| | | Lynchian punk to Lady Gaga: the best music Guardian staff and writers discovered this year | | by Chal Ravens, Shaad D'Souza, Dave Simpson, Rebecca Liu, Christine Ochefu, Laura Barton, Tayyab Amin and Alexis Petridis Sep 30, 2022 | | Old or new, wildly popular or punishingly obscure: our critics share the best songs, albums and artists they found this year – and how they discovered them In search of absolution after realising that I had been streaming NTS Radio uninterrupted for a week, I took the most convenient route I know to finding something fresh to listen to: Pitchfork’s mailout of highest-rated new albums. In that week’s list was the debut album by Chat Pile. Emerging from the post-industrial wastes of Oklahoma City, the not-so-young four-piece channel that strain of American vitriol that made a punk-horror canon out of Dead Kennedys, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Slipknot. Continue reading... | | | | | Taste by Stanley Tucci audiobook review – a mouth-watering memoir | | by Fiona Sturges Sep 30, 2022 | | The suave Hollywood actor shares delicious stories of his love of food, from the family kitchen to the world’s finest restaurants
When Stanley Tucci was a boy, he would often swap packed lunches with his friend, Ricky, at school. While Tucci’s lunch, assembled by his mother, would contain delicious leftovers from last night’s dinner, Ricky’s was always a sandwich filled with marshmallow – “the unhealthiest schmear between two slices of bread known to man”.
Nowadays, Tucci would rather eat gravel than ingest such rubbish. As we have learned from his cookbooks and from his Emmy-winning TV series where he wafts elegantly around Italy consuming his bodyweight in pasta and pizza, Tucci loves to eat. Taste, which is narrated by the actor, tells of a life lived through food, from the pomodoro sauce that would be strained through a pillowcase at his grandmother’s house, to his mother’s slow-cooked ragu, to the coq au vin he ate on an early date with his first wife, Kate. You will learn little here about his professional career, save for the Manhattan burger bars that sustained him during his early days as an actor, and the plate of andouillette, a particularly pungent French sausage, that he rashly ordered while dining with Meryl Streep (they sent it back and ordered omelette instead).
Tucci’s delivery is much as it is in his TV series: understated, urbane and charismatic. Not for nothing did an Instagram video of him making a negroni with exceptional chicness go viral during lockdown. Alas, there is no such video where he knocks up a perfect spaghetti carbonara, though listening to him rhapsodise about eating it in this mouth-watering memoir has to be the next best thing. Taste is available via Penguin Audio, 6hr 49min. Continue reading... | | | | | The best recent poetry – review roundup | | by Rishi Dastidar Sep 30, 2022 | | Days Like These by Brian Bilston; A Little Resurrection by Selina Nwulu; England’s Green by Zaffar Kunial; After Sylvia, edited by Ian Humphreys and Sarah Corbett; Journeys Across Breath by Stephen Watts Days Like These: An Alternative Guide to the Year in 366 Poems by Brian Bilston (Picador, £16.99)
The poem-a-day format of poetry publishing is ripe for subversion. One suspects the tongue of the “poet laureate of Twitter” is in his cheek when celebrating such wildly various historic occasions as Charles I’s execution, Dylan going electric and … Bilston finding one of his books in a charity shop. He succeeds when he describes the specific in the mundane, such as on TV: “I used to believe that the tiny people in the magic box / were watching me as I watched them – / looking out at somebody else inside a tiny box”. A Little Resurrection by Selina Nwulu (Bloomsbury, £9.99)
“I’ve been an angel before. No big deal, but it’s true.” From the off, the first collection by a former young poet laureate for London grabs the attention. Ranging across poems dealing with deportation and repatriation, trying to find a home between cultures, and charting the impact of this on Black bodies, Nwulu’s voice is direct and disarming, powered by a quiet anger. She is particularly good at illuminating the eddies of grief, thanks to her ability to freeze-frame decisive moments. When her father dies in hospital, there are “scattered around him, debris of a quiet bomb”. A compelling debut. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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