Category Archives: Culture

Kristen Stewart says Hollywood’s self-congratulation over gender equality ‘feels phony’

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The actor said that making movies by a small number of female film-makers was not cause for celebration. ‘You’re like, OK, cool. You’ve chosen four’

Kristen Stewart has chastised Hollywood’s efforts at gender equality, saying that the industry clapping itself on the back for an embrace of female film-makers “feels phony”.

Speaking to Porter magazine for the release of Love Lies Bleeding, a violent romance set in the world of female bodybuilding, Stewart said much of the high-profile greenlighting of female stories was lip service.

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Man arrested for attempted break-in at Drake’s Toronto mansion

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Incident comes the day after a shooting outside the rapper’s home in which a security guard was seriously injured

A man has been arrested after trying to gain access to Drake’s Toronto mansion, the day after a security guard at the property was seriously injured in a shooting.

“Officers were called after a person attempted to gain access to the property,” Toronto police said in a statement. “The person was apprehended under the Mental Health Act, and they were taken to receive medical attention.”

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Drukkje min broderѕ blod! Why the best Eurovision songs are no longer in English

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While Europe’s lingua franca remains dominant, there has been a definite shift since a Portuguese song triumphed in 2017

There was a time when in order to win Eurovision you had to “fly on the wings of love”, “take me to your heaven” or “sail into infinity while reaching for divinity”. This year, however, there’s a fair chance the winner will estar comiendo el mundo (be eating the world), ridere in queste notti bruciate (laugh in these burnt nights), or even drukkje min broderѕ blod (drink my brother’s blood).

The metaphors may have been mixed, but for the first two decades of the 21st century, the English language reigned supreme at the Eurovision song contest. In the run-up to the millennium, the so-called language rule restricted English songs to countries that counted it among their official languages, such as Britain, Ireland and Malta. But when the rule was scrapped in 1999, the floodgates opened.

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Steve Albini, US alt-rock musician and producer, dies aged 61

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Vocalist, guitarist and producer for bands such as Nirvana and Pixies suffers heart attack at his recording studio

Steve Albini, the vocalist, guitarist and producer who helmed a series of the most esteemed albums across the US alternative music scene, has died aged 61 from a heart attack suffered at his recording studio. Staff at his studio, Electrical Audio, confirmed the news to Pitchfork.

As well as fronting the bands Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac, who all pushed at the boundaries of post-punk and art-rock, Albini also produced – or, to use his preferred term, engineered – albums by Nirvana, Pixies, PJ Harvey and Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. He was noted for his DIY and punk ethos, resisting streaming services and refusing to take royalties from the recordings he produced for other artists.

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Flooding in Brazil: then and now – in pictures

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Devastating floods in Rio Grande do Sul state have about left 90 dead with survivors seeking food and shelter

Heavy rains that began last week have caused rivers to flood, inundating whole towns and destroying roads and bridges across the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.

The local civil defence agency said the death toll had risen to 90, while 131 people were unaccounted for with 155,000 homeless. A state of emergency has been declared in 397 of Rio Grande do Sul’s 497 towns and cities as rescue efforts continue.

The Taquari River in Rio Grande do Sul. Photographs: Maxar Technologies/AFP/Getty Images

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Drake’s security guard ‘seriously injured’ in shooting at Toronto mansion

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Guard was shot inside Drake’s home and had serious but non-life-threatening injuries, while the assailant fled in a vehicle

A security guard at the mansion of Canadian hip-hop artist Drake has been “seriously injured” in a shooting outside the musician’s Toronto home.

The victim, an adult male, was rushed to a Toronto hospital with serious but non-life-threatening injuries following the shooting early on Tuesday morning.

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‘Magical moment’ as fire-ravaged Brazil museum receives big fossil donation

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Collection of more than 1,000 fossils including rare dinosaurs given to National Museum in Rio six years after devastating blaze

Nearly six years after it was engulfed by a devastating fire that inflicted incalculable damage on Brazil’s cultural heritage, the country’s national museum has received an important donation of more than a thousand fossils as part of a campaign to help rebuild the collection lost to the flames.

The fire, caused by an electrical short-circuit on the night of 2 September 2018, consumed the former imperial palace which housed the 200-year-old museum in a park just north of Rio de Janeiro’s city centre and destroyed about 85% of its archive of 20m artefacts.

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Rufus Wainwright blames UK’s ‘narrow outlook’ after Brexit for Opening Night’s flop

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Exclusive: Audience had ‘vitriolic reaction’ to European tone of musical, forced to close early

Rufus Wainwright has defended his musical Opening Night, which was forced to close early after mixed reviews, saying West End audiences lack “curiosity” after Brexit and the British press had turned on the project because it was “too European”.

Opening Night was Wainwright’s first musical and is an adaptation of John Cassavetes’ 1977 film about an actor struggling to cope, who is played by Sheridan Smith. Directed by Ivo van Hove, it opened in March at the Gielgud theatre but a month later announced it would be closing two months early.

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‘An exceptional experience’: Adrian Dunbar to curate Samuel Beckett festival in Liverpool

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Line of Duty actor will oversee classic plays as well as new pieces inspired by the Irish author in Beckett: Unbound 2024

Adrian Dunbar is to curate a festival in Liverpool dedicated to the work of Samuel Beckett. The programme includes four specially commissioned productions, one involving prisoners at HMP Liverpool.

The Line of Duty actor said of Beckett: Unbound 2024: “Engaging with Beckett makes you think about the fundamentals of life. Those fundamentals are sometimes hard to engage with, but at the end, when he drives everything to a conclusion, he also makes you feel something that is liberating.”

Beckett: Unbound, Liverpool and Paris, 30 May–7 June

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Guernica-style battle of Orgreave painting stars in miners’ strikes exhibition

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Bob Olley’s unsettling vision of clash between miners and police is part of 40th anniversary show in Bishop Auckland

Bob Olley was there 40 years ago at the “battle of Orgreave”. “I saw the violence,” he said, shaking his head. “I thought I was in a foreign country when I saw what the police did. It is hard to believe it happened in this country.”

The brutality he and others witnessed on 18 June 1984 as striking miners met 6,000 police officers on horses or wielding batons on foot will stay in the memory. It was in his head as, some years later, he embarked on his response to one of the world’s greatest artworks, Picasso’s Guernica.

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Drake denies allegations by Kendrick Lamar of underage sex and harbouring secret child

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Drake says ‘I feel disgusted’ by allegations, as enmity between rap superstars deepens following weekend flurry of diss tracks

Drake has denied allegations of child sex offences and of him harbouring a secret child, both levelled at him by Kendrick Lamar in recent days.

The enmity between the rap superstars has escalated over a series of diss tracks in the past few weeks, culminating in a flurry of activity during the weekend with three tracks by Lamar and two by Drake.

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Free Madonna concert draws crowd of 1.6m to Brazil’s Copacabana beach

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Area around Rio de Janeiro beach filled for several blocks as singer closes her Celebration world tour

With the world-famous statue towering over it from Corcovado mountain, Rio de Janeiro is well used to Christ the Redeemer. For one night only this weekend, it also had Madonna.

More than a million people thronged Copacabana beach on Saturday night, turning its vast stretch of sand into a massive dancefloor for a free concert by the pop star as she completed her world tour.

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‘We’re so much more than that’: Stormzy opens #MerkyFC HQ centre to tackle racial inequality in football jobs

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Rapper says sport, music and gaming venture in south London is aimed at widening opportunities for young black community

Stormzy has won three Brit awards, headlined Glastonbury, persuaded Usain Bolt and José Mourinho to star in a music video, and bought AFC Croydon Athletic with the former Crystal Palace player Wilfried Zaha.

His skills on the pitch, however, are not up to much. “I’m shit at football. I was never going to be a footballer,” he said. “But maybe if I knew how to be a pundit [I’d have gone down that road]. Maybe if I knew how to be a data analyst or all the intricate jobs behind the scenes that people might not know about.”

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Sabrina Carpenter: how the Espresso singer became a piping hot pop prospect

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She’s set to depose Taylor Swift from No 1 and has the most-streamed song in the world this week – the culmination of a decade of slow-burn success

Capped with one of the most brilliantly nonsensical chorus lines in pop history – “That’s that me, espresso” – Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso is the most streamed song in the world this week, deposed Taylor Swift as the UK’s No 1 single yesterday and is shaping up to be the critics’ pick for the song you won’t be able to escape this summer.

Since its release in mid-April, this irresistible shot of nu-disco has been steadily climbing the charts to become one of the only tracks holding its own against the tidal wave of songs from Taylor Swift’s double-disc The Tortured Poets Department. Carpenter was recently released from Swift’s Eras tour juggernaut, having supported the superstar on her dates in Latin America, Australia and Singapore. Anointed by Swift as a “sweet angel princess”, she is now rising through the ranks to become pop royalty in her own right.

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‘Exceptional’: rare books of illustrations from Darwin’s ‘bird man’ on sale for £2m

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The set of folios published by John Gould will be presented at Firsts book fair in London in mid-May

John Gould was one of the most sought-after taxidermists in 19th-century London, commissioned by King George IV to stuff the first giraffe to arrive in England.

But Gould’s lasting legacy is birds. He travelled the world documenting and cataloguing as many avian species as he could find, many of them never seen before, earning him the nickname the Bird Man and the appointment as official “bird stuffer” to the Zoological Society.

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‘We are disappearing’: chef Fadi Kattan aims to keep Palestinian heritage alive through food

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Palestinian restauranteur speaks from Bethlehem, where food stalls are sparse as farmlands are under attack

Fadi Kattan looked forlornly at the stalls inside the Bethlehem vegetable market bearing small quantities of oranges, watermelons and cauliflowers. “This stall should be heaped with products, he said. “And over there should be piles of aubergines and courgettes.”

The watermelons from Jenin looked too small for the season, while he wasn’t sure where the boxes of oranges were from. They would normally be from Gaza. At Um Nabil’s stall in the West Bank market where Kattan is a regular customer, she told him she could no longer afford to bring in the best small local cucumbers or piles of green cherries from her village of Artas.

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Manchester Co-op Live cancels opening concert again after ‘technical issue’

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Some fans of A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie were already at the arena, which has been beset by delays, when the gig was called off

The troubled Co-op Live arena has again cancelled its opening concert at the last minute because of a “technical issue”.

The US rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie’s show was supposed to be the first official event at the 23,500-capacity Manchester venue, after several shows were cancelled or postponed in the past two weeks.

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Dorset auction house withdraws Egyptian human skulls from sale

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MP says trade in remains is ‘gross violation of human dignity’, as skulls from Pitt Rivers collection removed

An auction house has withdrawn 18 ancient Egyptian human skulls from sale after an MP said selling them would perpetuate the atrocities of colonialism.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Afrikan reparations, believes the sale of human remains for any purposes should be outlawed, adding that the trade was “a gross violation of human dignity”.

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Kendrick Lamar responds to Drake with diss track Euphoria in escalating feud

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Euphoria is the latest in the hip-hop heavyweights’ fight via songs, which has now drawn in some of the biggest names in rap

Kendrick Lamar has released a new diss track against Drake titled Euphoria – the latest in a long-running feud between the two hip-hop heavyweights which was reignited earlier this year and has since ballooned into a “civil war” among rap’s upper echelons.

The song, which shares a name with the HBO series on which Drake serves as executive producer, was released on Lamar’s YouTube channel on Tuesday.

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‘The model is broken’: Brisbane live music venue the Zoo to close after 32 years

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Fortitude Valley institution and sister venue Stranded will soon shut as owner cites cost-of-living pressures and young people drinking less

The Brisbane music venue the Zoo will call last drinks in July, with the owner listing a “perfect storm” of forces leading to its closure, including cost-of-living pressures and declining alcohol consumption among young people.

The 500-capacity room, which first opened its doors on Ann Street in 1992 in the formerly down-at-heel but now heavily gentrified inner suburb of Fortitude Valley, is one of Australia’s oldest music venues.

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