New York
Kieron Tyler
The death of lyricist Hal David at 91 is a sad reminder that the golden age of a uniquely American approach to songwriting is getting further and further away. The Bacharach and David brand will last, as will classic songs like “Anyone Who Had a Heart”, “Don’t Make Me Over”, “Magic Moments”, “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head, “The Look of Love” and “Walk On By”. Yet David’s passing emphasises that although these compositions have a life of their own, they remain rooted in an era that becomes less and less tangible as the years pass.Of course, for David and his partner Burt Bacharach Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Alfie Moore: I Predicted a Riot, Pleasance Courtyard **** There can't be many serving police officers doing stand-up comedy at the Fringe, so that makes Alfie Moore an unusual beast. Actually he's a one-off, a wonderfully engaging bloke in a sharp suit who says the most surprising things for someone currently indentured to Her Majesty. He's left-leaning, for a start, having grown up on a Sheffield council estate and who started his working life in a steelworks, where he was a shop steward. Moore, who was on Show Me the Funny on ITV last year, is now a sergeant in Humberside Constabulary Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Created by Jonathan Nolan (brother of film director Christopher) and exec-produced by the workaholic JJ Abrams, Person of Interest seeks to accomplish the counter-intuitive feat of finding something to celebrate in our surveillance culture. We're accustomed to feeling fear and paranoia at the idea that all our tweets, emails and phone calls are being routinely monitored by sundry mysterious agencies, but Person of... wonders whether there's a silver lining in the menacing info-cloud hanging over us.The show's central duo is the mismatched couple of technology nerd Harold Finch (Michael Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Describing the music of Franz Nicolay is a formidable task: it’s almost as easy to imagine the work of some of the bands he has loaned his considerable talents to in the past - most notably during his five years as a member of The Hold Steady - and then imagine the exact opposite. As proficient on accordion, saw and banjo as he is on keyboard or guitar; Nicolay’s music fuses elements of folk and punk with polka, gypsy and klezmer influences to create an articulate, joyful mix that is always entertaining.At least, that’s how I would have described it before my first listen to Do The Struggle, Read more ...
theartsdesk
Welcome to another show, in which Joe guides us around some of the weirder, smokier corners of the broad church of hip hop, and discussion returns to how far genre can stretch and where originality can reside in a multi-channel, everything-available-at-once world. We also take a listen to more and less authentic sounds of South America courtesy of a Brit-in-Colombia, a Colombian Brit, and a legend of British underground sounds turning Colombian sounds into house music. There's some neo-psychedelia and neo-folk thrown into the mix for good measure.The Colombian Brit is one José Hernando Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“It’s the oldest building in England,” Ana Matronic said breathlessly. “We’re probably going to behead someone.” The Tower of London is an unlikely venue for the fizzy pop monster that is Scissor Sisters, who dedicated one song to Anne Boleyn. In the end, no executions, or drawing or quartering, but they did have a couple of oversized beefeaters (pictured below) flanking the stage and dancing. Seeing them top the bill at the BT River of Music at the Americas Stage, you realise just how many pop classics they now have at their disposal from their four albums.It was a case of wishing you could Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
You now have two choices when you roll down to the bottom of the Turbine Hall's slope. You can go left to the established Tate Modern collection of paintings and sculptures in white boxes, or right to a warren of performance and video art that fills two new large concrete barrel rooms - two options in gallery geometry and art practice. With the help of architects Herzog and De Meuron, Tate have incorporated the two disused oil drums into the gallery to provide a permanent platform for the immersive and interactive art forms that have come to dominate the visual arts over the past Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It is sometimes hard to be enthused by midweek gigs. Last night was one of those occasions, at least for the 30 seconds I thought I was going to be watching most of the show on the iPhone screen of the six feet of beard that planked itself in front of me just in time for the music starting. Those are the nights you need, as Sharon van Etten might say, “something that’s hard to describe”. Something that changes your mood, and makes you smile, and doesn’t happen all of the time. Something fun.If you’re at all familiar with Tramp, the third album from Brooklyn-based van Etten which came out at Read more ...
Graham Fuller
If not as ensnaring as Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, or Out of the Past, Otto Preminger’s urbane police procedural Laura is one of the best film noirs because it transcends the genre. It is an inverted women’s picture – about the hubris of a successful career girl cum Galatea – a savage critique of the decadence of Manhattan high society, and a commentary on the neurotic idealisation of beautiful women.It begins like Rebecca: the Wildean newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) musing, with the words “I shall never forget the weekend Laura Read more ...
Sarah Kent
For three months in the spring of 2010, New Yorkers were gripped by Abramovic fever. The mania owed its origins to a somewhat unlikely source – a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) of a 63-year-old Serbian performance artist.Performance art is not exactly mainstream entertainment and Marina Abramovic is scarcely a household name, yet such was the enthusiasm generated by her exhibition that 750,000 people visited it in three months; many of whom queued all night for an audience with the artist.The hysteria was stoked up by shock/horror media coverage of nudity and stories about Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Once again bringing to screen the seemingly unfilmable (see also Naked Lunch and Crash), the audacious David Cronenberg takes on Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel - a novel which in the last decade has become frighteningly pertinent. Respectfully retaining much of DeLillo’s original dialogue, Cosmopolis is a paranoid, loquacious nightmare, a sly, searing study of the alienated super rich, a meditation on greed, emptiness and jealousy. It’s set almost entirely within the comfortable cocoon of a stretch limousine which, in the hands of Cronenberg, becomes an almost science fiction-style space. Read more ...