Category Archives: Culture

‘A very dangerous way to run a show’: reclusive Simpsons writer speaks out

Posted on by

John Swartzwelder, known for creating some of the best Simpsons episodes, has opened up about the show’s heyday – and why Homer is a big talking dog

The reclusive Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder, who is credited with creating some of the most popular episodes in the show’s 31-year history, has given his first interview since leaving the hit series 18 years ago.

The screenwriter, who wrote 59 episodes between 1990 and 2003 – including the James Bond parody You Only Move Twice and Homer the Great, which memorably featured the Stonecutters sect – spoke to the New Yorker’s Mike Sacks via email. Introducing his subject, Sacks described Swartzwelder as a cult figure for his offbeat work on the show, “conjuring dark characters from a strange, old America: banjo-playing hobos, cigarette-smoking ventriloquist dummies … pantsless, singing old-timers”.

Continue reading...

‘I did the vocals in the nude’ – the Bangles on how they made Eternal Flame

Posted on by

‘It felt like skinny-dipping,’ says singer Susanna Hoffs. ‘I ended up doing it for most of the album’

In 1988, it felt like the Bangles had been touring endlessly. Our second album, Different Light, with the singles Manic Monday and Walk Like an Egyptian, had been released two years earlier. Now, finally, we could take a break from living on buses together.

Continue reading...

Zimdancehall dreams: the back yard studios helping Harare get heard

Posted on by

Infectious hits produced on a shoestring allow Zimbabwe’s aspiring musicians to express their struggles and dream big

Inside a grimy flat in Mbare, Zimbabwe’s oldest township in the capital Harare, about 10 young musicians nervously rehearse their lyrical chants as they wait to be called into the recording booth.

Many celebrated musicians in Zimbabwe have been born out of this old flat. For those here now, this is their one shot at stardom, or at least a future in music.

Continue reading...

It’s a hard sell but Africa must invest in art and imagination

Posted on by

Building an arts centre in Uganda, in a pandemic, was never going to be easy but it’s crucial to our post-Covid future

I’ve been raising funds for a building project: not a hospital, not a school, but an arts centre.

It’s not an easy sell at the best of times but add in a pandemic and the fact that I’m in Africa and, according to the current rules of financial engagement, art is the verylowest of priorities.

Continue reading...

‘I’m bursting with fiction’: Alan Moore announces five-volume fantasy epic

Posted on by

Exclusive: Watchmen and V for Vendetta writer lands six-figure deal for fantasy quintet Long London and short story collection

Two years after announcing that he had retired from comics, Alan Moore, the illustrious author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta, has signed a six-figure deal for a “groundbreaking” five-volume fantasy series as well as a “momentous” collection of short stories.

Bloomsbury, home to the Harry Potter novels, acquired what it described as two “major” projects from the 67-year-old. The first, Illuminations, is a short story collection which will be published in autumn 2022 and which moves from the four horsemen of the apocalypse to the “Boltzmann brains” fashioning the universe. Bloomsbury said it was “dazzlingly original and brimming with energy”, promising a series of “beguiling and elegantly crafted tales that reveal the full power of imagination and magic”.

Continue reading...

Crude, obscene and extraordinary: Jean Dubuffet’s war against good taste

Posted on by

He was the inventor of ‘art brut’ who rebelled against his parents, his teachers and then art itself. Yet the impact of his wild provocative paintings, often culled from graffiti, can still be seen today

Which great artist of the 20th century has been most influential on the 21st? Neither Picasso nor Matisse, as they have no heirs. And not Marcel Duchamp, however much we genuflect before his urinal. No, the artist of the last century whose ideas are everywhere today was a wine merchant who took street art and fashioned it into something extraordinary more than 75 years ago.

After four years of Nazi occupation, you’d think Parisians would have been unshockable. But in 1944, the newly liberated city was sorely provoked by the antics of Jean Dubuffet. Even as the last shots were fired, he was creating newspaper collages bearing the fragmentary graffiti messages he saw in the streets: “Emile is gone again”, “Always devoted to your orders”, “URGENT”. In the next couple of years, he unveiled shapeless, childlike paintings that abandoned all pretence at skill.

Continue reading...

Billie Eilish says all her age group have suffered sexual misbehaviour

Posted on by

US singer, 19, made claim in Vogue interview when discussing new single about abusive relationship

Billie Eilish has spoken about the prevalence of sexual exploitation of minors in an interview, saying “it’s everywhere”.

Speaking about her new single, Your Power, which addresses an abusive relationship between a minor and an older person, the 19-year-old singer told Vogue that all her peers had experienced some sort of sexual impropriety.

Continue reading...

Olympia Dukakis obituary

Posted on by
American stage and screen actor who won an Oscar for her role in the 1987 film Moonstruck

After more than two decades of distinguished work in the US theatre as an actor, director and teacher, and appearances in a dozen or so films, Olympia Dukakis, who has died aged 89, became hugely famous overnight by winning the best supporting actress Oscar in 1988 for her performance as Cher’s mother in the romantic film Moonstruck (1987).

The course of her career suggests that her ambitions never lay in the direction of Hollywood. Her theatrical credits read like the canon of classic and modern plays: she had roles in plays by Euripides, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, Lorca, Pirandello, Brecht, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, on and off Broadway, as well as in various regional theatres across the country. In films, she took on several character roles, making an impression in scores of pictures for more than half a century.

Continue reading...

Leigh-Anne Pinnock of Little Mix: ‘Being Black is my power. I want young Black girls to see that’

Posted on by

In her early days with the girl band, Pinnock felt invisible and couldn’t understand why. Then the role of race became clear

Leigh-Anne Pinnock has been living the pop star dream ever since she was 19 and stepped on to a stage to audition for The X Factor, singing Rihanna’s Only Girl (In the World). She has now spent almost a decade in one of the UK’s biggest girl groups. But she had a difficult start with Little Mix, and not because she didn’t get on with her bandmates. She felt “invisible”, and would regularly cry in front of her manager. “I just couldn’t seem to find my place, and didn’t know why,” she said in a magazine interview in 2018. “I didn’t feel like I had as many fans as the other girls. It was a strange feeling.” She had, at that point, finally realised what the trouble was. “I know there are girls of colour out there who have felt the same as me,” she said. “We have a massive problem with racism, which is built into our society.”

If she expected the interview to change anything, she was disappointed. “I really did feel as if it fell on closed ears,” she says today, speaking from the Surrey mansion she shares with her footballer fiance, Andre Gray. “It was almost like people just weren’t ready to talk about race then.”

Continue reading...

Substack: how the game-changer turned poacher

Posted on by

It started as a newsletter platform for unknown writers. Now it is becoming a media giant in its own right – with many of the problems it was supposed to avoid

Isabelle Roughol was done with her day job at LinkedIn and was ready to start something of her own. She quit in early 2020 and launched Borderline, a podcast and newsletter aimed at “defiant global citizens”, and to help her build it she became an early user of a new online service: Substack.

Substack has marketed itself aggressively to people such as Roughol as a new type of tech company, one that will let writers build their own brands and communities. The company offers software to help people set up free or paid-for newsletters and promises the people creating them that they can write what they want and that they own their own mailing list and can take it with them if they leave.

Continue reading...

Rafe Spall: ‘Madonna came up and started grinding me. A circle formed’

Posted on by

For all the standing ovations, Hollywood roles and parties with stars, nothing beats the rough and tumble of real life for actor Rafe Spall

The play was going well. It was going very well, a Broadway production of Pinter’s Betrayal, starring Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz as a married couple and Rafe Spall as her lover – the last thing Mike Nichols directed before he died. It was a hit; so much so that one night Madonna invited the cast round for dinner. “So I went to dinner,” says Spall.

He is telling the story with relish, leaning into his laptop camera as if we’re slightly pissed on a Sunday and our families have drifted off to watch telly. “And Madonna was dressed as Madonna, a gold grill and fingerless gloves. I was feeling quite confident, because I’ve just done the show and I was like, I’m going to pretend to Madonna that I’m not scared of her.” After dinner the tables were pushed to the side to make a dancefloor, “and Lourdes is on the iPad playing tunes. So I started dancing and Madonna came up and started, well… grinding me. Very close. I suppose ‘dutty wining’ would be the phrase? My wife was there… [actor Elize du Toit, they’ve been married since 2010, three kids, recently moved from London to Stroud] And she looked at me like, ‘The fuck?’ My torso was pouring with sweat. And in my mind I was saying, don’t back down. So I looked her in the eye and said to myself, ‘Yeah, this is me.’” Soon after, a dance circle formed. “With Madonna on a literal throne. And all of the dancers from her tour were in a circle around her. And she said, ‘Rafe, get in the circle!’ So I was like, ‘Don’t back down, this is you.’ So I got in the middle of the circle of Madonna and the best dancers in the world. And I danced in there for three minutes.”

Continue reading...

How Holbein left clever clue in portrait to identify Henry VIII’s queen

Posted on by

New evidence shows miniature long held to be of Catherine Howard could depict Henry’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves

Created in around 1540 by Hans Holbein, court painter to Henry VIII and one of the greatest portraitists of all time, the miniature is a prized treasure in the Royal Collection. But the sitter is unknown, with the artefact long catalogued merely as “Portrait of a Lady, perhaps Catherine Howard”, Henry VIII’s fifth queen.

Now, as a result of fresh research, she has been given a new identity: that of Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fourth wife. Art historian Franny Moyle has amassed evidence to show that this is the face of the noblewoman whom the king married in 1540 to form a political alliance.

Continue reading...

Practically perfect? How a new kind of nanny novel nails parents’ angst and anger

Posted on by

Class, race, politics and power are at the heart of modern nanny novels that explore the complex relationship between working mothers and the women they pay to look after their children

There’s a line at the opening of Kiley Reid’s hit debut, Such a Fun Age, that encapsulates the drama at the heart of the recent spate of nanny novels. Emira, a young black woman dressed for a night out, is stopped by a security guard in an upscale supermarket with Briar, the white child she looks after. It’s late, the guard wants to know where Briar’s parents are. He won’t let Emira leave with her. “But she’s my child right now,” she tells the guard. “I’m her sitter. I’m technically her nanny …”

Emira isn’t strictly a nanny. She doesn’t get the perks of a full-time job – health insurance, holidays. Later, she reflects that, “more than the racial bias, the night at Market Depot came back to her with a nauseating surge and a resounding declaration that hissed, You don’t have a real job.” But in many ways, Briar is her child. Emira is the one who spends time with Briar, who understands her. Alix, a blogger and influencer, relies on her daughter’s nanny completely, but she is also desperate to befriend “the quiet, thoughtful person she paid to love [Briar]”. In pursuing a friendship with Emira at the expense of her own children, Alix only succeeds in putting further distance between them. As Emira reflects, Briar is “this awesome, serious child who loves information and answers, and how could her own mother not appreciate the shit out of this?”

Continue reading...

How to Love Animals by Henry Mance review – the case against modern farming

Posted on by

Turning vegan ... a series of investigations, presented with humour and humility, into our contradictory relationships with pets, livestock and wildlife

While researching this book, Henry Mance worked briefly in an abattoir, or “a disassembly line”, as he aptly terms it. As he watched sheep being stunned, their throats slit and then hung up, still twitching, from metal hooks on a motorised track, Mance asked himself: “How did humans come to this?”

His book is an attempt to answer that question, as well as an exploration of how our attitudes to pets, livestock and wild animals have changed through history: “I wanted to know whether my love for animals was reflected in how I behaved, or whether – like my love for arthouse films – it was mainly theoretical.”

Continue reading...

Noel Clarke shows dropped as allegations shake TV industry

Posted on by

ITV and Sky halt programmes featuring actor accused of sexual harassment and bullying

Allegations of sexual harassment and bullying made against the actor-producer Noel Clarke have shaken the film and television industry, prompting two broadcasters to cancel popular shows he was starring in and launching a debate about the treatment of women on sets.

The allegations against Clarke also led to questions about the decision by Bafta (the British Academy of Film and Television Arts) to give the actor a special award for outstanding British contribution to cinema last month.

Continue reading...

How Bafta spent two weeks grappling with Noel Clarke dilemma

Posted on by

Academy says it was in ‘impossible’ situation, but it faces questions over delays in offering safeguarding to alleged victims

When Bafta announced its plan to give Noel Clarke the award for outstanding British contribution to cinema on 29 March 2021, the academy’s film committee chair, Marc Samuelson, described him as an “inspiration … [we] cannot think of a more deserving recipient for this year’s award”.

Others in Britain’s film industry disagreed. Within hours, Bafta was contacted jointly by three industry figures alerting it to the existence of several allegations of verbal abuse, bullying and sexual harassment against Clarke.

Continue reading...

‘It’s currently 1991’: why old Top of the Pops reruns continue to enchant

Posted on by

Fifteen years after it was axed, the iconic show is drawing in nostalgia junkies by offering eclectic music, dodgy lip-syncing ... and lockdown escapism

For many of us, it was the soundtrack to our childhood. The opening riff of Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love still inspires an atavistic excitement in full-grown adults decades on. On Thursday – and later Friday – evenings, warbling singers and preening boybands would be beamed into homes across the nation as we waited to see which artist would take that week’s coveted No 1 spot. But in 2006, after years of falling ratings, Top of the Pops was cancelled. As music and TV streaming fractured our collective viewing habits, the singles chart started to feel like an irrelevance and, therefore, so did TOTP.

Related: In sync: how the mime-ban stripped Top of the Pops of its charm

Continue reading...

Germany first to hand back Benin bronzes looted by British

Posted on by

Culture minister says country is facing up to ‘historic and moral responsibility’ by returning artefacts to Nigeria

Germany is to become the first country to hand back the Benin bronzes looted by British soldiers in the late 19th century, after the culture minister, Monika Grütters, announced it would start returning a “substantial” part of the artefacts held in its museums to Nigeria from next year.

“We face up to our historic and moral responsibility to shine a light and work on Germany’s historic past,” Grütters said after museum experts and political leaders struck an agreement at a summit on Thursday.

Continue reading...

‘Sexual predator’: actor Noel Clarke accused of groping, harassment and bullying by 20 women

Posted on by
  • Actor-producer categorically denies allegations from all 20 women
  • Bafta suspends outstanding contribution award and actor’s membership
  • Alleged misconduct including claims he secretly filmed naked audition
  • Doctor Who and Kidulthood star allegedly showed colleagues sexually explicit photos and videos of women

When Noel Clarke appeared on stage at the Royal Albert Hall on 10 April to collect his Bafta, the typically self-assured actor looked a little on edge. Viewers might have concluded that Clarke was simply overwhelmed: he was clutching one of the most prestigious accolades bestowed by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the prize for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema.

Yet there were other reasons why Clarke – and Bafta – may have felt preoccupied.

Continue reading...

Billie Eilish: Your Power review – chilling ballad seeps under your skin

Posted on by

For the first single from her hugely anticipated second album, Eilish uses a disarmingly dreamy sound to confront a man preying on a young woman

To say that Billie Eilish’s forthcoming third album is eagerly-awaited is an understatement. It wasn’t just that 2019’s triple-Grammy winning When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? was incredibly popular, although it was. Eilish was already a phenomenon among tweenage girls, but its commercial success – it went platinum or multi-platinum in 17 countries – catapulted her into a different sphere of fame, where everyone from Tyler, the Creator to Pete Townshend expressed their approval, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it among the greatest albums of all time and the producers of the James Bond franchise commissioned Eilish to sing the theme to No Time To Die.

What invites quite so much anticipation, though, is that its success clearly impacted on the music industry: you don’t have to look too far in 2021 to find Eilish acolytes, hastily signed in an attempt to mimic her success. The question of what the 19-year-old and her brother and co-collaborator Finneas do next – on an album that was apparently hastened by the Covid pandemic and the cancellation of Eilish’s world tour – is an intriguing one.

Continue reading...