Category Archives: Culture

Vicky McClure: ‘I couldn’t stay in London. I begrudge paying so much for a pint’

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As she returns to our screens in a new drama about an abusive relationship, the actor talks about sexist directors, ignoring Line of Duty – and why people think she’s living on the moon

One of the best stories about Vicky McClure concerns the time she flew by private jet to attend the Berlin film festival in 2008 with Madonna. “It was, like, wow, a whirlwind.” And the next day, McClure was back at her office job sorting out the mail. “Answering the door: ‘Hello, postie? Yeah, I’ll let you through.’”

The film, Filth & Wisdom, wasn’t too well received, alas. But being handpicked by Madonna for her directorial debut – McClure must have felt she was about to make it? “When you’re young,” says the actor, her blue eyes widening, “it’s hard because your expectations are so high. Just having so much rejection, I’d built quite a thick skin. Even so I was like, ‘This is it, I know it.’ And it wasn’t, again.”

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Rebuilding Aleppo: ‘We cannot preserve the place but we can save our memories’

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Thousands of Aleppians are using a Facebook group to share their way of life before the Syrian war

Going to the hammam was once a beloved ritual for Aleppo resident Atef Shikhouni and his friends. Recalling the boisterous, joyful experience, the 55-year-old wrote: “Here is a man shouting, ‘Where is the soap?’ while another one is asking for the shampoo and a third wants someone to rub his back. It becomes very noisy. After spending some time in the sauna, it is time for the ‘rubbing man’. He uses a rough loofah to rub my body mercilessly and I pray it will end without any damage.”

But that was before the outbreak of war in Syria. “Today, the bath is cold and has no soul,” the sports teacher wrote in February 2017, shortly after the worst of the fighting in Aleppo had ended. “Cruel are our days, exactly like our bath today.”

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Scarlett Johansson: comments on ‘authentic casting’ taken out of context

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Star clarifies comment: ‘Any actor should be able to play anybody and Art, in all forms, should be immune to political correctness’

Scarlett Johansson has said comments she made on the “authentic casting” debate have been taken out of context and asserted that she supports diversity in film.

Related: Scarlett Johansson drops out of trans role after backlash

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Rosalía’s ‘Spanishisms’ upset Catalonia’s language purists

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Catalan pop star uses Spanish words in Milionària, her first single in the local language

The Catalan pop star Rosalía has upset language purists with her first single recorded in Catalan, by using “Spanishisms” that critics say dilute the language.

In Milionària, which received 2m views on YouTube in its first 24 hours, the 25-year-old singer uses the word cumpleanys – a corruption of the Spanish cumpleaños – to mean birthday, instead of the Catalan aniversari.

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My gonzo night at Hunter S Thompson’s cabin – now on Airbnb

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Fuelled by hard drugs and righteous anger, his incendiary prose shook America. Could our writer channel his spirit by spending a night at the typewriter where it all happened?

It is 4.30 on a Thursday morning and I am writing these words on the big red IBM Selectric III that once belonged to Hunter S Thompson. Owl Farm, Thompson’s “fortified compound” in Woody Creek, Colorado, is dark and silent outside. Even the peacocks he raised are sleeping. The only sound anywhere is the warm hum of this electric typewriter and the mechanical rhythm of its key strikes, as clear and certain as gunfire.

In April, Thompson’s widow, Anita, began renting out the writer’s cabin to help support the Hunter S Thompson scholarship for veterans at Columbia University, where both she and Hunter studied. It sits beside the main Thompson home on a 17-hectare estate marked with hoof prints and elk droppings that gradually rises towards a mountain range. A short walk uphill is the spot where Thompson’s ashes were fired into the sky from a 153ft tower in the shape of a “Gonzo fist”, a logo he first adopted during his unsuccessful 1970 campaign to be sheriff of nearby Aspen. Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, picked up the $3m tab for that elaborate sendoff, which took place shortly after Thompson killed himself in 2005.

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R Kelly arrested on federal sex trafficking charges

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R&B singer expected to be taken from Chicago to New York to face charges relating to child pornography and obstruction of justice

R&B singer R Kelly has been arrested on sex trafficking charges, according to American law officials.

The 52-year old was arrested in Chicago on Thursday night on 13 federal sex crime charges, and was expected to be taken to New York, according to officials.

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Sole to the highest bidder: Sotheby’s to auction rare Nike sneakers

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Nike’s famous ‘Moon Shoe’ and limited-edition trainers produced by Kanye West, Air Jordan and Adidas will be sold

Sotheby’s in New York has announced its first-ever auction dedicated to sneakers.

The auction house will sell 100 pairs of the rarest sneakers ever produced, including a sample of one of the first Nike running shoes with a pre-sale high estimate of $160,000.

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Men behaving badly: why cinema’s great hellraisers were a breed apart

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Rip Torn belonged to a high-spirited tradition that was fuelled by too much booze and testosterone. Like it or not, we may never see their like again

The death of the film and TV star Rip Torn, whose drunken exuberance so often resulted in the breaking of glass, the splintering of wood and the bandaging of limbs, has led the industry to ponder that exotic creature whose rock’n’roll behaviour, from the 1960s onwards, persisted for decades to tolerant chortling from the similarly inclined or wistfully well-behaved gentlemen of the press. And that creature is the “hellraiser” – a term that originates from a defiant credo espoused by the hard-drinking, hard-living Hollywood legend Richard Burton: “God put me on this earth to raise sheer hell!”

Peter O’Toole’s death in 2013 led to a similar outpouring of grief for the booze legends who have evidently been replaced by corporate dullards, drinking mineral water, policing their own language and anxiously checking their mentions on Twitter. Once we had hellraisers: now we have “disrupters”, people who give Ted talks about their revolutionary new app for maximising your leisure time. Actors used to spend every penny getting fantastically drunk. Now George Clooney gets a reported $1bn for selling his Casamigos Tequila brand to the drinks retailer Diageo — although Clooney was reported to lose his cool after a few drinks.

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Yesterday’s tomorrow today: what we can learn from past urban visions

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From modernist machine-built perfection to a nuclear-proof metropolis buried far underground, our predictions for future cities tell us much about the past

Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination by Paul Dobraszczyk is published by Reaktion Books

Ever since the world’s first recognised skyscrapers were built in Chicago and New York in the 1880s, cities have been in thrall to visions of extraordinary height. Early intimations of the ways in which skyscrapers would transform cities came in the 1910s, with images such as Richard Rummell’s below suggesting a future not only of immensely tall buildings but also of multilayered streets, railways and flying machines.

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Taylor Swift named world’s highest paid celebrity

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The singer has reportedly earned $185m in the last year in Forbes’ annual list of highest-paid stars, followed closely by Kylie Jenner and Kanye West

Singer Taylor Swift was named the world’s highest-paid entertainer on Wednesday but was closely followed by two members of the wider Kardashian clan – reality star turned cosmetics queen Kylie Jenner and rapper Kanye West.

The annual Forbes Celebrity 100 list also saw soccer stars Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar among the top 10, along with British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran and 1970s soft rock band the Eagles, who embarked on a new tour in 2018.

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Rip Torn, cult actor, dies aged 88

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Star of a string of 60s classics fell foul of Hollywood because of his temper but found a fresh lease of life in comedy, from TV’s Larry Sanders Show to the Men in Black films

Rip Torn, America’s celebrated wildman actor, has died aged 88. Torn, who had been a constant presence on stage and screen since the mid-1950s, was arguably better known for his eccentric, and occasionally violent, antics when the cameras weren’t rolling – and on one notorious occasion, when they were.

His publicist Rick Miramontez confirmed Torn died Tuesday afternoon at his home with his wife, actor Amy Wright, and daughters Katie Torn and Angelica Page by his side. No cause of death was given.

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Woody Allen: ‘I never think of retiring’

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Allen says at Spanish press conference to launch production on his new film, starring Christoph Waltz, that he’ll ‘probably die’ on set

Woody Allen has no plans to give up film-making despite the years of controversy that has dogged his directing career. “I never think of retiring. It’s not just something that has occurred to me,” Allen said at a press conference in San Sebastian to launch production on his new film, which is set in Spain and funded by the Spanish media giant Mediapro. It stars Christoph Waltz, Gina Gershon and Elena Anaya, and is informally known as Rifkin’s Festival – though is still officially called Woody Allen Summer Project 2019.

Allen said: “My philosophy, since I started many years ago in show business, is that no matter what happens is to focus on my work … No matter what happens in my life with my wife, children, current events, politics or illness, I focus on my work, and that’s all that really absorbs my time and effort seven days a week.

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David Attenborough: polluting planet may become as reviled as slavery

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Naturalist tells MPs radical action needed to tackle crisis but attitude of young people gives him hope

The attitude of young people towards tackling the environmental crisis is “a source of great hope”, David Attenborough has told MPs, as he predicted that polluting the planet would soon provoke as much abhorrence as slavery.

Giving evidence to the business, energy and industrial strategy committee on how to tackle the climate emergency, the naturalist and TV presenter said radical action was required.

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Egypt asks Interpol to trace Tutankhamun relic auctioned in UK

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Cairo calls on international police agency to find head sold to unknown buyer for £4.7m

Egypt has called on Interpol to intervene and will sue over the sale at Christie’s auction house in London of a 3,000-year-old Tutankhamun sculpture that may have been looted from a Luxor temple.

The 28.5cm brown quartzite head was part of a statue of the ancient god Amun with the facial features of the young pharaoh Tutankhamun, who ruled Egypt between 1333 and 1323 BC. Similar statues were carved for the Temple of Karnak in the city of Thebes, now Luxor.

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The Mulan trailer is a dismal sign Disney is bowing to China’s anti-democratic agenda | Jingan Young

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Mulan has been transformed from life-affirming epic to patriotic saga, showing Hollywood is prioritising box office success

Disney have just released their hotly anticipated teaser trailer for their live-action remake of Mulan. The 1998 animated musical action film, following the triumphant story of an awkward young woman who takes her father’s place in a war by disguising herself as a boy, resonated globally. I was seven years old when it was released, and as a half-Chinese girl born and raised in pre-handover Hong Kong, the film had special importance to me, with its combination of east-west values, musical numbers (Honour to Us All, I’ll Make a Man Out of You and Reflection have aged extremely well), and female protagonist who kicks some serious butt while retaining her moral integrity and reinforcing family values. To this day, my Mulan sword, Mushu soft toy and Mulan dolls are somewhere safe in storage at home in Hong Kong.

To say I was excited by the prospect of a live action remake of Mulan is an understatement. The film joins the plethora of live-action remakes of Disney’s 90s renaissance hits, including Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King. All of these retain their musical numbers. Why then has Disney decided to make Mulan a gritty realist film? Particularly considering there are already Chinese versions of the legend: General Hua Mu-lan (1964) and Mulan: Rise of a Warrior (2009).

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British Museum to return Buddhist heads looted in Afghan war

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Stolen artefacts likely removed by Taliban will go on display before being sent to Kabul

Fourth-century Buddhist terracotta heads probably hacked off by the Taliban and found stuffed in poorly made wooden crates at Heathrow are to be returned to Afghanistan where they will be star museum exhibits.

The British Museum gave details on Monday of one of the most significant repatriation cases it has dealt with relating to the illegal looting of artefacts from Afghanistan and Iraq.

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David Chipperfield’s Berlin temple: ‘Like ascending to the realm of the gods’

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James Simon Gallery, Berlin
Twenty years in the making, this dazzling synthesis of the classical and modern takes Museum Island to new heights

Friedrich Wilhelm IV described his vision for Berlin’s Museum Island as a “cultural acropolis”; a sacred sanctuary for the arts and sciences that would cement the Prussian capital as the Athens of the north. Almost two centuries later, the kaiser’s classical aspirations have been fulfilled by British architect David Chipperfield, in the form of a dazzling white temple. Opening this weekend, after 20 years of planning, the James Simon Gallery stands as a €134m (£120m) Parthenon-on-Spree, forming a handsome new entrance to one of the world’s most important repositories of cultural treasures.

“We were quite nervous,” says Chipperfield, standing in the lofty new ticketing lobby, where stripes of sunlight flood in between the row of slender white columns outside. “The challenge was how to create something that was of its context and also of our time, in this incredibly sensitive location.”

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Brazil mourns death of musician João Gilberto

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Bossa nova legend, 88, earns warm tributes – but not from president Jair Bolsonaro

Brazil is mourning the death of João Gilberto, one of the country’s greatest musicians and composers, a reclusive genius in a nation of extroverts whose work recalled happier, more optimistic times for a deeply divided nation.

Related: João Gilberto obituary

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An evening with João Gilberto, the bright wallflower of bossa nova

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A rare concert in 1998 was a chance to see the great musical pioneer emerge from hiding – and why his glorious talent lifted him beyond pop fads

In 1998, I had the rare experience of seeing bossa nova pioneer João Gilberto live in concert in San Francisco. Gilberto, who died on Saturday at age 88, was a famous recluse known both for his magical music-making as well as his stage fright. If you had the chance to watch him perform live, you seized the opportunity because it might never happen again. This is my account of that memorable evening.

Related: Brazilian musician João Gilberto dies aged 88

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