literature
theartsdesk in New York: Story Slamming in Greenwich VillageSunday, 12 December 2010
It’s 6.20 on a chilly Monday evening. The doors at the venerable Bitter End club in Greenwich Village don’t open till seven but already the line for the open-mic Moth StorySLAM is snaking down the block, way past the corner of Bleeker Street into La... Read more... |
John Waters, Shoreditch House Literary SalonThursday, 02 December 2010
I've been to a fair few spoken-word events in my time, and as a rule the more upmarket they are, the worse they tend to get. The bigger the celebrity or cult cachet of an author, the more likely they are to attract a crowd that turn up mainly to be... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Siberia: Cold Comfort KrasnoyarskSunday, 28 November 2010
In England you may joke about having Siberian weather with minus 7 degrees. This is really what Siberian winter looks like - at minus 26 degrees. The river is gushing steam, a hellishly peculiar sight. After travelling for 16 hours and through seven... Read more... |
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1Tuesday, 16 November 2010
Harry Potter has devoured entire childhoods, swallowed adolescences whole. Not to mention swathes of many a middle age. There are those of us who have read all 2,765,421 words (I checked) of the seven-part saga out loud to their children. Adults who... Read more... |
My Afternoons with MargueritteSunday, 07 November 2010
These days Gérard Depardieu looks as though he wouldn't need much padding to play Obélix again. Though he continues to work with some of the biggest names in French cinema, it has been a while since he really surprised us, maybe because he's now... Read more... |
The Penguin Jazz Guide: The 1001 Best AlbumsSunday, 07 November 2010
It's a curious fact that, for whole swathes of the music-buying public, their jazz collection has never grown beyond the ubiquitous Kind of Blue. OK, it's a seminal masterpiece which continues to sell like shovels in a snow storm. But why stop there... Read more... |
Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Death and Women, BBC FourThursday, 21 October 2010
The recurrent image in this somewhat staid documentary is a monochrome photograph of Poe’s moon of a face with its panda-like eye sockets. Occasionally the camera moves in for a close-up on those eyes - perhaps hoping they’ll reveal something that... Read more... |
Celebrity Autobiography, Leicester Square TheatreMonday, 04 October 2010
Celebrity Autobiography, like most of the world’s best ideas, is simple yet inspired. Eugene Pack’s creation, developed with Dayle Reyfel, was first seen in Los Angeles three years ago, then in New York and other American cities, and was a sellout... Read more... |
Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian FreudFriday, 10 September 2010
Visit the room in the Louvre where the Mona Lisa hangs, and all you will be able to see is a glass-covered rectangle and hundreds of camera phones held high. Certainly you will be unable to examine the woman in the picture, or contemplate the work... Read more... |
Tamara DreweTuesday, 07 September 2010
If Cold Comfort Farm and Hot Fuzz got chatting down their local one night, the conversation might go something along the lines of Tamara Drewe. Putting the “sex” in Wessex, Stephen Frears’s latest film loosens the corsets of the Hardy pastoral,... Read more... |
My Summer Reading: Author Tibor FischerMonday, 06 September 2010
Born in Stockport in 1959, Tibor Fischer is the son of two Hungarian basketball players who fled their homeland during the 1956 revolution; his 1992 Booker-nominated debut novel, Under the Frog, revisited this subject in wonderfully fleshy, blackly... Read more... |
The Girl Who Played With FireSaturday, 28 August 2010
This middle adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium crime trilogy will be followed almost instantly by the last. Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the elfin abuse victim and avenger who is the heart of the Larsson phenomenon, remains compelling. But... Read more... |
