In recent years, Africans on the continent and in the diaspora have become leading voices in black culture – in music, film, fashion, social media, comedy and even our memes. When Grace Shutti was growing up, black culture usually referred to African Americans. But from Beyoncé's visual album, Black is King, to Marvel's Black Panther and musician Diddy executive producing the Nigerian pop star Burna Boy's album, the shift to embrace African art has been seismic. Grace investigates how this came about
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Check her out: how Netflix hit The Queen’s Gambit thrills with fashion
Stylish chess drama fills the hole left by period pieces such as Mad Men – and puts the clothes front and centre
In chess, the first move is everything. This is also true in TV – something The Queen’s Gambit, a seductive seven-part drama about a female chess prodigy in the American midwest, knows all too well.
In the first few moments, we meet our teenage hero, Beth Harman (Anya Taylor-Joy), asleep in a hotel bath wearing a burgundy Pierre Cardin shift dress from the night before. Moments later, she has changed into a Biba-inspired mint-green viscose one, which matches the tranquillisers she knocks back with a minibar vodka. Grabbing her shoes – black pointed flats, so this must be the 60s – she hurries downstairs to play the most important chess game of her career on the mother of all hangovers.
Continue reading...Neil Diamond’s teenage obsessions: ‘The Brooklyn Dodgers betrayed me and broke my heart’
As his 80th birthday approaches, Neil Diamond reminisces about Pete Seeger, the Everly Brothers and how a baseball team’s desertion led him to the guitar
I was born and raised in Brooklyn, and for me the most important aspect of growing up there was the Dodgers baseball team. Everybody in Brooklyn loved the Dodgers. They were the underdog but we were loyal. I followed the games closely, with dreams that they would win the World Series and be recognised as the champions I knew they were.
Continue reading...British woman accusing senior UAE royal of sexual assault to fight on
Caitlin McNamara says she will appeal the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision not to pursue Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan for the alleged attack in Abu Dhabi
The British woman who accused a United Arab Emirates senior royal of sexually assaulting her has vowed to fight on after the Crown Prosecution Service declined to prosecute him last month, saying that the CPS decision sends “a clear message to this man and those committing similar crimes that as long as they’re of economic value to the UK, they can do whatever they want”.
Caitlin McNamara, who was the curator of the first Hay festival in Abu Dhabi in February, went public with her accusations last month. She alleges that Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, the UAE’s minister of tolerance, had attacked her shortly before the festival, which his department had funded. McNamara had believed she would be attending a business meeting with the royal, who denies the allegations through a London lawyer: “Our client is surprised and saddened by this allegation, which arrives eight months after the alleged incident and via a national newspaper. The account is denied.”
Continue reading...Katharine Hepburn’s 20 best films – ranked!
With the Hollywood legend’s classic romcom The Philadelphia Story turning 80 next month, here is our critic’s rundown of her finest performances
Katharine Hepburn is exactly the kind of star who should be in a Frank Capra picture. This presidential election drama was a great talking point in its day – not least because it daringly made mention of real-life contenders of the time such as Thomas Dewey and Robert Taft. Hepburn plays Mary Matthews, the estranged wife of an industrial tycoon (Spencer Tracy) who is running for office on the Republican ticket, a campaign secretly bankrolled by his wealthy mistress (Angela Lansbury). Mary agrees to return to his side because of his manifest idealism, but wobbles as he appears to get slowly sucked in to the cynical political world.
Continue reading...Xbox’s Phil Spencer: ‘We’re not driven by how many consoles we sell’
As the Xbox Series X and Series S are released, Microsoft gaming chief Phil Spencer says the next games generation is all about how many players you have, not how many consoles you shift
The launch of the Xbox Series X this week marked the start of a new video game console generation – historically a super-exciting time for players, as better technology unlocks new dimensions for games. But despite the usual competitive crowing about teraflops, frame rates and resolutions, there’s a different dimension to the console wars this time around. The looming Netflix-ification of video games threatens to upend the whole idea of video game consoles. Amazon and Google are both working on game streaming services that let people play cutting-edge games without paying for a box that sits under the TV. And Microsoft has spent the past five years spending billions on game developers to shore up its star service: Xbox Game Pass, a monthly subscription that lets you play hundreds of games for a monthly fee.
It’s been clear for a while that Microsoft sees the future of gaming in subscriptions, streaming and services. Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox since 2014, is known to players as the guy who shows up on stage at press conferences in video-game T-shirts. Under his leadership, Microsoft has massively broadened its stable of game developers, started selling Xbox games on PC, and engineered its own streaming service to let people play on any screen, known in prototype as Project xCloud. Subs and streaming have already transformed other creative industries, with varying effects on artists – Spotify has been a disaster for musicians, where Netflix has arguably been good news for TV producers. With Microsoft already clearly committed to this direction of travel, what will its effect be on the games industry?
Continue reading...Wild Mountain Thyme trailer blamed for Irish accent emergency
Storm of paddywhackery cliches in promo for Hollywood film stuns critics – and even the leprechaun museum
A trailer is all that Ireland has seen of Hollywood’s latest romantic comedy, but that has been enough to declare an Irish accent emergency.
Wild Mountain Thyme stars Emily Blunt and Jamie Dornan as star-crossed lovers – and farmers – on an emerald isle posing as Ireland.
Continue reading...Trial 4: how a teen spent 22 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit
Sean Ellis was 19 years old when he was arrested for killing a police officer in Boston. Decades later, he prepares for his fourth trial in Netflix’s Trial 4
Sean Ellis was 19 when he was arrested by Boston police over the killing of an officer in October 1993. Head down and nearly collapsing, barely keeping pace with police, Ellis wore his best suit as officers dragged him into custody – he had just attended the funeral of Celine Kirk and Tracy Brown, his cousins, who had been murdered by Celine’s ex-boyfriend in Ellis’s neighborhood of Dorchester. Ellis had spoken voluntarily to police about his cousins, with whom he was close; days later, he was on trial over the murder of a crooked cop as he slept in his car in a Walgreens parking lot.
Related: A Wilderness of Error: the year's most troubling true crime series
Continue reading...‘She made music jump into 3D’: Wendy Carlos, the reclusive synth genius
She went platinum by plugging Bach into 20th-century machines, and was soon working with Stanley Kubrick. But prejudice around her gender transition pushed Wendy Carlos out of sight
This summer, an 80-year-old synthesiser pioneer suddenly appeared online. She had been silent for 11 years, but now something had appeared that she just wouldn’t tolerate. “Please be aware there’s a purported ‘biography’ on me just released,” wrote Wendy Carlos on the homepage of her 16-bit-friendly website, a Siamese cat and a synthesiser behind her portrait. “No one ever interviewed me [for it], nor anyone I know,” she went on. “Aren’t there new, more interesting targets?”
Given that Carlos is arguably the most important living figure in the history of electronic music, it’s remarkable that Amanda Sewell’s Wendy Carlos: A Biography is the first book about her. This is the musician who pushed Robert Moog to perfect his first analogue synthesiser, from which pop, prog, electronica and film music flourished. Her smash-hit 1968 album Switched-On Bach made the Moog internationally famous and became the second classical album ever to go platinum in the US. Then came her extraordinary soundtracks for A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Tron. She made an ambient album five years before Brian Eno did, and jumped from analogue machines to do leading work in digital synthesis, but worried that her status as one of the first visible transgender artists in the US would overshadow it.
Continue reading...Joan Armatrading: ‘I want to make a heavy metal album – with lots of guitar shredding’
At the age of seven, she flew to Birmingham from Antigua on her own – and became the first globally successful British female singer-songwriter. As she wins the award she once gave to Margaret Thatcher, Joan Armatrading looks back
‘It’s very nice to be honoured,” says Joan Armatrading, down the phone from her home in Surrey. The 69-year-old is talking about receiving this year’s Women of the Year lifetime achievement award, which sees her honoured alongside the likes of child burns survivor Sylvia Mac and Adwoa Dickson, who set up a community choir for young women who survived trafficking. “Whether I measure up is another question.”
She’s joking, of course, but what does the continued existence of the award tell us about where the struggle for equality is in 2020? “It’s maybe not as relevant as it was in 1955,” she says, “when Tony Lothian set it up after being denied admission to a men-only meeting. But women are still doing incredible things in this society, so reward them.”
Continue reading...Britney Spears will not perform again if her father is in charge of her career, lawyer argues
LA judge Brenda Penny declines to suspend James Spears from his role in the court conservatorship that has controlled his daughter’s life for 12 years
Britney Spears is afraid of her father and will not resume her career so long as he has power over it, her attorney said in court on Tuesday.
Los Angeles superior court judge Brenda Penny declined to suspend James Spears from his central role in the court conservatorship that has controlled his daughter’s life and career for 12 years, as Britney Spears’ attorney Samuel D Ingham III requested at the contentious hearing. But the judge said she would consider future petitions for his suspension or outright removal, which Ingham plans to file.
Continue reading...‘We have lost a limb’: Azu Nwagbogu, the visionary curator bringing African art home
From helping photographers capture the Nigerian protests to exhibiting during a pandemic, the director of LagosPhoto festival has had his work cut out. Now he wants to fight ‘afro-pessimism’ and the posturing around Black Lives Matter
When I first spoke to Azu Nwagbogu, the recent protests against police brutality in his native Nigeria had just entered their second week. The curator was upbeat, describing them as “an incredible awakening”. A week later, when we made contact again, he sounded more sombre, but no less defiant, following the fatal police shootings of at least 12 protesters at the Lekki toll gate in Lagos, the main gathering point for the daily demonstrations.
“This protest is not about ‘the poor masses’,” he tells me. “My sister, who is a medical doctor and a consultant anaesthetist, was active in the protests. Everyone who isn’t in government has had enough. The genie has been let out of the bottle and it won’t go back in without the wishes of the people being fulfilled.”
Continue reading...The Crown season four, first look review – enter Diana, Thatcher, bombast and bomb blasts
The best series so far of the royal drama, with the family sliding into dysfunction and new characters providing 80s shoulder-padded spectacle
The Crown (Netflix) has finally reached the blockbuster era, thanks to the pincer-like introduction of Diana (soon to be Princess) and Margaret (Thatcher), at long last, who both elevate the season to its best form yet. It begins in 1979, with the election of Britain’s first female prime minister, and ends in 1990, amid the furious flames that were beginning to consume the marriage of the heir to the throne. It is grand, gorgeous and as soapy as ever, perfect for a wintery period of hunkering down.
I have not always been convinced by The Crown. In the past, it has been prone to sentimentality, and never knowingly using one word to hint at a situation when several thousand will do. The sumptuous look of it all and the delicious performances have frequently been called upon to come to the rescue of the writing, which is sometimes clumsy, over-explaining subtext, not trusting its own subtlety, eventually spelling any emotional conclusions out all in bold capital letters.
Continue reading...Rare stolen books, including works by Newton and Galileo, returned to owners
Books worth more than £2.5m found in Romania after Mission Impossible-style theft
Hundreds of internationally important and irreplaceable books worth more than £2.5m that were stolen in a daring heist by abseiling burglars have been returned to their rightful owners.
Metropolitan police announced the successful conclusion on Tuesday of a near four-year police operation investigating the Mission Impossible-style theft of books that included rare works by Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo and the 18th-century Spanish painter Francisco de Goya.
Continue reading...Assassin’s Creed Valhalla review: cloudy with a chance of mead halls
PS4 and PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, PC; Ubisoft
The weather’s as bad as ever, but this smart, inventive and witty open-world game is a veritable Viking feast of adventure
It’s been a wild ride this year, but you can always rely on Assassin’s Creed to lighten the mood. Let’s see what those zany historians at Ubisoft have cooked up for us in the excitingly named Assassin’s Creed Valhalla … Peterborough, is it? Norwich in the dark ages?
I have nothing against our beautiful cathedral cities, rolling plains and park-and-ride services, but after 12 months of Brexit, Covid-19 and forest fires, plus the cancellation of the Eurovision song contest, I was hoping for something a little less Tough Mudder from this giddy, quasi-historical, action-adventure series, which previously had us gallivanting around Atlantis.
Continue reading...The show the military couldn’t stop: Luca Guadagnino on We Are Who We Are
His new TV series about wild goings-on at an army base near Venice horrified the US Department of Defense. Did it also cost him his relationship? The Call Me By Your Name director reveals all
Lockdown was a nightmare for Luca Guadagnino. His dad died, his partner left and his myriad film projects had to be put in mothballs. As soon as restrictions were lifted, he jumped in his car and drove south from Milan, along empty motorways, right through the May night. He realises now he was in search of home.
Guadagnino, true to form, immortalised the trip on his iPhone and the resulting film is a lovely thing: part travelogue, part elegy, rattling around the director’s old village in Sicily. At one point Guadagnino stands outside his former house and inhales the smells from the open window – humidity, old grapes – like Proust with his madeleine. He wonders what kind of world the pandemic has left behind. He asks friends and colleagues for advice and support. “For a forest to stay healthy,” one tells him, “it has to periodically burn down.”
Continue reading...Stacey Abrams: Georgia’s political heroine … and romance author
Writing under the name Selena Montgomery, Abrams has penned eight romantic thrillers, often while also fighting for voters’ rights
Stacey Abrams is the former Georgia state house minority leader, whose fierce fight for Georgians’ right to vote has been credited for potentially handing the state to the Democrats for the first time in 28 years. But Abrams has another identity: the novelist Selena Montgomery, a romance and thriller writer who has sold more than 100,000 copies of her eight novels.
Abrams wrote her first novel during her third year at Yale Law School, inspired after reading her ex-boyfriend’s PhD dissertation in chemical physics. She had wanted to write a spy novel: “For me, for other young black girls, I wanted to write books that showed them to be as adventurous and attractive as any white woman,” she wrote in her memoir Minority Leader. But after being told repeatedly by editors that women don’t read spy novels, and that men don’t read spy novels by women, she made her spies fall in love. Rules of Engagement, her debut, was published in 2001, and sees temperatures flare as covert operative Raleigh partners with the handsome Adam Grayson to infiltrate a terrorist group that has stolen deadly environmental technology.
Continue reading...Stanley Kubrick and Kirk Douglas wanted Doctor Zhivago movie rights
Director wrote to Boris Pasternak in late 1950s, previously unpublished material reveals
It is one of the greatest British films of all time, directed in 1965 by David Lean with an A-list cast that included Julie Christie, Omar Sharif and Alec Guinness. But the epic adaptation of Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak’s classic love story set against the Russian revolution, might never have happened if a planned US production had got there first.
James Fenwick, a British film historian, has discovered that two of cinema’s most revered film-makers – Hollywood star Kirk Douglas and director Stanley Kubrick – had tried in vain to acquire the movie rights earlier, in the late 1950s.
Continue reading...BBC to hold investigation into how Martin Bashir obtained Diana interview
Diana’s brother Earl Spencer claims journalist produced fake documents to win trust of family
The BBC has pledged to hold a full independent investigation into how Martin Bashir obtained his career-defining interview with Princess Diana in 1995, following fresh claims that he produced fake documents and used other deceitful tactics to win the trust of her family.
Tim Davie, the corporation’s director general, confirmed that the terms of the investigation would be announced in the coming days: “The BBC is taking this very seriously and we want to get to the truth. We are in the process of commissioning a robust and independent investigation.”
Continue reading...‘It’s the screams of the damned!’ The eerie AI world of deepfake music
Artificial intelligence is being used to create new songs seemingly performed by Frank Sinatra and other dead stars. ‘Deepfakes’ are cute tricks – but they could change pop for ever
‘It’s Christmas time! It’s hot tub time!” sings Frank Sinatra. At least, it sounds like him. With an easy swing, cheery bonhomie, and understated brass and string flourishes, this could just about pass as some long lost Sinatra demo. Even the voice – that rich tone once described as “all legato and regrets” – is eerily familiar, even if it does lurch between keys and, at times, sounds as if it was recorded at the bottom of a swimming pool.
The song in question not a genuine track, but a convincing fake created by “research and deployment company” OpenAI, whose Jukebox project uses artificial intelligence to generate music, complete with lyrics, in a variety of genres and artist styles. Along with Sinatra, they’ve done what are known as “deepfakes” of Katy Perry, Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel, 2Pac, Céline Dion and more. Having trained the model using 1.2m songs scraped from the web, complete with the corresponding lyrics and metadata, it can output raw audio several minutes long based on whatever you feed it. Input, say, Queen or Dolly Parton or Mozart, and you’ll get an approximation out the other end.
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