Features
caspar.gomez
Day 1During the Soviet era, Katowice was the industrial hub of Upper Silesia, a poisoned region of multiple coalmines and rivers running yellow with chemicals. It now prides itself on 20 years of ecological clean-up and being one of the less polluted cities in Poland. This weekend it will be one of the noisiest. Doof! Doof! Doof! It’s techno time for myself and accomplice Finetime. With beer at 60p a bottle and the best vodka in the world on hand, we’re prepped and ready.Things start gently at a nineteenth-century mining complex that’s been converted into a gallery, the Szyb Wilson. An Read more ...
Jeremy Eccles
London is by now festooned with images showing the back-end of a horse surmounted by a black figure holding a gun across his chest. The man's head is a square black mask – a rectangular slit in it fails to reveal the expected eyes, instead taking us straight through to the clouds and sky. Sid Nolan was creating an iconic image, especially for his fellow Irish-Australians, which would go on to become shorthand for the rebel, the larrikin spirit of the Aussie outfacing both the land-owning squattocracy and the land, which stretches out, deserted into the flat and boring distance.Ned Kelly – for Read more ...
Jasper Rees
David Frost, who has died at the age of 74, was a character. The obituaries will tour the entirety of his career as swinging young presenter of TW3, as the first transatlantic celebrity of the gogglebox who gave his name to a sugary brand of Kelloggs cereal, and as a lifelong thorn in the side of Peter Cook. Then there was Through the Keyhole and the TV-am cataclysm later followed by his Sunday morning resurrection on the BBC. Above all, though, it falls to vanishingly few interviewers to see themselves fictionalised as a character onstage. And it was in this capacity that I once had the Read more ...
David Nice
Three great pianists, one of the world’s top clarinettists and two fine string players in a single concert: it’s what you might expect from a chamber music festival at the highest level. What I wasn’t anticipating on the first evening in Stavanger was to move from the wonderful cathedral to an old labour club up the hill, now a student venue with two halls, for a late-night cabaret and hear five more remarkable performers.Such is the free and easy way you come across top quality in unexpected formations at Stavanger. A lot of it has to do with the boundary-pushing of the clarinettist in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Hysteria is back. Terry Johnson’s comedy was written for the Royal Court in 1993, and for its 20th anniversary it is being revived at Hampstead Theatre. It is a homecoming in a sense: the play is set in the Hampstead home of Sigmund Freud, where he receives unexpected visits from Salvador Dalí and a young woman who cannot keep her clothes on. Freud will be played by Antony Sher.The intimate nature of a psychoanalytical exchange would seem to make Doctor Freud an ideal subject for theatre. In fact he has many more screen than stage credits. Indeed, if you scroll through this edition of Listed Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
There’s never a good day for traffic in the Hamptons, and a Friday in August takes the biscuit. The Montauk Highway, also known as Route 27, was bumper to bumper on the way to the Parrish Art Museum, recently relocated from nearby Southampton village to an exciting new building in the Watermill area. However the slow pace didn’t prevent me missing the turning for the museum, a remarkable achievement as it’s a vast barn-like structure, the length of two football fields, just off the highway on a site of a former tree nursery. But its tiny black sign was almost invisible and at first I thought Read more ...
Tim Cumming
No songwriter casts a deeper shadow than Bob Dylan does, and since the first three volumes of the Bootleg Series came in 1991, his shadow career – now reaching Volume Ten with Another Self Portrait – continues to prove as compelling as the official releases. While the latter are set in stone, the Bootleg Series is more like a basement excavation, digging into the softer darker clays of epochal concerts, wildly alternate versions, and almost willfully lost treasures.With Another Self Portrait, Dylan’s archivists have remoulded clay, looking for a hidden masterpiece. Folks, it’s just not there Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It may not be the land of milk and honey, but as the home of wine and apricots Lower Austria’s Wachau might just be even better. Bookended by the towns of Melk and Krems, this stretch of the Danube valley is absurdly picturesque, strewing the banks of the river with enough wooded hillsides and ruined castles to fill a Gothic novel (or several).But at just 50 miles from Vienna this storybook-wilderness is really anything but wild. The crags are neatly terraced into vineyards (earning the region its nickname of “the Tuscany of Austria"), while the abbeys and castles tell a tale of religious and Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Next Monday Bob Dylan releases Another Self Portrait (1969-1971), the tenth volume of his Bootleg Series which casts new light on one of his most maligned records, 1970's Self Portrait. Two days beforehand a selection of his pastel portraits will go on display at the National Portrait Gallery. (Both events, naturally, will be reviewed on theartsdesk.) At 72, popular music's most mercurial character is still throwing curveballs. For half a century now successive generations have wrestled with Dylan's mutations; mostly we pick and choose and settle for – at best – a partial understanding. His Read more ...
james.woodall
Feuchtgebiete has been the talk of Locarno. The word combines “damp” or “moist” with “areas” – yes, you might guess what’s coming. English-born, German-bred Charlotte Roche published in 2008 a novel of the same title, which became Wetlands in English. And as my mother’s reprimand of me and my brothers sniggering at what boys always snigger at went, “Will you please get your heads out of your pants…”The pants here are Helen’s (Carla Juri). She’s a hyper-imaginative teenager who can’t keep her mind off her fanny. She has bad haemorrhoids – don’t we just know that at the film’s start as she Read more ...
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 ...