documentary
graeme.thomson
In the early Eighties Peter Gabriel was the ne plus ultra of arty, experimental margin-hangers, breaking cover occasionally with an improbable hit single before “retreating back into the bushes with my normal crowd”. His fifth studio album, So, changed all that. Its lead single “Sledgehammer” strutted over the dividing line between cult kudos and mass-market kerching, leading Gabriel and the rest of this darkly soulful album straight into the arms of the mainstream. After 1986, he was one of the big beasts.This absorbing Classic Albums film suggested there was little premeditation about any Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“A place of human bondage, a place of human suffering,” was how Hank Skinner described the Texas prison where he’s spent the 17 years. On death row, he's convicted of triple murder. The subject of the disquieting first entry in Werner Herzog’s series on condemned prisoners, Skinner was sanguine in the face of death but pursuing every means to prolong its arrival.Although unseen, Herzog was heard. The programme began with his voiceover stating that “the death penalty exists in 34 states of the United States of America. Currently, only 16 states actually perform executions. Executions are Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
If you’ve ever had that cold, clammy feeling following the realisation that an email, in which you have been less than flattering about a colleague, has accidentally landed in said colleague’s inbox, then you will have experienced roughly a millionth of the pain felt by assorted US government officials in the wake of the WikiLeaks scandal.In late 2010, the website WikiLeaks posted around 250,000 secret communications between Washington and the scores of US diplomats stationed across the world, which were subsequently published in newspapers. Suddenly America’s private anxieties and political Read more ...
ash.smyth
If you’re one of those readers who likes to believe that a novelist’s work and the life he leads have little or nothing to do with one another, then I trust you were watching last night’s Arena: The Dreams of William Golding.After an upbringing of lower-middle state schooling, immersion in the Classics and archaeology, uncompromising atheism (father) and superstitious eclecticism (mother), eventual Nobel Laureate William Golding was spat out into the world – with a reference from Oxford marked “Not Top Drawer” – chippy, resentful, and deeply susceptible to the wishy-washy of the unconscious. Read more ...
fisun.guner
If you’re the kind of person who appreciates auto-recommendations based on previous purchases, then perhaps I could do worse than begin this review by saying:” If you liked The September Issue, you’ll simply love Bill Cunningham New York.” There are obvious similarities: both are Cinema Verité-style documentary profiles centred around New York and fashion, both present a series of talking heads, and both feature the formidable Anna Wintour, managing editor of American Vogue. Maybe it was The September Issue that gave Richard Press, Bill Cunningham’s director, the inspirational spark to make Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In the final instalment of our exclusive Simone Felice video series, the singer and poet from New York's Catskill mountains takes us on a tour of three further locations that kept him sane, whilst, around him, life seemed like an extract from the book of Job. These are also the places that inspired his forthcoming album, released April 2. As ever Felice proves an amiable and charismatic guide, and his haunts are the sort of places to nourish the soul of anyone in need of contemplation. But Felice is not anyone and he has also written a piece of prose-cum-blank-verse to accompany it. And what Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Simone Felice has both a back story to make Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon seem like a graduate of Fame, and the poetic gifts to make it as real to you as the air you breathe. In a two-part exclusive, he has recorded a series of videos for theartsdesk to take readers around some of the locations of his stomping grounds in the Catskill Mountains of New York State which have helped inspire his forthcoming debut solo album, released on 2 April.For those unfamiliar with the back story, it goes like this: at the age of 12 Felice suffered a brain haemorrhage that left him clinically dead for several Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the right hands, the English language can work itself up into an intensely erotic lather. It can seduce and caress, tease and undress. It can perform tantric wonders, all through the power of the word. In the right hands. “You ain’t got yer knob out already?” said Jenny, on the blower to a gentleman while redecorating her kitchen. “Listen to how wet I am.” And she dipped her brush in a sloppy tub of Dulux.Jenny, slightly wheezy at 56, is a phone sex worker. If she’s broad in the beam, she’s broader in the mind. “Control the cock, you control the man,” she advised. One of La Rochefoucauld’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Throughout our history, women and power have made an uneasy combination." Dr Helen Castor made it clear the path to power depended on more than the right alliances, lineage, and marriage partner. Even if all those were spot on, being female was enough to halt any rise. The series began with the medieval Queens Matilda and her daughter-in-law Eleanor of Aquitaine. Both wanted to rule, not reign like Queen Elizabeth II.She Wolves brought Castor’s book She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth to television. The programme’s sensational title was a given. With an audience beyond Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The scene is ineffably English. The thock of mallet on ball, the clack of ball through hoop, the gentle sun adding a benediction. A senior gent in natty English threads looks on from the pavilion, a member of this club for 55 years. Everything is just so, apart the setting: Cairo. “Was there nothing good the British did here?” wondered Jeremy Paxman. Apart from croquet. “All kinds of imperialism is bad,” ventured his host with a wily smile.Technically Egypt wasn’t part of the empire. We just hung around there for 70 years to keep an eye on the canal connecting the tiny island called home with Read more ...
howard.male
It’s hard to imagine a bad documentary on David Hockney. Hockney always gives good Hockney: the quotable sentences come thick and fast; his enthusiasm for his craft is never less than exhilarating, and like that other great British artist of his generation – Francis Bacon – he’s always been better at getting to the crux of why and how he makes pictures than any of his commentators have. And yet… But we’ll get to the “and yet” in a moment.In last night’s Culture Show Special, the amicable Yorkshireman was gently quizzed by his friend, the journalist and broadcaster Andrew Marr. But what added Read more ...
ash.smyth
So Homeland is here, and mid-ranking-CIA-operative Claire Danes is chasing Marine-Sergeant-and-possible-al-Qaeda-double-agent Damian Lewis all over the shop (but really only in their heads, so far), and neither of them is getting anywhere fast, so Claire goes home for a kip and sticks on some relaxing music, and would you Adam ‘n’ Eve it? – another bloody jazz nerd!Seriously, has anyone done research into the neurological links between analytical thought and jazz? Or whether the CIA does the bulk of its recruiting in Manhattan after-hours clubs? Or whether all spy dramas are now just Read more ...