Features
Claudia Pritchard
When Leonardo da Vinci went for a job in Milan, he wrote ahead mentioning his bridge-building skills and then turned up at court with a lyre he had made in the shape of a horse’s skull. But had he finished compiling his illustrated treatise on the human body - said Alastair Sooke in this Edinburgh Culture Show special - it would have been as a scientist, rather than as an artist, that he would have been remembered for centuries.Some of the hundreds of anatomical drawings he made are on show at the Queen’s Gallery, Holyrood House now, many on loan from Windsor Castle, having passed from a 16th Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Originally there was never any plan to take Top Boy into a second series, but its arrival in autumn 2011 provoked such acclaim and enthusiasm (mixed with a bit of useful controversy) that Channel 4 could hardly help themselves from recommissioning it. It has partly been a phenomenon driven by social media, where fans have persistently discussed the show and demanded another series over the intervening two years.The upshot was that writer and Hackney resident Ronan Bennett went back to his research and his word processor, and next week we'll see what happens next to Sully (Kane Robinson) and Read more ...
David Nice
Take note of the title, with its “could”, not “must”. “The word ‘must’ is not to be used to Princes,” quoth Good Queen Bess as echoed in Britten’s Gloriana. Yet that was the verb used by New York writer Scott Rose, guest-posting on Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped Disc blog. He declared that hit-and-miss superstar soprano Anna Netrebko, having proved fair game for the drive against Putin’s Nazi-rulebook laws in Russia by aligning herself politically with the regime as a named supporter of his re-election campaign, “must state her position on gay rights in Russia”.The momentum has gathered over in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Rock ‘n’ roll was invented in Bodø about 1922,” declares Elvis Costello before kicking into “A Slow Drag With Josephine”. “Then it crept down to Trondheim,” he continues. “Then the squares in Oslo got it about 1952.” Up here, 25km inside the Arctic Circle, it actually seems possible that anything could have developed without the outside world noticing. On the tip of a finger of land between two mountain-fringed fjords, the city of Bodø doesn’t need to shout its identity. The setting is enough.Costello is here with the Imposters, playing Bodø Spektrum as the opening attraction of the 2013 Read more ...
fisun.guner
What happens when art is everywhere? Does it become wallpaper? Visual white noise? I'm struggling to see the point of Art Everywhere, though I can see it's a nice idea on paper: if the people won't come to the gallery, then the gallery must come to the people. Now there's a rallying cry. What's more, it's the people who've done the curating, or at least voted on Facebook for the 57 works of art that we'll see on 22,000 billboards across the UK, from JMW Turner's The Fighting Temeraire ( Read more ...
James Williams
This week sees the release of the eagerly anticipated Alan Partridge film, Alpha Papa. And while there are those of us who simply cannot wait to cringe along with Norwich’s favourite talk radio host, there is a rather vocal minority that are indignant at having their favourite sitcom sullied by the limitations of the movie format. While it would be churlish to judge a film on the basis of an innate distrust of the movie-making business, a precedent has been set when it comes to much-loved comedies making that considerable leap to the big screen. We cherrypick a selection of films that have Read more ...
mark.padmore
“O what have I done, o what, what have I done? Confusion, so much is confusion.” So sings Captain Vere in the Prologue of Billy Budd and Benjamin Britten plunges us straight into this confusion from the very first bar as we are left in uncertainty which of two keys - B flat major and B minor - will prevail. Their simultaneous sounding is an apt metaphor for the moral ambiguity which pervades the opera and which is given a dramatic, meteorological presence when the mist descends on the ship in Act 2.I have known and loved Billy Budd ever since seeing it at ENO in 1988 in the Tim Albery staging Read more ...
Alexander Robinson
I'm a great fan of the BBC, I really am, but it pains me to say that its coverage of the arts on TV often leaves a great deal to be desired. A case in point is Sarah Montague's recent (29 July) HARDtalk interview of opera singer Thomas Hampson, which I watched via the HARDtalk YouTube page.Should opera companies receive public subsidy? Could they do more to diversify the demographics of their audiences? How can opera be made to appeal to modern listeners? These are all valid questions which have been posed before, from Yes Minister to the BBC News website, and which will no doubt continue to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“JJ Cale will be onstage in three minutes.” With the house lights still full on, an old cove with tatty, silvering hair and an open untucked-in puce shirt shuffled about onstage, tinkering with equipment, before picking up a guitar and leaning into a flavoursome sliver of Okie-smoked boogie. Either JJ Cale didn’t give two hoots for the convention of the big entry, or he was enjoying a joke about his anonymity. Probably both.The musician whose calling card was writing songs for others has died at the age of 74. The reality is that it was a mere three songs which made Cale’s name and fortune: Read more ...
theartsdesk
There's good cops and bad cops, hard cops and soft cops, old cops and young cops, funny cops and straight cops, maverick cops and by-the-book cops. The pairings are legion, the permutations endless. The movies teem with buddy cops, unlike paired with unlike to bring down bad guys. They've all pretty much got one thing in common: it's a guy thing. Yes, when it comes to reeling in the guilty parties, not a lot of sisters get to do it for themselves. The release of The Heat, a shoo-in as this summer's big comedy hit, has found us trawling through the archives to celebrate other instances of Read more ...
Matt Parker
In both a personal and literary sense, Grant Hart has been to hell and back. While the 52-year-old Minnesotan is still best known as the drummer and songwriting contributor behind legendary US punk band Hüsker Dü, his fourth solo album, The Argument, is a bold adaptation of John Milton's Paradise Lost that could finally see him recognised as an artist in his own right. And it's about time.For better or worse, Hart has spent three decades being cast as the yin to Hüsker Dü frontman Bob Mould's yang. In contrast to Mould's direct, hardcore-influenced compositions, it was Hart that brought Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Woody Allen once joked that he would prefer to achieve immortality not through his work but through not dying. He is now 77 and the inevitable is a lot nearer than it was when he first realised, aged five, that this doesn’t go on forever. Fear of death has powered the furious productivity that in the early days yielded jokes by the yard, then the films appearing year upon year. In the interim the public image has calcified: the master comedian who would prefer to be a tragedian, the world-class worrier, the clarinet-tooting workaholic. But is that the real Woody Allen? This week a two-part Read more ...