Books features
sue.steward
In another lifetime, I walked into the Electric Ballroom in Camden Town through a portal into a new world: the cavernous dancehall was packed, and the "audience" being choreographed by cross-rhythms of Afro-Cuban and Brazilian ancestry in an atmosphere created by a 17-year-old jazz funk DJ called Gilles Peterson. I was witnessing the dawn of the New Jazz Age.The mostly black dancers wore baggy suits, white shirts and braces like the 1930s jivers at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, the Forties mambo-niks at Manhattan’s legendary Palladium Ballroom, and hats like the Jamaican rude boys in (London) Soho Read more ...
michael.pennington
In a life so short it is always a shock to remember the fact. Chekhov lost more friends than most people do by 60, but he has gained hundreds of thousands who love that fugitive figure, its guardedly attentive attitude, the merciless word in the right place, the moral force lightly carried: one thinks of him in the most unexpected corners of life.Unavailable to account for himself, he has become the invention of his admirers, who may prefer him wary or exuberant, skittishly lyrical, coldly severe, charming or implacable, walking like a girl or tough as old boots. Some get excited by the new Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Poetry on the underground – we all know it: those well-intentioned verselets that set out to brighten the weary traveller’s journey. But poetry about the underground? You begin to worry about some sub-Larkinesque aubade on the brevity of life and the length of the trip. In Three Men on the Metro, poets Andy Croft, W N Herbert and Paul Summers face the challenge squarely, though they skip the stations of their native Tyne and Wear, bypass what passes for a mass transportation system in London, and journey to the mother of all metros – Moscow.In the process they discover as much about what’s Read more ...
josh.spero
Your browser could search a long time for philiproth.com. There are some writers, it is plain, who are not the web type. I find it hard to envision a site garnished with a picture of a smiling – scowling – Roth standing outside his Connecticut farmhouse, beckoning web traffic to read his latest blog post (“My new year’s resolutions”) or even providing a biography beyond the terse notes on his flyleaves. An author who is reclusive in life is unlikely to be prodigious online. You would not define these solely as “literary” writers, but the high priests of prose style are not often found in the Read more ...
sue.steward
Every day till 3 January theartsdesk will carry a survey of one of the arts we cover. We begin with Photography. Photography books are exploding on to the market like fireworks just as the book as a tangible object is becoming increasingly endangered. And with so many titles emerging from established and pop-up publishers, it’s a hard task to pin them down to the best of 2009 without some shocking omissions. So I’ll call them “Favourites” - and await cries of outrage about who’s in and who’s out.
First, some regretted omissions: the National Portrait Gallery’s Beatles to Bowie exists thanks Read more ...
David Nice
Love it or loathe it, the powerhouse effect is back at English National Opera. The era which gave its name to the sobriquet, that challenging time in the 1980s and early 1990s when Davids Pountney, Alden and Fielding skewed the stage and Mark Elder matched their vision in the pit, now has an equal. The ENO calendar year has just ended with Rupert Goold's Chinese restaurant shake-up of a Turandot , everything we saw beautifully thought out and focused to knife-edge brilliance, and every sound emanating from the ENO Orchestra and Chorus under Ed Gardner sensual-perfect. Alas, the kind of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The spy out in the cold, the alienated Heathcliff of ballet, rough-hewn, moody and a little frightening - this is an image that’s commonly paraded of the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan. His ballets stand up that image, staging barely watchable sexual urges (The Judas Tree, My Brother, My Sisters), accusing polite society as a force for evil (Mayerling, Las Hermanas), smashing the porcelain in ballet’s china cupboard. Even his two most popular and conventional achievements, Romeo and Juliet and Manon, take the classical ballet model and shake it hard into a modern world of rebellious sex that Read more ...
joe.muggs
Linked to Joe Muggs' interview with Tim Lawrence on theartsdesk, this is extracted from the introduction of Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992.
Arthur Russell hailed from the Midwest, yet felt at home in downtown New York. Outwardly normal to those who observed his checkered shirt and acne-scarred face, he trod the maze-like streets that ran from the battered tenements of the East Village to the abandoned piers on the West Side Highway for hours at a time, and on a daily basis.The labyrinthine infrastructure and contrasting neighborhoods of lower Read more ...
robert.sandall
As Terry Teachout makes clear in this terrific biography, the world that Louis Armstrong inhabited was anything but wonderful. It was, for most of his life, both profoundly racist and astonishingly bitchy. By the late 1950s, with his 60th birthday approaching and four decades of solid success behind him, Armstrong was still forced to sleep in a gymnasium while playing in segregated North Carolina, and denied access to a public toilet in Connecticut. In Knoxville, Tennessee, dynamite was thrown at the auditorium where he and his All Stars band were performing. “It’s just the phone,” he told Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
What do you do when, on a bright December day in New York City, you have a sudden urge to read Tennyson’s "Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky?" You could get Google to flash up the eight stanzas, or if you’re feeling romantically old-school, you could go to Poets House (no apostrophe - "Some things must never be possessed but shared," said a founder and two-time poet laureate, the late Stanley Kunitz, who died at the age of 100 in 2006) and look it up.The new Poets House (entrance, pictured right) is a sumptuous space on River Terrace in Battery Park City, beside the Hudson River. It’s Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Something has just happened to make Clint Eastwood's day. We refer, of course, not to the fact that he was yesterday made a Commander of the French Legion of Honour in Paris by President Sarkozky, but to the publication of Clint Eastwood, Icon, a gorgeous assembly of artwork from around the world commemorating an incredibly long-lived career.Armed with an enthusiastic and ingenuous preface by David Frangioni, the mad-keen American collector-fan whose devotion to duty over the years has made this book possible, it encompasses posters, door panels, standees (the larger-than-life-size cut-out Read more ...
sue.steward
Throughout the 60s and 70s, when Soviet reality was based on observation, supervision, communality, destruction of sense of self and concealed from the West, Sutkus’s portraits quietly revealed details in images quite at odds with the official convention for portraits of smiling, women working on farms, respectful teenage soldiers atop tanks, and intense factory workers lunching in vast canteens – all designed to convince the vast population that “everything’s OK.”
His young “Pioneers” – the corps of children sent to farms for harvest, to cities to train in workers’ skills and Read more ...