar acts was to publish the journal that his 15-year-old daughter had kept during their immuration. The Diary of Anne Frank became a canonical text, one of the few accounts we have of living through Hitler’s Final Solution in real time. And it is Anne’s face – peaky, clever, ferociously alive – that has become the emblem of all the evil unleashed by antisemitism in Europe’s terrible mid-century. Yet despite the story being so familiar, there is one detail that remains a mystery. Who tipped off the authorities that there were people hiding at the back of Prinsengracht 263?

Continue reading...

Will Wordle still be free after the New York Times buyout?

Posted on by

Will the hit game imminently be locked behind a paywall or stay as it is? What about ads? The NYT’s head of games explains the plan

In a month of spectacular video game industry buyouts, symbolised by Microsoft’s incredible $68bn swoop for Activision Blizzard, there is one purchase that has sent paroxysms of fear across the planet. On Monday, the New York Times revealed that it had bought the viral megahit Wordle for a “low seven figure sum”. The web-based word puzzle, which launched in October, was originally intended as a gift from software engineer Josh Wardle to his partner. But it has become a viral sensation, amassing an audience of millions – and key to its appeal is the fact that it’s free, with no ads.

So what does a big newspaper like the New York Times want with a game like Wordle, and what happens next?

Continue reading...

A surfing god rides The Cradle of Storms – Chris Burkard’s best photograph

Posted on by

‘This is Josh Mulcoy, the godfather of cold-water surfing, catching a wave in Alaska. The place is so windy and wild, it’s known as The Cradle of Storms’

The Aleutian Islands are fabled in surfing. Part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, they’re a raw chain of islands connecting Alaska to Russia. The area is known as The Cradle of Storms because it’s so windy and wild.

Most of the islands are made up of tundra and there are big active volcanoes. This island, Umnak, is home to a very small Aleut community. I went there in 2013. The planning alone took two years. You need to be completely self-sustained. You need to charter a small plane and have enough food and supplies for your entire stay, with the means to charge all your equipment.

Continue reading...

Monica Vitti, ‘queen of Italian cinema’, dies aged 90

Posted on by

Vitti shot to international fame in Michelangelo Antonioni’s drama L’Avventura in 1960

• Monica Vitti – a life in pictures


Italian actor Monica Vitti, an icon best known for her starring roles in films by Michelangelo Antonioni, has died aged 90, the country’s culture ministry said on Wednesday.

“Goodbye Monica Vitti, goodbye queen of Italian cinema. Today is a truly sad day, we have lost a great artist and a great Italian,” the culture minister, Dario Franceschini, said in a statement.

Continue reading...

‘Incredible’: from Wordle’s Welsh beginnings to the New York Times

Posted on by

The puzzle’s global success has turned Josh Wardle into a megastar in the gaming world and bemused his family

He is the toast of New York, of London – and of a small village called Llanddewi Rhydderch.

Just four months after Josh Wardle invented the wonderfully simple and soothing puzzle Wordle, he is a megastar in the world of games and is a great deal wealthier after the New York Times acquired his creation for a seven-figure sum.

Continue reading...

Coming down: why has shock teen show Euphoria become such a drag?

Posted on by

In its second season, the hit HBO drama on drugged-out and love-crazed teens has finally tipped into too much style over substance

Euphoria, the slick, explicit, high-budget teen drama halfway through its second season on HBO, has from the start been a soap layered in heady seriousness. The show, adapted by Sam Levinson from an Israeli series of the same name and co-produced by Drake, took on a near encyclopedia of Today’s Teen Issues – sex shaming, drug addiction, body insecurity, web personas, revenge porn, pregnancy and abortion, emotional abuse, toxic masculinity, self-harm and depression, and more – with a bracing, revelatory frankness and thick lacquer of gloss (and full-frontal nudity).

By its first season finale in 2019, in which main character Rue (Zendaya, who won an Emmy for the role) nearly dies in a graphic drug overdose, Euphoria had drawn a legion of fans (the finale drew 1.2 million night-of viewers and became HBO’s most second-most tweeted-about series ever, behind Game of Thrones) and managed to balance shock with sensitivity. It established beloved characters – in particular the fragile, alchemical bond between Rue and Jules (Hunter Schafer), a trans character – as well as a distinctive visual palette: saturated color, shimmery beats, high-voltage fantasy, meta narration, a zeitgeist-aiming show with a small hint of irony and a large dollop of excess.

Continue reading...

Scam the bereaved, defraud the dead: the shocking crimes of America’s greatest psychic conman

Posted on by

He was the fake medium from Florida whose scandalous cons almost got him shot. So why did M Lamar Keene then blow the whistle on psychic swindlers? A new podcast finds out

What does it take for someone to impersonate a dead teenager to the grieving mother of the deceased? For M Lamar Keene, a prominent Tampa-based medium in the 1960s and 70s, it was a cinch – all it required was a cocktail of cunning, charisma and sheer audacity. In front of the congregation of his spiritualist church, Keene would enter a trance state and appear to speak as the deceased 17-year-old, Jack, and ask Jack’s mother, Lona, to donate thousands of dollars to the church. One day, Lona asked Jack about the secret name he used for her, to prove it was really him, and Keene was stumped – until he attended a gathering at her house and feigned a headache. While pretending to rest in her bedroom, he searched her belongings and found the name scribbled in a family Bible: “Appleonia”. He pulled it off.

Keene confessed to being a conman in his 1976 book, The Psychic Mafia. Jack and Lona’s was just one of many audacious cases he revealed in the exposé, which shook the world of spiritualism so much that it led to an attempt on his life. Someone took a shot at him on his lawn but missed, leaving a bullet in the side of his house. In the book, Keene described how mediums shared client information so that they could conduct “hot readings” based on solid facts. He recounted how they would steal jewellery from clients for a few months, only to pretend a dead family member’s spirit had made it reappear (which usually resulted in generous tips). Ultimately, he confirmed that mediums formed a vast network to fraudulently monetise people’s grief. So why did Keene – the so-called Prince of the Spiritualists – choose to blow the whistle on everyone?

Continue reading...

Belle review – anime that makes for an intriguing big-screen spectacle

Posted on by

This weird postmodern drama sees a lonely teenager join a virtual world where she becomes a hugely successful singer

There’s some amazing big-screen spectacle in this weird postmodern emo photo-love drama from Japanese anime director Mamoru Hosoda, whose previous film Mirai elevated him to auteur status. Suzu, voiced by Kaho Nakamura, is a deeply unhappy and lonely teenager at high school, who lives with her dad. Her mum died some years ago, attempting (successfully) to save a child from drowning and Suzu can’t come to terms with the zero-sum pointlessness of this calamity: a total stranger was saved but her mother died. Or not zero in fact: while her loss increased the sum-total of unhappiness, the most popular boy in school – a friend since they were little – is tender and protective towards Suzu.

Her life is complicated further when she is persuaded to join a virtual reality meta-universe called U, a glittering unearthly city like a next-level Manhattan or Shibuya. (Presumably entry into this fantasy world needs a VR headset, although oddly this is not made plain.) Participants have their biometrics read and get an enhanced avatar of themselves and Suzu finds that she is now “Belle”, an ethereally beautiful young woman with quirky freckles and a wonderful singing voice. To her astonishment, Suzu finds that Belle is becoming a colossally famous singer – but at the very high point of this meta-success she comes across the Beast, who disrupts one of her concerts: a brutish, aggressive outcast figure loathed by the self-appointed vigilante guardians of U.

Continue reading...

Playing to win: are Mattel movies about to take over Hollywood?

Posted on by

The toy company has recruited Lena Dunham, Greta Gerwig and Tom Hanks to help usher in a new slate of films based on kids’ favourites

Deep down, everyone wishes they were Marvel. Armed with nothing but B-grade IP and heroic levels of pluck, a lowly comic book company slowly went about wrestling the film industry into an inescapable stranglehold. But a decade and a half on, Marvel has become the established order. It is time for a new plucky upstart to stage another revolution. That upstart?

Mattel. You know, Mattel. The toy people. No, really.

Continue reading...

Flee: inside the film about a Kabul boy who finds happiness, cats and a husband in Denmark

Posted on by

He escaped death, fled across the Baltic, and eventually found love and a new life. Jonas Poher Rasmussen describes how he turned Amin’s often harrowing story into an uplifting, award-winning animation

When the Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen was 15, an Afghan refugee moved to his small village. Rumours circulated about how the boy, Amin, had got there. Some said he had walked all the way from Kabul, others that he had seen his whole family slaughtered. Rasmussen became the newcomer’s friend and confidant – Amin even came out to him as gay when they were teenagers – and their closeness endured into adulthood. When they both suffered bad break-ups in their 20s, for instance, Rasmussen went to stay with Amin; they refer to that period now as “the heartbreak summer”. He still didn’t know the truth about how his friend came to Denmark, though, so he did what any documentarist might do: he proposed making a film about him. Amin refused to reveal his identity on screen – but what if the film were animated?

The result is Flee, which alternates between scenes of Rasmussen interviewing his friend, dramatisations of Amin’s perilous journey to Copenhagen via Moscow, and present-day interludes showing him househunting with his boyfriend in which the concept of settling down presents unique challenges for someone who has spent his life running. Aside from the occasional excerpt of archive footage – the war-scarred streets of Kabul, the unruly waves seen from a boat smuggling people across the Baltic – every frame of the movie is animated, most of it in a simple, straightforwardly realistic fashion that matches Amin’s narration.

Continue reading...

Glasshouse review – dreamy dystopian horror with a Picnic at Hanging Rock vibe

Posted on by

A mother and her daughters hole up in a Victorian conservatory, hiding from a devastating pandemic that lays waste to human memory

Shot in a Victorian hothouse in South Africa with a mixed cast of local actors and the odd imported Brit – including Jessica Alexander, soon be seen in Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid – this tense dystopian horror-thriller feels geographically non-specific, almost as if it were taking place in some kind of dream world. That touch of hazy vagueness is just right for SA director and co-writer Kelsey Egan’s cracking feature debut (co-written with Emma Lungiswa De Wet) which imagines a family of survivors hiding out in the title’s botanical conservatory after a pandemic has ravaged most of the world’s population.

The invisible threat here is an airborne virus called “the shred” which wipes out memories and leaves its victims in a bestial state, unable to remember even their own names. A matriarchal woman known only as Mother (Adrienne Pearce) guides her three female progeny – cautious Evie (Anja Taljaard), dreamy Bee (Alexander) and adolescent Daisy (Kitty Harris), alongside shred-infected brother Gabe (Brent Vermeulen) – by teaching them how to garden (they have to pollinate the plants themselves because the bees are all gone), to read, paint, and pass on the stories of the Before Times.

Continue reading...

Bootleggers, bondage and law-breaking bashes! The scandalous history of the wild party

Posted on by

From Prohibition-busting cocktail parties to all-night raves, illegal gatherings have been at the centre of modern culture for decades. So why do they still have the power to shock?

For more than a month now, the press has been full of stories of “illegal” parties in Downing Street. The government, we are told, has almost ground to a halt because of the scandal.

Given the coverage, one might easily get the impression that the law-breaking bash is a recent invention, something that could only happen in lockdown, driven by privilege and an unhealthy sense of entitlement. Yet the modern party began life as a crime just over a century ago, when the Volstead Act banned the production and sale of alcohol in the US. As the New York Times explained in 1920:

You cannot carry a hip flask.
You cannot give away or receive a bottle of liquor as a gift.
You cannot take liquor to hotels or restaurants and drink it in the public dining rooms.
You cannot buy or sell formulas or recipes for homemade liquors.
You cannot …

“Oh,” said the Bright Young People. “Oh, oh, oh.”

“It’s just exactly like being inside a cocktail shaker,” said Miles Malpractice.

Continue reading...

Joe Rogan pledges to ‘try harder’ after Spotify misinformation controversy

Posted on by

Podcast host apologises to streaming service, which has faced criticism over episodes featuring guests who shared Covid conspiracy theories

Joe Rogan has addressed controversy over his Spotify podcast, hours after the streaming service announced a plan to tackle the spread of Covid-19 misinformation.

In a 10-minute video posted to Instagram on Sunday night, the comedian and host pledged to “try harder to get people with differing opinions on” and “do my best to make sure I’ve researched these topics”.

Continue reading...

‘I wanted my art to resonate’: The Zimbabwean sculptor responding to Covid with creativity

Posted on by

When the pandemic hit, David Ngwerume began creating pieces to inspire and raise awareness. Now, one of his pieces will feature in the Beijing biennale

When the pandemic first hit the world, Zimbabwean stone sculptor David Ngwerume took his hammer and chisel and started work on the first of a collection of Covid-inspired pieces.

Almost two years and 14 sculptures later, one has made its way to China after being selected for the ninth Beijing International Art Biennale, an exhibition showcasing work from thousands of artists from more than 100 countries.

Continue reading...

‘I had the perfect life – then both my husbands died’: singer Labi Siffre on love, loss – and happiness

Posted on by

The man behind Something Inside So Strong and It Must Be Love talks about his half-century in music, coming out in the 70s – and his menage a trois on a Welsh mountain

Before meeting Labi Siffre, I am intrigued by the varied reactions I get when mentioning his name. Many people I speak to have never heard of him. Some remember his 80s anthem Something Inside So Strong. Others are dimly aware of a solo career before that.

And then there are those whose eyes light up – those who, like me, regard him as one of the key figures in British pop history, and wonder why he’s not celebrated as such. “Labi Siffre’s fingerprints have been on popular music for many decades now,” wrote the electronic musician Matthew Herbert in 2012. “But his actual voice is rarely heard.”

Continue reading...

‘A vortex of thinking’ – inside the LSE’s brawny, brainy new building

Posted on by

A game of squash, a quick Rachmaninov concert, a brew with a view and then back to studying … the £145m Marshall Building has got the lot, says our writer, even its own Old Curiosity Shop

One minute, it’s a shish kebab. The next, it’s a washing machine. A second later, it’s a casserole. Speaking to Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara about their new building, the metaphors come tumbling out in a passionate torrent. The two Irish architects, whose practice Grafton won worldwide recognition in 2020 when it won the prestigious Pritzker prize, can’t contain their excitement about their £145m facility for the London School of Economics, partly because they haven’t had a chance to visit it yet. “The pandemic has really made us understand the meaning of longing,” says Farrell. “Site visits on FaceTime just aren’t the same.”

The longing is over for students and academics, though, who return to face-to-face teaching this term, in a place that truly brings home the benefits of meeting in the real world. The new Marshall Building, which looks out over Lincoln’s Inn Fields like a gleaming white palazzo, houses some of the finest spaces that any London university has to offer.

Continue reading...

Spotify to direct listeners to accurate Covid information after Joe Rogan outcry

Posted on by

Streaming platform publishes rules for creators and announces plan to tackle misinformation, including ‘content advisories’

Spotify is adding a message that will direct listeners to correct Covid-19 information as controversy over misinformation shared on Joe Rogan’s podcast continues to grow, with the streamer losing billions in market value and more musicians withdrawing their music.

On Sunday, the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek, released an official statement setting out the streaming platform’s plan to tackle misinformation. New content advisories will direct listeners of any podcast that discusses coronavirus to a dedicated website that “provides easy access to data-driven facts, up-to-date information as shared by scientists, physicians, academics and public health authorities around the world, as well as links to trusted sources”.

Continue reading...

Ruth Slenczynska: the pupil of Rachmaninov still releasing music at 97

Posted on by

Pianist who has played for five US presidents says great composer taught her to incorporate colour in music

The greatest lesson Ruth Slenczynska learned from the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov was that sounds have colour.

Nearly 90 years ago, the nine year-old Slenczynska was practising one of Rachmaninov’s preludes when he asked her to join him at the window. It was springtime in Paris, and the avenues were lined with mimosa trees laden with fluffy, golden blossoms.

Continue reading...