Los Angeles
India Lewis
Artist and writer, Heather McCalden, has produced her first book-length work. The Observable Universe examines, variously, her familial history, the death of her parents to AIDS, and the subsequent loss of her maternal grandmother, Nivia, who raised her. It’s a fragmentary work, but the medium (half-memoir, half-essay) responds to the author’s own sense of disconnection and uncertainty, and at its heart is an aching feeling of loneliness and grief.Initially, the book seems to present the reader with the story of McCalden’s parents and her relation to them, but this is complicated by the Read more ...
mark.kidel
Julia Holter has created a long line of albums that trade on sophisticated poetry, both lyrical and musical, and her latest, perhaps the most adventurous of all, inhabits a world where nothing is certain, narratives are disjointed, and the imagination of the listener is left to run free.Los Angeles, so grounded in showbiz commerce, is also the city of angels, and the place where dreams can be transformed into reality. Perhaps not surprising that the city should often produce music – from the warm embrace of dream pop to the edgy experimentalism of avant-garde experiment – that has the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Some icons sit back and bask. Kim Gordon does not. She has occasionally intimated that her New York cool and relentless work rate may be down to a smidgeon of imposter syndrome, even after all her years on the frontline. Whatever the truth of it, her output since Sonic Youth (and her marriage) dissolved in 2011 has been prodigious. It’s ranged from new band projects Body/Head and Glitterbust, to film roles, to art exhibitions, and more. But perhaps most dynamic are her solo albums with producer Justin Raisen, of which this is the second. The Collective successfully continues their journey Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Declan McKenna is that rare thing, a popular contemporary male British singer-songwriter whose work tends to avoid solipsism, relentlessly projected vulnerability, and general whining. He writes interesting songs about an array of subjects, some even political in intent, and revels in expanding his musical palette. His last album, Zeros, almost made it to the top of the UK album charts despite – or, perhaps, because of – over-slick, epic production. Happily, his third is a cheerfully offbeat adventure in the possibilities of studio recording. McKenna sounds like he’s having a ball. Read more ...
David Kettle
You can almost feel the energy blazing off the stage in this fast, furious and fiercely funny two-hander from writer Racheal Ofori and Newcastle-based Alphabetti Theatre. Don’t blink or you’ll miss a crucial plot twist, or a nifty swerve into new characters, or even a major technological development.But behind all the japes, attitude and theatrical playfulness, there are broader, more human issues being explored here. Carleen and Crystal are urban 20-somethings who’ve done well with their amusing musings for online consumption via a platform that feels very much like YouTube ("Questions I Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It must have looked like a funny idea on paper: a mute innocent stumbles into a Hollywood career, is mindlessly fêted by the industry and throws all its idiocies into stark relief. It’s an idea as old as the romances of Chretien de Troyes and Voltaire’s Candide, and was given an earlier Hollywood outing in Being There. But the lack of originality of the basic premise isn’t the problem here. Because lovable Charlie Day, star of the TV series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, is the begetter of this script, as well as its director and star, all manner of famous faces have pitched in to Read more ...
joe.muggs
A little remarked fact of modern music is just how lush the sound of modern R&B and adjacent music is. A decade ago, the relative harshness of trap beats and EDM synths seemed to dominate sonically, or on the more bohemian fringes there was a meandering haziness derived from the UK influence of James Blake and Burial. But now, in the work of artists like Kehlani and Tinashe – and filtering outwards into pop from Billie Elish to Ariana Grande – all of this is folded together, the electronics smoothed into more traditional musicality, and with production that is sometimes as Read more ...
India Lewis
I approached Henry Hoke’s fifth book, Open Throat, with some trepidation. A slim novel (156 pages), it seemed, at first glance, to be an over-intellectualised prose-cum-poetical text about a mountain lion.But the novel was so much more: an odd but wryly astute social commentary from an animal that has been forced to move from nature to where the humans are – and he doesn’t wholly hate it. It’s also (loosely) based on the famous P-22 mountain lion, who also lived in LA, and whose story at times intersects with that of the protagonist of Open Throat.The lion, whose name, we are told, is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Directed by Adrian Lyne, Fatal Attraction was the biggest-grossing film of 1987, and gave the world the term “bunny boiler”. Lyne isn’t aboard for Paramount’s new eight-part series, but the film’s screenwriter James Dearden is a major script contributor alongside the show’s creators Kevin J Hynes and Alexandra Cunningham.This isn’t a re-make, more like an expanded Fatal Attraction universe which develops the original story outwards and forwards in time. At its core is the brief affair between Dan Gallagher (Joshua Jackson), a Los Angeles county prosecutor, and Alex Forrest (Lizzy Caplan), who Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Neil Jordan’s take on Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is the first since Bob Rafelson’s Poodle Springs (1998), itself a lone outlier after Michael Winner’s misbegotten The Big Sleep (1978). No one seems to have considered why, or what they might add.Jordan is an Irish magic realist at his best, a gauzy poet around bloody themes. His ambitions here are more modest on an honest job of work. Liam Neeson, his friend and star in Michael Collins and Breakfast On Pluto, wanted to play Marlowe, William Monahan provided a script from John Banville’s Chandler estate-sanctioned novel The Black-Eyed Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Being a few years more marinated in life than Miley Cyrus, it’s taken me a while to come around to her music. From the periphery, I’ve traversed the annoyance of small folk watching Hannah Montana and the "Hoedown Throwdown", to the bemused horror of watching a young female talent be either so manufactured/exploited by a male-centric music industry or rebelling against it so hard without being safeguarded she seemed intent on implosion.But fast forward 10 years since the No.1 hit “Wrecking Ball” and enough time since the near-naked PVC twerkery and hypersexualised, gurning, hammer-licking Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This third Creed film outgrows Rocky, leaving Stallone’s bridging presence behind for a wholly renewed series. Starring again as Adonis Creed, the illegitimate son of Rocky’s late rival Apollo, Michael B. Williams’ directorial debut builds a richly conceived African-American world in and out of the ring.A double-prologue starts with a flashback to Adonis as a teen in 2002, sneaking out from his newly privileged life with Apollo’s widow Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad) to roam LA with old children’s home friend Damian, till a violent incident sends Damian to jail. Fifteen years later, Adonis ends a Read more ...