While streaming continues to dominate and likely will for some time, a small cineaste uprising has been quietly rumbling away. As boutique companies maintain a steady supply of Blu-ray editions for collectors, the past month has also seen the triumphant return of the brick-and-mortar video store. In Brooklyn, Night Owl Video has opened its doors … Read more
The BBC today announce its eight-week Proms season featuring 86 concerts in London, Bradford, Belfast, Bristol and Gateshead. A record number of female conductors will be at the podium – 15 – and the Last Night will be the first to feature an all-female lineup of conductor and soloists: Elim Chan will conduct, with trumpeter … Read more
In 1975, when Mao Ishikawa was in her early 20s, she took a job in a bar frequented by Black American GIs stationed at Camp Hansen, in Okinawa. She had grown up hating the Americans who controlled her home island and, to this day, maintain military bases there. Yet she found kindred spirits among the soldiers … Read more
You, in which a serial killer and stalker of women, but a sexy one, is somehow fashioned into the hero of the piece, is a fundamentally preposterous show. It washes its hands of plausibility in favour of vocal fry, phones without passwords and quasi-literary second-person monologues. Perhaps most preposterous of all is that it has … Read more
When English teacher Joe Scott used to sign homework planners, it was because students were in trouble. But things changed in January, when the Southampton-based secondary schoolteacher appeared in the latest series of the BBC reality show The Traitors. Pupils started voluntarily pressing their planners into his hands – for autographs. “It felt funny,” says … Read more
Remember when controversy was fun? If not, that’s because you’re too young. But back in the 1990s, my child, Britain got itself in hilarious knots about conceptual art, the readymade and whether a pickled shark or elephant dung can be art, with the Turner prize as battleground. It was a culture war but with laughs, … Read more
The Congo dwarf crocodile is a lovely species. They’re very shy and, unfortunately, very easy to find and catch. Mostly hunted for their bushmeat, these crocs only grow up to a few feet in length and during the dry season, they often spend the daytime hiding in burrows and dens at the water’s edge. Hunters … Read more
Nestled between Millwall FC stadium and an intersection of south London railway lines, the 350-capacity Venue MOT – once an actual MOT garage – is a cornerstone of the city’s underground music scene. But every Tuesday, owner Jan Mohammed gathers his staff at the bar and tells them how much money it has lost since … Read more
I’m a millennial musician who was there at the buttcrack of dawn of MySpace and YouTube, so girl, I’VE BEEN THERE FROM THE BEGINNING. Did my personal MySpace page have a nauseating Lisa-Frank-on-acid aesthetic with a mouse cursor that transformed into a unicorn spewing glitter when it moved? Absolutely. Did I have a Xanga page … Read more
Everything about the papacy is cinematic – especially picking a new one, as shown in the wildly popular movie Conclave, with Ralph Fiennes as an unwilling contender for the top job. There is the mystery, the ritual, the vestments; the spectacle of a lone, fragile human being poised over an abyss of history and good … Read more