| | | Field of dreams: the best music festivals still available to book | | by Emma Garland, Graeme Virtue and Jenessa Williams Apr 2, 2022 | | Big hitters such as Glastonbury may be sold out but – from an Afrobeats party in Portugal to Lil Wayne in a Cambridge orchard – there’s a huge variety of outdoor events out there to brighten your summer Portable toilets and pop-up tents, the heady mix of mud and glitter … there is no form of entertainment we’ve missed more during the pandemic than the Great British music festival. It’s no surprise that we are champing at the bit for our first “normal” festival season since 2019, clamouring to catch up on two years’ worth of unmissable live acts. Many of the summer’s hottest tickets are already sold out – Glastonbury, Creamfields, Reading and Leeds, Green Man and more – but from picturesque three-day family adventures to vibrant inner-city delights, here are the festivals worth booking for 2022 …
Jenessa Williams *** Continue reading... | | | | | Streaming: the best films set on aeroplanes | | by Guy Lodge Apr 2, 2022 | | From Airport to Snakes on a Plane, films set in the skies have always exploited the tensions of a tight space. The latest, Zero Fucks Given, is the sharpest portrait yet of cabin crew life In general, the hours we spend on budget airlines are not ones we’re particularly keen to relive, so a film that vividly recreates the unique ambience of a Ryanair flight is probably not, on paper, moving to the top of your must-see list. But I’d encourage you to fight those instincts for Zero Fucks Given, a marvellously titled French film newly streaming on Mubi. Those three words could, I suppose, encapsulate the service experience on many a low-cost carrier. Instead, they refer to the pushed-to-the-brink attitude of young flight attendant Cassandre, who works with increasing exasperation for Wing, a fictitious airline that resembles Ryanair about as closely as possible (down to the garish yellow-and-blue branding) without inviting legal action. Based, if barely rooted, in Lanzarote, she spends her days jetting from one European city to another, racking up miles but no real sense of place in the world. Her dream is to work for the loftier Emirates, though one wonders if a better uniform and richer customers will make her much happier. Continue reading... | | | | | Soundings by Doreen Cunningham review – a whale of a journey | | by Edward Posnett Apr 2, 2022 | | A mother and her young son follow pods of whales from Mexico to Alaska in this brave, lyrical memoir Almost a decade ago a group of Canadian and British scientists made a remarkable observation about the social lives of sperm whales in the Sargasso and Caribbean seas. While mother whales dived deep to hunt for squid, others assumed the role of “allomothers”, caring for the calf at the water’s surface (the popular press referred to these whales as “babysitters”). The paper by the scientists was part of a growing body of eye-opening research into whales’ social behaviour, which centres on those close-knit groups called pods. Pods, human as well as cetacean, come up repeatedly in Doreen Cunningham’s debut, Soundings, a striking, brave and often lyrical book that defies easy interpretation. It’s the story of a single mother and her two-year-old son, Max, and their journey to follow the whales that migrate from Baja California to the Arctic. But this is not really a work of natural history. Mother and son are in a state of turmoil and, like the whales they pursue, must navigate an environment that appears callous, if not hostile, and rely on friendship to get by. The experiences of the alienated pair are inseparable from their literary quarry, and as they travel up the Pacific coast, whale and human cultures seem to converge, eroding the gap between ourselves and our distant mammalian cousins. Continue reading... | | | | | 'The movie directed me': inside the year's most haunting new film | | by Benjamin Lee Apr 2, 2022 | | The writer-director of buzzy new folk horror You Won’t Be Alone talks about dealing with gore, critics and Hollywood You Won’t Be Alone is one of the most extraordinary films I’ve seen, or rather experienced, in recent memory, a deeply unusual and deeply emotive drama about a witch discovering how to be human by taking over the bodies of others in rural 19th century Macedonia. It’s part gruesome body horror, part dreamy fairytale, part exercise in existentialism and extreme empathy told mostly through strange, fractured narration from someone learning what language is and means as they navigate an often barbaric yet often beautiful world. It’s really quite something. “You’re gonna realise I’m an idiot really quickly,” director Goran Stolevski says, laughing, at the start of our Zoom conversation with disarming, and ultimately unwarranted, nervousness. The 36-year-old Macedonian-Australian film-maker, who quickly reveals himself to be very much not an idiot, traces the nerves back to my ebullient five-star review of his debut feature, which premiered at this year’s virtual Sundance film festival in January. Continue reading... | | | | | Douglas Stuart on Shuggie Bain and his tough start: 'Living with an alcoholic, there wasn't much I didn't see' | | by Simon Hattenstone Apr 2, 2022 | | After his debut about a gay boy in 80s Glasgow, comes another tale drawing on his childhood. Could his glittering fashion career ever have kept the Booker-winner from his roots?
After Shuggie Bain was published, Douglas Stuart prepared to pack in writing and go back to the day job. He’d spent 10 years on his debut novel, then it came out during a pandemic. “It was the first week of lockdown. I thought, ‘God, this is the end of my publishing career.’” Stuart couldn’t complain. It had received fabulous reviews, even if nobody was buying it, and he knew he could walk straight back into a top job in fashion. Then Shuggie got nominated for the Booker prize and America’s National Book Award for Fiction. In fact, between 2020 and 2021, it was shortlisted for well over 20 major awards. Not bad for a book that had been rejected by more than 40 publishers. It went on to win the Booker, which inevitably boosted sales. But here was something different. A novel that had been considered inaccessible and unmarketable was selling by the shelfload in supermarkets. To date, it has sold more than 1.3m copies in the English language alone. This brutal love story about a young gay boy trying to protect his alcoholic mother from herself and the ravages of the world, partially written in the Scottish vernacular, had huge popular appeal. Perhaps even more remarkable, Stuart had not read a book for pleasure until he was 16. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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