Tuesday, September 21, 2010 12:54 PM EDT
Tweeting Fry
Stephen Fry is a man of many hyphens: story-teller, stage-bolter, quiz-master, early-adapter, partner-in-crime (to Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, his former Cambridge classmates and comedy colleagues). A British national treasure, his new memoir, The Fry Chronicles, has knocked Tony Blair’s brick of a book off the top of U.K. best-seller lists.
This week for three nights, Fry is performing the nail-biting feat of appearing solo at the Royal Albert Hall in a show called, simply, Stephen Fry Live. In it, he’ll be giving a talk partly based on the tweeted requests of his many Twitter followers, and I’ll be tweeting right along with him. If I don't get my knuckles rapped by the little old lady sitting next to me, that is.
Link to this postSunday, February 6, 2011 12:05 PM EST
In the beginning was the word, in ballpoint
It’s worth remembering, as Pope Benedict XVI travels across Britain condemning a culture of ‘’aggressive secularism,’’ that in just a few months, the country will be celebrating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible (i.e. the people’s holy book.)
Joanne Shurvell
The first page of Daniel Rapley's project: writing out the entire text of the King James Bible by hand.
There are dozens of events planned to celebrate the first printing of the sanctioned English bible and its famously beautiful prose, but already one London artist is paying homage to the book – by writing it out, longhand.
That’s Daniel Rapley over there in the corner, trying to shake the cramp out of his hand. Okay, not really. But you can see the result of the young artist’s work, called Authorized, at London’s PayneShurvell, a new gallery opened by Canadian Joanne Shurvell and Londoner James Payne.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010 11:25 AM EDT
Now that’s a magic wand
Chalk up another one for the metal-detector enthusiasts. A spectacular Roman helmet, only one of three found in the past 250 years according to experts, is about to go on sale in London after being discovered in northern England by a clever hunter with a wand.
It’s valued at £300,000 or more – we’ll know when Christie’s auctions it on Oct. 7 (the person who discovered the helmet in Cumbria has asked for his or her identity to remain a secret).
The next time you see a fellow with a metal detector in a field, don’t laugh; it might look silly but there could be riches underfoot. A year ago, another enthusiast, Terry Herbert, discovered a vast cache of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver treasure, weighing five kilos; historians were beside themselves, and when the Staffordshire Hoard went on display at the Birmingham Museum, people lined up for hours to see it. Herbert became the subject of a television documentary.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010 12:20 PM EDT
What’s the Stig matter? BBC loses its challenge to keep the Top Gear driver masked
So now all you gearheads can sleep more soundly tonight, safe in the knowledge that Ben Collins has been unmasked as the Stig. (The rest of us will let out a collective mumble of ‘’The Who?’’ and go back to driving our 15-year-old Toyotas.)
The Stig is the dude on the popular car-review TV show Top Gear who drives really fast while disguised as an Apollo-era astronaut. His identity has been a long-hidden secret, and the BBC, the anxious goose that sits on Top Gear’s golden egg, had wanted to keep it that way. Nice way of boosting freedom of expression there, BBC.
The BBC had gone all the way to Britain’s High Court to suppress Collins’s upcoming memoir, which would of course have pulled the helmet off Britain’s most enigmatic driver of cars that go silly-fast. Today the public broadcaster lost its challenge, and the world can know now for certain that the Stig is, indeed, Bristol-born race driver Collins. Now if only we could find Jimmy Hoffa ….
It’s a bit of good news for British book publishers, who often find themselves on the receiving end of injunctions, thanks to privacy-friendly courtroom decisions. Jude Law recently won his battle to get his ex Sadie Frost to cut from her memoir bits that he found unsavoury (as well as pictures of their children). And Andrew Morton’s biography of Angelina Jolie wasn’t even published in Britain, which he attributes not to Jolie’s powers to cast hexes across oceans, but to ‘’the Ice Age of libel chill,’’ which he recently claimed, in a Sunday Times article, is freezing the blood of British publishers. (I’d post the link but it’s frozen behind a pay wall.)
As I’ve written before, London is not-so-fondly known to writers as ‘’the town called sue,’’ although the new coalition government promised, just after its election, to review libel laws.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010 12:47 PM EDT
Off with its head (and everyone else on the board)
Britain’s new coalition government is sharpening its axe and one of the first to feel the blade is the UK Film Council, which culture minister Jeremy Hunt is proposing to close within two years.
In the view of Mr. Hunt, the move would ensure "greater value for money," although predictably not everyone agrees. Director Mike Leigh, who’s been the beneficiary of film council support in the past, called the decision "remarkable and extremely worrying." The Deadline London blog, which broke the story of the council’s demise, quotes writer-director Armando Iannucci calling the decision-makers "wangpots." (If you want even more inventive cussing, you should rent, or even better buy, Iannucci’s terrific political satire In the Loop. Yes, it too received film council funding.)
The film council, which employs 75 people, supports and promotes the UK movie industry by dispersing £15-million ($24-million) worth of lottery funds for feature films every year, as well as supporting British cinemas, festivals, and money for foreign films to be shown across the country. By its own reckoning, it has spent £160-million ($257-million) in its ten-year history on movies from Bend it Like Beckham to this year’s hit Streetdance 3D. (The film council does not trumpet its contribution to 2004’s non-hit Sex Lives of the Potato Men, although its critics do, often and loudly.)
Wednesday, July 7, 2010 2:15 PM EDT
Prince gives away new CD with U.K. newspaper, says Internet is “completely over”
For a tiny man, Prince sure has some big ones – controversial beliefs, that is. His purple majesty has declared, in a Britain’s Mirror newspaper that “the Internet is completely over,” and then added – before making the poor reporter accompany him on drums to a Beatles song – ‘’I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else.’’
Instead, on Saturday, he will be giving his new music away on that packet ship of the old media, a newspaper: Every copy of the Mirror (yes, the newspaper to which he granted the interview, are you surprised?) will contain 20TEN, Prince’s new album. It won’t be available online or in shops, although I don’t think it will be long before some enterprising fan makes it available digitally. It didn’t take long for Planet Earth, the CD that Prince released through Britain’s Mail on Sunday in 2007, to become available for download.
The review of 20TEN that appears in today’s Mirror is giddy with praise (does anyone else smell cross-platform promotional magic here? That’s a terrible name for a perfume anyway.) Tony Parsons calls it “truly momentous” and says the 10-track CD is Prince’s “best record since Sign o’ the Times 23 years ago.” Songs are described as “classic Prince,” “his most funky,” and in at least one case, quite topical, when he sings about “dirty fat bankers.”
Wednesday, June 30, 2010 2:54 PM EDT
Architecture’s Miss Universe
Have you ever become so fixated on something that you stare at it for ages, hypnotized by its beauty, dreaming of ways you might one day be in the presence of your beloved, perhaps even touch that glowing surface? No, ladies, I’m not talking about Robert Pattinson. Go back to watching the Eclipse trailer.
The Seed Cathedral is the British pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010, and ever since it was unveiled last month it has seemed to me the most wondrous building in the world. Some learned minds must agree, because today it won architecture’s equivalent of the Miss Universe contest (okay, it’s formally known as the Lubetkin Prize, given each year to the best British-designed building in the world by the Royal Institute for British Architects.)
Think of a sea anemone gently undulating underwater, or Albert Einstein’s hair dancing in the wind, or a cubical Maltese terrier, and you’ll have some idea of what the Seed Cathedral looks like (or just stare at it in motion, as I often do http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpBa_QpkzNE). Designed by London’s Heatherwick Studios, the pavilion is made of 60,000 fibre optic rods, each the length of three tall men, attached to a timber frame. The rods carry light into the building’s interior and – in case you were wondering about the name – have at least one seed embedded in the tip.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010 1:15 PM EDT
The poetry racket: Wimbledon gets its first official poet
Sports and poetry aren’t such strange bedfellows, perhaps: Donald Hall’s baseball poems celebrates America’s favourite pastime and there’s been so much verse devoted to the labyrinthine world of cricket that the Marylebone Cricket Club has published an entire book about wickets and googlies.
Now the All England Lawn Tennis Club has appointed a “Championships Poet’’ to celebrate the wonders of Wimbledon – the perfect lawn, the muttered curses, the strawberries, the cream, the bankers’ VIP boxes.
Matt Harvey, poet and BBC presenter, has just been named the first Wimbledon Poet and his job for two weeks will be to celebrate, in verse, all aspects of the world’s most famous tennis tournament. If a racket needs restringing, he’ll be there. Someone in white shorts screaming at an umpire? Hart will be there. When thousands line up in the baking sun for the chance to sit on the hills overlooking the action, Hart promises to memorialize their suffering. What Tennyson did for the Crimea, perhaps, Hart can do for Centre Court.
He’s already written his first poem, The Grandest of Slams, and tennis fans around the world will sympathize with his onerous challenge, and forgive the rhyming of ‘’Wimbledon’’ and ‘’kindled in.’’
Excuse me. I’m sorry. I speak as an Englishman
For the game of lawn tennis there’s no better symbol than
Wimbledon
The place where the game’s flame was sparked and then kindled in
Where so many spines have sat straight and then tingled in
Wimbledon
Where strawberries and cream have traditionally been sampled in
Kids’ eyes have lit up and their cheeks have been dimpled in
Wimbledon
Where tough tennis cookies have cracked and then crumbled in
Top seeds have stumbled, have tumbled, been humbled in
Wimbledon
Where home-grown heroes’ hopes have swelled up and then dwindled in
Wimbledon
The Grand Slams’ best of breed, it’s the whizz it’s the biz
The temple where physics expresses its fizz
There’s one word for tennis and that one word is
Wimbledon
Hart’s heavy lifting begins in just over a month, when Wimbledon kicks off on June 21. He’ll need that time to work on a rhyme for ‘’Andy Murray, please don’t choke.’’
(Photo of Matt Harvey, above, by Graham Fudger)
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 11:30 AM EDT
Handbags at dawn
Call up any comparisons you like – two rutting stags locking antlers, two WWF wrestlers steaming up their spandex, two old ladies fighting over the last Eccles cake at the supermarket – but the live-to-air scrap between journalist Adam Boulton and Labour’s former spinmeister Alastair Campbell was the most entertaining smackdown of this election.
The antipathy between Boulton, the political editor of Sky News, and Campbell, once Tony Blair’s top aide, has simmered for years. It has to do with the fact that Sky is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and Campbell thinks that Murdoch’s newspapers and broadcaster are ‘’utterly slavish’’ in their devotion to the Conservative Party, and that Boulton’s coverage has been biased. You can read Campbell’s (clearly partisan) analysis of the ‘’Murdoch agenda’’ here.
The two of them are turning into the Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell of this campaign. Listen to what Campbell says during their tussle, which took place immediately after the British prime minister announced he was stepping down: ‘"Adam, I know you’ve spent the past few years saying Gordon Brown’s dead meat and he should be going." And even worse, "You're clearly upset that David Cameron isn't Prime Minister."
Friday, April 30, 2010 3:27 PM EDT
Martin Amis’s protest vote
So the Tories may be the party of the hunting brigade with double-barrelled surnames, and Labour hangs on to the truculent trade-union vote (minus one “bigoted” pensioner in Rochdale), so where does the support for the newly powerful Liberal Democrats come from?
From a tiny, threadbare but loud-mouthed rump, it seems: the country’s writers. As I was interviewing Martin Amis this week (an interview that will appear in full in the Globe in May), I asked him about his decision to abstain from voting in this election. In his characteristic drawl, he said: “I think I might now. I was going to miss [the election] but I like the idea of there being three parties, stirs things up. I would vote for [Nick] Clegg. I was going to abstain and I could never vote Tory. But now there’s a third leftish party.”
This was on the same day that a group of well-known novelists, scientists and philosophers wrote a letter to the Guardian outlining their support for the Lib Dems, who stand a good chance of playing kingmaker in a minority government. The letter, signed by novelists John le Carre, Philip Pullman and Jeanete Winterson, musician Brian Eno and scientist Richard Dawkins, among others, reads: “The question is where the energy for the future of progressive politics is to be found. It is a contemporary political fact that the stronger the performance of the Liberal Democrats on 6 May the better the chances of progressive reform.”
London Eye Contributors
Elizabeth Renzetti
Elizabeth Renzetti has worked at The Globe and Mail as a columnist, reporter, and editor of the Books and Review sections. She is currently a member of the Globe's London bureau and The Globe and Mail's European arts correspondent. She also writes a weekly column for The Globe's Focus Section.
