| | | Pushing Buttons: There isn't a more exciting time of year for games than autumn | | by Keith Stuart Oct 4, 2023 | | In this week’s newsletter: Folklore is rich with the monsters, demons and more that come out in autumn – games can be the best place to encounter them • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here It is that time of year again, when every major video game publisher on the planet drops all its biggest releases within a few days of each other. Currently on the October release schedule: Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Detective Pikachu Returns, Forza Motorsport, Sonic Superstars, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Super Mario Bros Wonder … and November is looking just as busy. Many of us are still playing Starfield – what are we supposed to do now? Even though the way games are sold has fundamentally changed in the last five years, away from packing the shelves of high street stores and toward digital downloads, Christmas still provides a major boost to sales, and until that is transitioned into a holistic online platform, the seasonal rush will continue. There is something intrinsically autumnal about video games. As the days get colder and the darkness draws nearer, we’re definitely in a familiar emotional and aesthetic realm. Consider the chilly gothic splendour of Elden Ring and Bloodborne, the stark killzones of Call of Duty, the spooky haunting grounds of Alan Wake, Silent Hill and Ghostwire: Tokyo. Folklore is rich with the monsters, demons and spooks that come out at this time of year as the fields lie fallow and the sun withdraws. Continue reading... | | | | | Are you the lower middle class? Michael Bennett's best photograph | | by Interview by Amy Fleming Oct 4, 2023 | | ‘I went to a Berni Inn to find the lower middle class. But no one wanted to admit to being part of this growing demographic. There was no pride in it. So I started to gloss over that part’ This was taken in 1981 at a Berni Inn steakhouse in Harrow, London. I think it’s a Beefeater now. These people had just walked in out of the rain. They were a bit wary of me, but stood there for a few seconds and I was able to grab one frame before they disappeared. It was for the magazine New Society, founded in the early 1960s to document society in ways understandable to general readers, avoiding jargon – a mirror of its stablemate, New Scientist. The art editors had almost complete freedom to commission and choose pictures. The brief was to find the lower middle class, to accompany an article about this growing demographic. But the problem was that nobody wanted to admit to being lower middle class. There was no pride in it, like there was in being working class. People just looked baffled when I approached them, so I started to gloss over that part and simply said I was shooting for a magazine feature about how people lived in north London. Continue reading... | | | | | 'A new low': explicit UK show Naked Attraction causes a stir in the US | | by Adrian Horton Oct 4, 2023 | | The dating show, where people are judged on their naked bodies, has become a much-discussed hit after landing on streaming, with detractors in its wake I vaguely remember the first time I heard about Naked Attraction, the British reality series in which singletons judge prospective partners in the nude, which premiered on Channel 4 in 2016. The show prompted a series of incredulous headlines about the premise, casting and general shock of full frontal nudity on TV, to which I reacted with something along the lines of “how can this be real?” And then I promptly forgot about it, because a show about people matter-of-factly assessing a bunch of strangers by their genitals would simply never air on US television, given its particular blend of titillating, prudish, and regulated; the most archetypical American dating show remains The Bachelor, which has a distinct flavor of Instagram Christian modesty. Such tameness, at least on network television or in the US version of Love Island, is at odds with the unsentimental frankness of Naked Attraction, which has unsurprisingly rattled American viewers upon its arrival to US streaming. Since the show’s six seasons landed on Max last month, it’s become an object of consternation, curiosity and clear obsession; it’s topped the service’s most-watched list for two weeks. Continue reading... | | | | | These Demons review – sisters under siege in a haunted house | | by Arifa Akbar Oct 4, 2023 | | Theatre503, London
Rachel Bellman explores Jewish exorcisms and rebellion in this darkly funny, psychological play There is a slow-burn buildup of creepiness in this haunted house story which uses Jewish demonology and mysticism to explore outsider women and antisemitic terror. Longlisted for the Women’s prize for playwriting in 2021, Rachel Bellman’s drama takes place inside a shabby cottage with a central window looking on to pitch black night. Troubled teen Leah (Olivia Marcus, excellently stroppy) is holed up here in the woods in a home belonging to her eccentric aunt Mirah (Ann Marcuson). Mirah is tarred as something of a witch by her middle England neighbours and becomes the target of antisemitic hostility from one shadowy figure outside her window. But she is also seen as a renegade within the Jewish community for her unorthodox interpretations of the faith. At Theatre 503, London, until 14 October Continue reading... | | | | | Chinese author Can Xue favourite to win 2023 Nobel prize for literature | | by Ella Creamer Oct 4, 2023 | | Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie are also among those highly tipped for the prize, announced on Thursday Can Xue, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie are among the most likely authors to win this year’s Nobel prize for literature, according to bookies. Chinese avant garde author Xue, 70, is leading the pack with Ladbrokes giving 8/1 odds of her winning the prestigious literary award. Continue reading... | | | | | 'Tunbridge Wells sells out time and time again': the bonkers craze for karaoke with Barry from Eastenders | | by Hugh Morris Oct 4, 2023 | | With Barrioke, actor Shaun Williamson is leaning into the popularity of his much-memed singing style – and finding an audience hungry for nostalgia and silliness On 26 January 2014, Darren Burnett defeated Mervyn King to win the World Indoor Bowls Championships, but the internet remembers that day for a different reason. On pre-match entertainment duties was Shaun Williamson, best known for playing Barry Evans in EastEnders (and “Barry from EastEnders” in the Ricky Gervais series Extras). His performance of Labi Siffre’s (Something Inside) So Strong – with its passionately delivered refrain “we’re gonna do it anyway” – has been immortalised in internet meme culture as the ultimate example of committing to a bit. The whole bowls scene is deliciously awkward: Williamson belts out Siffre’s anthem to a crowd equal parts bored and baffled, and some seem to get up to leave. (They weren’t walking out, Williamson’s team insists; they were taking advantage of their allotted comfort break before the final.) Nine years later, an altogether more enthusiastic crowd waits patiently for Barrioke, Willliamson’s karaoke show, on a Friday night at Southend-on-Sea’s music pub Chinnerys. An hour later, the room is bouncing along to Chelsea Dagger and Chesney Hawkes as audience members join him on the mic, and remember the hard way that So Strong finishes with a key change. Continue reading... | | | | | Fleetwood Mac decided to go their own ways. How do bands know when to quit, and shouldn't more do so? | Michael Hann | | by Michael Hann Oct 4, 2023 | | After the death of Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks has called time. There is an art to timing it right – just look at the Beatles Though Stevie Nicks has only now called time on Fleetwood Mac – there’s no point in continuing after the death of Christine McVie, she told Vulture – this is a band that has been on the brink of ending for more than 50 years. They might have called it a day when their leader, Peter Green, left in 1970. Or when their sublime guitarists Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan left in 1971 and 1972. Or when the group’s three main writers – Nicks, McVie and Lindsey Buckingham – wanted to pursue solo work in the early 80s. Or when Buckingham left for the first time in 1987. Or when McVie departed in 1998. Or when Buckingham was sacked in 2018. But every time they found a reason to carry on. “Hey,” wrote Steve Albini in the sleeve notes to his group Big Black’s final album in 1987, “breaking up is an idea that has occurred to far too few groups, sometimes to the wrong ones.” That sentence – written as a fan as much as a musician – captures the tension between the observer, who wants their favourite musician to leave a perfect legacy, and the performer, for whom making records and touring is their job – the thing that puts food on the table and is often the only thing they actually know how to do. Continue reading... | | | | | 'There's bombshell after bombshell': will Blue Therapy be the wildest reality TV ride of the year? | | by Leila Latif Oct 4, 2023 | | After three million people tuned in for the online version of this therapy show for Black couples, Channel 4 have turned it into an explosive series. Brace for controversy In a world where we are on our seventh series of Naked Attraction’s genital unveilings, it’s hard to imagine there are many boundaries left for British reality television to break. But In Love & Toxic: Blue Therapy pushes at a more subtle taboo – Black people going to therapy. That may seem relatively innocuous, but it’s full of couples baring their souls on screen, admitting to infidelity and insecurities and uttering ludicrous statements such as: “But I’m a bad bitch!” It’s quite the way to challenge a stereotype the show’s creators wanted to battle against: that therapy is “exclusively for middle-class white people.” Channel 4’s latest series is one of the most fresh, fun and subversive reality TV debuts of the year. It is not entirely new, however. It has been adapted from the hit 2021 YouTube show Blue Therapy, an outrageous but surprisingly complex portrait of Black people’s relationships that was named “the most explosive reality show of the year”. Continue reading... | | | | | 20 Days in Mariupol review – searing film bears terrible witness to brutal siege | | by Peter Bradshaw Oct 4, 2023 | | Film-maker Mstyslav Chernov risked everything to document Russia’s attack from within the besieged city, recording unthinkable horrors in this vital account There is genuine horror in this eyewitness documentary about Vladimir Putin’s attack on the southern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol; I spent many moments of it with my head in my hands. The brutal siege lasted from February to May 2022; civilian centres were targeted and more than 20,000 people killed. The Ukrainian Associated Press journalist and film-maker Mstyslav Chernov was there for 20 days, and filed video reports that helped to galvanise western opinion, particularly the horrific images of mass graves. But this movie is the uncut, unexpurgated version: the real nightmare, the real explicit obscenity which no TV executive would put on the nightly news. Chernov shows the dead bodies of men, women, children and babies. But perhaps even more horribly, he shows us, in unthinkable closeup, the wrenching anguish of those left behind, sobbing over the shattered bodies of their loved ones. It really is not to be borne. Continue reading... | | | | | Assassin's Creed Mirage review – a stripped-back stab in the right direction | | by Julian Benson Oct 4, 2023 | | Ubisoft; PC, PS/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
Set in ninth-century Baghdad, this latest iteration of the murderous mega-series has cleared out recent bloated extras, leaving you with just a sword and dagger Most canals that cut through ninth-century Baghdad are a muddy brown, thick with the silt churned up by the poles of passing punts. But there’s one inlet in the city where the water is stained red, a persistent crimson cloud that doesn’t shift with the stream’s eddies. Follow the red-running gutters through the sidestreets shouldered by clay-brick houses, and you’ll find not an abattoir but a dye factory. Between lines of fabrics hung up to dry, workers sweat as they stir cloth in great pots of coloured water, occasionally stopping to mop their brows. It’s an arresting sight, one of the many that litter Ubisoft’s latest open-world stab ’em up, Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Set in the years preceding the Viking-flavoured Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Mirage puts you in the foot wraps of pickpocket-turned-hitman-in-training Basim Ibn Ishaq. After a palace burglary goes wrong, you are forced to flee your village and join The Hidden Ones, taking up their fight against The Order, a secretive club who are worming their way into Baghdad’s upper echelons of power. While both clandestine groups operate in the shadows and kill people, Ubisoft is at pains to stress that your extrajudicial murders are honourable, whereas The Order’s are dastardly. In part, this is because you do this on behalf of the people, though it’s not worth interrogating the game’s morality too closely, as, thanks to Mirage’s pickpocketing mechanic, you can rob the people blind, even stealing jewellery from the nurses working in the Baghdad hospital’s burns ward. Suffice it to say, murderers in hoods: good; murderers in masks: bad. Continue reading... | | | | | Himalayan tree-huggers and a landscape of vulvas: the eco-show where women call the shots | | by Natalie Hanman Oct 4, 2023 | | The Barbican’s new exhibition looks at the way ecofeminism has evolved – from anti-nuclear protests at Greenham Common to ‘multiple clitoris’ art There are photographs of women with their arms wrapped around the trunks of trees in the Himalayas to prevent them from being felled. There are aerial, yet intimate, pictures of open-pit mines and dams that have been blasted across the landscape in western Australia. There are films shot underwater, in warming seas, of melting ice and damaged coral reefs. But “this isn’t a show about climate change”, insists curator Alona Pardo. The Barbican’s new exhibition, Re/Sisters: A Lens on Gender and Ecology, brings together 250 works of photography, film, performance art and installation, created since the late 1960s by nearly 50 women and gender non-conforming artists from across the world. Continue reading... | | | | | The Postcard by Anne Berest review – an autofictional tale of family survival | | by Rachel Seiffert Oct 4, 2023 | | The author sets out to discover what happened to her ancestors during the Holocaust in this gripping, poignant work Anne Berest’s work of autofiction, a bestseller in France and a finalist for the Prix Goncourt, opens on a snowy Paris morning in 2003. The protagonist’s mother, Léila, steps outside for her first cigarette of the day, only to find a mysterious postcard in the mailbox. On it are four names: Ephraim, Emma, Noémie, Jacques. Her grandfather, grandmother, aunt and uncle – all killed at Auschwitz. No signature, no explanation. “Who could have sent me this terrible thing?” For Léila, the postcard is a threat, a provocation. For Anne, it poses a question: why does she know so little about those ancestors? Her quest to find the sender will open rifts between mother and daughter; it will also unearth the family’s origin story. Their early years of wandering; their fate under Vichy France and the Nazis; the risks her grandparents undertook in the Resistance. And then afterwards, the pain of survival; the long reach of the Holocaust through the generations. Every page is gripping, revelatory. Continue reading... | | | | | The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde review – menace on Edinburgh's mean streets | | by Cath Clarke Oct 4, 2023 | | Hope Dickson Leach’s atmospheric adaptation of the classic thriller looks good but in rewriting the story, adds an unnecessary element of distraction This atmospheric black and white adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic classic from Hope Dickson Leach, the director of The Levelling, opens with a tremendous shiver of menace. In the dead of night, as an eerily inhuman singsong echoes on the soundtrack, a little girl walks along an alleyway. Something steps out of the shadows. From behind, it appears to be a man, a gentleman – in a top hat and exquisitely tailored shirt. But the way it moves, gliding like a predator towards the girl, is hardly human; then it savages her with the rotting teeth of an animal. Perhaps nothing else that follows quite lives up to this taste of evil. Dickson Leach’s film adds to the pile of 120-plus screen versions of Jekyll and Hyde. This one started out last year as a “hybrid-production” staged in an Edinburgh theatre: for three nights, audiences sat in front of a screen watching a live stream of actors performing scenes on sets around the theatre. That footage has been edited – with added effects – to make this film. And it really does feel like a feature film (rather than filmed theatre): stylishly shot with a noirish feel, velvety rich black and white cinematography, camera furtively lurking in the shadows. Continue reading... | | | | | | | 'Dangerous gatekeeping': why is country music still resistant to diversity? | | by Jeffrey Ingold Oct 4, 2023 | | Grammy-winning star Maren Morris has announced she is leaving the genre that made her famous due to bigotry revealing an industry still stuck in the past In 2017, Texas-born singer-songwriter Maren Morris won her first Grammy award for best country solo performance with her debut single, My Church. After that breakthrough moment, she cemented herself as an industry staple winning six Country Music Association Awards, earning four number one hits on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart and 15 Grammy nominations in the country category. Morris’ success was not only held up by country music executives as a shining example of change in the industry, but she also consistently used her platform to “talk about the importance of making folks of colour and LGBTQ+ people more visible in the industry”, explains Dr Francesca Royster, author of Black Country Music. Six years later, Morris is getting “the hell out” of country music citing an industry that celebrates people “proud to be misogynistic and racist and homophobic and transphobic”. Morris’s experience as a white woman, outspoken on issues of racial equality, LGBTQ+ rights and abortion, is just the latest in a series of instances where liberal country artists are struggling to feel at home in Nashville. Black country singers and journalists are being called racial slurs by fans and openly LGBTQ+ performers are having to back out of performances. Continue reading... | | | | | | | Monica by Daniel Clowes review – a thrilling kaleidoscopic journey | | by James Smart Oct 4, 2023 | | A woman sets out to uncover the truth about her mother’s disappearance in this genre-hopping celebration of visual storytelling The title suggests that Daniel Clowes’s latest is a work of biographical fiction – and, to a degree, it is. A woman called Monica features in most of the nine chapters of this kaleidoscopic graphic novel. Abandoned by her hippy mother, she grows up with her grandparents, builds a career, then abandons it to uncover the truth about her mother’s departure – and the secrets of the mysterious cult she may have joined. Yet Monica changes its colours like a skittish octopus. The chapters don’t simply carry the story forward. Instead, they chart the protagonist’s life in a wide range of styles – a free-wheeling drama, a ghost story, a rags-to-riches tale, an occult thriller and a retiree romance – broken up by standalone tales of wartime friendship, hitmen, blue-skinned interlopers and cynical artists in which Monica appears only obliquely, if at all. There’s no back-cover blurb or introduction to tell us what to make of it all. The reader, like Monica herself, must play detective. Continue reading... | | | | | Haunting of the Queen Mary review – tap-dancing horror ride aboard the big ship | | by Leslie Felperin Oct 4, 2023 | | With a gory plot that unfolds across two timelines, this feels like a rebranding exercise for the grand ocean liner, turning it into a horror-themed adventure experience This horror feature takes place largely on the RMS Queen Mary, the grand ocean liner built in Glasgow’s Clydeside docks in the 1930s which for many years now has been permanently moored in the harbour at Long Beach, California. In order to take advantage of both the ship’s vintage decor as well as its touristy gift shops and scale model displays, the screenwriters have crafted a plot that unfolds across two timelines. One is set in 1938 when a grisly, entirely fictitious murder takes place, while the other happens in the present day as a family interested in history and the supernatural gets caught up in the ship’s haunted legacy. The crisscrossing between the two periods is executed gracefully thanks to some nimble rhymed editing, and there’s some real dramatic heft at play here – but the bloated running time drags it down, and lots of spooky business in the back half might have been better jettisoned overboard to gain speed. In the 1938 section, a family of grifters – war veteran David Ratch (Wil Coban), his fortune-teller wife Gwen (Nell Hudson) and their young daughter Jackie (Florrie Wilkinson) – try to pass themselves off as toffs to access the first-class dining room. When their ruse is discovered, wee Jackie manages to persuade a table of Hollywood folks to let her audition, a plea that appeals to Fred Astaire (Wesley Alfvin) who lets her perform with him. The whole dance sequence, with period-appropriate choreography and taps dubbed in post and all, goes on for ages, making this a film with the highest gore-to-dancing ratio since cult Japanese director Takashi Miike’s The Happiness of the Katakuris. While the band are swinging, dad David is possessed by an evil spirit and soon there is a great deal of axe murdering, shown in gory detail with the colour processed to make the blood look extra dark, toned to the deep browns of the wood panelling. Continue reading... | | | | | Celluloid counter-revolution: a salute to the underground film lovers of Iran | | by Ehsan Khoshbakht Oct 4, 2023 | | Unsuitable films were burned after the Islamic regime took over Iran. But one man stashed away reels and reels of banned and western movies – to thrill a new generation in secret film clubs Passion for movies has hardly ever been more political than in Iran. Over the past century, drastic political change in certain countries has split the personality of the country’s film culture into two distinct halves. Usually, the new ideology ostracised and undermined the one that it had displaced. But in scarcely any other country has extreme change – a revolution – worked to make access to the past virtually impossible. The Islamic regime in Iran made watching any type of film outside strictly defined codes an illegal activity; doing so shunted the act of loving cinema into counterculture. The regime’s aim, though never explicitly pronounced, was to destroy images of alternative realities and worlds. It is not yet clear how many films went up in smoke during the film incineration campaign of the early 1980s, a tragic episode still denied by the regime. This is the point when cinephilia became a hazardous occupation. Continue reading... | | | | | Madonna by Mary Gabriel review – the definitive life of a pop colossus | | by Fiona Sturges Oct 4, 2023 | | The work of a cultural historian rather than a fan, this meticulous study puts the shape-shifting star in proper context When Madonna Louise Ciccone arrived in New York from Michigan aged 19 in 1978, she had a small suitcase, a winter coat and $35 in her pocket. In an interview with the broadcaster Howard Stern years later, she would admit that she was frightened: “The massive scale of New York took my breath away … I was poised for survival … But I was also scared shitless and freaked out by the smell of piss and vomit.” In the ensuing years, Madonna would experience grinding poverty, living in a succession of cockroach-infested apartments where addicts populated the hallways, and often going without food. Yet Whitley Setrakian, Madonna’s roommate at the University of Michigan, where both had studied dance, says: “I’ve never seen her so happy and so sure.” She recalls Madonna telling her: “Every day I’m here in this city I can’t stop thinking about all the days I haven’t been here. I feel like I’m running a race and everyone’s had a head start.” Continue reading... | | | | | |
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