childhood
Veronica Lee
Only part-way through a mammoth stadium tour that began last April and continues until next autumn (and which he insists will end on 15 October at the MEN Arena in Manchester, where he once worked as an usher), Peter Kay is still having to add dates as they sell out almost the instant they're announced. He’s a phenomenon that even Michael McIntyre and Jimmy Carr - no slouches in stadium-show sales themselves - must be envious of.I must confess myself a huge fan, and last night it was a real pleasure to see Kay live for the first time in several years at the O2 (formerly the Millennium Dome). Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Greg Davies is a comedian who laughs along to his own material. A conspiratorial look glints in his eye, a hint of fruity mischief plays on his lips. The adage that you should never be amused by your own punchlines is, of course, a tall tower of rubbish – different jokes for different blokes – but Davies’s enjoyment of his own routine begs a couple of questions. Is it as funny as he thinks it is? Or is it funny because he thinks it is? And then there is the greatest existential quandary of all, which has knitted the brows of philosophers since time immemorial. Exactly how hilarious is Read more ...
fisun.guner
When Jake and Dinos Chapman first came to the attention of a wider public at the Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition, their work came with a parental warning: a sign barring under-18s. After all, naked child mannequins sporting surprised-looking anal apertures for mouths and erect penises for noses were not, until then, the Royal Academy’s usual fare.But the Chapmans, whose works have always delighted in puerile humour, have never been convinced by the notion of childhood innocence. What's more, even at their most macabre and apparently shocking, their imagination has always had Read more ...
neil.smith
The 15 years since Disney released the original Toy Story have seen a seismic boom in the computer animation field that has prompted every major movie studio to get in on the act. Relatively cheap to make, accessible to both adults and children and easily converted to 3D, these digital cash cows have become as much a part of a Hollywood balance sheet as the action-packed thriller, low-brow comedy or all-star contemporary reboot.Yet while its chief rival DreamWorks has shown few qualms in turning their animated hits (Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda) into serial franchises, pack leader Pixar Read more ...
fisun.guner
It took Picasso four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but it took him a lifetime to paint like a child, or so he said. For Brancusi it wasn‘t a case of relearning childhood, but of being careful not to lose it in the first place. “When we are no longer children we are already dead,” he said. A little further down the food chain of contemporary art, Grayson Perry, the delightful transvestite potter who accepted his Turner Prize award as alter-ego Claire (because he likes to feel the prickle of humiliation when he’s dressed like Milly-Molly-Mandy in a crowd), evokes the spirit of Alan Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A father keeps his three adult children in a state of retarded development. They are deprived of books, education, television, indeed denied any access to the world beyond the electronic gates marking the perimeter edge of their known territory. In the place of knowledge is disinformation, disseminated on tapes. The sea is a leather chair, a zombie is a yellow flower, a vagina is a keyboard. And so on. In all this the mother is quiescent, complicit. The father is an absolute patriarch, the source of all morality and law. Dogtooth, a film by Giorgos Lanthimos set in contemporary Greece and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are gunshots outside in the street, a boy sits behind his front door desperate to get to ballet class, the two sides of his life colliding in front of his eyes - reality and dream. It’s a favela in Rio, one of the most dangerous cities in the world, a vast estate of poverty riddled with drug crime and addicted young lads with no future other than dealing, until they get shot or jailed. Ballet... well, what an irrelevance.This is the background from which, unbelievably, a fairytale became real. A boy, Irlan da Silva, escaped his certain destiny and this year became a professional ballet Read more ...