Category Archives: Culture

Ryan Adams cancels UK and Ireland tour

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The tour – which was due to commence on 30 March – has been cancelled in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct

Ryan Adams’ planned tour of the UK and Ireland has been cancelled in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct made about the musician.

“Full refunds to ticket purchasers from authorised outlets will be processed by end of day on Monday,” the ticketing company said in a tweet. Tour venues including the Royal Albert Hall, Dublin’s Olympia theatre and the O2 Academy in Newcastle have shared the same message.

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Spandex snobbery smackdown: why the liberal elite snubs wrestling

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The sport has drama, showmanship, and gender equality – as the film Fighting With My Family proves. Yet, because it’s working class, it’s marginalised, writes director Stephen Merchant

In 2014, after years of struggle, a working-class British woman, aged just 21, was awarded the highest honour her profession can bestow, live, in front of 20,000 people and a television audience of millions.

The Guardian didn’t report it. In the days following, there were no laudatory profiles, no in-depth interviews, no op-eds about her stratospheric success in a male-dominated world.

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Forget tango: the murga of Buenos Aires is a riot of sequins and salvation

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Freelance photographer Kate Stanworth has been following a Buenos Aires murga group for 10 years, as they perform in an energetic street carnival that is little known beyond Argentina

Argentina’s charismatic capital, Buenos Aires, might be more famous for tango, steak and football than colourful carnival parades. However, murga – a feisty, home-grown form of street dance and percussion performed during carnival season, once unfairly thought of as only performed by drop-outs and drunks – has flourished in recent years, providing a source of pride, happiness and salvation for the predominantly working class families that dedicate their lives to it.

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The Hole in the Ground review – superbly scary country horror

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Mounting weirdness descends as a mother and young son set up home in the middle of a dark and sinister forest

Here’s an Irish folk-horror that clearly drew the right conclusions from the midnight-movie pairing of The Babadook and Under the Shadow: a film operating at a suspenseful, spider-like creep that allows it to skirt your defences and get some distance under the skin.

It opens with a broadly familiar set-up. Recently separated, subtly scarred Sarah (Seána Kerslake) installs herself and young son Chris (James Quinn Markey) in the kind of countryside fixer-upper-type property that conventionally serves as a magnet for trouble. Yet its foundations are undermined in unexpected fashion, first by the discovery of a vast sinkhole in the surrounding forest, then by the neighbourhood crone (Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen) who pauses her catatonic murmuring to insist that Chris isn’t who he seems. As Sarah briefs one confidante: “It’s been a funny few days.”

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Glastonbury festival bans plastic bottles

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Music festival will no longer sell single-use plastic water bottles in bid to cut waste

With its sea of discarded tents and litter-strewn fields, Glastonbury has become almost as infamous for the mountain of rubbish left in its wake as it is renowned for its music.

But this year, organisers are hitting back – by banning plastic bottles in a bid to stem the tide of waste.

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‘Pornographic’ songs by Ed Sheeran and Ariana Grande banned in Indonesian province

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Shape of You and Love me Harder among western hits deemed obscene and playable only between 10pm and 3am

More than a dozen western pop songs, including Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You, have been deemed pornographic and banned from being played in daylight hours in Indonesia’s notoriously conservative West Java province.

The West Java broadcasting commission singled out 85 songs, including 17 western pop songs, it said contained adult and offensive content.

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‘Centuries of entitlement’: Emma Thompson on why she quit Lasseter film

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In her resignation letter from the film Luck, the actor questions whether any company should work with disgraced film executive John Lasseter

When the actor Emma Thompson left the forthcoming animated film Luck last month while it was still in production, it was done without public fanfare, and was only confirmed when film-industry publications such as Variety magazine picked up on it. Now Thompson has put herself firmly above the MeToo parapet with the publication publishing her incendiary letter of resignation addressed to the film’s backers, Skydance Media, one of Hollywood’s most prestigious studios.

It was known that Thompson was unhappy with the arrival in January of former head of Pixar John Lasseter as the new head of Skydance Animation. But the letter goes into extraordinary detail about her disquiet over the appointment of a studio executive whose downfall had been one of the key landmarks of the Me Too and Times Up campaigns.

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‘Unbelievable’: Alan Sugar irate over not owning a Bafta award

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The Apprentice host says his wife is upset he has never been allowed to keep a statuette

Awards season is in full swing but one man feels particularly hard done by: Alan Sugar.

The host of The Apprentice has called for himself to be given his own special award in recognition of the reality show’s success, after revealing that his wife is upset that he has never been allowed to keep a Bafta statuette.

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This Time With Alan Partridge review – an excruciating white-knuckle ride

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The monkey tennis-pitcher is back – and now he’s taking on do-badder hacktivists. After half an hour in his appalling company, you’ll be limp from laughter, loathing, panic and despair

Impossible though it is to do justice to Alan Partridge with only the written word at our disposal, we must try. Because after his years in the wilderness, Linton Travel Tavern and North Norfolk digital radio, the monkey tennis-pitcher is back. Almost. Well. To be clear. The exquisitely excruciating creation of Steve Coogan and Armando Iannucci (and others at On the Hour, where Partridge made his first appearance) ‘Alan Partridge’ is definitely back, in This Time With Alan Partridge.

It’s the character’s first proper run-out since his 2013 feature film Alpha Papa, and is co-written and directed by twin brothers Neil and Rob Gibbons, who have become – since 2010’s Mid Morning Matters – not just keepers of the flame but fuel and bellows for it too. They have accomplished the feat of finding new layers in Alan, somehow allowing him growth without change, development without enlargement of that definitively constricted soul.

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Mark Hollis, lead singer of Talk Talk, dies at age 64, reports say

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Hollis and the ‘post-rock’ band made a name with 1980s hit singles including It’s My Life

Figures from the world of music have paid tribute to Mark Hollis, frontman of the band Talk Talk, after it was reported that he had died at the age of 64.

With Hollis as its singer and creative mastermind, the group made a name with 1980s hit singles such as It’s My Life, Today, Talk Talk and Life’s What You Make It. They progressed to albums like Spirit of Eden, which was hailed as a “masterpiece”, and Laughing Stock.

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R Kelly remains in jail as lawyer says ‘not easy’ for singer to pay $100,000 bail

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  • Singer being held in 7,000-inmate county jail in Chicago
  • Lawyer says Kelly not wealthy despite string of hit records

R Kelly remains in jail as confidants make arrangements to pay the $100,000 bail needed to free him as he awaits trial for aggravated sexual abuse, his lawyer said.

Related: R Kelly: judge sets $1m bail for singer on sexual abuse charges

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A brief history of concrete: from 10,000BC to 3D printed houses

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The Romans used concrete in everything from bath houses to the Colosseum. Our modern concrete structures will never last as long

“Unlike the Pantheon … virtually all the concrete structures one sees today will eventually need to be replaced,” writes Robert Courland is his weighty tome Concrete Planet, “costing us trillions of dollars in the process.”

While there is some debate over when and where the first concrete was used – the Göbekli Tepe temple in modern-day Turkey was built using T-shaped pillars of carved limestone approximately 12,000 years ago, desert traders used early concrete to make underground water cisterns 8,000 years ago, and the ancient Egyptians used gypsum and lime to make mortars – there is little dispute that the first people to use concrete in the way we do today were the Romans.

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Frank Gehry at 90: ‘I love working. I love working things out’

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He didn’t hit his stride till he was 50, and now the architect, as inventive and bold as ever, hangs out with everyone from Harrison Ford to Jay-Z

I’ve taken up flying,” says Frank Gehry, aged 89 years and 11 months, as he sits opposite me in his Los Angeles office, “a little bit.” Then he tells a story. How in his youth he had a job washing aeroplanes, and how his cousin had a Waco biplane and would take him up in it. How he wanted to do this again. How the subject came up when Sydney Pollack was making the 2005 film Sketches of Frank Gehry. How the architect asked the film director, did he know someone who had a Waco?

“Yes, he did – Harrison Ford. And I knew Harrison way, way back, when he was a cabinet maker. He bid for some of our projects.” But Gehry never got to fly with the man who played Han Solo. Then, one evening, he was at a dinner party complaining to Ford on the subject when the host chipped in. He had another make of biplane, a Stearman, and was happy to take Gehry into the sky. He shows a photo as proof. “I can’t land it or anything, but he lets me steer it.”

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R Kelly due in court following arrest on 10 sexual abuse charges

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  • R&B singer taken into custody in Chicago on Friday
  • Cook county state’s attorney says abuse dated back as far as 1998

The R&B star R Kelly is due in court in Chicago on Saturday, charged with 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse involving four victims, including at least three between the ages of 13 and 17.

Related: R Kelly in police custody after being charged with 10 counts of sexual abuse

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‘No, I’m a Londoner’: Top Boy’s Yann Demange on his tussle with identity in the US

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Filmmaker was born to French-Algerian parents and made his home, and his name, in multicultural London. But he never felt a sense of belonging. Then Hollywood called …

Where are you from? It’s a question I’ve always had a hard time with. And since moving to the US four years ago, I’m asked it on a regular basis. Maybe it’s the combination of a brownish face, London accent and French names that throws people off. Who knows? But this question, hearing it asked over and over these past few years, has forced me to confront unresolved questions I have about identity: how I grew up and how those experiences led me to being a director.

People tend to like things compartmentalised and simple, but it’s never been that simple for me. I’ve never had any sense of a “national identity” or, for that matter, a sense of belonging to any one tribe. I’m mixed race: French white mother, Algerian father. So “I’m a Londoner” is my standard go-to short response when the question comes up. That’s the simplest answer I feel comfortable giving without getting into it.

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Trump picks up two Razzies as Holmes & Watson dominates worst of Hollywood

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Trump wins for worst actor and worst screen combo, but the Will Ferrell detective comedy scores for worst film and director

President Donald Trump and a comedy movie take on Sherlock Holmes on Saturday topped the annual Razzie awards for the worst performances and films of 2018.

Holmes & Watson, starring Will Ferrell and John C Reilly, was the biggest winner, taking four trophies including worst film and worst rip-off. Reilly also was named worst supporting actor in what Razzie founder John Wilson called the “clueless parody” of the classic detective tale.

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R Kelly in police custody after being charged with 10 counts of sexual abuse

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Indictment filed in Illinois and seen by Guardian includes nine counts involving victims aged between 13 and 17

R Kelly is in police custody in Chicago after turning himself in at the Chicago police precinct on Friday night.

Earlier in the day, the R&B star had been charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in Illinois for incidents dating back as far as May 1998.

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