Entertainment and Culture 1

Built on tar swamps and two tortuous decades in the making, Lacma’s latest addition used twice as much metal as the Eiffel Tower. How did America supersize revered architect Peter Zumthor?Driving down the palm-lined strip of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, a striking new crossing heaves into view. A ribbon of glass leaps over the road, sandwiched between two gigantic planes of concrete. As you get closer, the bridge swells out in sinuous arcs, swooping back on itself to inscribe an amoebic, shape-shifting blob, spreading out like an inkblot. From some angles it has a retro-futuristic air, recalling a Jetsons airport terminal, or one of California’s “Googie” style gas stations. From others, the curving roof looks like a great big tongue, flaring out to give the neighbours a raspy lick. This concrete colossus is home to the new David Geffen Galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), a $724m mothership designed by the fabled Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. It is less a museum than a mighty piece of infrastructure, a 110,000 sq ft warehouse-cum-bridge, jacked up nine metres in the air and looming above the street with a brooding, muscular heft. Two decades in the making, and subject to tortuous years of delays, controversies and cost escalations – building on a tar swamp in a seismic zone is not straightforward – it finally opens this weekend.The Fitzcarraldian feat is the brainchild of Michael Govan, who became Lacma’s director in 2006 with an ambition to build a museum like no other, using the promise of a dazzling structure to lure donations of artworks and dollars ($125m came from LA county, the rest was fundraised). Govan cut his teeth at the Guggenheim, and on Frank Gehry’s Bilbao outpost, where he clearly got a taste for the transformative fairy dust of signature architecture. He later moved to Dia:Beacon, in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he commissioned Zumthor for a project that was ultimately unrealised. At Lacma, he was determined to make a monument for posterity, at any cost. Continue reading…

E H Shepard drawings go on display for book’s centenary, showing how he brought AA Milne’s character to lifePreviously unseen drawings of Winnie-the-Pooh that show the honey-loving bear before he was introduced to generations of readers in the 1926 book have come to light.Two preliminary pencil sketches by E H Shepard have been shared for the first time by his family to mark the centenary of one of the most loved books in children’s literature. Continue reading…

The Stand Comedy Club, GlasgowThe northerner finds the funny in banalities with this raucous compendium of all-in-it-together bantsPhil Ellis has been watching Netflix specials, and has noticed that all the alpha standups now have a hype-man to big them up pre-show. Here, then, is his own version, a shuffling fellow northerner (comic Tom Short) deadpanning a list of Ellis’s non-achievements in a threadbare American accent, punctuated by gunshot SFX and an airhorn. The modest success of a Taskmaster stint has not gone to Ellis’s head: with his new show, he continues to revel in the failures and banalities of his midlife, a 44-year-old man recently moved home with his parents – single, balding, skint.In Bath Mat, he turns all that into a raucous laughalong, inviting us to pitch abuse at him, straw-polling his observations with the audience, and laughing himself, throughout, to think he gets away with doing this for a living. Over two hours, I found the set more attenuated than the concentrated hits of Ellis I’ve enjoyed on the fringe. It’s a structureless compendium of barely related routines, with more emphasis on so-so standup than the tomfoolish antics that often characterise his work. With sections such as the chat he has with his crowd about roadkill, or another about luxury treatment for pets, we’re in the territory less of precision-focused comedy and more all-in-it-together bants. Continue reading…

The hip-hop producer, remixer and crate-digger on staying fresh creatively, the influence of David Lynch and giving away his most valuable recordCan you share any regrets or missed opportunities from your career? nnagewadIn 1999, I was approached by Deftones to work on White Pony, but I had just come off of Unkle’s Psyence Fiction album. I was nursing a hip-hop image and reputation, so I was wary of working with anything that felt like it was too alternative or rock-oriented. So I missed out on being a part of a pretty seminal album. I wouldn’t say it’s a regret, necessarily, because I feel like my rationale was sound, but it’s kind of a missed opportunity.Was your move towards sample-free production on your recent albums driven by the headache and costliness of sample clearance, a desire to keep the creative process fresh, or a bit of both? EditorialJoeDefinitely both. There have been times in my career where I’ve wondered: at the end of the day, am I going to own only 15% of my catalogue because of all the samples? So that was part of it. But equally, I became known as somebody who was trying to be on the vanguard of making music with samples but I always knew I would want to make music in as many different ways as possible. Continue reading…

The poet reconnects with the landscape of the May Day Mountains in Jamaica where he grew up in a personal story of migration, race and rural lifeAn award-winning poet living in Roundhay Park, Leeds, Jason Allen-Paisant spent his early childhood living with his grandmother in Coffee Grove, a hilly rural district of Jamaica which was cut off from basic amenities such as electricity and water. Seen through the eyes of a child, Coffee Grove was, he notes, “both a tiny place and a huge planet”. There he developed a close relationship with the local plant life through climbing trees, picking fruit and helping his grandmother harvest yams on the “grung”, the local name for their small plot of land.Allen-Paisant later yearned for pastures new, moving first to Paris and then to Britain to study at Oxford. His dream of upward mobility had become a reality, yet in the UK he noticed his interactions with nature were few and far between. He came to realise “just how much class keeps people in Britain from the privileges of land and soil and also keeps them from the tenderness that comes with forming kinship with the earth”. Continue reading…