85-year-old Oscar-winner appears in the magazine’s June issue
Judi Dench has become British Vogue’s oldest cover star, securing her first front page for the style arbiter at the age of 85.
The Oscar-winning actor was photographed just before lockdown for the magazine’s June issue, but the accompanying interview explores her experiences self-isolating at home in Surrey.
Continue reading...Author wins fiction prize for The Nickel Boys while the first ever prize for audio reporting goes to an episode of the hit podcast
Colson Whitehead, This American Life and writers from the New York Times are among this year’s Pulitzer prize winners.
During an online, at-home video, the Pulitzer administrator, Dana Canedy, referred to the “deeply trying times” in which these prizes are being announced but how journalism remains as important as ever and how the arts continue to “sustain, unite and inspire”.
Continue reading...This carefully authorised documentary offers glimpses of a dazzling presence on America’s political stage
Michelle Obama is a class act – one of the classiest – and her intelligence and poise now look like something from a lost golden age. The publication of her globally bestselling memoir Becoming in 2018 brought her dazzlingly into the public sphere on her own terms. It gave her an international A-list status to rival her husband’s and provided Democrats and non-Trumpians around the world with a manifesto of decency and dignity to cling on to.
Now we have this watchable, but carefully authorised, behind-the-scenes documentary for Netflix (from the Obamas’ company, Higher Ground Productions) about Obama’s American book tour (with a stopover at London’s O2 Arena). It shows her getting in and out of armoured sports utility vehicles, chatting easily and good-naturedly with her security detail, with colleagues and family members backstage, with beaming celebrity moderators onstage (starting with Oprah Winfrey) and with people getting their copies signed in bookstores who often dissolve in floods of tears just in coming face to face with her. (I was sorry, however, that we didn’t get to see again her amusing cameo in the TV comedy Parks and Recreation, which showed Amy Poehler’s earnest public official Leslie Knope reduced to a gibbering fangirl in her presence.)
Continue reading...Comments in authorised biography also associate gay marriage with the Antichrist
The former pope Benedict XVI has accused opponents of wanting to silence him, while associating gay marriage with the Antichrist and attacking humanist ideologies in an authorised biography published in Germany.
The 93-year-old, whose original name is Joseph Ratzinger, said in Benedict XVI – A Life he had fallen victim to a “malignant distortion of reality” in reactions to his interventions in theological debates.
Continue reading...Fifteen years ago, when the word podcast was added to the dictionary, only the tech-savvy were listening. Now, as star names pile in, they’re big business. Can the quality survive?
Hello friends! Do you fancy listening to “a new type of time-shifted amateur radio”? No? How about a brilliant podcast? Of course you do.
Fifteen years ago, Macworld, a magazine for fans of Apple products, announced, with limited fanfare, that Apple was about to add podcasts to iTunes, its music download offer. Unfortunately, few readers knew what a podcast was, hence Macworld’s “time-shifted radio” definition. In June 2005, the idea of having thousands of ready-to-hear audio shows, anything from true-crime documentaries to all-chums-together comedy, to up-to-the-minute news to gripping drama to revealing interviews, and being able to listen to these shows whenever you want, wherever you are – well, that wasn’t quite happening. So Apple’s move didn’t seem important. Nor did the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary added “podcast” to its lexicon in the same year, after tech journalist Ben Hammersley came up with the term in 2004 (which was also the year the BBC launched a downloadable version of In Our Time). Podcasts were new. It takes time for the new to become everyday.
Continue reading...Literary star Guzel Yakhina shocked by emotional ‘cabin fever’ response to dramatisation
The Russian novelist Guzel Yakhina had learned to live with the persistent buzz of controversy surrounding her bestselling debut novel, Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes.
Her coming-of-age story of a young woman deported to Siberia during the Stalin-era purges of wealthier peasants, or kulaks, had been picked over for its portrayals of Soviet repressions and national identity in the largely Muslim region of Tatarstan ever since it was published in 2015.
Continue reading...Icelandic actor and strongman Hafthor Bjornsson set a world record for the deadlift on Saturday when he lifted 1,104 lb (501 kg) at Thor’s Power Gym in Iceland.
Bjornsson, best known for his portrayal of Ser Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane on Game of Thrones, broke the record previously held by Briton Eddie Hall who in 2016 became the first man to lift 500kg.
Continue reading...The author on publishing when bookshops are closed, being an ‘exercise nut’ and the dangers posed to writers by mob rule
Lionel Shriver is a US-born writer whose novels include Big Brother, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 and the bestselling We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the 2005 Orange prize and was turned into a film by Lynne Ramsay starring Tilda Swinton. In 2014, she won the BBC national short story award. Her new novel, The Motion of the Body Through Space, is about a long-married couple whose relationship is almost destroyed when one of them becomes obsessed with exercise.
What kind of lockdown are you having?
One of the most horrifying things about this experience is that it’s having so little effect on my life. I live in lockdown all the time! I don’t think this reflects well on me, but either I don’t have a very keen social appetite or I’m under-aware of when I’m starting to get lonely.
The three-time Hugo award winner is one of the biggest names in modern scifi. She talks about overcoming racism to rewrite the future
In 2018, NK Jemisin became the first writer ever to win three consecutive Hugo best novel awards for science fiction and fantasy. Her first award had been in 2016, for her novel The Fifth Season, and its two sequels, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky, won in the following years. Yet speaking on the phone from her home in coronavirus-hit Brooklyn, Jemisin says she never thought she’d be published. “I honestly didn’t think I had a chance. You just didn’t see characters like me in fiction,” she says.
Growing up in Mobile, Alabama and New York, Jemisin was an avid reader, making up her own stories from the age of eight, but the lack of black women writing science fiction and fantasy, the genre she loved, made her believe it wasn’t for her. “We were all exposed to nothing but white dude fiction, occasionally young white women fiction, and if that’s how you’ve grown up, then that is what is normal.”
Continue reading...The Nigerian musician was a restless creator who embraced the physicality of drumming and innovated until the end
Few musicians can claim to have invented a revolutionary rhythm, but then few are quite like the late Afrobeat pioneer Tony Allen. Brian Eno called him “the greatest drummer that ever lived”, citing his style alongside James Brown’s funk breakbeat and the constant pulse of German band Neu! as the “three great beats of the 1970s”. Allen’s swirl of jazz, Yoruba and highlife was unlike anything the world had ever heard: a full-body polyrhythmic workout that would give most drummers sore wrists just thinking of it.
Allen came to prominence in Lagos alongside Fela Kuti. He started drumming in the late 50s while working at a radio station, looking to jazz icons such as Art Blakey and Max Roach for inspiration as he taught himself to play. In 1964 he met Kuti and they spent the next half-decade fine-tuning their fusion of west African party music and American funk and jazz, in the bands Koola Lobitos and, by 1969, Africa ’70. While Kuti, who died in 1997, is more well-known than his musical soulmate, he said that “without Tony Allen there would be no Afrobeat”.
Continue reading...Gilles Peterson and Biz Markie pay tribute to the Fela Kuti collaborator, described by Brian Eno as ‘perhaps the greatest drummer who ever lived’
The Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, who is credited with creating Afrobeat along with his old bandmate Fela Kuti, died suddenly at the age of 79 in Paris on Thursday, his manager said.
“We don’t know the exact cause of death,” Eric Trosset said, adding it was not linked to the coronavirus.
Continue reading...The series has delivered a horror masterwork, a seminal shoot-em-up and some auteurist gems ... but how do they rank?
What better way to celebrate the recent Alien Day than to place the eight movies in the long-running space saga into some kind of order of excellence? And also perhaps to ask how so many film-makers have managed to muck up the original film’s formula.
Let’s start at the bottom. The two Alien vs Predator movies from 2004 and 2007 are now remembered largely for their staggering blandness, as if everybody involved had forgotten what made the early films so chilling. Ostensibly B-movies, but lacking the joyful, half-cocked knockabout bombast of a Roger Corman or Ray Kellogg film, they even disappointed fans of the crossover comic books that spawned them. If 20th Century Fox thought it was getting the new Ridley Scott when the studio hired Paul WS Anderson to direct ’s Alien vs Predator they were sadly mistaken. Bringing the xenomorphs to Earth, as Fox had intended to do in 1992 prior to David Fincher’s Alien 3, turned out to be the dumbest move since John Hurt decided to take a closer peek at the funny egg thing on LV-426. Even a smart moment of stunt-casting – Aliens’ Lance Henriksen as Charles Bishop Weyland – couldn’t paper over the cracks of this weirdly bloodless film. Aliens vs Predator: Requiem upped the gore but dropped quality levels even further, with untried music video directors Colin and Greg Strause at the helm. That the saga survived at all after this twin descent into movie purgatory is remarkable in itself.
Continue reading...Family urges fans not to publicly mourn leading man of numerous musical romances
The Indian actor Rishi Kapoor, who built a career as one of Bollywood’s romantic heroes, has died of leukaemia at the age of 67.
Kapoor, part of a famous Bollywood family, was admitted to hospital in Mumbai on Wednesday and died on Thursday, according to a family statement.
Continue reading...The actor has claimed that his famous role in Pride and Prejudice 25 years ago left him typecast and narrowed his acting horizons
Name: Mr Darcy.
Age: 207, 28, 35, 25, depending on how you look at it, really.
Continue reading...Khan, who had a string of Anglo-American successes under his belt, including Slumdog Millionaire, Life of Pi and Jurassic World, has died in Mumbai
Irrfan Khan, the Indian-born actor who achieved considerable success in both Bollywood and the west, has died aged 53. He had been admitted to the intensive care unit of Mumbai’s Kokilaben hospital on Tuesday with a colon infection.
In March 2018, he revealed he had been diagnosed with a neuroendocrine tumour, but after extensive treatment he recovered well enough to shoot Angrezi Medium, the film which would turn out to be his last, and whose release this March was cut short because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Continue reading...The German Society for Nature Photography (GDT) has selected its Nature Photographer of the Year 2020.
The winning image is part of a series of photographs taken in Dortmund’s north by Peter Lindel. Compared with many international nature photography hot spots, this region has little to offer. Lindel spent a lot of time and blood, sweat and tears working on this project on his doorstep. It is a beautiful statement about the long-term exploration of a single species and region.
Continue reading...The Hollywood star and bestselling author is becoming a podcaster. He discusses his fight against circumcision, his fear of Harvey Weinstein – and why he is an optimist to the core
‘I’m loving the idea of being here for a sustained period of time,” says Alan Cumming, speaking over Zoom from his “country pile” buried deep in New York’s Catskill mountains. It is purpose-built for isolation. “I realised I’ve been craving it; it’s a shame it took a global pandemic to make it happen.”
The 55-year-old actor has been rigorous about lockdown. He is asthmatic, so he has been out past his gate only once in five weeks. Cumming spends his days with his husband, the artist Grant Shaffer, and their dogs Lala and Jerry, mostly writing. In the evenings, he has Zoom cocktails – last night it was with his old Good Wife co-star Julianna Margulies.
Continue reading...Planet of the Humans, which takes aim at the green movement, is ‘full of misinformation’, says one online library
A new Michael Moore-produced documentary that takes aim at the supposed hypocrisy of the green movement is “dangerous, misleading and destructive” and should be removed from public viewing, according to an assortment of climate scientists and environmental campaigners.
The film, Planet of the Humans, was released on the eve of Earth Day last week by its producer, Michael Moore, the baseball cap-wearing documentarian known for Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine. Describing itself as a “full-frontal assault on our sacred cows”, the film argues that electric cars and solar energy are unreliable and rely upon fossil fuels to function. It also attacks figures including Al Gore for bolstering corporations that push flawed technologies over real solutions to the climate crisis.
Continue reading...Peyton Fulford shot LGBTQ+ teenagers in the deep south; Sabine Ostinvil explores nascent black masculinity in pictures that cast a new light on US youth culture
When Peyton Fulford looks at her photograph Backbend, she sees gender fluidity in motion. A body arches over a bag of pink grapefruit, the white underwear and bare legs curving across the golden landscape in a defiant pose that is both playful and strong – yet also ambiguous.
“I wanted to tell a story and for people to question the figure in the image,” the 25-year-old photographer says from Atlanta, Georgia. “Whether it’s a man or a woman or a non-binary person.”
Continue reading...As businesses in Seattle closed their doors, many storefronts nailed plywood over their windows – but it created the feeling of a ghost town. So artists came together to create something beautiful and uplifting, turning these wooden coverings into murals. Sydney Pertl, who created one of the murals in Pioneer Square, says the response has been amazing
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