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Entertainment‘His chords are like sheets of diamond ice’: the beguiling psych-folk of late cult songwriter Ed Askew
The late songwriter released around 50 records, writing gay love songs and effortless folk songs from folk’s fringes. Fans including Bill Callahan explain his singular brillianceIn a grainy television clip from 1986, a flame-haired and neckerchiefed troubadour plucks away at a lute-like instrument, harmonica under chin, the gentle ripples giving way to a voice full of longing. This performance, uploaded to YouTube in 2010, has generated only a handful of comments, but peruse any of them (“Ed the Great!”; “pure gold”) and you begin to understand the passion that Ed Askew – an under-the-radar US poet, artist and musician – has inspired over the years.“He was living in a world that was for people who didn’t fit in,” Askew’s collaborator, Jerry David DeCicca, says on the free-spiritedness of his friend, whose musical life began with discovering the 10-stringed tiple as a teenager in the 1950s and ended with his death a year ago, aged 84, on the verge of him releasing his album The Final Painting, now being released posthumously this month. Continue reading...
EntertainmentSocial Darwinists to tech bros: tracing the long fight against equality in US
Historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s book Country of Lords looks back at the many men who have tried to fight against egalitarianism, from John Adams to Peter ThielThe historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s new book is published amid celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence and its truth “self-evident, that all men are created equal”. Country of Lords, however, is a history of Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America.Concise and hard-hitting, the book arrives at a time of glaring social and economic inequality, Phillips-Fein seeing Elon Musk “emerging as a trillionaire very much on people’s minds, with a deep level of discomfort, both fear and anger about what this portends”. Continue reading...
EntertainmentThese Wild English by Nicola Wilding review – explaining a mother’s drift to the far right
A documentary-maker probes family history and the darker corners of the internet to solve an urgent political puzzleWhen Sandra Forsyth began marching in support of the English Defence League, her daughter Nicola Wilding hoped it was a phase. The Cumbria-bred, Dover-dwelling Sandra was about to turn 60 and had been dealing with a lot of stress. Not only had her son been sentenced to two years in prison for armed robbery, but she was working at a home for adults with complex needs. She liked the job, but it could be gruelling – especially when clients hurled furniture at her or ripped sinks off walls.Then, in May 2013, came the death of Lee Rigby, a drummer with the Second Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers who was murdered by two Islamist terrorists using machetes. Sandra didn’t know Rigby, Wilding notes, but his death nonetheless brought her pent-up rage to the surface. She began watching videos on Facebook by a man named Tommy Robinson, who wanted to know why the country’s brave soldiers were being murdered. By September of that year, she was protesting on the streets of London. Continue reading...
EntertainmentThe Odyssey: jaw-dropping action, dark magic and dolphin cameos – discuss with spoilers
Inside all the blink-and-you-miss-it moments, subtle easter eggs and poignant takeaways from Christopher Nolan’s ancient epicThis article contains spoilers for The OdysseyThe Odyssey looks set to be the blockbuster hit of the summer, with global opening weekend grosses of $264m, critical rave reviews including five stars from the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, and reports of fans traversing continents to experience Christopher Nolan’s epic tale of gods and monsters in one of the few dozen screens worldwide with the capability to screen Imax in 70mm. It also has the potential to rule the box office for the coming weeks, with few other true blockbusters to be released this summer, with the exception of Spider-Man: Brand New Day (hence the cast’s humiliation ritual of a press tour). Read on for a spoiler-packed breakdown of the epic battles, narrative twists and out-of-nowhere cameos that bring richness to Nolan’s idiosyncratic vision of ancient life. Continue reading...
EntertainmentThe Fires review – volcanoes and passions erupt in Iceland disaster-romance
A volcanologist and a photographer try to save Reykjavik in impressive and plausible dramaThis scientifically plausible, CGI-tastic disaster film will either do wonders for Iceland’s tourist industry or destroy it completely. Vigdís Hrefna Pálsdóttir stars as a volcanologist called Anna, who is descended from a short line of volcanologists (just her dad). When mini volcanos start erupting and earthquakes get more frequent, Anna begins to suspect the subterranean systems everyone thought were separate might all be fed from one big magma lake deep underground. Great gaseous clouds of geologic mumbo jumbo get spewed into the dialogue, backed up with sombre graphs on computer screens and people drawing stuff on blackboards. But the gist is that Reykjavik is in danger.Of course, the powers that be are sceptical about Anna’s theories and don’t want to cut off the island’s supply of sweet, sweet tourist money. Pretty soon, though, the signs are too numerous to ignore. And a big eruption either could last a day or two, or as Anna points out, for 30 years, like a volcano that erupted in the 9th century. (Good thing Icelandic history goes back that far.) Continue reading...
EntertainmentChickenhare and the Secret of the Groundhog review – time-travel fun for plucky hybrid critters
A half-chicken half-hare, a skunk and a tortoise go in search of a 3,000-year-old groundhog in this wholesome animation with a surprisingly complex plotAlthough this animated feature doesn’t have a title as utterly awesome as its predecessor, Chickenhare and the Hamster of Darkness, it’s still a perfectly adequate 90-ish minutes of creamy pastel-coloured picaresque entertainment. It feels like it’s skewed in the direction of younger viewers given the simple character designs, general wholesomeness and easy-on-the-jokes tone, but the plot is surprisingly complicated. The lead character is named Chickenhare because of course he is half-chicken half-hare, although in practice he looks more like a hare than a chicken other than a tuft of feathers on the crown of his head. He is best friends with a skunk named Meg, equipped with the awesome power of stink and who is very butch-coded with her waistcoat, faux-hawk and tomboy characteristics; there is also a tortoise named Abe, who as you might imagine is less keen on running about than the other two.After a pleasingly kinetic introductory action sequence that feels very Indiana Jones-inspired, during which the treasure-hunting trio run into a svelte but scratchy cat called Crolloq, an old school friend (girlfriend?) of Meg’s. Angry at Meg for assorted reasons, she leaves the other three in a pit but they eventually escape with the golden spork they were seeking all along, a doodah that proves useful later. One thing leads to another, like they do, and they end up on a new adventure in search of a 3,000-year-old groundhog with a backwards facing face who can turn back time. A new character accompanies them on the way: Gina, Chickenhare’s long-lost half-sister who is, wait for it, a harechicken – more aviform than mammalian. Continue reading...
EntertainmentCool Machine by Colson Whitehead review – final part of the Harlem Trilogy is freewheeling fun
The grit and grandeur of 80s New York drive this rollicking story of an underground wheeler-dealerIn the summer of 1977 a bolt of lightning struck a substation on the Hudson River, knocking out power across New York City. Two nights of darkness sparked a wave of looting as Harlem and Bronx teenagers swiped high-end items from the downtown stores. They took speaker systems and turntables to experiment with at home. They taught themselves how to scratch and mix, and sang self-styled scat lyrics into stolen microphones. Hip-hop, according to urban legend, was the child of a lightning strike and a robbing spree.It’s art from crime, thinks Ray Carney, the hardscrabble hero of Colson Whitehead’s rollicking Cool Machine, the final part of his Harlem Trilogy. Or possibly vice versa, given that the man dislikes rap music and nurses a sneaking affection for old-school smash-and-grab. For years Carney has led the sort of intrepid double life that would make Spider-Man proud, supplementing his furniture business on 125th Street with a lucrative sideline as an underworld fence. In his stealthy, dogged fashion, he helps facilitate a process he describes as “the churn”: the movement of stolen goods through New York. The churn fuels the economy and helps refresh the culture. It’s the city’s equivalent of an endocrine system. Continue reading...
Entertainment‘Witty, engaging and absurd’: LensCulture critics’ choice award winners – in pictures
Is that a rooftop crocodilian? Can you cause a forest fire in a matchbox? Things are not always as they seem with the winners of this year’s Lensculture critics’ choice awards Continue reading...
EntertainmentTV tonight: Simon Pegg’s cyber-thriller The Undeclared War returns
Siân Brooke and Adrian Lester also star in the tense GCHQ drama. Plus: hideous creations on the Great British Sewing Bee. Here’s what to watch this evening9pm, Channel 4Espionage, malware and Simon Pegg doing his best serious face feature as Peter Kosminsky’s cyber-thriller returns for a second season. When we left him, GCHQ director of operations Danny Patrick (Pegg) had discovered shocking secrets about both the internal workings of government and his own marriage. Perhaps inevitably, things are now even worse. Saara (Hannah Khalique-Brown) has observed irregularities in flows of information that can only mean one thing: a mole in the intelligence agency. Plenty of scowling and running down empty corridors ensues, with Adrian Lester back as the prime minister and Siân Brooke joining as Danny’s wife, a former MI6 member. Phil Harrison Continue reading...
EntertainmentGruel and graft: museum asks if you could survive a Victorian workhouse
Revamped Ripon attraction reopens as a more immersive experience telling ‘national story’ of poverty and welfareVisitors to one of Britain’s most complete surviving Victorian workhouses won’t have to strip and bathe in someone else’s bath water. But they might get some gruel, they can sweep the yard and there are “schoolmaster” volunteers happy to tell children how to behave.“You are literally going to walk in the footsteps of people who have experienced this place,” said the director of the Ripon Museums Trust, Alexa Vernon. Continue reading...