Category Archives: Culture

RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under contestant apologises for past performances in blackface

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Two cast members of the Australia and New Zealand edition of the reality TV show have apologised for their past, after racially insensitive images resurfaced online

RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under has already been marred with controversy after two contestants apologised for past racially insensitive behaviour, one having performed in blackface multiple times.

Less than a week after the cast of the hit drag reality competition’s Australia and New Zealand iteration was announced, images emerged of contestant Anthony Price, known for his drag persona, Scarlet Adams, in multiple costumes appearing to imitate other cultures.

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Miraculous moment at a pagan festival: Alexey Vasilyev’s best photograph

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‘Yakutia is five times the size of France with a population of just 1 million. Snow lasts from October to April and there are practically no railways or roads. At these festivals, we become whole’

I grew up in Yakutia. It’s the largest region of Russia, five times the size of France, but with a population of only one million spread over three million square kilometres. The climate is severe and contrasting. In summer, it’s 40C; in winter -60C, with snow from October until mid-April. To go anywhere takes a long time – several hours in the car. There are practically no railways and few roads. It’s easier to fly from the far east to Moscow than it is to travel around. Half of the people are ethnic Sakha from Yakutia, half are Russians. The two communities don’t socialise much. The Russians mostly live in the Aldansky district, but their number is shrinking. Many are moving away to less harsh parts of the country.

As a documentary photographer, I want to record how people live here, what they do, what their problems are, what makes them happy. Each solstice we have a holiday called Ysyakh. It’s a pagan festival, an important part of our national identity and a moment when we become an organic whole. Because we are so spread out it’s often hard to feel any kind of unity. Yakutia’s brand is winter; I wanted to show summer. Participants dress up in national costume. Women wear long, flowing dresses decorated with flowers. It’s a moment when people are relaxed about being photographed. There’s still some paranoia in Russia about posing for a camera. It’s a bit of a Soviet hangover.

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‘Two boys snogging was revolutionary’: the greatest gay moments in cinema

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From Gus Van Sant to Maryam Keshavarz, Terence Davies to Andrew Haigh, film-makers and writers recall the charged scenes that moved and inspired them – and even helped nudge them out of the closet

Gus Van Sant, director of My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, To Die For, Milk

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Demi Lovato says she was raped as a teenager by someone she knew

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In a new docuseries, the singer says she was assaulted as a teen and after telling somebody, the rapist ‘never got taken out of the movie they were in’

Demi Lovato has said she was raped as a teenager while working for the Disney Channel in the late 2000s by someone who faced no repercussions when she revealed what happened. The singer does not say who the offender was, only that she “had to see this person all the time” afterwards.

Related: Demi Lovato says she had three strokes and heart attack after 2018 overdose

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Nest of Vampires review – a bloodless bid for the title of worst film ever

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This horror story about an MI5 agent and a gang supplying girls for ritual sacrifice is on a par with the monumentally terrible Plan 9 from Outer Space

There are bad movies, the kind of third-rate film-making we see all the time, and then there are transcendentally bad movies that can only result from deep, fanatical attachment to the material. Director, writer and producer Chris Sanders here achieves something on a par with Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space or Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. His Nest of Vampires is a little-England horror-thriller with a plot as over-larded as an Elvis sandwich, uniformly appalling acting, and the same almost beatific earnestness as those two legendary films.

MI5 agent Kit Valentine (Tom Fairfoot) leaves his London stamping ground to shake down some unnamed English town for a human trafficking ring that – after his wife is murdered – has abducted his daughter. He needs to get a move on, because the network sells off the girls to moneyed clients to butcher in satanic rituals. Not racy enough? Some of the criminals are also vampires who like a “nibble” on the customers. And Valentine is further up against it when his bosses reveal they are in cahoots. Tied to a chair, though, he has news for them: “You’re not the only secret society that operates within MI5.” Then his own canines turn extra-pointy.

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‘Sometimes the answer is to do nothing’: unflashy French duo take architecture’s top prize

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The Pritzker prize, once reserved for flamboyant creators of icons, has gone to Lacaton & Vassal, whose rallying cry is: ‘Never demolish, never remove – always add, transform and reuse’

When Lacaton & Vassal were commissioned to redesign a public square in Bordeaux, their response was unusual. The French architects told the client to leave it alone. They thought the square was perfectly good as it was, and that public money would be better spent elsewhere.

“When you go to the doctor,” said Jean-Philippe Vassal, “they might tell you that you’re fine, that you don’t need any medicine. Architecture should be the same. If you take time to observe, and look very precisely, sometimes the answer is to do nothing.” In Bordeaux, the architects’ diagnosis was that the square just needed some new gravel.

Vassal and his partner, Anne Lacaton, have built a 30-year career on knowing how to intervene with the most economical of means, for which they have now been recognised with the Pritzker prize, architecture’s highest honour. In an age of demolishing public housing and replacing it with shiny new carbon-hungry developments in the name of “regeneration”, Lacaton & Vassal have worked tirelessly to expand and upgrade existing buildings with surgical precision, transforming the lives of thousands of people in the process.

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‘Mixture of Jane’s trendy records!!!’: discover readers’ cherished mixtapes

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Following the death of Lou Ottens, creator of the cassette tape, Guardian readers share the romances, friendships and discoveries his invention generated

In 1992 I started a degree in civil engineering at the University of Surrey. I had no idea until the day I arrived that I would be sharing a room with Carol, also a civil engineering student. We had very different tastes in music. I loved the Cure and Led Zeppelin and Carol loved dance music. We created a mixtape of songs that we both liked – no mean feat, but we had to do something as I kept playing 29 Palms by Robert Plant and it drove Carol mad.

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‘Music is my life’: ban on schoolgirls singing in Afghanistan met with protest

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Government appears to backtrack on decree after women take to social media to sing in defiance under #IAmMySong hashtag

Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education appears to be backtracking on a decision to impose a nationwide singing ban on schoolgirls.

In a letter to school boards last week, which was leaked to the media, Kabul’s Education Department said girls aged 12 and above would no longer be able to sing at public events, unless the events were attended solely by women. The letter also stipulated that girls couldn’t be trained by a male music teacher.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray review – the ugly face of social media

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Available online
Eternal youth and beauty exist only online in this thoroughly modern adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s fable, which counts Stephen Fry and Joanna Lumley among its impressive cast

If Dorian Gray were reborn in our age, it seems entirely fitting that he would be a social media star obsessing over his image. So it makes great intuitive sense for this adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel to situate its protagonist in the centre of the digital whirl of 2021.

There is now no physical painting: the deal made with Basil Hallward allows Dorian eternal youth and beauty online, but age marks him in the real world, his face becoming etched with the ugliness of his accumulating misdeeds (snorting coke, catfishing and late night hookups). The pandemic is incorporated into the drama and enhances the storyline as Dorian wears his mask to cover his ageing face.

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Allen v Farrow review – a one-note pick over the bones of old investigations

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The HBO series arrives on Sky in the UK, but fails to dig deep and do more than regurgitate Mia and Dylan Farrow’s allegations against Woody Allen

Eight months after his relationship with not-quite-stepdaughter Soon-Yi was revealed in 1992, Woody Allen was accused of sexually abusing Dylan Farrow, his younger daughter with his partner Mia Farrow, when she was seven. Allen strongly denied all the allegations, as he has continued to do over the nearly 30 years since. But they fell on fertile soil. How could a man who could start an affair with his partner’s daughter not be capable of just about anything else, the argument went? A welter of publicity followed, claims (that no mother, especially one as devoted as Farrow, could possibly make such a thing up), counterclaims (that in fact she had done so, that Dylan was coached – which she denies, and that it was all an act of vengeance for the Soon-Yi affair), along with gossip and hearsay proliferated.

Dylan and her brother Ronan Farrow began speaking about the matter publicly themselves in 2014. This has disinterred old battle lines and occasioned new accounts from people who were close to the family at the time and from Moses, another of the Farrow children, which contradict either things they said at the time or the saintly mother narrative that seemed the most natural one. Meanwhile, doctors examined Dylan at the time and found no evidence to support Farrow’s contention, and Allen was investigated by the Yale New Haven hospital’s child sexual abuse clinic and the New York State’s social services department, who reached similar conclusions.

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Canadian lobbyists attack Netflix children’s film for ‘anti-oil propaganda’

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Canadian Energy Centre, funded by Alberta government, says Bigfoot Family ‘brainwashes’ youngsters and ‘peddles lies’

The animated film Bigfoot Family has come under fire in Canada – but not because of its stilted dialogue or confusing plot.

Instead, a government-funded lobbying group has targeted the movie – a fantasy epic featuring a human family whose father is Bigfoot – on the grounds that it “peddles lies” about the oil and gas industry.

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Disc-go: Should you get rid of your CDs?

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They’re ugly and they clog up your cupboards. But just like vinyl spun back into fashion, the compact disc could too

In the Guide’s weekly Solved! column, we look into a crucial pop-culture question you’ve been burning to know the answer to – and settle it, once and for all

When compact discs started arriving on the shelves of Woolworths in the 1980s, liberated boomers set about chucking out all the vinyl clogging up their entertainment centres. After an investment in a three-disc changer and some CD towers, they could rest easy in the assurance that they were future-proofed. A couple of decades, and a few music industry meltdowns later, no one wants CDs any more. Music is now nebulous, swirling round us like a particularly tuneful dust storm or, in the case of Gary Barlow’s new album, a fart in a lift.

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The Grammys’ diverse winner list isn’t box-ticking – these are terrific artists | Alexis Petridis

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While questions rightly remain over its shadowy nominations process, Grammy voters should be praised for honouring a large number of women and people of colour

The Grammys always attract a degree of controversy. This year, there was singer Teyana Taylor protesting that “all I see is dick” in the all-male nominations for best R&B album, and a slightly peculiar statement from Justin Bieber, asking to be considered an R&B artist rather than a pop singer. More headlines were grabbed by the Weeknd, understandably shocked that his double-platinum album After Hours, and its accompanying single Blinding Lights – a song so omnipresent that it recently celebrated an entire year in the US Top 10 – didn’t receive a single nomination: he subsequently announced he would stop his label submitting his music in future. The latter’s complaint revolved around a lack of transparency in the voting process: the presence of nomination committees that retain executive power over who makes the shortlists and who hold the ability to add artists who have received no nominations in many of the Grammys’ categories.

The argument about transparency isn’t going to go away – if your voting process involves a shadowy and apparently unanswerable cabal who exert control over the nominations, you should probably expect people to look askance at it – but, the absence of the Weeknd aside, the actual winners in the Grammys’ big categories brooked little argument.

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While We Are Here review – enigmatic study of romance is hard to love

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There is an avant-garde bravery to this international love story – but how can we invest in protagonists we never see?

Here is a thought-experiment of a movie from Brazilian film-makers Clarissa Campolina and Luiz Pretti: it’s a dramatic essay, or docu-fictional romance, or perhaps the cinematic equivalent of an epistolary novel, and it has been much admired on the festival circuit.

Related: Streaming: indie films from Latin America

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Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga review – prelude to violence

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Tensions at a school for privileged girls in Rwanda foreshadow the 1994 genocide in this surprisingly bright, light-touch debut

This debut novel by French-Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga, originally published in 2012 and the first of her books to be published in the UK, could have been called Privilege and Prejudice. Translated by Melanie Mauthner, it is a school story like no other, set in the late 1970s in a lycée nestled in the mountains of Rwanda, near the source of the Nile (“‘We’re so close to heaven,’ whispers Mother Superior, clasping her hands together”), where the pupils, daughters of the rich, are taught a little of God and a lot about how to maintain the status quo.

The school is notionally a part of the government’s efforts to promote female education in Rwanda, but within limits: the lycée is a white intrusion in Africa, built under the direction of “white overseers who did nothing but look at large sheets of paper they unrolled like bolts of cloth from the Pakistani shop, and who went crazy with rage when they called the black foremen over, as if they were breathing fire”. The girls are to be the drivers of change, while strictly following rules: they must speak French – Swahili is forbidden – and are taught that “History meant Europe, and Geography, Africa. Africa had no history… it was the Europeans who had discovered Africa and dragged it into history.”

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Grammy awards 2021: women rule as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé break records

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The Covid-restrained Grammys were a mostly female-fronted affair, with wins for Billie Eilish, Megan Thee Stallion, Dua Lipa, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift

It was a historic, triumphant night for women in music at the 2021 Grammys, as a range of female artists took home the top awards. HER took home song of the year for the Black Lives Matter anthem I Can’t Breathe, Taylor Swift became the first woman to win album of the year three times, and the rapper Megan Thee Stallion won both best new artist and best rap performance for her Savage remix with Beyoncé, now the most awarded singer (male or female) and female artist of all time.

Related: Grammy awards 2021: the full list of winners

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Lady Gucci is just the latest guise of the ever transmutable Lady Gaga

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Pop singer, activist, art installation, actor, Stefani Germanotta has taken on many faces

Like Lon Chaney, the great silent actor known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces”, Lady Gaga has traversed roles, from music to fashion to film to politics, transmuting with creative fluidity but remaining – sometimes with defiance – the girl next door.

Last week, the 34-year-old star – days after retrieving her two French bulldogs from a dognapping in which her walker was shot and injured – posted a photo of herself beside actor Adam Driver in which she was wearing a white fur hat and was draped in gold jewellery. It was a publicity shot from Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, a forthcoming film based on the story of Patrizia Reggiani, aka the Black Widow (played by Gaga), who married – and later had killed – Maurizio Gucci, head of the luxury fashion house.

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Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez say reports of break-up are ‘inaccurate’

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‘We are working through some things,’ Lopez said, following reports that the celebrity couple had called off their engagement

Singer Jennifer Lopez and former New York Yankees baseball star Alex Rodriguez said on Saturday they were “working through some things” and that reports of them splitting up after almost four years together were inaccurate.

Celebrity website TMZ, the New York Post’s Page Six and multiple entertainment sites on Friday cited unidentified sources close to the couple, sometimes known in the media as J-Rod, as saying the pair had called off their engagement.

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On my radar: Aidan Moffat’s cultural highlights

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The Arab Strap vocalist on late-night horror chats with his mum, spending time with Alan Partridge, and bingeing on Succession

Born in Falkirk, Scotland, in 1973, Aidan Moffat is the vocalist of indie rock band Arab Strap, which he founded in 1995 with Malcolm Middleton. Characterised by Moffat’s half-spoken vocals over lo-fi instrumentation, the band gained international acclaim with 1996 single The First Big Weekend; they went on to release six studio albums before splitting in 2006 and reforming in 2016. Since 2002, Moffat has released music under the name L Pierre, and collaborated with artists including Mogwai and Bill Wells. Arab Strap’s first album in 16 years, As Days Get Dark, is was released this month on Rock Action.

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Witch Camp (Ghana): I’ve Forgotten Now Who I Used To Be review – magical sound of the marginalised

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(Six Degrees)
Sung in little-spoken Ghanaian dialects, these haunting, spontaneous songs by women accused of witchcraft are unlike anything you have ever heard

Now that it is fashionable for aggrieved political factions to dismiss criticism as a “witch hunt”, it’s worth remembering what makes actual witch hunts so pernicious. It’s not that the women thus accused are in fact innocent – it’s that they couldn’t possibly be guilty. In northern Ghana, witch hunts are more than a political metaphor. Even now, vulnerable women are accused of the dark arts because they have a mental illness, a physical disability or simply because their families want them out of the way. They are blamed for infertility, crop failure, bad weather, accidental deaths and much more besides. Lynchings and burnings still occur from time to time. That’s what a witch hunt means.

While belief in witchcraft is not unique to Ghana, witch camps are. These small settlements, which still exist despite government efforts to shut them down, offer accused women safe haven, albeit within the same framework of belief that drove them from their homes: the chiefs claim to ask the local gods to neutralise their powers and render them harmless. Protection assumes guilt. “If we are here, then we must be witches,” one told a journalist a few years ago.

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