Shout FilmsThe week’s best arts and culture reads – including violence against women in crime fiction and whether The Beatles owed their success to hype.
Documentary | In search of Amy
Amy, a new documentary film about the short and troubled life of Amy Winehouse, by Asif Kapadia, shows her to be “funny, sharp, brash, as crude as she is elegant and, at least initially, not fragile at all”. Her music is filled with “casual brilliance”; her voice is “a miracle heard through a pub window – a glottal-stopped London accent eerily combined with Motown swing”. She is lovely, and clever and dead. (Lidija Haas, London Review of Books, 2,240 words)
Rock music | Metal’s meltdown
Interview with Penelope Spheeris, who directed Wayne’s World and turned down the chance to make Spinal Tap. Her masterwork, The Decline of Western Civilization, has been remastered for DVD. A trilogy about heavy metal music, scenes include “a frazzled post-rehab Ozzy preparing the world’s least appetizing fried breakfast” and “Wasp’s Chris Holmes floating in a pool chair and dowsing himself in vodka while his disapproving mom looks on”. (Laura Snapes, Pitchfork, 2,695 words)
Popular fiction | How to depict violence against women
Sara Paretsky explains the gestation of VI Warshawski, and provides a brilliant critique of crime fiction along the way. “The line between exploitation and exposure is a hard one to walk. While I’m appalled by the widespread abuse of women, I haven’t figured out a way to address this massive violence in my work. Given the number of writers willing to incorporate assault against women into their work, my absence is not noticeable.” (Sara Paretsky, Harrogate Festival, 2,900 words)
Literature | The first chapter of Go Set a Watchman
“Home was Maycomb County, a gerrymander some seventy miles long and spreading thirty miles at its widest point, a wilderness dotted with tiny settlements the largest of which was Maycomb, the county seat. Until comparatively recently in its history, Maycomb County was so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South’s political predilections over the past ninety years, still voted Republican.” (Harper Lee, Guardian, 3,800 words)
Rock music | Did The Beatles owe success to hype?
Wide-ranging interview about life in and after The Beatles. “Bob Dylan was asked why didn’t he write another Tambourine Man and he goes, ‘Because I’m not that guy any more’. I think that’s the truth. Some of it is also to do with the circumstances. Those songs were launched by The Beatles, the biggest band ever. If I had Let It Be now, it just might not get as much attention.” (Alex Bilmes, Esquire, 8,400 words)
Cultural history | The last link to Elvis and Sinatra
A Rolls-Royce among profiles, from 2008, updated for the music and film producer’s recent death. “Jerry is old like God (70) and he too lives on a mountain in the desert, the Sinatra wilderness around Palm Springs. In the cool of the morning, he walks in his garden, or moves over the surface of the earth in one of his many cars. Before he wades into his swimming pool, his face, for a moment, is reflected in the chlorinated waters.” (Rich Cohen, Vanity Fair, 8,500 words)
Art | The world’s most coveted art
Notes on the re-shaping of the global art market. Scarcity is the best predictor of price. Eastern money wants Western art. “Modernism is now completely uncontroversial. The first half of the 20th century is seen as culturally and intellectually serious and lasting in its reputation… Classic, ultra-rare modernist art is now seen in many ways as the top of a cultural hierarchy, transcending all national cultural boundaries.” (J.J. Charles worth, Artnet, 1,240 words)
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