Buzz
joe.muggs
Ari Up, frontwoman of The Slits from the age of 14, died yesterday aged 48 after a long illness, it was announced by her stepfather, John Lydon of the Sex Pistols. The brilliant and confrontational female-fronted Slits were one of the finest examples of the punk era's DIY creativity, and also one of punk's most successful engagements with reggae. Ari Up never stopped being a fervent supporter of reggae culture in all its forms: after The Slits she formed New Age Steppers with legendary British producer Adrian Sherwood, and for many years she lived in Kingston, Jamaica where she was a keen Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Frontline public funding for arts will be cut by some 15 per cent over the next four years, said the Chancellor George Osborne today, as he announced a cut of almost half in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport budget, from £1.9 billion to £1.1 billion. Arts Council England's funding will be cut by almost 30 per cent over that period, starting with a 14 per cent reduction for next year.The bulk of the DCMS figure will be met by 41 per cent savings in the department’s administration costs, and 19 quangos will be abolished or substantially reformed, including some in film, library and Read more ...
joe.muggs
Some days I feel like I've woken up on the other side of some wormhole in the spacetime continuum, and the world is a subtly but definitely different place to yesterday. So it was last week when I got a slightly drunken email from a music producer in Rotterdam, with some remixes of his work, saying, “There was this dude called DJ Orion and this dude was working in his lab on his freak creation. Mixing moombahton with footwork and guarachero at 140 bpm. He named it: boombahchero.”OK, “footwork” I know. Footwork is a rhythmically warped mutation of house music and hip hop that comes Read more ...
fisun.guner
Three days after its closure, and just a few days after opening, Tate Modern is still to make an announcement over the future of Ai Weiwei's interactive Turbine Hall installation. Will the closure of the dust-emitting artwork be permanent? Or are the Tate perhaps thinking of issuing dust masks to the public, which may, in fact, add a thrilling "danger zone" dimension to the experience?
It may be remembered that Tate Modern faced similar fears when it opened a decade ago. With the high number of visitors, it was suggested that the untreated wooden floors were creating enough dust to cause Read more ...
josh.spero
Talking to Jude Kelly at the Royal Festival Hall last night, Stephen Sondheim gave a glimpse into his own theory of lyrical composition by contrasting Noël Coward (whom "I intensely dislike") and Cole Porter.The problem with Coward, he said after some hesitation, was that he was born poor, and so when he writes about the rich, he does so with the outsider's sneer. Porter, on the other hand, was born rich and thus could treat his peers with good humour and kindness. Sondheim compared Coward's "I've Been to a Marvellous Party" with Porter's "Well, Did You Evah?", both songs about parties, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On 10 October, 2010 Harold Pinter would have turned 80. To celebrate, a group of actors gathered in a room to read The Room, his first play, to an invited audience. Among those present was his widow Antonia Fraser.The play was introduced by Matthew Lloyd, artistic director of the Actors Centre and its in-house performance space, the Tristan Bates Theatre. Given that The Room was written when Pinter was still making his living as an actor it felt appropriate, he explained, that the celebration was being hosted by a venue where actors are able to hone their craft.The famous Pinteresque menace Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
He was the man who Jerry Wexler, co-founder of Atlantic Records, thought was the greatest soul singer of them all and "a salesman of epic proportions". Nearly 30 stone when he died, he fathered 21 children (and is reported to have had 90 grandchildren). He was born in Philadelphia in 1936, 1938 or 1940 according to differing reports and made his mark as a preacher before becoming a song-writer and performer. He also had a job as an undertaker and ran a mortuary business in Los Angeles having worked in his uncle's funeral parlour, and was a gospel radio DJ.Among Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The elusive street artist Banksy was invited by Matt Groening to script an opening sequence for The Simpsons. "MoneyBart", the episode it fronted, was broadcast in America yesterday, and comes to the UK on 21 October. The sequence is inspired by recent reports that The Simpsons gets its animation done in South Korea. Banksy has taken that ball and run with it, producing a pitch-black satirical fantasy in which Bart himself is a graffiti artist, while lifeless drones, fluffy furry things and fantasy creatures are all alike put in the service of the great marketing machine that is the animated Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you can’t play a cop or a mass murderer, steer clear of the acting profession. That would be the logical inference from the swarms of cops’n’killers series cramming the TV schedules. You’d think we’d have had enough, what with Luther, all the CSI franchises, and simultaneous home-grown and American versions of Law & Order squabbling for attention, but they just keep on coming.On Sunday night, Sky1 launches its much-trailed new series Thorne, adapted from Mark Billingham’s bestselling novels and starring David Morrissey as titular ‘tec Tom Thorne. He finds himself on the trail of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The public works for free. That is the founding principal of modern broadcasting culture. It phones radio stations with its air-filling thoughts on this and that. It monopolises Saturday nights on primetime in singing and dancing and plate-spinning. Until recently, it would sit in a house for weeks on end while we (in decreasing numbers) watched. But the public as museum curators? That’s a new one.Or almost new. The undisputed radio triumph of the year has been Radio 4’s collaboration with the British Museum, A History of the World in 100 Objects. To leaven what might be perceived as Read more ...
josh.spero
Members of the artistic communities have been campaigning for weeks now against the imminent cuts in the subsidies given to the arts (see David Shrigley’s clever video here). All arts organisations have been told, in the latest money-saving initiative, to rewrite their budgets with a 10 per cent cut in their Arts Council grant. These are the lucky ones – the Arts Council has indicated that some bodies will have their entire grant removed.So on the fringe of the Tory party conference here in Birmingham, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Association of British Orchestras Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Parallels have occasionally been drawn between techno and modern classical music, most especially dissonant movements such as minimalism, serialism and the broader avant garde. The purest techno has a stark, almost barren simplicity and those involved with it, notably Detroit techno original Jeff Mills, are keen to build bridges with the orchestral community, taking techno into concert halls and hoping to add a certain intellectual kudos. Such ventures are a mixed blessing - often losing the sheer energetic fun of the music along the way - but a new German outfit called Brandt Brauer Frick Read more ...