Category Archives: Culture

Elena Ferrante names her 40 favourite books by female authors

Posted on by

List by pseudonymous author of beloved Neapolitan novels includes Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney and several Italian classics

Elena Ferrante, the bestselling pseudonymous Italian author behind My Brilliant Friend, has named her favourite 40 books by female authors around the world, with Toni Morrison, Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith all making the cut.

The author, whose quartet of Neapolitan novels has sold 13m copies worldwide, has published her list on Bookshop.org, the online store that recently launched in the UK and gives a proportion of sales to independent booksellers. Ferrante’s UK publisher, Europa Editions, is returning their 10% sales commission from Ferrante’s list to Bookshop.org so it can be shared among the 300 independent bookshops that have signed up to the site so far.

Continue reading...

Pavement Picassos: the locked-down artists showing work in their windows

Posted on by

Galleries are closed due to Covid – so a group of artists have taken to displaying their work from their houses for passersby. Our writer takes to the streets

It is not a good time for art lovers. The second lockdown has closed galleries once more – I’m imagining portraits waiting moodily in the National Gallery in London to be admired again; Van Gogh’s sunflowers wilting further – and so it is not a good time for artists.

Artists Walk is an initiative that aims to improve that state of affairs. It’s a simple idea for an art trail that began as a joint endeavour between printmaker and painter Rosha Nutt, and her art marketing consultant friend Holly Collier. Those who in normal times would be exhibiting in galleries or community spaces can now place their work in the windows or surroundings of their homes for passers-by to admire. Kind of like “how much is that doggy in the window?” Except that it might be that Picasso sketch of his dachshund.

Continue reading...

Megan Thee Stallion: Good News review – galloping into greatness

Posted on by

With easy flow, hard barbs and a magnetic persona, the rapper casts herself as the successor to hip-hop’s old-school heroes

On YouTube, you can still see one of Megan Thee Stallion’s early appearances at a 2016 rap cypher in Houston. It’s a very telling performance. Twenty-one years old and still an unknown student (“Support the artists,” pleads the accompanying text, “this is only the beginning of their journey”) she’s vastly outnumbered by male counterparts who don’t seem to be taking her terribly seriously. It could be that they’re laughing and high-fiving while she performs because they’re incredulous at her skills, but it doesn’t really look that way. Yet she seems impossibly confident and self-possessed, ending her performance with the salacious, tongue-out taunt of “ahhh” that has since become her trademark. It isn’t just the benefit of hindsight that makes her seem the artist most likely to.

Continue reading...

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom review – Chadwick Boseman glorious in his final film role

Posted on by

The movie version of August Wilson’s story of the blues, starring Boseman and a tremendous Viola Davis, is a ferocious opera of passion and pain

A detonation of pure acting firepower is what’s on offer in this movie version of August Wilson’s 1982 stage play. Declarative and theatrical it might be, but it’s also ferociously intelligent and violently focused, an opera of passion and pain. We see African-American musicians hanging around a white-owned Chicago studio one stiflingly hot day in the 1920s, waiting for the legendary blues singer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey to show up with her entourage so they can cut an album. The lead track is expected to be her live hit, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and the drama imagines a certain pushy trumpeter in the band named Levee angling for his own version to be recorded. A simmering argument about how this song is to be arranged and performed forms the basis of a confrontation about race, sex and power.

Viola Davis plays Ma Rainey with tremendous hauteur: Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth I never arrived at Hampton Court with more magnificent display or more queenly prerogative than Davis’s Rainey making her entrance, with her own lovers and court favourites, sweating at the temperature, her painful feet and the incompetence of the studio chiefs. And Chadwick Boseman gives a moving performance as the fiercely talented but insecure Levee, crucified by a childhood experience of racist violence and dreaming of fronting his own band.

Continue reading...

Jamie Lynn Spears: ‘Britney created so much power for herself – I wanted that too’

Posted on by

The former teen star on why she’s not jealous of her more famous sister, and the strain that legal battles have placed on the Spears family

Jamie Lynn Spears was sitting in a car, surrounded by screaming fans, when it finally hit her. Of course, she knew her sister Britney was successful – she had seen her swap family singalongs for pop stardom – but this was next-level. “Something clicked in my head on that car ride,” she recalls, “like, my sister is famous: Mariah Carey famous. She’d created so much power for herself. At that moment I knew I wanted it, too.”

Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips

Continue reading...

Douglas Stuart wins Booker prize for debut Shuggie Bain

Posted on by

Scottish-American wins £50,000 for autobiographical novel about a boy growing up in 80s Glasgow, which is ‘destined to be a classic’

The Scottish-American author Douglas Stuart has won the Booker prize for his first novel, Shuggie Bain, a story based on his own life that follows a boy growing up in poverty in 1980s Glasgow with a mother who is battling addiction.

Stuart, 44, has described himself as “a working-class kid who had a different career and came to writing late”. He is the second Scot to win the £50,000 award after James Kelman took the prize in 1994 with How Late It Was, How Late, a book Stuart said “changed his life” because it was the first time he saw “my people, my dialect, on the page”.

Continue reading...

10 of the best Christmas songs (that aren’t by Mariah Carey)

Posted on by

The classics are back in the charts even earlier than usual – alongside the perennial row about the Pogues. So why not discover these lesser-known festive bangers?

Judging by the number of trees and lights going up already, the UK is rounding off the worst year ever by turning Christmas 2020 into a six-week celebration of successful vaccine trials. Sure enough, sales and streams of festive songs are up by 50% compared with the same week last year, with Mariah Carey leading the charge and likely to go Top 40 tomorrow. But to avoid being thoroughly sick of All I Want for Christmas Is You before you have even opened an Advent calendar, consider adding these lesser-known tracks to your playlists.

Continue reading...

Bobby Brown Jr found dead in Los Angeles home at age 28

Posted on by

Police pronounced son of singer Bobby Brown dead at the scene but provided no additional details

Bobby Brown Jr, the son of singer Bobby Brown, was found dead at a Los Angeles home late Wednesday. He was 28.

Los Angeles Police spokesman Jeff Lee said officers were responding to a medical emergency when they found Brown Jr’s body around 1pm at a home in Encino, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Continue reading...

‘My mother was like a steel fist in a velvet glove’: the real Audrey Hepburn

Posted on by

Her delicate beauty and starring roles made her seem fragile. But having endured an unloving mother and a perilous childhood under Nazi occupation, such an impression belied Hepburn’s remarkable strength, compassion and resolve

“Very alert, very smart, very talented, very ambitious.” That was the director William Wyler’s verdict after watching a screen test for Roman Holiday by a young chorus girl called Audrey Hepburn in 1951. She got the part, won an Oscar and the rest is history. For decades, Hepburn has been adored for her graceful beauty and style. But somehow, the “smart”, “talented” and “ambitious” woman Wyler described never makes it into the books about her enduring charm with titles such as How to Be Lovely: The Audrey Hepburn Way. Now a new documentary, Audrey, gives us a more complex picture of the woman.

Directed by Helena Coan, the film features never-before-seen archive footage of Hepburn alongside intimate interviews with her family and friends. Speaking on Zoom from his home in Italy, Hepburn’s eldest son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, says his mother’s steeliness is often overlooked. “She was no pushover. You have to fight in Hollywood for every little bit, and she did. But she played the part of the ingenue. And that’s who she was, too. None of us are just one way or another.”

Continue reading...

Naya Rivera drowning: wrongful death lawsuit filed on behalf of Glee actor’s son

Posted on by

Lawsuit alleges boats lacked safety equipment and that there were no warning signs around California lake where she died in July

A wrongful death lawsuit has been filed over the drowning of Glee actor Naya Rivera, who died in July while boating with her four-year-old son on a lake in California.

The suit was filed on Tuesday against Ventura County and managers of Lake Piru over her accidental death on 8 July at the lake north-west of Los Angeles. It was filed on behalf of her son, Josey Hollis Dorsey, by Ryan Dorsey — Rivera’s ex-husband and the boy’s father and guardian — and also on behalf of her estate.

Continue reading...

Map of the soul: how BTS rewrote the western pop rulebook

Posted on by

Contrary to their dismissive framing as manufactured robots, South Korea’s BTS use social media, documentary and storytelling to make themselves into profoundly human stars

BTS’s leader RM looks up from under a black baseball cap, then stares back down at his hands. “Doing the promotional interviews, [I kept saying], ‘Music truly transcends every barrier.’ But even while I was saying it I questioned myself if I indeed believe it.”

It’s late September, and the rapper is confiding in over one million fans live from his Seoul studio. His “complex set of feelings” about the explosive, record-breaking success of Dynamite – the first fully English-language single from the South Korean megastars – is not the celebration you’d expect from a band that just topped the US Billboard Hot 100, the first K-pop act to do so. But this kind of frank, unfiltered conversation is exactly what their global “Army” fanbase love: BTS’s candid social media presence has included their fans in every step of their artistic journey, and, as they release new album Be this week, has made them the biggest pop group on the planet.

Continue reading...

When it comes to a family trauma, who gets to tell the story?

Posted on by

When Fariha Róisín started writing Like a Bird, she thought the traumatic event at its heart was just a dream. She explores the weight of a family secret

In her 1861 account Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs exposed her sexual abuse by her master with lucidity and truth. Yet for more than 100 years, it was accepted academic opinion that Incidents was a novel, written by white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. It was not until the 1980s that critic Jean Fagan Yellin proved Jacobs to be the true author; Incidents had been autobiographical all along.

In Hollywood, rape narratives are largely penned by men and seen as a motif, because the tension (and tragedy) of the experience creates sympathy, compassion; it formalises emotion. When we see a woman raped and abused on film we absolve ourselves for watching, because we want to understand the ugliness of human atrocity, or so that’s what we say. And when women write about rape, often in literature, its seen as melodramatic, overemotional, too impossible to be true. “Primarily, rape is considered a women’s issue, though this is, of course, hardly the case,” writes poet Moniza Alvi, in the introduction to Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives, “and perhaps this is partly why it is considered a literary taboo, particularly when conveyed from a female viewpoint.”

Continue reading...

‘He’ll make your head explode’: sax stars on the genius and tragedy of Charlie Parker

Posted on by

He was nicknamed Bird and he soared in his music – if not in his life. For the centenary of the saxophonist who redefined jazz, today’s players reveal how his dizzying speed and spirituality changed their lives

Outside jazz circles, Charlie Parker might not be a household name like Miles Davis or Louis Armstrong, but the saxophonist, who died of cirrhosis aged 34 after struggling with addictions to heroin and alcohol, was one of music’s true innovators. By inventing the dizzyingly fast style known as bebop, Parker turned jazz from dance music into something intensely intellectual and spiritual. As the London jazz festival celebrates his centenary with a tribute, today’s jazz stars talk about the shattering impact of the man nicknamed Bird.

Continue reading...

UK music industry will halve in size due to Covid, says report

Posted on by

Growth of 11% in 2019 predicted to reverse this year with collapse of live sector

The UK music industry is set to halve in size this year as issues including an effective shutdown of concerts, gigs and festivals strip £3bn from its contribution to the economy.

UK Music, the umbrella organisation representing the commercial music industry from artists and record labels to the live music sector, has revealed that the industry grew by 11% last year to be worth £5.8bn to the UK economy.

Continue reading...

Dolly Parton partly funded Moderna Covid vaccine research

Posted on by

The country music icon’s $1m donation supported the latest breakthrough by Moderna and several research papers

It’s truly the greatest gift of all: a $1m donation by Dolly Parton to coronavirus vaccine research supported the development of the Moderna vaccine, which shows 95% protection from the virus.

In April, Parton donated £800,000 to research after her friend Dr Naji Abumrad of the Vanderbilt Institute for Infection, Immunology and Inflammation at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee told her that they were making “some exciting advancements” in the search for a cure for the virus. Abumrad and Parton became friends in 2014 after the singer was involved in a car accident and treated at Vanderbilt.

Continue reading...

Obama hails arrival of a more ‘caring government’ as memoir launches – video

Posted on by

In an interview marking the launch of his memoir A Promised Land, Barack Obama tells Oprah Winfrey that the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will help lead the US back to the 'competent, caring government we so badly need'. 

He lamented the standard of governance over the past four years, saying Biden and Harris will 'level set' and show that the presidency will not label journalists 'enemies of the state' or 'routinely lie'  

Continue reading...

Scents of history: study hopes to recreate smells of old Europe

Posted on by

Researchers plan library of scents from plague repellents to early tobacco

From the pungent scent of a cigar to the gentle fragrance of roses, smells can transport us to days gone by. Now researchers are hoping to harness the pongs of the past to do just that.

Scientists, historians and experts in artificial intelligence across the UK and Europe have announced they are teaming up for a €2.8m project labelled “Odeuropa” to identify and even recreate the aromas that would have assailed noses between the 16th and early 20th centuries.

Continue reading...

From Che Guevara to lockdown: photo book tells story of Madrid

Posted on by

Work features images by some of the most famous photographers of the past century

One warm June weekend 61 years ago, a scruffily bearded Argentinian on his way from Cuba to Cairo stopped over in Madrid. With almost a day to kill between flights, he did what any tourist of the time would have done: explored the city, visited a bullring, had breakfast and did a little shopping.

He was, however, no ordinary tourist. A photograph taken very early that Sunday morning shows the unmistakable figure of Che Guevara standing in boots, beret and battle fatigues, one hand hooked over his belt and the other clutching a newspaper.

Continue reading...

Home Alone at 30: how the unlikely Christmas comedy has endured

Posted on by

No one could have predicted that a simple family film would have been such a box office smash in 1990 or that it would remain a favorite decades after

To the news of Disney’s plans to produce a remake of holiday classic Home Alone, director of the genuine article Chris Columbus had words sharper than a toy car on a bare foot. “It’s a waste of time, as far as I’m concerned,” Columbus said in a recent interview with Insider commemorating the 30th anniversary of the film’s release. “What’s the point? I’m a firm believer that you don’t remake films that have had the longevity of Home Alone. You’re not going to create lightning in a bottle again. It’s just not going to happen.”

Related: My favourite Christmas film: Home Alone

Continue reading...