Roback, a producer, guitarist and keyboardist, played a leading role in the neo-psychedelic revival of the 1980s and ’90s
The Mazzy Star co-founder and multi-instrumentalist David Roback has died, a representative for the band announced Tuesday. He was 61. A cause of death has not yet been released.
A producer, guitarist and keyboardist, Roback formed Mazzy Star alongside Hope Sandoval. The pair would go on to write all of the group’s songs.
Continue reading...Welsh singer made statement on Instagram saying she was held captive for several days
Aimee Duffy, the Welsh pop singer known as Duffy who retreated from the public eye following her hugely successful debut album Rockferry, has said she was drugged, held captive and raped by an unidentified person.
In a statement on her official Instagram account she said: “The truth is, and please trust me I am OK and safe now, I was raped and drugged and held captive over some days. Of course I survived. The recovery took time. There’s no light way to say it. But I can tell you in the last decade, the thousands and thousands of days I committed to wanting to feel the sunshine in my heart again, the sun does now shine.”
Continue reading...LA case, announced before Manhattan trial began, focuses on charges for two alleged attacks over two days
The verdict in the New York case against Harvey Weinstein is only the beginning of the movie mogul’s prosecution, with separate charges against the disgraced producer ahead in Los Angeles.
In the most high-profile trial of the #MeToo movement yet, a New York jury on Monday found Weinstein guilty of third-degree rape for an attack in a New York hotel and guilty of a criminal sex act for forcing oral sex on a former television production assistant. The fallen titan of Hollywood, who was taken away in handcuffs, could face 25 years in prison and will have to register as a sex offender.
Continue reading...Stephen Fry, Noam Chomsky and more than 40 NGOs say the country’s support for the event is at odds with its record on human rights
As bestselling authors from Jung Chang to Bernardine Evaristo prepare to gather in Abu Dhabi for the first Hay festival in the United Arab Emirates, leading figures have spoken out against the country’s compromised free speech. Stephen Fry - the festival’s president – has joined more than 40 public figures and organisations castigating its government for “promoting a platform for freedom of expression, while keeping behind bars Emirati citizens and residents who shared their own views and opinions”.
An open letter signed by Fry, Noam Chomsky, and a coalition of more than 40 NGOs including Amnesty and PEN International, is calling on the UAE to use the launch of the festival’s Abu Dhabi branch – which opens on Tuesday – to “demonstrate their respect for the right to freedom of expression by freeing all human rights defenders imprisoned for expressing themselves peacefully online”.
Continue reading...Brazil’s famed carnival kicked off in earnest on Saturday as millions of revellers poured into the streets, some of whom took aim at the nation’s deeply polarised politics. Most partiers, though, were dressed in distinctly apolitical garb, ranging from mermaid to cowboy costumes, suggesting that during carnival, Brazilians are focused on revelry first, and politics second
Art fair founder says western institutions belatedly investing in contemporary art from Africa
Major western culture institutions – including Tate and MoMA – are “playing catch up” to create truly global collections that recognise modern art from the Africa, according to the founder of an influential art fair devoted for contemporary African art.
Touria El Glaoui, the director and founder of 1-54, said that only in the last decade have institutions begun to take it seriously.
Continue reading...John Bolton is “a traitor” and his book should not be published before the election in November, Donald Trump reportedly told aides and media figures.
The president’s views on news of a book deal for Marie Yovanovitch, another key figure in the Ukraine scandal which led to Trump’s impeachment, were not immediately clear.
Continue reading...Jury indicated that in three counts they have reached their decision, and will now break and return to deliberations on the other two counts on Monday
The jury at Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial in New York appears to have reached a verdict on three of the five counts facing him, though they are deadlocked on the most serious charge – predatory sexual assault.
Shortly after the lunch break on Friday, the five men and seven women of the jury were called back into court having indicated that in three counts they have reached their decision. These are: the count that alleges the fallen movie mogul forced oral sex on a then Project Runway production assistant, Miriam Haley, in 2006 and two counts of rape in 2013 of a woman who the Guardian is not naming as her intentions on identification are unclear.
Continue reading...This account of the tough, troubled life of naive artist Antonio Liguabue boasts a committed performance from actor Elio Germano
Georgio Diritti has directed a lovely-looking and fervent film about the life of the 20th-century naive artist Antonio Ligabue, who suffered poverty and mental illness throughout his life but whose fierce, primitive, impassioned studies and sculptures of animals and human portraits made him celebrated in his own day as an authentic unschooled genius, and an object of cult fascination from the metropolitan elite who perhaps regarded him as comparable to Van Gogh. (There was another biopic in 1978, with Suspiria star Flavio Bucci in the lead.)
The Italian actor Elio Germano stars as Ligabue here, with a performance that has something of both Daniel Auteuil and Daniel Day Lewis — and also, maybe, a little of Sacha Baron Cohen. He plays him with the stoop, the shuffle, the fierce glare, the occasional equine twitch of the head and teeth-baring and drooping lower lip. This is a congenital dysfunction but also the natural brusqueness of the creative spirit and someone who does not suffer fools gladly (despite or because of being dismissed as a fool all his life). And for all that Ligabue once lived an almost feral existence, he is someone with some sense of the good things in life, particularly a decent meal in a restaurant.
Continue reading...Depp plays real-life US photojournalist W Eugene Smith who travels to cover the story of mercury poisoning that caused horrendous disfigurements
Minamata is not a masterpiece and there are one or two cliches here about western saviours and boozy, difficult, passionate journalists who occupy the perennial Venn diagram overlap between integrity and alcoholism. This movie’s producer-star Johnny Depp has form on this score, with his starstruck impersonation of Hunter Thompson. And once again, he has chosen a role in which he wears a hat indoors. But Minamata is a forthright, heartfelt movie, an old-fashioned “issue picture” with a worthwhile story to tell about how communities can stand up to overweening corporations and how journalists dedicated to truthful news can help them.
Depp plays real-life US photojournalist W Eugene Smith whose glory days were in the second world war and the decades following, working for Life magazine in that now-forgotten era when analogue cameras were incapable of lying and magazines with compelling photos could command newsstand sales.
Continue reading...President says US has trade problems with South Korea and wonders if ‘we can get Gone With the Wind back’
Donald Trump has taken a jab at the Oscars for awarding this year’s best picture honor to Parasite, because the film is South Korean.
“How bad were the Academy Awards this year?” Trump asked a rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The crowd responded with loud boos.
Continue reading...Two masked and hooded men are reported to have attacked the rapper, regarded as one of the most promising talents in the US
New York rapper Pop Smoke has been shot and killed in an apparent home invasion, according to multiple sources speaking to NBC and TMZ.
The rapper, real name Bashar Jackson, 20, was at home in Hollywood, Los Angeles, when two men wearing hoodies and masks entered the house and fired multiple shots, according to police sources quoted by TMZ. He was pronounced dead at a hospital in West Hollywood early on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Raised to hide her low caste, Yashica Dutt’s new book traces her realisation that her history is one of oppression, not shame
Pretending not to be a Dalit took a heavy toll on the young Yashica Dutt.
Her mother, Shashi, was so determined to protect her three children from the discrimination of the Hindu caste system that relegates Dalits to the periphery of society that she pretended the family were Brahmin.
Continue reading...Former One Direction member reportedly handed over cash during incident in Hampstead, North London
Singer Harry Styles was reportedly mugged at knifepoint in London on Valentine’s Day.
The 26-year old former One Direction member was “threatened with a knife” on Friday near midnight, according to police, but was unharmed after handing over an unspecified amount of cash.
Continue reading...The jury began deliberating their verdict Tuesday, asking to see emails with names of women Weinstein allegedly tried to silence
The jury at Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial in New York have asked to see emails in which the movie mogul highlighted the names of potential accusers and handed them to investigators he employed, to try and silence the women and prevent them going public with their allegations.
Just hours after the seven men and five women of the jury began deliberating their verdict on Tuesday, they began asking the judge at the New York supreme court a series of detailed questions. They wanted to see copies of all emails where “certain women’s names are highlighted in red”.
Continue reading...McGowan tweets that she ‘lost sight of the bigger picture’ after calling fellow actor a ‘fraud’
Rose McGowan has expressed regret for her attack on Natalie Portman over the latter’s Oscar dress “protest”, which took aim at the exclusion of women from the best director Academy Award nominations.
Related: Rose McGowan: Natalie Portman's Oscars dress protest 'deeply offensive'
Continue reading...Once lauded as one of Sudan’s finest musicians, Abu Obaida Hassan faded into obscurity under the Bashir regime and was even pronounced dead. Now he is back – to global acclaim
The unpaved outskirts of Omdurman, Sudan’s second city, seem like an unusual place to find a musical superstar, but Abu Obaida Hassan is far from ordinary. The frail man in his 60s who holds court in the shaded yard of a squat brick house represents a musical revolution, one that electrified traditional Sudanese music. Stranger still, in the eyes of the Sudanese public he is back from the dead.
In his 70s heyday, Abu Obaida travelled from Merowe, the home of the Shaigiya people and a centre of Nubian culture, to Khartoum, finding fame as a renegade player of a local stringed instrument known as the tambour.
Continue reading...Singer ‘deeply upset and sorry’ for cutting short farewell concert in Auckland
Sir Elton John has said he is “deeply upset and sorry” for cutting short a concert in New Zealand after being diagnosed with a mild form of pneumonia.
The musician, 72, was performing at Auckland’s Mount Smart Stadium on Sunday when he lost his voice and broke down in tears on stage.
Continue reading...As YouTube celebrates its 15th birthday, we talk to five early adopters about how the all-singing all-dancing platform has evolved
Late on the evening of 14 February 2005, Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen registered the website YouTube.com. Two months later, when the first video (of Karim briefly describing the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo) was uploaded, a platform was launched that has gone on to change the world.
Today, more than 2bn of us visit YouTube monthly, and 500 hours of footage is uploaded every minute. That’s a far cry from the 18-second video that started it all. Its stars are multi-millionaires: YouTube’s highest earner in 2019 was an eight-year-old called Ryan, who netted $26m. The number of creators earning five or six figures has increased by more than 40% year on year. At first, users earned a few hundred pounds for mentioning products in their videos; now they can make hundreds of thousands, and much more through exclusive brand deals. Not many like talking about their income: it makes them less relatable.
Continue reading...Former Love Island host reported to have been found dead at east London home on Saturday
The boyfriend of TV presenter Caroline Flack, who was found dead at her home on Saturday, has said he is heartbroken by her death.
Flack, 40, was due to go on trial on 4 March for assaulting Lewis Burton, a prosecution he did not support. She had been forbidden by a judge from communicating with him before the trial.
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