Buzz
RIP Ari UpThursday, 21 October 2010
Ari Up, frontwoman of The Slits from the age of 14, died yesterday aged 48 after a long illness, it was announced by her stepfather, John Lydon of the Sex Pistols. The brilliant and confrontational female-fronted Slits were one of the finest... Read more... |
Watch this space: Arts funding cuts emergeWednesday, 20 October 2010Frontline public funding for arts will be cut by some 15 per cent over the next four years, said the Chancellor George Osborne today, as he announced a cut of almost half in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport budget, from £1.9 billion to £1.... Read more... |
Moombahton, Boombahchero and 21st-century genre meltdownMonday, 18 October 2010
Some days I feel like I've woken up on the other side of some wormhole in the spacetime continuum, and the world is a subtly but definitely different place to yesterday. So it was last week when I got a slightly drunken email from a music... Read more... |
When will it end? Dust continues to spoil fun for visitors to Tate ModernSunday, 17 October 2010
Three days after its closure, and just a few days after opening, Tate Modern is still to make an announcement over the future of Ai Weiwei's interactive Turbine Hall installation. Will the closure of the dust-emitting artwork be permanent? Or are... Read more... |
Sondheim pits Porter against CowardSunday, 17 October 2010
Talking to Jude Kelly at the Royal Festival Hall last night, Stephen Sondheim gave a glimpse into his own theory of lyrical composition by contrasting Noël Coward (whom "I intensely dislike") and Cole Porter.The problem with Coward, he said after... Read more... |
The Room: Harold Pinter's 80th birthday celebratedTuesday, 12 October 2010
On 10 October, 2010 Harold Pinter would have turned 80. To celebrate, a group of actors gathered in a room to read The Room, his first play, to an invited audience. Among those present was his widow Antonia Fraser.The play was introduced by Matthew... Read more... |
Solomon Burke, c 1940-2010Monday, 11 October 2010He was the man who Jerry Wexler, co-founder of Atlantic Records, thought was the greatest soul singer of them all and "a salesman of epic proportions". Nearly 30 stone when he died, he fathered 21 children (and is reported to have had 90... Read more... |
Banksy Runs Riot in SpringfieldMonday, 11 October 2010The elusive street artist Banksy was invited by Matt Groening to script an opening sequence for The Simpsons. "MoneyBart", the episode it fronted, was broadcast in America yesterday, and comes to the UK on 21 October. The sequence is inspired by... Read more... |
TV Cops and KillersFriday, 08 October 2010
If you can’t play a cop or a mass murderer, steer clear of the acting profession. That would be the logical inference from the swarms of cops’n’killers series cramming the TV schedules. You’d think we’d have had enough, what with Luther, all the CSI... Read more... |
'Things' Ain't What They Used To BeWednesday, 06 October 2010
The public works for free. That is the founding principal of modern broadcasting culture. It phones radio stations with its air-filling thoughts on this and that. It monopolises Saturday nights on primetime in singing and dancing and plate-spinning... Read more... |
The cuts are coming. So what now?Tuesday, 05 October 2010
Members of the artistic communities have been campaigning for weeks now against the imminent cuts in the subsidies given to the arts (see David Shrigley’s clever video here). All arts organisations have been told, in the latest money-saving... Read more... |
Techno for Concert EnsembleSaturday, 02 October 2010
Parallels have occasionally been drawn between techno and modern classical music, most especially dissonant movements such as minimalism, serialism and the broader avant garde. The purest techno has a stark, almost barren simplicity and those... Read more... |
