Category Archives: Culture

Passing the ‘chimp test’: how Neanderthals and women helped create language

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How did humans learn to talk and why haven’t chimpanzees followed suit? Linguistics expert Sverker Johansson busts some chauvinist myths

How and when did human language evolve? Did a “grammar module” just pop into our ancestors’ brains one day thanks to a random change in our DNA? Or did language come from grooming, or tool use, or cooking meat with fire? These and other hypotheses exist, but there seems little way to rationally choose between them. It was all so very long ago, so any theory must be essentially speculation.

Or must it? This is the question presented as an elegant intellectual thriller by The Dawn of Language: Axes, Lies, Midwifery and How We Came to Talk. Its author is Sverker Johansson, a serene and amiable 60-year-old Swede who speaks to me over Zoom from his book-crammed home study in the city of Falun, where he works as a senior adviser at Dalarna University.

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Purple Sea review – panic and terror as Syrian refugees battle to stay afloat

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Syrian director Amel Alzakout records her own stranding in this difficult-to-watch film on a day when 40 people died off the coast of Lesbos

Powerful but painful to watch, this experimental documentary challenges viewers to avert their eyes from the tragedy unfolding before them. It consists almost entirely of footage recorded on a waterproof camera that was strapped to the wrist of Syrian co-director Amel Alzakout while she was floating in the sea off the coast of Lesbos, after the boat she’d been travelling in sunk. Like the other 300 people on the vessel that day in 2015, Alzakout had paid people smugglers to help her escape the war in Syria and find a better life abroad. While she lived to make this film and was reunited with her partner and co-director Khaled Abdulwahed, some 40 people died in the water that day.

It’s possible that some of the perished are even captured on film here – though to be honest, it’s hard to make out much for long stretches as the images thrash around, evoking the panic Alzakout and her fellow passengers, many in lifejackets, must have been experiencing as they tried to stay afloat. Sometimes the camera is above the waterline and we can hear people crying, calling hysterically, blowing whistles to call for help. Otherwise, the view is of jeans-clad legs and other jumbled bodies twisting in the water, the sound muffled by the sea.

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Fran Lebowitz: ‘If people disagree with me, so what?’

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With a hit Netflix series and The Fran Lebowitz Reader now published in the UK, the American wit talks about failing to write, her dislike of Andy Warhol and her best friend Toni Morrison

Fran Lebowitz is a famous writer who famously doesn’t write. “I’m really lazy and writing is really hard and I don’t like to do hard things,” she says, and it’s the rare writer who would not have some sympathy with that. Yet, as all writers also know, writer’s block, which the 70-year-old has suffered from for four decades now, is never really about laziness. Lebowitz’s editor Erroll McDonald (“the man with the easiest job in New York”) has said she suffers from “excessive reverence for the written word”.

Given that Lebowitz has, at last count, more than 11,000 of them in her apartment, there is no question that she loves books. “I would never throw away a book – there are human beings I would rather throw out of the window,” she says. So is this talk of “excessive reverence” a euphemistic way of saying that she has low self-esteem and doesn’t think she can write anything good enough to commit to print?

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Tom Cruise’s car stolen while filming in Birmingham

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Mission: Impossible star’s belongings reportedly missing from his BMW X7 when recovered in Smethwick

The Hollywood actor Tom Cruise’s BMW was stolen while he was filming in Birmingham.

The BMW X7 had been used to ferry around the star, who has been in the city filming scenes for the seventh instalment in the Mission: Impossible series.

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From Shonda Rhimes to Armando Iannucci: 10 of the best TV showrunners

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A celebration of the brains behind some of the small screen’s biggest and best shows, including The Wire, Grey’s Anatomy and Friends

Since graduating from the US remake of The Office, Schur has done more than anyone to develop its ethos of making comedy that’s cool without being unkind. He was the boss of Parks and Recreation, which recovered from a so-so start to become truly beloved. Then The Good Place wowed us with primary colours and slyly intelligent philosophising. He co-created Brooklyn Nine-Nine, too.

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Vinnie Jones: ‘My career flew off the rails. The wheels were going. There wasn’t a spare seat!’

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The footballer-turned-movie hard man is back, starring in a new Footsoldier film. He talks about how his film and TV career exploded and refinding his dignity

I am, obviously, scared of Vinnie Jones. Even though he is calling from New York, 3,000 miles and five hours away, I keep expecting him to click his neck three times and pull me into a breathless headlock. But instead, he is sleepy and then charming, and doesn’t threaten to kick my face in once.

He is sleepy because he was up until 2.30am shooting Law & Order: Organized Crime, in which he appears in the recurring role of Albanian gangster Albi. “Going toe-to-toe with Christopher Meloni,” he smiles, “a legend in the acting world.”

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‘It was the happiest time’: The Beach Boys on their strange second coming

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They helped define the 60s, but were hopelessly uncool as the 70s began – and Brian Wilson was unravelling. The band discuss the masterpieces they made against the odds

In the 1960s, the Beach Boys staked their claim as the US’s most popular band, as their dazzling, harmony-drenched songs about surfing, cars and California Girls epitomised the American dream. So, at the end of the decade, when leader and principal songwriter Brian Wilson – who had recently spent several months in a psychiatric hospital – suggested that the band were on the verge of bankruptcy, everyone thought it was a joke.

“We arrived in London for a tour on the day that hit the headlines,” co-founder Al Jardine says over the phone from California. “The IRS [US tax collection agency] had closed our studio and our offices in Hollywood. The hotels wouldn’t accept our corporate credit cards. In the end, I had to use my personal American Express card to pay for our rooms.”

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‘We want to create magic’: Taking cinema to remote Spanish villages

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La Barraca de Cine has spent the past year roving its way around dozens of communities across the country

Stretching six metres and painted turquoise, the trailer has trundled across Spain, making its way to mountaintop villages, cobblestone plazas and medieval historical centres. No matter the location, the process starts much in the same way: with the unfurling of a giant screen.

“Our motto is cinema for everyone and anywhere,” said Patricia de Luna, one of the co-founders of La Barraca de Cine, a roving cinema that has made its way to dozens of villages across Spain in the past year. “Those evenings of cinema with family, friends and that shared experience with those around you – that’s the magic we want to create.”

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Candyman director Nia DaCosta: ‘It is shocking the way people have talked to me’

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As well as rebooting the horror classic, the 31-year-old is directing a Marvel movie with a $100m-plus budget. She talks about ambition, superstition – and whether she’s risked saying ‘Candyman’ five times

“Say it,” implore the posters for the new Candyman sequel, referring to the urban myth that the hook-handed ghost of the title can be summoned by repeating his name five times in front of a mirror. But Nia DaCosta will not say it: “Oh hell, no.” She is shaking her head. “Never have done, never will.” Despite having written and co-directed the film, DaCosta isn’t taking any chances. “In fact, when I was watching auditions, I would get a little freaked out so I’d stop the audition before they said it all five times. So silly,” she admits, laughing at herself. But she is not superstitious, she insists. “It’s just that one bit. Nothing [else] about it scares me at this point. Except … I’m just not gonna put myself in the space for my brain to play tricks on me.”

Related: Candyman review – BLM horror reboot is superb confection of satire and scorn

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‘Not just a drummer – a genre’: Stewart Copeland and Max Weinberg on Charlie Watts

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The Police and Bruce Springsteen drummers share memories of their late Rolling Stones counterpart, explaining his technical brilliance, his verve – and his clothes-folding skills

I’m an early-period Stones fan, and not so much because of losing interest in them, but because when you’re 16, music is 100 times more important – and the Rolling Stones were right there when I was 16. Humans are sort of like ducks. A duck comes out of the shell, the first warm thing it sees is mama; for adolescent teenage humans, the first raucous sound of rebellion, that’s daddy. And in my generation, that sound was the Stones.

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Adam Driver’s 10 best film performances – ranked!

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Ahead of the release of Annette, we rank the actor’s greatest roles, from the insufferable hipster of While We’re Young to his severe missionary in Silence

The movie might be flawed, but Driver’s performance (playing opposite the similarly excellent Alba Rohrwacher) is outstanding, winning him the Volpi Cup at the Venice film festival. He plays Jude, a young man who meets his future wife Mina (Rohrwacher) in New York when they are bizarrely locked in a restaurant toilet together. They marry, have a baby and at first everything is wonderful – but then she begins to show symptoms of postpartum psychosis and Jude has an agonising dilemma: if and when to take the baby away from her. Driver plays it with overwhelming sincerity and force.

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‘I’m a one in a billion’ – how Diane Warren penned windswept power ballads for Cher, Gaga and Dion

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She’s the queen of the power ballad mega hit – and has even written songs for Biden, Harris and Ringo Starr. Now the world’s most successful female songwriter is finally releasing her own album

At the end of the 1990s, when Diane Warren was the unrivalled queen of the power ballad, her music publisher presented her with a quartet of gold discs and a plaque hailing her as “the career saviour of the 90s”. The discs celebrated the windswept mega-hits Warren had written for Toni Braxton (Un-Break My Heart), LeAnn Rimes (How Do I Live), Celine Dion (Because You Loved Me) and Aerosmith (I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing), the first two of which are still among the bestselling US singles ever.

To be imperial in one pop era is usually to be defined by it for evermore, but Warren has been writing hits for almost four decades, notching up nine US No 1s and 32 Top 10 hits. In 2015, Til It Happens to You, her potent Lady Gaga collaboration for a documentary about campus rape, made her once again the pop equivalent of the striker you turn to when you absolutely have to score a penalty.

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Tsitsi Dangarembga’s next work won’t be read by anyone until 2114

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The Zimbabwean writer joins authors including Margaret Atwood and Ocean Vuong who have agreed to lock away new writing in the Future Library

Tsitsi Dangarembga made the Booker shortlist for her most recent novel, This Mournable Body, the story of a girl trying to make a life in post-colonial Zimbabwe which was praised as “magnificent” and “sublime”. Her next work, however, is likely to receive fewer accolades: it will not be revealed to the world until 2114.

The Zimbabwean writer is the eighth author selected for the Future Library project, an organic artwork dreamed up by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson. It began in 2014 with the planting of 1,000 Norwegian spruces in a patch of forest outside Oslo. Paterson is asking one writer a year to contribute a manuscript to the project – “the length of the piece is entirely for the author to decide” – with Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong and Karl Ove Knausgård already signed up. The works, unseen by anyone but the writers themselves, will be kept in a room lined with wood from the forest in the Deichman library in Oslo. One hundred years after Future Library was launched, in 2114, the trees will be felled, and the manuscripts printed for the first time.

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Candyman review – BLM horror reboot is superb confection of satire and scorn

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Nia DaCosta’s quasi reboot develops the horror myth as an expression of rage against racism in the era of Black Lives Matter

Candyman, in its first incarnation, stepped daintily out of the mirror in 1992, in writer-director Bernard Rose’s US-set version of the Clive Barker novella The Forbidden, a parable of English class shame set in a Liverpool housing estate. Rose shifted the locale to Chicago’s deprived Cabrini-Green projects, switched the racial identity of the demon from white to black and gave filmgoers that inspired premise of exactly how he is summoned by rash unbelievers and giggling teens. Since then, Candyman has spawned sequels, references, memes and gags: such as Handyman – say his name five times in the mirror and he shows up three hours later and does a horrific job on your boiler.

Related: Candyman’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II: ‘Black people are so much more than our trauma’

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How John Cage, the great disrupter, had the last laugh – by writing beautiful music

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Late in life, maverick composer Cage decided to stop finding ‘alternatives to harmony’. The results have been rediscovered by a new generation of musicians

In the summer of 1990 John Cage gave a lecture at the International New Music gathering in Darmstadt, Germany, and effectively admitted defeat. The then 76-year-old US composer announced that his philosophical ideas of freedom and collaboration, concepts built into his avant garde musical compositions since the 1950s, had failed to influence reality. The world had got worse, not better. It was “a life spent … beating my head against a wall”, he announced. There was, however, one consolation. “I no longer consider it necessary to find alternatives to harmony,” he said. “After all these years I am finally writing beautiful music.”

Cage was referring to his Number Pieces, around 40 late works named after the quantity of performers involved (from 1 to 101) in which individual musicians could choose when and how long to play (within designated time brackets) resulting in often quiet and meditative pieces, a marked contrast to the previous, often abrasive compositions he’d built his 40-year reputation on.

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Charlie Watts: a rock’n’roll legend whose true love was jazz

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He may have backed the world’s most successful rock band, but the late drummer worshipped his jazz heroes through big bands and other projects

Everyone knew that Charlie Watts’s heart was always in jazz. Even when he grew his hair long and put on hippie garb while the Rolling Stones were going through their Satanic Majesties period, underneath he was still the cool bebopper who could see through the nonsense that surrounded his group and the rampaging egos at its heart.

Wisely, he never let his true musical allegiance show in his playing with the Stones. When they recruited him from Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated in January 1963, not long after he’d been serving an apprenticeship with trad jazz bands, he listened to the records of Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters in order to absorb the way that master Chicago blues drummers such as Earl Phillips, Fred Below and Elgin Evans kept things simple, soon appreciating that simplicity is often the hardest thing of all to achieve.

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Baby on Nevermind cover sues Nirvana over child sexual exploitation

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Spencer Elden, who appeared at four months old on iconic album design, claims the image is child pornography

Spencer Elden, who appeared as a naked baby on one of rock music’s most iconic album covers – Nevermind by Nirvana – is suing the band, claiming he was sexually exploited as a child.

In a lawsuit filed in a Californian district court against numerous parties, including the surviving members of the band, Kurt Cobain’s widow Courtney Love, and the record labels that released or distributed the album in the last three decades, Elden alleges the defendants produced child pornography with the image, which features him swimming naked towards a dollar bill with his genitalia visible.

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Hong Kong to scour old films for subversive themes under new censorship law

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Movies deemed a security threat can bring penalties of up to three years’ jail under stricter law that also covers previously approved titles

Hong Kong will scrutinise past films for national security breaches under a tough new censorship law in the latest blow to the city’s political and artistic freedoms.

Authorities announced in June that the financial hub’s censorship board would check any future films for content that breached the security law. But on Tuesday they unveiled a new, hardened censorship law that would also cover any titles that had previously been given a green light.

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Charlie Watts: the calm, brilliant eye of the Rolling Stones’ rock’n’roll storm

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Unruffled amid excess, personality clashes and musical disputes, the Rolling Stones’ exceptional drummer used technique to deepen the meaning and power of their songs

By any standards, Charlie Watts was an unlikely candidate for rock stardom.

He was quiet, drily funny and unfailingly modest, characteristics theoretically better suited to his initial profession as a graphic designer than the scream-rent world of 60s pop. Furthermore, by his own admission, he didn’t particularly care for rock’n’roll (“I didn’t know anything about it … I used to hate Elvis Presley. Miles Davis – that’s what I considered someone,” he told an interviewer in 1993) and had initially had to have the rhythm and blues so beloved of his bandmates explained to him: “I didn’t know what it was. I thought it meant Charlie Parker, played slow”.

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