| | | | | Up close and dangerous: the irresistible allure of DH Lawrence | | by Lara Feigel Aug 30, 2021 | | For decades he was wildly out of fashion, now DH Lawrence is everywhere – from novels and biographies to a new adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover When the clock struck for lockdown last March, many of us found ourselves condemned to live alongside people in more intense proximity than we’d bargained for. Flatmates, spouses, children were no longer occasional companions but a constant presence. For me, this has been the case with DH Lawrence. Having committed to writing a book on him, suddenly I found myself sequestered with him. There was a time when this would have felt sexually charged. In my 20s, I fell for his vision of bodily life, as so many of his female readers had done. “His intuitive intelligence sought the core of woman,” Anaïs Nin wrote after his death. Visiting the shrine at Lawrence’s former ranch in New Mexico in 1939, WH Auden mocked the “cars of women pilgrims” traipsing “to stand reverently there and wonder what it would have been like to sleep with him”. Continue reading... | | | | | 'Big sisters are magic!' Frozen musical set to cause a West End flurry | | by Lyndsey Winship Aug 30, 2021 | | Jennifer Lee, Disney Animation’s chief creative officer and the writer and co-director of Frozen, describes expanding her hit for the stage, and reveals whether she’s more of an Elsa or an Anna It was the sound unleashed from a million pairs of little lungs across the land: “Let it “go-oooo-ooo!” The standout hit from Disney’s 2013 animation Frozen; a song that wormed its way into the ears of everyone who heard it, but especially young children. Director Jennifer Lee still gets videos sent to her of toddlers belting out that tune with all their hearts. “When Kristen [Anderson-Lopez] wrote Let It Go, if we played it for anyone, just someone coming in the room, everything stopped,” says Lee, on a video call from LA. “It was this incredible reaction – we knew there was something really special there.” Why it struck such a chord with preschoolers, she is not certain. “It’s a rebellion song,” she offers, “particularly when you’re learning the word ‘no’, as you’re trying to individualise in this world. It’s the idea that you have this power inside you.” Continue reading... | | | | | Maybe I Don't Belong Here by David Harewood – chilling insight into an unravelling mind | | by Kadish Morris Aug 30, 2021 | | The actor’s harrowing account of the breakdown he suffered in his 20s highlights the psychological impact of racism In his hospital records, the esteemed actor David Harewood is described as a “large Black man”. This means that during his stay on a psychiatric ward, aged 23, he was administered diazepam (to manage anxiety) and haloperidol (used to treat schizophrenia, delirium and agitation) at four times the recommended level. “Were they afraid of me?” he asks upon reading the files that detail the breakdown he had more than 30 years ago. There’s a racist history of classifying black men as “giant” or “superhuman”. Their perceived size has long been used as a justification for brutality. Think of the 2014 murder of Michael Brown, shot dead by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Wilson described himself as “like a five-year-old holding on to [wrestler] Hulk Hogan”. “I’m absolutely convinced that had I been in America at the time of my breakdown, I’d most likely be dead,” writes Harewood. “It took not one or two but six police officers to hold me down. One false move by me or any of them could have ended my life.” Continue reading... | | | | | | | | | Frank Oz on life as Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy and Yoda: 'I'd love to do the Muppets again but Disney doesn't want me' | | by Hadley Freeman Aug 30, 2021 | | He played some of the most memorable characters of all time on The Muppet Show and Sesame Street - then became a brilliant comedy director. What is he most proud of? I ask Frank Oz if he feels like the Paul McCartney to Jim Henson’s John Lennon, the one left behind to carry the flame after his revered creative partner suddenly and shockingly died. Oz takes a deep breath and turns his head to the side, thinking. If you grew up in the 1970s and 80s, your childhood was shaped by Henson and Oz and their work with the Muppets, just as the kids who grew up in the 50s and 60s did so in the shadow of Lennon and McCartney. Even if you weren’t a devoted fan of the Muppets themselves, you couldn’t help but take in their influence osmotically, what with The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, the Muppets movies and Labyrinth swirling in the atmosphere. I was pretty much raised on the Muppets, just as I now raise my own kids on them, and I cannot remember a time when Henson and Oz’s creations were not stamped in my mind’s eye. Continue reading... | | | | | The curse of Mies van der Rohe: Berlin's six-year, £120m fight to fix his dysfunctional, puddle-strewn gallery | | by Oliver Wainwright Aug 30, 2021 | | The modernist maestro had carte blanche to build a great museum. The result? A breathtaking icon hopeless for displaying art. British architect David Chipperfield relives his gargantuan repair job Never has so much praise been lavished on so dysfunctional a building. The last major project of modernist master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie is a perfectly square temple of steel and glass, raised above the street on its own granite acropolis. Built in 1968, not far from the recently erected Berlin Wall, it was intended to symbolise the freedoms of the west, its big black roof enclosing an epic column-free hall for the display of modern art. It has long been venerated as a 20th-century Parthenon, the ultimate example of Mies’s pursuit of “universal space”. But as a museum, it has always been a disaster. Ever since it opened, the New National Gallery has been dogged by cracking windows, heavy condensation and awkward display spaces, presenting a curatorial nightmare for its staff. Beneath the impractical grand hall are subterranean galleries for the permanent collection that have the dreary feeling of a windowless office complex. It is one of the most extreme examples of the quest for purity of form trumping the demands of function. Continue reading... | | | | | Martin Figura creates poetic record of life during pandemic at Salisbury hospital | | by Steven Morris Aug 30, 2021 | | Figura worked with staff to produce poems reflecting their experiences during the Covid crisis One poem imagines an NHS nightshift worker at the height of the coronavirus crisis as an astronaut, adrift and untethered from a spacecraft. Another touches on the difficulty of trying to console a patient when the comfort of a smile is obscured by a mask. The feelings of horror, sadness, isolation and frustration that NHS staff and volunteers endured at the height of the pandemic have been crystallised in verse as part of a spoken word collection at Salisbury district hospital. Continue reading... | | | | | | | Jazz on a Summer's Day review –Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson and more shine bright | | by Peter Bradshaw Aug 29, 2021 | | Powerful musical moments are undercut by exasperating blandness in this rerelease of Bert Stern’s film of the 1958 Newport jazz festival This rerelease of Bert Stern’s filmed record of the 1958 Newport jazz festival happens to arrive in the UK just after Summer of Soul, about the 1969 Harlem cultural festival, known then as the “Black Woodstock”. Both events and both movies feature the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson – but there the comparison ends. Where Summer of Soul is amazingly vibrant and passionate, Jazz on a Summer’s Day is exasperatingly sedate and restrained and often just bloodless and dull, despite some occasionally intriguing musical offerings from musicians such as Thelonious Monk, George Shearing and Gerry Mulligan; Chuck Berry is there, on his bland best behaviour, and finally we get some powerfully charismatic appearances from Louis Armstrong and Jackson herself. During the daytime, the movie bizarrely intercuts shots of the musicians on stage with bland B-roll footage of the America’s Cup yachting races taking place nearby – but the wealthy folk’s sport of sailing is about as uncool and unjazzy as it gets, and the juxtaposition is completely baffling. And so are the cutaway shots of the people in the crowd, who very often seem to be an America’s Cup crowd, sedately nodding along or maybe nodding off, or simply looking bored or talking among themselves. Continue reading... | | | | | Vigil review – Suranne Jones feels the pressure in sharp submarine thriller | | by Lucy Mangan Aug 29, 2021 | | Martin Compston is in trouble and Jones’s detective must calm the troubled seas, in a murky marine drama that delivers solid, old-fashioned entertainment A nuclear submarine. A dead body. A fishing trawler and her crew dragged beneath the waves by an unseen, unstoppable force. A reactor shutdown. Suranne Jones as a bereaved police detective battening down her grief to get on with the job. Martin Compston (DCI Arnott from Line of Duty) as – well, we’ll get to that. Paterson Joseph as a naval captain whose first duty is to his crew and his mission, not to a murder investigation. The BBC’s new six-part drama has all the ingredients to be an absolute humdinger of a series, and it is. Claustrophobics beware – the submarine scenes are very, very submarine-y, all tiny bunks, narrow corridors and building pressure in all senses of the word – but anyone who can bring themselves to watch will have hours of solid, old-fashioned entertainment delivered unto them. We begin with the trawler crew, bantering away until something snags them and starts pulling them – not quickly, quite harrowingly – down into the vasty deep. A mile away and beneath, HMS Vigil hears their distress call. Petty Officer Burke (Compston) argues that they should go to the rescue. Captain Newsome (Joseph) insists they must not give away their position or place themselves at the mercy of whatever did for the boat, and Burke is sent to his bunk to calm down. Continue reading... | | | | | Extinction Rebellion activists glued to Science Museum site in Shell protest | | by Kevin Rawlinson and agency Aug 29, 2021 | | Demonstrators attach themselves to railings in reaction to museum taking funding from oil firm for Our Future Planet show Extinction Rebellion protesters have glued and locked themselves to the railings inside the Science Museum, in a protest against the oil firm Shell’s sponsorship of an exhibition about greenhouse gases. Five people have put their arms through the railings and glued their hands together so that they are not damaging the museum’s property. Six have deadlocked their necks against the railings. Some are scientists dressed in lab coats, while others are in clothes with Extinction Rebellion logos. Continue reading... | | | | | | | Eric Clapton releases song seen as criticising official response to Covid | | by Kevin Rawlinson Aug 29, 2021 | | This Has Gotta Stop lines include ‘I can’t take this BS any longer’ and follows negative comments about restrictions Eric Clapton, a staunch critic of measures designed to tackle the Covid pandemic, has released a song entitled This Has Gotta Stop. While the song does not directly mention lockdown measures or vaccines, the musician has performed on anti-vaccine songs in recent months. His latest offering has been interpreted by some as an attack on the measures recommended by health officials. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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