Books features
Snowboy's History of the UK Jazz Dance SceneTuesday, 26 January 2010
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... Read more... |
Extract: Are You There, Crocodile?Thursday, 14 January 2010
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... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Moscow: Three Poets on the MetroSunday, 10 January 2010
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... Read more... |
Beyond Ink: Authors and Their WebsitesTuesday, 05 January 2010
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... Read more... |
Photography 2009: Favourite BooksWednesday, 23 December 2009
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... Read more... |
Opera for Everybody: The Story of English National OperaFriday, 18 December 2009
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... Read more... |
Different Drummer: the Life of Kenneth MacMillanSaturday, 12 December 2009
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... Read more... |
Extract: Tim Lawrence's Hold On To Your DreamsSaturday, 12 December 2009
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... Read more... |
Pops: The Wonderful World of Louis ArmstrongMonday, 07 December 2009
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... Read more... |
theartsdesk in New York: Poets HouseSunday, 06 December 2009
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... Read more... |
Movie Gallery: Clint Eastwood postersSaturday, 14 November 2009
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... Read more... |
Snowboy's Jazz Dance BibleFriday, 13 November 2009
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... Read more... |
