Features
sue.steward
News about the death of Colombia's greatest salsa singer, Joe Arroyo, has sent shock waves through the salsa world and fan bases internationally, and it brought in streams of digital messages. On the morning of his death two weeks ago, the President Juan Manuel Santos tweeted, “It’s a great loss for music and Colombia.” Arroyo’s life resembled a soap opera, and the irony is that a series based on his life story, El Joe, le Leyenda, (Joe, the Legend), has been the most popular soap on primetime Colombian television since May. It remains on air in tribute.Joe’s life was a narrative in the grand Read more ...
alex.kotlowitz
Twenty-four years ago, I found myself hanging out virtually every day in the Henry Horner Homes, a Chicago housing project on the city's hardscrabble West Side. I had begun to immerse myself in the lives of two young brothers, Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, in an effort to understand what it means to be growing up poor in the world's wealthiest nation. Mother Teresa had visited this neighbourhood just a few years earlier, and what so struck her was not the poverty of the pocketbook - she had certainly seen worse in India - but rather what she called “the poverty of the spirit”. Indeed, it was Read more ...
joe.muggs
I'm not claiming some major prescience or insight here. I am as guilty as anyone of dipping into the music of the sink estates for a small dose of frisson then returning to art and music that confirm my own worldview. But maybe, just maybe, if we had all paid more attention to what was being said by young British men and women from those estates over the last decade, the events of the past few days might not have come as such a horrific surprise. After all, French rappers had been explicitly predicting the riots that took place there in 2005 for a decade beforehand, as I noted (with, Read more ...
james.woodall
Think what you will about Switzerland and the Swiss – calm, ordered country, treasured environment, cautious, democratically precise people – but look behind the scenes and things can seem quite scary. Vol spécial (Special Flight), by Swiss-French-speaking Fernand Melgar, is one of the most intense documentaries I have ever seen. Depicting asylum seekers in a detention centre, it is a vibrant portrait of human (entirely male) endeavour warping into despair under an unkind but, as the Swiss see it, necessary law of repatriation: in 1994, they voted for what is known as the federal law on Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If Bombay Bicycle Club had been born on America’s West Coast, their music would no doubt soon be all over the soundtrack of the next big teen drama. All the ingredients are there: the artiness, the phlegmatic cool, and the tunes that form a natural soundtrack to people’s lives. That’s Bombay Bicycle Club, the band. The individuals, however, are refreshingly normal. They are more like a bunch of guys you might meet in a student union. At Jack and Ed’s digs in central London, theartsdesk hung out to discuss the new album, rocking out, and how they plan to conquer the States.Jack Steadman and Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There is an interesting tension at the Sarajevo Film Festival which, though this was my first time, I suspect exists as a matter of course. And this is a tension between the spirit of the people I meet here – ebullient, good-humoured and indefatigable (they really know how to party) – and the films themselves, which suggest a country and a region still reeling from the turmoil of its recent past. It’s a strange experience, then, poised between light and gloom.The origins of the festival embody this tension. It began in 1995, in the midst of the Siege of Sarajevo, one of the many cultural Read more ...
joe.muggs
“Huxley! Electra!” called a plummy mummy to a couple of dawdling children. “Hurry up or you'll miss the BMX display!” Thursday night and Camp Bestival was, to a rather comical degree, looking like a playground for slightly funky middle-class families. Not that I was complaining – with an 18-month-old not so much in tow as leading the charge, I was extremely grateful for the regimented, relatively quiet campsite and the untold entertainments and comforts that CB provides. This was my first experience of a festival with said inquisitive toddler, and the experience of having to abide by his Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Odessa must be one of Central Europe’s more distinctive cities, characterised by a profoundly cosmopolitan ethnic mix over more than two centuries. It was one of the most international cities in the Tsarist empire, while in Soviet times it honed that identity, based not least on the size of its Jewish population, and the brand of humour – accompanied by an almost distinct language – that resulted. So what am I doing here, I asked myself, watching a Monty Python film retrospective, in a packed late-night showing, where a fair part of the audience seems to know the lines off by heart?The answer Read more ...
ronald.bergan
When Jean Renoir returned to France at the end of 1953 after 13 years of exile, he felt as if he were beginning his career from scratch. His Hollywood films were not highly regarded, and neither The River (1951) nor The Golden Coach (1953), shot in India and Italy respectively, were successful enough to redeem his international standing among reviewers or at the box office. The critical consensus declared that he was an artist in decline. There were exceptions, of course, one of the most important being Cahiers du Cinéma, the magazine founded in 1951.Cahiers contradicted the received opinion Read more ...
paul.mcgee
By and large, Adele Adkins chooses to avoid the limelight, and therefore little is known of either her personal life or her indulgences, whatever they may be. The spectacular success of 21 suggests that her audience couldn't care less either way, which I think is quite telling. Compare and contrast, on the other hand, with the shambles formerly known as Amy Winehouse. When she emerged - or rather, came out swinging - in 2003, it was with some forthright opinions on her peers in her left hand and, for a 19-year-old, an arresting line in cynical, world-weary lyrics in her right ("Fuck Me Pumps Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I’m standing with my feet on peaks and my head in clouds, looking down steep Alps at the tiny chocolate-brown chalets of little Verbier way below on the green slopes. It’s ravishing up here on the top of Fontanet, and I tarry, gloating over the botanical riches around me of milky-blue gentians, royal-blue harebells, glistening edelweiss, dark little orchids and garnet-bright sedum, watching the trickling water of a brook, and replaying last night’s music in my head. And if you move quick you can do this yourself before next Sunday.There’s an Easyjet to Geneva several times a day, a train ride Read more ...
terry.friel
As hot, sweaty tourists dangle their feet in pools for Thai Nibble Fish to eat the dead skin from their feet at Kuala Lumpur’s quirky Art Deco Central Market, a small theatre upstairs is packed for a play about racial divisions and the myth of social unity here. The performance of Parah ( which means "severe") at the market’s Annexe Gallery by the young team from The Instant Café Theatre Company is a daring look at race and division in a country that paints itself as a shining example of unity, but whose policies are increasingly driving a wedge between the main groups – Malays, Chinese, Read more ...