Dedicated Federer of fashion February 27, 2013 THERE IS a problem. It is 8am in Dubai and a freak storm has descended over the improbable desert city. Where there should – statistically, at least – be clear, azure skies, there is a mulch of saggy grey cloud. This is a problem because I was supposed to be boarding a helicopter to Roger [...]
Taking the Michael February 27, 2013 AS ALAN Shearer and John Barnes have proved, a good player does not a good pundit make, but former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan was instantly at ease on screen. Always immaculately turned out, I wonder how he chooses what he wears. “I just wear all my own stuff,” he says, referring to his tailoring [...]
Louis CK is number 1 February 27, 2013 IF YOU had to pinpoint the moment Louis CK became the most important American comedian of his generation, you could do worse than choose 10 December 2011. This was the date he released the self-funded Live at the Beacon Theater – his fourth hour long special in five years – on his website, free of [...]
Fair enough: Art 13 is coming to London and it’s bringing the rest of the world February 27, 2013 THE ART world is expanding and the capital’s newest fair is making sure London isn’t left behind. With galleries from Brazil (pictured) to Johannesburg to Tel Aviv all exhibiting, Art 13 a global art fair for a global city. Prices range from £100 to £500,000, so there is something for personal and commercial collectors alike. [...]
Boxing with Bellows February 27, 2013 LIFE WAS hard in the early twentieth century. War and industrialisation brought about a revolution in art. Cubism, futurism and constructivism ushered in a blockish future of hard edges and fragmented forms. American realist painter, George Bellows (1882–1925) had a different reaction to the onset of modernity. While European masters turned to abstraction, Bellows fixed [...]
A bloody good Valentine gift February 27, 2013 WHEN MY Bloody Valentine announced UK tour dates late last year, few fans regarded it as anything more than the victory lap of the band’s triumphant live reunion in 2008. Fewer would have imagined that they might play not only tracks from the fervently beloved Isn’t Anything and Loveless but unveil new material for the [...]
David Bowie, the man who made it normal to be weird, still has the ability to shock 30 years after his heyday February 27, 2013 ON 8 January this year, David Bowie marked his 66th birthday with a surprise new single. Silently uploaded onto the internet in the middle of the night, Where Are We Now? was released with no accompanying fanfare. There was no publicity campaign and no one saw it coming. The quietness that characterised its arrival was [...]
Booker and Oscar marriage is on the rocks February 27, 2013 IN THE 90s, Oscar couldn’t get enough of Booker. The English Patient, Schindler’s List and The Remains of the Day all proved irresistible to both Booker Prize juries and voters of the Academy Awards Since then though, the marriage of literary merit and Hollywood emotion hasn’t been quite so harmonious. Stuck in development hell for [...]
An inside look at the Cheney and Rummy show February 27, 2013 MICHAEL MOORE has a lot to answer for. His success has precipitated a flurry of documentary polemics. Right wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016: Obama’s America was a huge hit with Fox News fans (including Fox’s owner, Rupert Murdoch). Using bombastic rhetoric and questionable scholarship, it aimed to show the “roots of Obama’s rage”, creating what [...]
Match made in Heaven February 27, 2013 MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM is Britain’s most intriguing film- maker. Averaging a movie a year, he’s made a sci-fi love story (Code 46), one the most sexually explicit mainstream films ever released (9 Songs) and a trio of increasingly loose adaptations of Thomas Hardy novels. And when Hardy doesn’t inspire, he’s got Steve Coogan. The pair have [...]