Brexit is delayed – so voyager avec nous on a trans-European tour of music, from Paris to Berlin via Finistère. Tout le monde à bord!
Poor old Lloyd went to Amsterdam and all he got was double pneumonia in a single room. And, by the sounds of it, his love life is going horribly wrong. Just don’t ask him about the price of medicine (obviously he didn’t get his European health insurance card). It’s enough to make anyone go No Deal, really.
Continue reading...Austrian magazine alleges pupils were subjected to physical, mental and sexual abuse
The Vienna State Opera has launched an investigation and promised far-reaching reforms after allegations that students at its prestigious ballet academy were subjected to physical, mental and sexual abuse by two teachers.
“Things have happened that are unacceptable,” the State Opera’s director, Dominique Meyer, said on Wednesday after the Austrian magazine Falter published a detailed exposé of the alleged abuse based on interviews with students and staff.
Continue reading...Standing nearly 20 feet high, 43 US presidents’ busts, remnants from a bankrupted theme park, are stored in Croaker, Virginia, on the property of Howard Hankins who is seeking to restore the massive sculptures. Hankins has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to relocate the statues to a place where they can be visited by all
Continue reading...For Dubrovnik, doubling as King’s Landing in Game of Thrones is a mixed blessing. Stardom has been a boon for business – but has also sparked an inundation of visitors to a city already struggling with overcrowding
Continue reading...President’s campaign video featured Hans Zimmer music from The Dark Knight Rises
Warner Bros has launched legal action against Donald Trump after he used music from The Dark Knight Rises in a tweet.
The US president posted a two-minute video for his 2020 re-election campaign that featured Hans Zimmer’s Why Do We Fall? from the 2012 film. It also featured the film’s title cards.
Continue reading...Calls for venues to have better sexual assault policies as punk duo tweet about fan being groped
Sexual harassment and groping remains a big problem at live music events, promoters and venue owners have warned, after the duo Sleaford Mods said a female fan had been assaulted during one of their shows.
The punk band spoke out after a gig in Bristol on Saturday night, saying on Twitter that they had “had a report of a female fan being groped in the crowd”, and adding: “Touching anyone without their consent is not acceptable no matter how you dress it up.”
Continue reading...R&B star was due to do two Saturday performances at the Californian music festival
Solange has cancelled her Coachella performance a week out from the Californian festival due to “major production delays”, organisers say.
The R&B star was slated for two Saturday performances at the festival – on 13 and 20 April – but on Sunday night it was confirmed both would be cancelled.
Continue reading...Hungarian singers allegedly signed paper to bypass stipulation of all-black cast
The Hungarian State Opera has come up with a dubious way around a stipulation that George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess be performed by an all-black cast: it is allegedly asking its white, Hungarian singers to sign a paper saying they identify as African-American.
The company first put on the opera a year ago, leading to a spat with the Gershwin estate, which stipulates the opera should only be performed by a black cast.
Continue reading...Politicians in the city are seeking to halt a photography exhibition called Balkan Pride
Plovdiv, one of the 2019 European capitals of culture, has become embroiled in a homophobia scandal as local officials attempt to remove the head of the organising committee over a photographic exhibition featuring LGBT themes.
Officials in the Bulgarian city, which is co-hosting the 2019 edition of the European capital of culture with Matera in Italy, said a “Balkan Pride” photo exhibition due to open in July should be stopped.
Continue reading...In two years’ time, the Lower East Side will be home to the world’s first underground ‘green’ space – the Lowline
To get a glimpse of what will eventually become the Lowline, a subterranean Eden being billed as the world’s first underground park, you have to swipe your MetroCard at the Lower East Side’s Delancey Street station, go down one flight of stairs, go down another, slither through a few characteristically congested subway corridors, and then up another flight, to the J train platform.
Here, in the crucible of Manhattan’s public transportation system, with its slow, industrial wheeze, is an abandoned space the size of a football field. Seventy years ago it was the Williamsburg Bridge trolley terminal, transporting city folk between boroughs. But since 1948 it’s existed in a state of dark, musty desertion, save for tall metal columns, a few men in hazmat suits and the outlines of the balloon loops in which the trolleys once turned, which will be integrated into the park’s walkways.
Continue reading...The former YouTuber turned musician and actor talks about sudden stardom, queer pride and life as a showman
Troye Sivan is posing in full view of the street, delighting the small groups of teenagers who stop outside the photo studio to gawp. Some of them know who he is. The rest can tell he must be Someone. The South African-born Australian, 23, is as luminous as a cherub and has no qualms about giving it his best Rodin: foot perched on a starry plinth, trousers gaping around his slim frame.
Sivan has been preparing to be looked at since before puberty. As of last year, he is a pop star – not quite a household name, but big enough to command an invitation from Taylor Swift to duet on her recent US tour, and a guest spot from old friend Ariana Grande on his 2018 album Bloom. Critics compared Bloom’s euphoric synth-pop to cult Swedish pop star Robyn (the ecstatic My My My!) and 4AD goths This Mortal Coil (The Good Side, a spectral break-up ballad). He’s also an actor, recently lauded for his supporting role in the gay conversion therapy drama Boy Erased, with Nicole Kidman and Lucas Hedges.
Continue reading...‘Short story stations’ in Canary Wharf print one- three- and five-minute reads on demand
“Every single day,” says Paresh Raichura, “I’m on the lookout for something new to read.” On his hour-long commute to Canary Wharf, where he works for the Financial Ombudsman, he picks up Time Out or a local paper or the freesheet Metro, but says: “I’ve stopped reading all the long novels I used to read.”
Why?
Continue reading...Trafalgar Studios, London
In his funny and perceptive two-hander, Godber and his wife play a quarrelsome couple on a tandem trip to Europe
Although it dominates our lives, Brexit has so far made surprisingly few appearances on stage. It is, however, a key topic – along with grief and cycling – in this humane, funny and perceptive two-hander written by John Godber and performed by him and his wife, Jane Thornton. This is certainly the first play I’ve seen that seeks to explain why so many people voted leave.
It presents us with an odd couple brought together by loss and a love of bikes. Don, an ex-miner and now a porter at Pontefract hospital, is grieving over the death of his wife. Carol, a teacher and would-be artist, is a widow haunted by the passing of her architect husband. But, after a chance graveside encounter, the two of them discover they have a shared passion for cycling. Rashly they set off on a bike-and-train trip to Florence on the day of the 2016 referendum, only to realise that they are on opposite sides of the argument about Europe.
Continue reading...This puffed-up cultural citadel was meant to be an endlessly evolving, telescopic arts complex. But the glistening billionaires’ playground rising up beside it had other plans
It seems fitting that the cultural centre of New York’s latest luxury private development should look like a quilted Chanel handbag. Rearing up at the northern end of the High Line on Manhattan’s reborn West Side, the Shed presents a 10-storey wrapping of puffed-up diamond cushions to passersby, standing as the gaudy gateway to Hudson Yards – the most expensive real estate project in US history.
While it might fit in with the gilt-edged world of Swiss watch boutiques and Michelin-starred chefs that awaits in this $25bn private enclave, it is an unlikely costume for what the project’s architect and originator, Liz Diller, insists is “simply a piece of infrastructure” to support whatever artists want to do. “It’s not precious,” she says of the $500m building. “It’s muscular and industrial, just meat and bones.”
Continue reading...It is seen as a lawless breeding ground for hooliganism and drug trafficking. But a photographer called Mister Happiness is on a mission to tell the real story about the demonised area
‘She put her pen down,” says Monsieur Bonheur, “and told me to stop dreaming.” The French photographer is recalling the day he told the careers advisor at his school that he wanted to study fashion design. “She said, ‘Your parents won’t have the money to pay for those schools. They won’t be able to pull strings. You should consider something more appropriate for a black kid from the 93, like fixing central heating systems.’”
There is still disbelief in Bonheur’s voice as he recounts this decade-old conversation. “She was reminding me of the codes,” he says, “advising me to play by the rules.”
Continue reading...National Archives’ cold war exhibition shows planned scenarios such as arrest of Michael Foot
In the apocalyptic event of a nuclear strike on Britain, the government offered householders make-do-and-mend advice on how to create refuge shelters under stairs and tables, and knock up temporary toilets from a chair and bucket.
Few were reassured by the DIY defences advocated in the widely lampooned public information “Protect and Survive” pamphlet, published in 1980, and a new cold war exhibition at the National Archives in Kew, featuring such a shelter, will do little to augment faith in this as a robust strategy for civilian survival.
Continue reading...Taoiseach Leo Varadkar sent handwritten letter saying he is ‘huge fan’ and offering to meet singer in person before her Dublin concert
The Irish prime minister used official letterhead to write a fan letter to Kylie Minogue, freedom of information documents reveal.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar sent a handwritten message saying he was a “huge fan” of the Australian pop star, offering to meet her in person ahead of her Dublin concert in October last year.
Continue reading...The saga of the Seven Kingdoms may be bowing out, but it has opened the floodgates. Here’s your guide to the next big heroes
Rand al’Thor was found as a baby on the slopes of Dragonmount and taken to Two Rivers, where he grew into a broad-shouldered shepherd boy. But Rand is possessed of immense power, a power as yet untapped, for he is also The Dragon Reborn, destined to be hunted by Darkhounds and Darkfriends as he bids to prove himself a mighty warrior leader. Among other things, Rand’s existence shows that you should always believe ancient prophesies, that even the low-born can save the world – and that characters in TV fantasy series must always have two names.
Rand is just one of the 2,782 characters who appear in Wheel of Time, the bestselling saga of fantasy novels by Robert Jordan. We can only hope the forthcoming adaptation on Amazon will hone the cast down a little, as we follow Rand and his forces towards Tarmon Gai’don, or the final battle between good and evil.
Continue reading...A large crowd of fans gathers to pay tribute to the rapper Nipsey Hussle after he was shot dead outside his Los Angeles clothing store on Sunday. The 33-year-old earned a Grammy nomination this year for his major-label debut and was a respected figure in south LA, where he grew up
Continue reading...Japan’s sakura (cherry blossom) season has officially begun, with crowds flocking to parks to photograph the early blooms
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