“The Simpsons Movie” | Dysfunctional family on the move | Economist.com

AFTER 18 years on prime-time television, “The Simpsons Movie” brings to the big screen all the qualities that have made the Simpson family superstars. That should reassure pundits who have been fretting over the question Homer Simpson poses at the beginning of the film, after viewing an especially Aesopian episode of “The Itchy & Scratchy Show”, Bart Simpson's favourite ultraviolent cartoon-within-a-cartoon: “Who's going to pay for something they've been getting for free?”

The answer is another question: how many smart, satirical, uproariously witty comedies did Hollywood make this year? “The Simpsons Movie” fills a niche in the major studios' release schedules that has lately become a void.

Critics were shown the film just before it opened to keep the audience's enjoyment of the rococo plot twists from being spiked by internet killjoys, a policy deserving of support. Briefly, an ecological disaster befalls the town of Springfield, brought about by Homer's involvement with a new love and his weakness for doughnuts.

The dysfunctional cohesion of the Simpson family is put to the test. Bart starts wishing he had a father like Ned Flanders next door, who practises family values with a wise serenity that is horribly off-putting. Marge doubts her love for Homer. Lisa meets a musician named Colin whose green politics is matched by his lilting brogue. And baby Maggie breaks 18 years of silence by speaking her first word, which audiences will have to stay through the final credits to hear.

But it is Homer who really evolves, after an Inuit medicine woman teaches him his “throat-song” and sends him on a spirit journey to an epiphany about human interconnectedness based on enlightened self-interest. Strangely, we come to care deeply about all of them.

“The Simpsons Movie” Dysfunctional family on the move Economist.com

The Hair - Disco/Retro | Single | Record Box

The Hair have been making big waves in Leeds for well over a year now building a strong following and wowing crowds with a number of brilliant support slots, before recently stepping out at The Faversham as headliners themselves for the launch of debut single Ghosts.

As with Ghosts their follow up single Disco / Retro is an ultra limited edition 7” release and download only, so you’d be advised to move quickly to get hold of one as these four Yorkshiremen are likley to be hot property over the coming months.

Disco / Retro is a a four minute salvo of electro dance hooks mixed with indie guitar and vocals that remind you of why you fell in love with The Rapture when they released House Of Jealous Lovers. Also worth checking out is Sidney Betts on the b-side, again it’s another punk funker, which is if anything even more raucous than the a-side.

The single is out on the 23rd July through Louder Than Bombs Records.

The Hair - Disco/Retro Single Record Box

http://www.hairmusic.co.uk/pressCuts/

This year's dozen best albums? - Telegraph

The 12 acts on the shortlist for this year's Mercury Prize were revealed this week. Neil McCormick assesses their chances ...


A leading contender of course being these lads:


Arctic Monkeys - Favourite Worst Nightmare - Melody, wit and rhythm again prove an unstoppable force. Last year's winners, the acerbically cynical Sheffield quartet consolidated their position as band of a generation with this more muscular, energetically syncopated and passionate follow-up. Even music-biz prizes, multi-million sales and Gordon Brown's endorsement can't dent their counter-cultural cachet.

Watch interviews with the nominated artists



This year's dozen best albums? - Telegraph

Business.view | A Tiger in the boardroom | Economist.com

HIS firm may have been flirting with disaster, but that did not stop James Cayne from playing his usual round of golf. Last month, as the boss of Bear Stearns pondered launching the biggest-ever hedge-fund rescue, which ultimately cost the investment bank $1.6 billion, he did so from the fairways and greens of the Hollywood Golf Club in Ocean Township, New Jersey. According to the New York Times, during the summer he regularly flies there from New York in a helicopter that has permission to land at the club.

At key moments during the crisis—during which Bear Stearns says he remained in “constant contact” with his office—Mr Cayne shot rounds of 96, 98 and 97, reports the newspaper, citing scores posted on an online database, GHIN.com. That is impressively consistent, although given his handicap of 15.9, “his scores during that stressful time certainly ballooned a bit higher than normal”, says law and golf blogger, Tom Kirkendall. “But think how bad this could have gotten for Bear Stearns if Cayne had not been able to get his golf therapy.”

Indeed. Golf Digest has published a 200-strong list of the top golfing chief executives in the Fortune 1000. Perhaps, to add value to this, every chief executive should be required to post his or her golf scores, for unusual volatility could be a useful indicator of trouble at work. On the other hand, a relatively calm performance like Mr Cayne’s might reassure investors that though things are worse than usual, they are not getting out of hand.

The central role played by golf in business life is under-reported—except maybe in Japan—perhaps because journalists can’t afford the green fees let alone the membership dues of the swanky clubs to which chief executives belong. Nor are bosses exactly rushing to draw attention to yet another perk.

Yet, “no matter how sophisticated business becomes, nothing can replace the golf course as a communications hub”, argues a new book, “Deals on the Green”, by David Rynecki. “It’s where up-and-comers can impress the boss and where CEOs can seal multibillion-dollar deals. Its no coincidence that many of the most admired people in business—Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Sandy Weill—always carved out time in their busy schedules for golf.”

“Golf brings out a person’s true character”, argues Mr Rynecki, who then provides various business lessons illustrated with examples of famous bosses “at work”. Messrs Gates and Buffett deepened their friendship by playing golf, not least because (perhaps in contrast to when they play bridge) “they don’t take themselves seriously when they are on the course”.

Stan O’Neal, now the boss of Merrill Lynch, got noticed because “some of the more influential Merrill people got to spend time with [him] on the course and saw a different side of him”, enabling him to go on to be the first African-American to lead the firm.

Mr Welch, arguably the best golfing chief executive ever, is the “patron saint of corporate golf”, argues Mr Rynecki, stripping the traditional holder of the title, John D. Rockefeller, of his halo. Rockefeller took up golf when he was nearly 60, and played nearly every day for the next 33 years, even claiming (wrongly) that his quest to shoot par would enable him to live past 100. But although he played with such corporate titans as Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie, he banned all talk of business from the course.

Mr Welch, by contrast, regarded golf as a key part of his managerial armoury, which he deployed with great success during his long, glorious reign at General Electric (GE). The firm was already known as a “golf company” when he took charge. But under Mr Welch, “golf became an essential tool for any manager looking to move up”. Golf “was a litmus test for character. It showed whether a person had the guts to work in Welch’s GE.”

Not everyone is convinced. The other week, reports DealBreaker, two veteran Wall Street tycoons railed against the game. Hank Greenberg, the former boss of AIG, complained that golf was a distraction from business: “A lot of people like to get away from their work. You have to wonder about whether they like what they’re doing.” Carl Icahn, the legendary corporate raider, sees golf as a symbol of all that is wrong with the clubby higher echelons of American business: “These guys would rather play golf, slap each other on the back. I want a guy running a company who sits in his tub at night thinking about the challenges he faces. The guy who can’t let it go. The focused guy.”

But enough about guys.

The most troubling aspect of “Deals on the Green” is that women are almost entirely absent from it—except as wives, girlfriends or even groupies—until chapter 16, which is all about how corporate golf may hold back female executives. The chapter makes a strong case that the biggest obstacle to women getting to the top in business is less a glass ceiling than a “grass ceiling”. On the rare occasions when women get to golf with their male counterparts, they play off a different tee. Augusta, Pine Valley and most of the other prestigious male-only clubs, says Mr Rynecki, are “like majestic, genteel proving grounds for business deals”.

John Mack, the boss of Morgan Stanley, “has made a habit of appointing golf friends to the board”, says Mr Rynecki. Apparently more open-minded than most bosses, Mr Mack, then boss of CSFB, organised a series of events to introduce female executives to golf as a tool for business. Yet his enlightenment proved quite limited. When they arrived, the women found themselves confined to the driving range and the short course “while the men played the real course”.

There are currently only 11 female chief executives of Fortune 500 firms, and, tragically, nobody thinks that number will increase much any time soon. Could the male monopolisation of corporate golf be to blame? Mark Twain famously dismissed golf as a “good walk spoiled”, but sadly for many promising female executives a more apt definition of the game may be “a good career spoiled”.

Business.view A Tiger in the boardroom Economist.com

Cinquecento reborn | Test Drives | Motoring | Telegraph

I. WANT. ONE.

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All that drinking and dancing celebrated one little car. Dante Giacosa's new Fiat 500, or Cinquecento Nuova, was first presented to the Italian premier 50 years ago on July 4, 1957. Like Britain's Mini, Germany's Beetle and France's 2CV, the Cinquecento was the Italian "People's Car".

But the celebration must be a uniquely Italian thing, because I don't recall reading about an all-night party in Birmingham to celebrate the original Mini in 1959, or a 24-hour Mardi Gras in Oxford to wassail BMW's new MINI in 2001. Perhaps Italians celebrate their industry more than we Brits do - go on, tell me something I don't know. Anyway, happy birthday, Cinquecento.

Fiat might be almost back in the black these days, but it doesn't just throw massive parties out of teary-eyed nostalgia for a much-loved car that provided most people of a certain age with some sort of amazing adventure - mine involved a blonde, a bottle of Haig whisky, a sunny afternoon on Dartmoor and a pig… (That's enough - Ed)

In fact, Fiat has another nuova Cinquecento to sell. With the possible exception of the first Audi TT, the new 500 is the most successful transmogrification from retro-styled concept car (the Trepiúuno, shown at Geneva in 2004) to production model. Just look at it - from its wide-eyed headlamps to its pert bottom, doesn't it just remind you of whisky and a pig?

(Full review via link, below)

Cinquecento reborn Test Drives Motoring Telegraph

Confessions of a Glastonbury virgin | Music | Arts | Telegraph

Confessions of a Glastonbury virgin


Tom Horan is washed away by the music
Video: Fun in the mud at Glastonbury
Audio: Christopher Howse on the magic of Glastonbury
In pictures: Glastonbury 2007
Glastonbury videos, reports, reviews and blogs

Christopher Howse reports from the Glastonbury Festival

Christopher Howse: The only man in a tie among 144,000 revellers

Zac, 11, was pulling Josh, nine, in a sledge, with sloppy Glastonbury mud in place of snow. "Again! Again!" Josh shouted. Then the thunderstorm started.

Away from the mud, with teepees at £1,600 and ridiculously bulky, shiny white camper vans filling the fields, the three-day festival has never been so comfort-seeking.

"In the past eight years I've been here," said the gate steward to the family camping field, "there's more money, less drugs, less crime and no fear of it."

In the first 24 hours, among 144,000 visitors there were only 33 arrests, mostly for drugs.

"And there's less of the hippy thing. Not so much naturism," says a woman volunteer, delicately. "It's the wall that's made the difference," says the steward. The wall is prefabricated, solid and high, disturbingly like Israel's wall.

Michael Eavis, the founder of the festival, is proud of it. "Apparently you can see it from the Moon," he says.

The festival is not at Glastonbury at all, though the cone of the tor breaks the horizon. It is held at Pilton. Perhaps the mystical number of 144,000 here make up a new breed, Pilton Man, which never grows out of a youthful urge to unite ritually each year.

But Clare and David from York, who have "just got our bus passes", are not veterans from the first festival 36 years ago. "We got interested after our children left home," she says. "Dave likes world music, but it's more than that. I like the performance art. It's amazing."


Among the 30,000 cars in the car parks, there are plenty of Audis, Volvos and BMWs. Ten thousand, almost all young, came greenly by train and then chugged the last miles on dirty old buses.

"We're doing a dance degree at Greenwich," says my 20-year-old neighbour, pointing to her fair-haired friend. But now they're spending the weekend working in a vegan cafe, hoping to slip out to see Bjork. Bjork has been here before, she just can't remember.

If for some Glastonbury is joining the social season with Ascot and Henley, its style is still young and grungy. At Henley gentlemen must still wear ties. Here I spent 24 hours without seeing anyone else with one on. Ascot cocktail dresses and feather hats can look vulgar. Here the middle class come in muddy disguise.

The mud was shaping up nicely yesterday - slopping under reckless reinforcements of rain. Nearly 2,000 years ago, an Iron Age tribe built a lake-village near here with huts raised on a solid pile of brushwood clay. This skill has been lost.

Tents in the rain cover the slopes like a swarm of crabs in a nature documentary - their carapaces jostling. The maddest camp next to the giant speakers. Hayley Evans, with her 20-month-old boy, found a quieter family field, behind the open-air cinema. "My baby slept through. But they had Ghostbusters on, and every time there was a scream, I woke up with a jump."

By night the noise and stalls turn the site into an endless funfair. A neon red dragon spews real fire. Chewing on burgers or Mexican veggie wraps, "newgers" or neo-punks mill past Blendavenda (juices and smoothies), Magic Shoes (For Happy Feet), Fairylove (The Place Where the Fairies Get Their Wings). A child cries for a fake tattoo - three scorpions for a pound. "The kids love it," says Miriam Kandis, of north London, as her six-year-old daughter, Bea, grizzles against her sleeve. Well, it was 10.45pm.

The site is so big and the crowds so sluggish that it seems many arrive at the Jazz World stage just in time to miss Toumani Diabate and then slug back to the Dance stage in time to miss Courtney Orange.

The place has its own smell - firelighter smoke, fat from burgers, bacon, Thai food, beer-tent swill, rubbish bins, rubber boots, chemical lavatories. It is not true that Glastonbury is unfashionable dress-wise. Everyone is dressed in a way that would turn heads in the street. Leopardskin wellingtons, a leather kilt and tattoos make a man stand out at home. Not here. Some of the G8 protest tendency can even look frightening in a pixie hat.

A festival-goer dives into the ubiquitous Glastonbury mud, encouraged by a crowd of revellers
A field is given over to disabled camping. A woman in a tricycle wheelchair whizzes downhill towards the Pyramid stage, where Kasabian were to play last night. As a first-timer to Glastonbury, I found it more friendly and more disorientating than I expected. In a way it is an immense babysitting venture. The 144,000 are fed and kept safe. Security men swap radio messages through the night.

Just after dawn at 4am the music abates and a thrush sings. Otherwise nature does not get much of a look-in. Outside the site, honeysuckle smothers a hawthorn, and bramble blossom chokes the ditches. Inside, the grass is trodden into mud. For the locals with houses in the lanes around, this weekend is like August bank holiday for Notting Hillers - noisy and crowded. But at Glastonbury only 13 thefts from tents were reported in the first full day.

"Come back when Mr Eavis's cows are in sole occupancy," says an earnest young man with an interest in the National Youth Orchestra, who perform tomorrow. "You'll be able to see the Four Evangelists carved on the old tithe barn."

Thanks, George, I might just.

Confessions of a Glastonbury virgin Music Arts Telegraph

Ordinary People: The Art World: The New Yorker

Went to the Hopper retrospective at Tate Modern, London, a couple of years ago. Stunning.

Go see ...

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Why buck crowds to attend the big Edward Hopper retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston? Don’t we know this artist well enough by now? When I want to commune with “Nighthawks” (1942) again, I can do so quite satisfactorily at my dentist’s office, where, from a framed poster, the beaky dude and the bony dame at the wee-hours diner convey that root-canal surgery may not rate all that high on the scale of human tribulations. In fact, Hoppers in the flesh add remarkably small increments of pleasure and meaning to Hoppers in reproduction. The scale of the paintings is indifferent, in the way of graphic art. Their drawing is graceless, their colors acrid, and their brushstrokes numb. Anti-Baroque, they are the same thing when looked at up close and when seen from afar. I believe that Hopper painted with reproducibility on his mind, as a new function and fate of images in his time. This is part of what makes him modern—and persistently misunderstood, by detractors, as merely an illustrator. If “Nighthawks” is an illustration, a kick in the head is a lullaby.

A visual bard of ordinary life, Hopper imposed a thudding ordinariness on painting. The strangeness of this quality must be contemplated directly, and in quantity, for its radical character to register at full force. It is the basis of his universal accessibility. Laying the cards of his intention face up, it inspires rare trust, which steadies our minds to receive the living truths that the pictures tell. Hopper stands with two other American artists, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, whose likewise monumental styles also trashed prevailing conventions of good painting and have proved to be deathless.

The Boston show is so comprehensive a gathering of Hopper’s greatest hits—each a world, created ex nihilo—that it may best be described by what little it lacks, in that regard. I miss about a half-dozen favorites, including “Pennsylvania Coal Town” (1947)—a geeky-looking guy with a rake in late-afternoon sunlight between two old town houses, seemingly glimpsed from a passing car—and “Office in a Small City” (1953): a young man at a desk in a large-windowed corner office like an abstracted control tower, seen from an impossible point of view in the air outside. Both characters appear to daydream, absenting themselves from themselves, as people by Hopper do. Those are relatively late works, from the twenty-some ever less prolific and consistent (but underrated) years before the artist’s death, at the age of eighty-four, in 1967. One of the show’s curators, Carol Troyen, has deëmphasized that period as well as the busy phases, before the early nineteen-twenties, of Hopper’s long maturation, during which he practiced variants of Impressionism and, to support himself, worked unhappily as an illustrator.

While including a great many of the watercolors, of New England places, at which he excelled—with light-struck, massy, hardly watery effects, even when they depict water—Troyen scants the revealing drawings with which he painstakingly evolved his painted compositions. This is an occasion for exploring not what Hopper was for himself but what he is for us.

There isn’t a lot to know about him, anyhow. Born in Nyack, New York, the son of a drygoods merchant, Hopper studied with Robert Henri and made three sojourns to Europe. He was almost six feet five, and taciturn. In 1924, when a show of watercolors brought him his first success, he married Josephine Verstille Nivison, a disappointed painter and his lively, obstreperous partner for life. She both resented and defended him. She insisted on being the model for nearly all his paintings of women. Childless, they lived on the top floor of a town house on Washington Square and, starting in 1934, spent nearly half their time in a starkly isolated house on Cape Cod. (Hopper seems to have liked places possessed of what might be termed negative feng-shui.) The couple read voraciously, often in French, and were compulsive moviegoers. Hopper portrayed himself and Jo in “Two Comedians” (1965-66), a late painting which is not in the show, as commedia-dell’arte clowns taking a farewell bow.

A good way to grasp Hopper paintings is to sketch them—never mind if, like me, you can’t draw. Just get the main shapes, including those of empty space, and how they nest together in the pictorial rectangle. Hopper bets everything on composition, which, in his work, is almost as tautly considered as in a Mondrian. (He didn’t so much hold back from modernism, from which he took what he needed, as see beyond it. He objected to abstraction only as Picasso did, for its limits on emotional engagement.) Hopper’s means are light and shadow, which establish the masses and the relative locations of forms. Raking light is the active element in static situations, as a stand-in for the artist, who inhabits his works everywhere and nowhere, like God. The light’s authority overrules worries about clotted textures and gawky contours. A wall or an arm is exactly as it is because the light, hitting it, says so.

Hopper’s is an art of illuminated outsides that bespeak important insides. He vivifies impenetrable privacies. Notice how seldom he gives houses visible or, if visible, usable-looking doors; but the windows are alive. His preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture. Imputations, to them, of “loneliness” are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder. They may not have lives you envy, but they live them without complaint. Another mistake that some observers make is to quibble with Hopper’s crudeness, notably in his renderings of flesh and foliage. His insults to taste are even instrumental to his art, focussing attention on what matters, which is drama. Clement Greenberg got it right when he remarked that if Hopper “were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist.”

Art: COURTESY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON

“Ordinary People” continues


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Ordinary People: The Art World: The New Yorker