Buzz
Jasper Rees
The second annual Freedom to Create Prize, which was presented in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London last night, has been won by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The internationally renowned and prolific Iranian filmmaker, 52, downed tools earlier this year to become an official mouthpiece outside Iran for the presidential candidate Mir-Mossein Mousavi.Makhmalbaf dedicated his award to Iran’s Green Movement and its spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri. “People of my country are killed, imprisoned, tortured and raped just for their votes," he said. "Each award I receive gives me an Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
An ongoing series celebrating musicians' birthdays.
23 November 1876: Manuel de Falla's El Amor Brujo filmed as part of Carlos Saura's classic film dance trilogy.
{youtube width="400"}Ftd8tIdiYq4{/youtube} El Amor Brujo Carlos Saura26 November 1931: Tina Turner with husband Ike and backing singers the Ikettes perform Phil Spector's "symphony for the kids", "River Deep, Mountain High". Its relative lack of success in the States was, according to many, one reason he lost his grip on reality. Distorted but divine.
{youtube width="400" height="300"}4KkMSkmx7sM{/youtube}
25 Read more ...
ash.smyth
The Regal Cinema is a charming old place. At 300 rupees for a box seat (£1.50 on a good day for the SLR), you can put your feet up, sip your Fanta in style and, peeping through the plush velour curtains that separate you from both hoi polloi and screen (if not from the nouveaux in box 9), get a disconcertingly exact idea of how the place must have felt when the young Queen Elizabeth II sat in this very seat, shortly after the place was built for her.There’s a new anthem now, of course, but you still have to stand up. Then you get the trailers for "Coming" movies (no rash promises as to when, Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
A continuing series celebrating musicians' birthdays.22 November 1965: Bjørk released her first self-titled album at the age of 11, at 14 she was in a punk band called Spit and Snot, and has since gone on to be one of the most successful and original musicians on the planet. Many of her classic videos have had their sound removed on YouTube, but "All is Full of Love" directed by Chris Cunningham is up there still, and features the best lesbian robot love scene ever filmed.{youtube width="400"}EjAoBKagWQA{/youtube}Before leaving Bjork, perhaps we should have a guided tour of her house in Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's genuinely sad that last night's proceedings are not higher on the cultural agenda and that the gleaming new Kings Place auditorium was only half full. But as one of the participants pointed out, 50 years on from C P Snow's Two Cultures, there is still an arts establishment for whom sci-fi means Star Trek, and the ludicrous guff of Independence Day touches more of a nerve than Arthur C Clarke's visionary treatment of the same subject-matter in Childhood's End. The event, the last in a series of science discussions organised by Nature magazine, all began very sensibly with a Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Upon emerging from Sheffield railway station, one of the first things you clap eyes on is Andrew Motion’s 2007 poem What If? unfurling down the side of one of the university tower blocks and gleaming faintly in the last of the autumn sun. With its exhortation to “greet and understand what lies ahead... The lives which wait as yet unseen, unread,” it’s not a bad incidental epigram for a festival of documentary film-making whose trailer was inspired by the city’s cosmopolitan identity. Doc/Fest opened on Wednesday with Mat Whitecross’s Moving to Mars (pictured below), about a family of Burmese Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
8 November, 1927: Patti Page was the Madonna of her time, selling over 100 million records. "The Tennessee Waltz" was her biggest hit, being number one in the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Jerry Springer picked the song last week as one of his Desert Island Discs. {youtube width="400" height="300"}_Ek3eCbfqp0{/youtube}8 November, 1944: Twenty years after Patti Page, women singers were looking a bit different. Bonnie Bramlett here sings "Getting to know you so well" with husband Delaney in 1970. {youtube width="400" height="300"}klbW-cSZ5Ac{/youtube} 9 November, 1959: Thomas Quasthoff, 50 Read more ...
alice.vincent
With the launch of the Wunderbar Featival this week, Newcastle continues to demonstrate just what 2008’s European Capital of Culture judges missed when they anointed Liverpool. The 10-day celebration, which starts tomorrow, is international in content but thoroughly North-East in spirit: unpretentious, clever and surprising. There are 28 free and ticketed events taking place throughout the city, from conventional cultural venues such as the Baltic, Northern Stage and Gallery North to people’s private living rooms and a plot of land in Byker. It is one of those rare festivals that makes Read more ...
ellin.stein
The Victorian Gothic (with 1970s additions) maze of Cheltenham Ladies’ College is a far cry from the sun-blasted soundstages of Los Angeles, particularly at this time of year when it’s surrounded by deep piles of swirling autumn leaves. Nevertheless, this past week saw the high-ceilinged, wood-panelled College corridors filled with over 400 scriptwriters, both aspiring and established, rushing to the seminars, panels and pitching sessions offered as part of the Cheltenham Screenwriters' Festival, the only event of its type in the UK.Unlike the Cheltenham Literary Festival, which is about Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
A continuing series celebrating musicians' birthdays.6 November 1949: Virtuoso Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval co-founded Irakere with pianist Chucho Valdez in Havana. This is in 1988, after Sandoval had set up his own band, but before he defected. His technical ability is astonishing, even if his tendencies to be a terrible show-off only got worse once he left Cuba.{youtube width="400" height="300"}vu6r_JUZu38{/youtube}2 November 1944: Keith Emerson made a career from recycling the classics, most famously as part of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, who traduced Mussorgsky and Bartok and others. His Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
"Hip-hop has been a commercial proposition since the release of 'Rapper’s Delight' in 1979. That’s 30 years, a long time for any genre," writes Sasha Frere-Jones in this week's New Yorker. The genre, according to Frere-Jones, is on the way out. Not so for Chap-Hop, however, which has been going for about six days since the video below was put up on YouTube, featuring Gentleman Rhymer Mr B.The eponymous Mr B, who lives in Hove but comes from Surrey (of course) accompanies himself on his idiosyncratic banjolele, and manages in the video to telescope the history of hip-hop into five minutes. As Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The first in a new series that celebrates musicians born this week:
31 October 1896: Ethel Waters sings "Am I Blue" from the 1929 film On with the Show, actually the first sound film with colour, although only black and white copies have survived (click below, and then click on the link to YouTube).
26 October 1951: Bootsy Colllins, the funkiest man alive, gives a brief lesson on how to play funk bass.
25 October 1825: Johann Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz has been used for multiple purposes, including as an aid to the perfect golf swing, but never more beautifully than in Stanley Kubrick' Read more ...