Category Archives: Culture

Dalliance, affair, love, intimacy: how should we approach sex as we age?

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As sex lives ebb, the wider world can get more interesting. Robert Dessaix asks, does it really matter if we’re out of the sexual running, even in a society as sex-obsessed as ours?

If the Roman poet Lucretius is to be believed, the whole universe is “a dance with Venus” – a sexual performance. “Love” just provides some of the footwork for amicable copulation. Or something to that effect. In his day, of course, with high child mortality and a ripe old age far from assured, reproduction must have been at the top of everyone’s list.

Nowadays, in the west, average life expectancy is much longer than it was in Rome at the beginning of the first millennium – indeed, a quarter of the population where I live can hardly walk in a straight line without assistance, let alone cavort around Venus’s dancefloor – yet we are still fixated as a society on arousal and performance. What is the point of living on into old age in such a society? Why soldier on? Even if you could still dance, who would dance with you?

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Daphne Guinness: ‘Making music is the most fun I’ve had’

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The designer and singer, 52, reflects on living next door to Salvador Dali as a child, her brush with death and why she never looks in the mirror

I’m told that I had a difficult childhood. I had a lot of freedom, but there was a lot of drama. It was a childhood of extremes.

I was bullied by my history teacher. He’d say, “Well, your grandmother is a fascist [Diana Mitford, wife of Oswald Mosley], so you’re getting a D in this essay,” and I was like, “What does that have to do with it?” I didn’t retrench into just thinking, “Oh gosh, they’re just being mean to me.” I went to Auschwitz. I went to the Holocaust camps. I did a lot of deep research, which was pretty heavy in my teens. But it was something I needed to resolve to understand why I was being bullied. It took me a long time to realise that I didn’t have to be defined by the place that I came from.

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Caught in time’s current: Margaret Atwood on grief, poetry and the past four years

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In an exclusive new poem and essay Margaret Atwood reflects on the passing of time and how to create lasting art in a rapidly changing world

Read Dearly by Margaret Atwood

I can say with a measure of certainty – having consulted my poor excuse for a journal – that my poem “Dearly” was written in the third week of August 2017, on a back street of Stratford, Ontario, Canada, with either a pencil or a rollerball (I’d have to check that) on some piece of paper that may have been anything from an old envelope to a shopping list to a notebook page; I’d have to check that as well, but I’m guessing notebook. The language is early 21st-century Canadian English, which accounts for the phrase “less of a shit”, which would never have been used in, for instance, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam AHH”; though something like it might have appeared in one of Chaucer’s more vernacular tales – “lesse of a shitte”, perhaps. This poem was then taken out of a drawer, its handwriting more or less deciphered by me, and typed as a digital document in December 2017. I know that part from the date and time identifier on the document.

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Kylie Minogue: ‘It’s time to dress in sequins and glitter through the darkness’

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For 33 years the singer has been a byword for pop joy. She talks to Laura Snapes about disco, breakups and moving on from division

By the time you read this, two pivotal issues should soon be settled. There is the small matter of the US election. Then there is the fate of Kylie Minogue. If her newly released 15th album, Disco, beats Little Mix’s Confetti to No 1 next week, she will be the first female artist to top the UK album chart in five consecutive decades, a feat only previously achieved by Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Paul Weller. “I’m so glad I didn’t know that when I was making this album,” she says, her still thoroughly Australian accent expressing real relief. “I would have felt the pressure.”

It is a Friday afternoon in mid-October, and we are in a London photo studio, where Minogue has just finished an intensive two-hour, four-outfit shoot (this counts as elite-level efficiency, the Guardian’s photographer tells me). The only trace left is her pink glittery eyeshadow, a contrast to her Bruce Springsteen T-shirt and khaki trousers. The ankle-shattering silver stilettos have been replaced with cream plimsolls. Sitting at the other end of a velvet sofa, Minogue folds and unfolds a black face mask, aptly embroidered with “More Joy” (not bespoke, it turns out, but a designer Christopher Kane job).

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George Condo: ‘Change can’t just be an idea or a slogan – it has to get real’

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The artist, who worked with Warhol, befriended Basquiat and painted for Kanye, talks about making art during a tumultuous year and why he left New York City

The New York City artist George Condo has become New York state artist George Condo, a surprising move for someone so intensely intertwined with the city’s culture. The Hamptons is his new normal, after he ditched Manhattan in March.

Not that he is keeping track of time. “The month of May soon turned into August, which then turned into November,” Condo says to the Guardian from his studio later that day. “2020 is just the framing of the time lapse.”

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Johnny Depp says he has been asked to resign from Fantastic Beasts franchise

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Actor has announced he will be exiting the Harry Potter prequel series after losing his libel case over allegations of assault towards ex-wife Amber Heard

Johnny Depp is set to exit the Fantastic Beasts franchise after being asked to resign by Warner Bros.

The actor announced the decision in a statement on Instagram, one that comes just days after he lost his libel case against the Sun over claims he abused his ex-wife Amber Heard.

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PlayStation 5 review – Sony’s new console makes a splashy entrance

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This enormous spaceship of a console comes with enough flagship features – from fast SSD and frame rate to 4K resolution – that you might overlook the hefty price tag

With more than 110m PlayStation 4s sold, Sony is coming into the next console generation with nothing to prove. But the company has squandered goodwill before: it followed up the beloved PlayStation 2 with an awkward-looking, difficult-to-develop-for console that cost the equivalent of £600 in today’s money. It took PlayStation 3 almost a decade and several remodels to make up the ground it had lost. The PlayStation 5 certainly looks wild next to the modernist oblong that is PS4, but this is no conceptual experiment in hardware design. It is a console that wants to make you feel good, to celebrate the time, money and passion we expend on video games.

The console itself is a statement object. Standing vertically, its white casing tapers to a V around the shiny black body of the machine. It is enormous and looks like a futuristic spaceship. The new DualSense controller is white with black accents, a slightly different shape from the PS4 pad that feels equally comfortable in the hands. The texturing on the grips comes in the form of tiny circle-square-triangle-cross symbols that you can see only if you zoom in on a high-res photo – a cool hidden design secret indicative of the thought that has gone into the PS5’s appearance.

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Singer, activist, sex machine, addict: the troubled brilliance of Billie Holiday

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A new documentary uncovers lost tapes to tell the intimate real story of the jazz singer – one with terrible resonance today as the US continues to fight institutional racism

There’s an electrifying moment in Billie, a new documentary about Billie Holiday, when Jonathan “Jo” Jones, a tempestuous, influential African American drummer who played with Holiday from the 1930s to 50s, challenges his white interviewer. “You don’t know what we was going through then,” he says, referring to travelling through the deep south on Count Basie’s tour bus. “What were you going through?” asks the interviewer, Linda Lipnack Kuehl. “We was going through hell!” he shouts. “Miss Billie Holiday didn’t have the privilege of using a toilet in a filling station. The boys at least could go out in the woods. You don’t know anything about it because you’ve never had to subjugate yourself to it. Never!”

James Erskine’s film is constructed entirely from such interviews by Kuehl, a high-school teacher and Holiday fan with a sideline in arts journalism. In 1971, she began plans for a biography: Holiday had died aged 44 in 1959 and, 11 years on, Kuehl wanted to speak to those who were there throughout her life. She interviewed and interviewed and was still finding people in 1978 – almost 200 of them in all. The project overwhelmed her and she never finished it, and in 1979 she was found dead on a Washington sidewalk. Police deemed it suicide, Kuehl having supposedly jumped from her hotel room, although there was no proof of this.

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Neil Young – every album ranked!

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As a new live album is released and a 50th anniversary edition of After the Gold Rush approaches, we rate every album by Canada’s irascible godfather of grunge

If other 1970s greats, including Don Henley, were having 80s hits with modern, synth-heavy records then why shouldn’t Neil Young give it a go? A question to which the obvious answer is: because it might sound like Landing on Water, on which perfectly good songs – not least Hippie Dream’s devastating portrait of David Crosby in his coked-out ruin – were knackered by sterile, unsympathetic production.

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Xbox Series X and Series S review: no-nonsense, next-generation gaming

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They’re superfast, they’re frictionless and you get access to Xbox Game Pass. But not much else, from the controller to the interface, has changed – and launching without a single new game is just bizarre

The world was a different place in 2013, when Microsoft launched the Xbox One. Back then, the company was pitching consoles as living-room entertainment centres, with picture-in-picture display and built-in Skype and TV integration. The new Xbox models – the Series X and Series S – are comparatively no-nonsense. They’re powerful, fast, home to the good-value Xbox Game Pass subscription, and make playing games as frictionless as possible. Rather than making a statement, the new Xboxes want to get out of your way.

The Series X, the more powerful model, is a black monolith with green detailing on the top vent. (It won’t win any design awards.) The more eye-catching Series S is a slimmer white machine with a contrasting round black vent. The X has a disc drive, 1TB of storage for downloaded games and the ability to output in true 4K resolution on cutting-edge TVs; the S has no disc drive, 512GB of storage and is optimised for 1440p resolution. You would need a cutting edge 4K television to benefit from the X’s superior visual prowess. On the TVs that most people own, there won’t be much of a difference in what you see on screen.

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Lucky Grandma review – gambling granny goes on fun knockabout caper

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Former Bond girl Tsai Chin confounds expectations brilliantly as an older woman who gets mixed up with the Chinese mafia

Sentimentalising, patronising and generally disrespecting our elders is by now enough of a movie trope that any title including the words “grandma” or “grandpa” causes an involuntary shudder. That Lucky Grandma isn’t one of those films is mostly down to its star, Tsai Chin, whose many attributes include the ability to conduct full conversations with a lit cigarette suspended from her bottom lip. One look at Grandma’s stern face tells us she did not come to play.

Related: Tsai Chin: 'What was it like being in bed with Sean Connery? Fine'

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Rocky Horror’s Richard O’Brien: ‘I should be dead. I’ve had an excessive lifestyle’

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The creator of the cult show is not going quietly into his 70s. He talks about coming out as trans, going ‘loopy’ on crack – and speaking in tongues after suffering a stroke

Richard O’Brien is 78, but his toothpick body and lightbulb head have always lent him a certain agelessness. A few months ago, however, the rakish Rocky Horror Show creator, Crystal Maze presenter and transgender parent-of-three received a stark reminder of his advancing years.

He was pottering around at home in New Zealand when he suddenly found himself lying on the floor. “I didn’t register that something was desperately wrong,” he says, speaking from the house he shares with his third wife, Sabrina, 10 miles outside of Katikati. “I just thought: ‘I wonder why I can’t get up.’” Struggling to his feet, he attempted to make a drink, only to discover he couldn’t put the top back on the milk. “I was in a dream-like state. Finally, I gave up with the milk, went to go back to the bedroom, slid down the wall and started speaking in tongues. That’s when Sabrina called the ambulance.”

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Luxor review – beautifully sparse character study amid Egypt’s ancient glory

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Andrea Riseborough stars as a war-zone medic going through a low-key mid-life crisis as she tries to recover by visiting the famous archaeological site

Slow, delicate and sparse, Luxor is coming out on digital this week just as all the cinemas close down again. If you have a chance to see it, try to view it in the dark, without distractions, on the biggest screen you can in order to approximate a cinema setting and to best appreciate its deep-breath pacing and dry-heat beauty.

Writer-director Zeina Durra’s feature, her second after the evocatively titled The Imperialists Are Still Alive!, follows English surgeon Hana (an unusually subdued Andrea Riseborough, giving a great, slow-burn performance) as she recovers from the horrors of working in a Syrian war zone for an aid organisation. As she rests up at a plush hotel in Luxor, the open-air museum of a town in Egypt she used to live in years 20 before, she passes the time visiting the sights and having polite interactions with other guests and tourists, all the while considering what may be an even more traumatic assignment in Yemen.

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Fashion embraces disco as kitchen becomes dancefloor

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Brands are getting in the groove for stay-at-home parties amid a 70s musical revival

With stay-at-home restrictions on the rise and England heading into its second lockdown, there is a surprising renaissance taking place in fashion and culture: disco.

Days before Kylie Minogue releases her new album, Disco, on Friday, John Lewis has unveiled its Christmas collection featuring a “kitchen disco two-piece” (a sparkly sweatshirt and joggers). The legendary Terry de Havilland label has announced its Disco collection featuring platform-heeled shoes in bold Studio 54 referencing colours.

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‘Singing feels like giving birth’: Brazilian samba star Elza Soares at 90

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She’s not sure of her exact age, but it doesn’t matter: the woman voted singer of the millennium stays timeless by collaborating with younger artists – and moving on from her painful past

You often hear a praying mantis before you see it. As a child, Elza Soares always liked listening to their buzz – the noise reminded her of her own raspy register – and she tried to emulate them with her voice. Then, when carrying buckets of water on her head to and from her house, she realised she could actually sing. “When I picked them up, I’d groan and, eventually, I realised that gave off a [musical] sound. So, I continued doing it: carrying the buckets and singing.”

Now 90 – though accounts vary, and even she isn’t sure of her age – Soares has evolved those buzzes and groans into one of Brazil’s most revered voices. Born in a favela slum in Rio de Janeiro to a washerwoman and a factory worker around 1930, she has recorded 36 studio albums, performed at the 2016 Olympic opening ceremony in Rio, and was voted the greatest singer of the last millennium by the BBC in 1999. She has released a string of singles this year – the newest is out this month, with the band Titãs – and still can’t bear to imagine a life without singing: “God forbid!”

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Watch Dogs Legion review – fight fascism in a futuristic London

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PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5 (forthcoming), Xbox Series X/S (forthcoming); Ubisoft
This ambitious, imperfect and unashamedly weird game attempts to simulate an entire population

Video games have become extraordinarily adept at simulating geography, from Assassin’s Creed’s detailed, architecturally accurate takes on ancient Egypt or 18th-century Paris to Microsoft Flight Simulator’s virtual simulacrum of the Earth’s surface. But they are still no good at simulating people, and their cities are populated with reactive automatons who forget you tried to run them over two seconds ago. This makes Watch Dogs Legion’s attempt to simulate the entire population of a futuristic, technocratic London one of the most ambitious things a game has tried in years. Walk from Camden to Nine Elms and every person you see has a name, a cluster of attributes (gambler, fashion expert, paramedic, low mobility) and a custom-generated voice and appearance. You can recruit any of them to your hacker resistance movement and step into their shoes.

I played most of Watch Dogs Legion as a construction worker named Hassan. He has no particular special skills; he can summon a cargo drone and ride it up to rooftops, but he hasn’t got any useful weapons or technical expertise. I picked him because he was nearby, and I liked his haircut and accent: not too EastEnders, not too plummy. But then I accidentally took Hassan into the bowels of one of Watch Dogs Legion’s autocratic tech giants, on a mission that I thought would be easy but turned out to involve hiding in a vent from heavily armed private security guards while using a spiderbot to steal encrypted information. Hassan barely escaped with his life. I became rather attached to him after that.

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Tsai Chin: ‘What was it like being in bed with Sean Connery? Fine’

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From Bond girl to badass grandmas, Tsai Chin has had an extraordinary career. She talks about her battles with racism, predatory producers – and farting leopards

‘I have lived on my own since 1963,” says Tsai Chin down the phone from her home in Los Angeles. “It doesn’t mean I haven’t had a sex life.” But it does mean that the 88-year-old actor brings something special to her latest role as a beguilingly irascible, chain-smoking widow who faces down triad thugs over stolen money in the comedy Lucky Grandma. Apart from the smoking, Grandma Wong is my new role model.

“I’m tough but my heart is very soft,” she says. And that is the key to Grandma Wong, a woman who projects to the world the opposite of what she is inside. In the film, she has a shrine to her late husband in her meagre Chinatown apartment in New York. She’s alone and impoverished but isn’t quite ready to give up her independence and move in with her sweet if bougie son in his brownstone.

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The fall of Johnny Depp: how the world’s most beautiful movie star turned very ugly

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In the 1990s, he was a different kind of film star – eloquent, artistic and cool. But this week, with the loss of his court case against the Sun, the dream has decisively soured

Johnny Depp is “a wife-beater”. This is the verdict of the UK courts. Just writing that sentence feels genuinely shocking, and yet, by now perhaps, it should not. For a start, the allegation that he was physically abusive to his ex-wife Amber Heard emerged more than four years ago, after she applied for a temporary restraining order against him following their divorce, citing domestic abuse. It should also not be a shock, given how many other hugely famous men have been accused of abusing women. Sean Connery was alleged to have beaten his first wife and frequently defended hitting women. His death this weekend sparked online arguments about how much the coverage should focus on the professional achievements of a man who repeatedly insisted it was fine to hit women, “if the woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually”, as he said in 1965.

But Depp is a very different figure from Connery. The latter represented alpha masculinity and aggressive sexuality. No one ever said it explicitly, but Connery’s defences for beating women fit in, on some level, with his image, and so that side of him was never going to be a problem with his audience. Depp, however, represented something else. He sued the Sun for defamation when it described him as “a wife-beater”, something Connery would never have done, and it’s also why for a certain kind of fan (me), this feels like the death of yet another childhood hero.

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Johnny Depp’s defeat in libel case hailed by domestic violence charities

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The trial highlighted tactics used to silence and discredit victims, say campaigners

Johnny Depp’s defeat in the London libel courts has been hailed by domestic violence charities as a victory that should encourage other victims to come forward and seek justice.

The judgment on Monday by the high court that the Sun was justified in describing the Pirates of the Caribbean star as a “wife beater” was welcomed by lawyers and campaign groups who support those who have experienced domestic abuse.

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