Category Archives: Culture

Irish battleship to fly Munster flag as part of Bloomsday celebrations

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Annual celebration of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses will see dream of ‘citizen’ character played out for real

The cantankerous xenophobe referred to as the “citizen” in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses seems poised to finally get his wish after more than a century.

In Joyce’s literary masterpiece, set in Dublin on 16 June 1904, the character rails against foreigners, Jews and the “thicklugged” English and yearns for an Irish battleship to fly the flag of the province of Munster, which shows three crowns on a blue field.

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Bard day’s work: what I learned from eavesdropping on RSC rehearsals

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The Royal Shakespeare Company is letting the public watch the usually secret processes towards performance – from clapping games to verse sessions

The creative process normally takes place behind closed doors. But the RSC has boldly upended that idea by streaming its Open Rehearsal Project for Henry VI Part One. What this means, in practice, is that cameras are admitted for three sessions each day. At 10am we watch a half-hour company warm-up. From noon, for 90 minutes, we get to see either a class (movement, combat, verse-speaking) or the rehearsal of a scene. Then at 6pm we eavesdrop on a green-room chat, in which company members mull over progress so far. After dipping in and out for the first fortnight – and there’s still more than a week to go before a streamed performance on 23 June – I’m intrigued by how much I’ve learned.

But are open rehearsals a good idea? There was a pivotal moment when Gregory Doran – who shares direction of the project with Owen Horsley – quoted a letter he’d received from an actor who said “the rehearsal room is sacrosanct – actors must not be exposed like this”. I spoke to a veteran actor who said she too was horrified by the idea of the public witnessing the trial and error that takes place in a rehearsal room.

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The Viewing Booth review – seeing is believing in the Israel-Palestine conflict

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Volunteers respond to politically polarised film footage from Israel and the Palestinian territories in this critical look at interpretation

Even though he tries to maintain a cool, scientific demeanour, Israeli director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz finally lets slip a twinge of despair at the end of this interesting geopolitical Rorschach test. Alexandrowicz sits studiously behind a monitor as he invites a succession of volunteers to enter an adjacent booth. There, they have a choice of 40 clips to watch, snippets of life in Israel, while he asks them to share their thoughts on what they see. Half of the clips are from rightwing Israeli sources; the other half are from B’Tselem, an Israeli human-rights organisation that aims to document abuses of power in Palestinian territories.

Alexandrowicz quickly zeroes in on the pensive Maia, a Jewish American who supports Israel, but brings an insistent scepticism to everything she watches. He is the director of pro-Palestine documentaries such as The Inner Tour (2001) and The Law in These Parts (2011) – and believes her to be his ideal audience: a possible convert.

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Ned Beatty: the good ol’ boy who made playing the ordinary guy look easy

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From his breakthrough in Deliverance to a memorable turn in Toy Story 3, the authenticity of Beatty’s middleman gone bad made him the perfect co-star – and often stole the show

If ever a character actor personified the “good ol’ boy” archetype of Hollywood’s new cinema of the 1970s it was Ned Beatty from Louisville, Kentucky, whose broad, open, good-natured face seemed so often to be covered with a sheen of sweat – either from suppressed guilt, or tension, from discomfort in whatever sweltering southern clime he happened to find himself. His was a smiley face bounded by its prosperous double-chin and nascent combover, a face that lent reality and approachability to the movies: an authentic and worldly presence.

Ned Beatty had the hardest role to play: the middle-ranking ordinary guy: lawyer, cop, official, politician and maybe, effectively, the wingman to the conventionally better-looking male leads, and in his 70s movie heyday this tended to mean Burt Reynolds, with whom he starred in six films, including, of course, Beatty’s brilliant and brutal breakthrough: Deliverance (1972), written by James Dickey and directed by John Boorman, in which Reynolds’s sinister alpha male businessman leads his buddies Beatty, Jon Voight and Ronny Cox on a vacation canoeing trip through the deepest Georgia wilderness only to come into horrible contact with hillbillies playing banjos and bearing grudges.

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The Great Dissenter review: a superb life of John Marshall Harlan, champion of equality

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not the only great supreme court justice to have made her name with dissent in the name of progress

The late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent collar is a small part of a larger history. Unlike some other high courts, the US supreme court accepts strong dissent. Ginsburg stood in the tradition of John Marshall Harlan – the only justice with the courage, foresight, humanity and constitutional vision to object to the odious 1896 Plessy v Ferguson decision that approved racial segregation.

Related: How the Word is Passed review: After Tulsa, other forgotten atrocities

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How did a £120 painting become a £320m Leonardo … then vanish?

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A film about the disputed Salvator Mundi blames the National Gallery for its role in giving credibility to the claim that it was the artist’s lost work

The National Gallery is facing controversy over its role in the tangled story of how the world’s most expensive painting emerged from obscurity before being sold for a staggering £320m, only to vanish again from the public eye.

The gallery exhibited the Salvator Mundi in its Leonardo da Vinci exhibition a decade ago when it was an unknown work with doubts about its attribution, restoration and ownership.

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Brandon Taylor: ‘I grew up reading my aunt’s nursing-home manuals and bodice-rippers’

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The Booker-shortlisted novelist on teaching himself to read, critics who say he’s not nice enough to white people, and why the Bible still haunts him

Brandon Taylor, 32, grew up in Alabama and studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He was shortlisted for last year’s Booker prize with his debut, Real Life, a campus novel about a gay black biochemist. His new book, Filthy Animals, is a series of linked stories loosely centred on the sexual tension between Lionel, a black maths postgraduate, and two white dance students, Charles and Sophie. The writer Paul Mendez has called Taylor “a phenomenon… the laureate of young, expensively educated people... pleasuring and harming themselves and each other”. He spoke to me over Zoom from his home in Iowa City.

Did you consciously set out to broaden your range in these stories?
I wrote the bulk of them in 2016, before writing Real Life, but I was revising the collection just as Real Life was being shortlisted for the Booker. After the challenge of writing that novel from one character’s perspective over one weekend, I found that when I came back to the stories I had more confidence to play around: the central thread of the collection is that Lionel meets these two dancers at a party, so I got to have different point-of-view characters circling one another, which was nice after the hermetic severity of Real Life.

In one story, a black protagonist recounts his boyhood trauma because white people have “a vast hunger for the calamities of others”…
A black student on my creative writing programme criticised that line heavily, but it seemed so true to me. I was trying to work out my feelings about black subjectivity as it would be consumed on the page by progressive white liberals – as a black person, am I complicit in the consumption of my own calamity? Like, I profit from it in some ways and not in others; I was trying to put down some of what that feels like, when there are white people ready to consume your story and give you a scholarship for having a tragic past or whatever. Real Life was all about what happens when you take white people up on their very kind offer to pay for your education because they feel sorry for you.

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David Eagleman: ‘The working of the brain resembles drug dealers in Albuquerque’

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The neuroscientist, broadcaster and author on the evolution of the brain, the mystery of consciousnesss, and why the next generation will be much smarter than us

David Eagleman, 50, is an American neuroscientist, bestselling author and presenter of the BBC series The Brain, as well as co-founder and chief executive officer of Neosensory, which develops devices for sensory substitution. His area of speciality is brain plasticity, and that is the subject of his new book, Livewired, which examines how experience refashions the brain, and shows that it is a much more adaptable organ than previously thought.

For the past half-century or more the brain has been spoken of in terms of a computer. What are the biggest flaws with that particular model?
It’s a very seductive comparison. But in fact, what we’re looking at is three pounds of material in our skulls that is essentially a very alien kind of material to us. It doesn’t write down memories, the way we think of a computer doing it. And it is capable of figuring out its own culture and identity and making leaps into the unknown. I’m here in Silicon Valley. Everything we talk about is hardware and software. But what’s happening in the brain is what I call livewire, where you have 86bn neurons, each with 10,000 connections, and they are constantly reconfiguring every second of your life. Even by the time you get to the end of this paragraph, you’ll be a slightly different person than you were at the beginning.

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Neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth: ‘Coronavirus has changed us all’

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The neuroscientist and psychiatrist explains Zoom fatigue - and why the conditions of the pandemic can induce an ‘altered state’

The coronavirus pandemic has been a disorienting kind of emergency. It is a generation-defining cataclysm, but for many of us the day-to-day reality has been lonely, even dull. It is a call to action, but the most useful thing most of us can do is stay at home. Covid-19 is a disease that attacks the lungs, but it has also worsened mental health while causing a drastic reduction in patients seeking care for depression, self-harm, eating disorders and anxiety. Whatever path the pandemic takes from here, says Karl Deisseroth, the pioneering American neuroscientist, psychiatrist, bioengineer and now author, “Coronavirus has affected us all and it has changed us all. There’s no doubt about that.”

Deisseroth, 49, is talking in the lush, squirrel-filled garden of his house in Palo Alto, northern California, where he has spent much of the pandemic looking after his four young children. But he has had much else on his mind. He has been finishing his book, Connections: A Story of Human Feeling, an investigation into the nature of human emotions. He has been meeting with psychiatric patients over Zoom as well as putting in night shifts as an emergency hospital psychiatrist. And he has fitted all of this around his day job, which is using tiny fibre-optic cables to fire lasers into the brains of mice that he has infected with cells from light-sensitive algae and then observing what happens, millisecond by millisecond, when he turns individual neurons on or off.

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My husband’s death inspired It’s a Sin scene, says Russell T Davies

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In new Guardian podcast, TV dramatist tells Grace Dent about writing Colin’s final hours

Russell T Davies, the writer of It’s a Sin, the Channel 4 drama about the HIV/Aids epidemic in the late 1980s, has revealed that the death of Colin, one of show’s characters, was partly based on the death of his partner.

Speaking to the food writer Grace Dent on a new Guardian podcast, Comfort Eating, which launches on Tuesday, Davies said he had drawn on the experience of watching his husband, Andrew Smith, die from brain cancer in 2018 to write the scenes featuring Colin’s death.

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Finding fangs: new film exposes illicit trade killing off Bolivia’s iconic jaguar

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Undercover documentary investigates the trafficking of Latin America’s big cat to meet demand in China

Elizabeth Unger was a 25-year-old biology graduate working as a PhD research assistant for big cat and climate projects in Latin America when she heard about the Bolivian authorities intercepting dozens of packages containing jaguar fangs sent by Chinese citizens to addresses in China.

“I was really blown away as [the story] was completely under the radar,” she says. Six years later, she is making her directorial debut with a film about the trade, which is contributing to a decline in the population of Latin America’s iconic big cat.

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Lorde’s comeback single is a lesson in letting pop stars take their time

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Solar Power delivers a statement of loose-limbed maturity from a mercurial star who is much imitated but utterly unique

Lorde has said she was “waiting for the right moment” to release her comeback single, Solar Power, and opted for 11 June to coincide with the year’s only solar eclipse (although leaks may have forced her hand). Her chosen date resonates beyond the obvious thematic associations of her hazy, sun-worshipping comeback single and its cheeky cover art.

Pop stars, especially young women, are expected to be available, relatable, always on. Lorde has defied this with an old-school release rate (just three albums in nine years) and such a low-key public presence that a recent update of her Instagram account on which she reviews onions rings generated headlines. (She benefits, too, from New Zealand’s minimal paparazzi culture.) The rare arrival of new music from the 24-year-old, last heard from in 2017, has come to feel like its own celestial event.

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Bake Off to Inside No 9: what to watch instead of the Euros

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A football-free cultural guide to the week ahead, from comedy podcasts to Sean Bean dramas

Listen, I’m with you. I have no interest in Euro 2020 either. But luckily, over the years I’ve perfected the art of finding other things to do. Here’s a day-by-day alternative viewing guide for the first week of the tournament (after that, you’re on your own).

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The greatest ever songs of the summer – ranked!

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From Don Henley to Drake, we rate the hottest sounds of the season

For a fleeting moment Brooklyn’s the Drums were the skinny jean-sporting indie band du jour. This is their crowning moment, all pogoing bass, petal-soft whistle riffs and a lyric about waking up on a sunny morning and running to the beach. “Oh mama I don’t care about nothing” feels like a very summer 2021 mantra, too.

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Eurovision winners Måneskin: ‘Cocaine? Damiano barely drinks beer!’

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Already multiplatinum in their native Italy, the swaggering rock quartet now have two singles in the UK chart. They discuss their rise to success – and that drug-taking allegation

Before their momentous Eurovision victory with Zitti e Buoni, placing Italian rock back on the world stage and earning praise from Simon Le Bon and Miley Cyrus; before a baseless accusation of snorting cocaine almost veered into a full-blown diplomatic crisis; and before their post-win ping-pong tournament became a twee secondary narrative, the Italian band Måneskin had already raised eyebrows in Rotterdam, this year’s host city.

After a rehearsal session ended late, says the bassist, Victoria De Angelis, they were parched – but realised there was no drinking water in their hotel rooms. “We went to the hotel reception, but they said there was no water around,” De Angelis says. “So we made it into the kitchen and took some.”

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Voluntourism: new book explores how volunteer trips harm rather than help

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‘Don’t do as we did,’ says Pippa Biddle, who highlights colonial structure of industry where unqualified Western tourists pay to volunteer abroad

Seven years ago, Pippa Biddle wrote a blog post about volunteering abroad. She recounted her struggles speaking Spanish to children living with HIV in the Dominican Republic and how local people in Tanzania would spend all night redoing the construction work she and her classmates had done poorly.

“Taking part in international aid where you aren’t particularly helpful is not benign,” Biddle wrote. “It’s detrimental.”

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‘Father of African cinema’ Ousmane Sembène at work – in pictures

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A look back at the career of Senegal-born film director Ousmane Sembène as his 1968 film Mandabi is released in the UK for the first time

•Mandabi is released on 11 June in cinemas, and on 28 June on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital platforms.

•Peter Bradshaw on Mandabi: classic about colonialism resonates today

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Acropolis now: Greeks outraged at concreting of ancient site

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Installation of new pathway and lift has been criticised by archaeologists and called ‘a scandal’

When seen through the eyes of Manolis Korres, the architect who has long presided over the restoration of the Parthenon, the Acropolis needs no improvement at all.

In the face of such architectural mastery, he thinks of himself more as a maestro of order, making a monument that has survived explosions, fire, looting and earthquakes more understandable to the public.

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My Amazon rainforest angel: Claudia Andujar’s best photograph

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‘When I first visited the Yanomami tribe, they were completely isolated – they hadn’t seen a camera and didn’t know what photography was’

It was 1971 when I photographed the Yanomami tribe of Brazil for the first time. I knew that it would take time to build our relationship, but I wanted to see if we could become friends. For me, the best photographers are those who are truly interested in their subjects.

The Yanomami is a big population of indigenous people who live in the Amazon rainforest in northern Brazil and southern Venezuela; several thousand live in Brazil alone. A small village can be as few as 40 people, or a big one as many as 200. When I first went to the Yanomami villages, the tribe was completely isolated – some still are today. At that time, 50 years ago, they hadn’t seen a camera and didn’t even know what photography was.

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