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      ‘I was always obsessed with death’: how Linder turned pornography and trauma into art

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 10 February, 2025

    At 70, Linder is having a retrospective at the Hayward Gallery – after years of being overlooked by the art establishment. She discusses punk, porn and politics

    In 1977, the punk band Buzzcocks released a single called Orgasm Addict, with a record sleeve as jolting as the song’s title. It depicted a lean and muscular, oiled-up naked woman with an iron for a head and smiling, lipsticked mouths for nipples. The collage was scary, sexy and shocking – especially since it was mass produced, seen in record shops and on the streets, rather than confined to a gallery.

    “Buzzcocks had just signed to United Artists, so there was quite a large publicity budget,” Linder Sterling, the creator of the collage, remembers. “So that poster was in cities everywhere. It was unmissable. There was no social media, so the effect was hard to track, but years later people say to me ‘I saw that poster in Glasgow, or in a back street in Birmingham, and it changed my life.’”

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      Super Bowl: Kendrick Lamar, the ads, Taylor Swift and everything but the football – as it happened

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 10 February, 2025

    While the game goes ahead, it’s a big night for culture with a much-anticipated half-time show, a string of big name ads and a returning role for Taylor Swift

    Brad Pitt is making sure you know that football is culture. The actor just showed up in a PSA for … the Super Bowl? That was essentially a rambling collage of American propaganda. Appearing in New Orleans – an interesting choice, given the many issues with homes his foundation built there post-Katrina – Pitt waxes poetic on the football huddle as “a metaphor for our history” along with many platitudes on American unity, for a game Donald Trump is attending.

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      Yrjö Kukkapuro, renowned Finnish chair designer, dies aged 91

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 10 February, 2025

    ‘Almost every Finn has sat on a chair he designed,’ his studio says, with his postmodern creations gracing galleries around the world

    Yrjö Kukkapuro, a renowned Finnish designer whose postmodern style of chairs graced waiting rooms, offices and living rooms across Finland as well as collections in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, has died aged 91.

    Kukkapuro died on Saturday at his home outside Helsinki, his daughter, Isa Kukkapuro-Enbom, confirmed in an email on Sunday, as well as in a statement from Studio Kukkapuro, where she is the curator. The cause of death was not disclosed.

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      Tom Robbins, comic novelist of US counterculture, dies aged 92

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 10 February, 2025

    Author of books including Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Another Roadside Attraction, was known for his outlandish tales of sex, drugs and mysticism

    Tom Robbins, whose novels read like a hit of literary LSD, filled with fantastical characters, manic metaphors and counterculture whimsy, has died aged 92.

    The author of works including Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Another Roadside Attraction and Still Life With Woodpecker, died on Sunday, his wife, Alexa Robbins, wrote on Facebook. The post did not cite a cause.

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      Keir Starmer takes public HIV test in push to destigmatise testing for virus

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 10 February, 2025

    Prime minister takes home test at No 10 with soul singer Beverley Knight to promote HIV Testing Week

    Keir Starmer has taken a public HIV test in an effort to destigmatise testing for the virus and to highlight HIV Testing Week.

    The prime minister took a home test at 10 Downing Street alongside the soul singer Beverley Knight. “It’s really important to do it and I’m really pleased to be able to do it. It’s very easy, very quick,” he said.

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      Sewer fatberg of ‘grease and rags’ forces Bryan Adams to postpone Perth concert

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 10 February, 2025

    Singer was due to perform Sunday night but authorities worried large blockage could cause sewage to back up in venue toilets

    An enormous fatberg in central Perth has forced a Bryan Adams concert to be postponed after authorities raised concerns that sewage may back up at the venue’s toilets.

    Adams was due to perform at the Western Australian capital’s RAC Arena on Sunday night, but the city’s water corporation said a “large blockage of fat, grease and rags” was causing wastewater overflows at nearby properties, prompting authorities to intervene.

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      Big Boys series three review – sitcoms don’t get more moving than this

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 9 February, 2025 • 1 minute

    From jokes about Tesco meal deals to depictions of life’s most precious moments, Jack Rooke’s semi-fictionalisation of his student years is back for the final time. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking watch

    The last episode of Big Boys finished on a note of almost transcendent devastation. From the very beginning, this tale of male bonding and sexual expedition – inspired by the comedian Jack Rooke ’s university days – existed in the shadow of grief. The first thing we learn about Jack, our semi-fictional protagonist, is that his dad, Laurie, died when Jack was a teenager. Loss hovered over the show’s chronicle of the sensitive, sheltered Jack’s student scrapes, as he formed an unlikely friendship with his laddish, socially assured roommate Danny while struggling to find his feet in Brent uni’s gay scene.

    Yet it wasn’t until the final instalment of series two that we were thrown headlong into Jack’s grief. When his motormouth cousin Shannon goes into labour with her first child, the family are transported, physically and psychologically, back to the place where Laurie died. By intercutting the farcical birth scene – inappropriate midwives, urgent demands for Peperami Firesticks – with gut-wrenching flashbacks to Laurie’s final days, Big Boys was able to do what it does best: splice ferocious sadness with snippets of sweet, mildly profane comic relief, and capture life at its most precious and prosaic.

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      Unforgotten review – like being trapped in a newspaper comments section

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 9 February, 2025 • 1 minute

    This beloved cold-case drama still has a dry sense of humour, but its attempt to wade into the culture wars was not a good idea. Its tackling of politics is starting to feel very ham-fisted

    For five series, Unforgotten was my go-to comfort television. Yes, the crime drama is always about a grisly murder, and every season begins with the gruesome discovery of remains that have been buried for years or even decades. And yes, there are plenty of scenes with body parts laid out on mortuary tables, being picked over by pathologists who say things such as, “this artery does show signs of gaping”, as if they’ve just won the lottery. But in its combination of strong casts, ample twists and the inevitable dispensation of justice, it always felt soothing, somehow. It is occasionally workmanlike, but reliably solid.

    As it reaches its sixth season, though, I worry that the wheels are coming off. The structure is largely the same every time – another reason it is so comforting, perhaps – and this seems to be no different. A body is discovered, it turns out to be a cold case, so it reaches the desks of the friendly, efficient and only mildly troubled cops we know and love. It throws a handful of suspects into the air and dares you to guess how these people could possibly be connected, then it waits for them to come crashing down to earth, as the pieces finally slot into place. It sprinkles it all with a touch of concern for the private lives of the detectives, and kicks back in nice, fancy kitchens as it works out whodunnit and why.

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      RPO/Giltburg/Petrenko review – intimate Beethoven and exhilarating Stravinsky from an orchestra on top form

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 27 January, 2025 • 1 minute

    Royal Festival Hall, London
    In the first of the Royal Philharmonic’s Lights in the Dark series, Boris Giltburg’s Emperor Concerto had delicacy and grace, and the Rite of Spring and Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra were persuasive and lovingly shaped

    Compared with most opening announcements, this was dramatic: the previous morning the pianist Paul Lewis, due to be the soloist in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, had been hit by a car. Happily he’s expected to make a quick recovery. And the Beethoven went ahead, with Boris Giltburg as a luxury stand-in.

    This reunited Giltburg and the conductor Vasily Petrenko , who have recorded all Beethoven’s piano concertos together, and their familiarity smoothed the way to a more polished performance than the circumstances might have suggested. Giltburg, characteristically, played with firm delicacy, dovetailing nicely with the warm-toned orchestra. He threw in the odd thunderous moment but tended more towards understatement, as in the haunting music-box passage of the first movement and the hushed transition to the finale. In that movement he struck a fine balance of grace and exuberance; but his encore, Schumann’s Arabeske in C, seemed calibrated to a more intimate level, Giltburg’s introspective playing making us lean in and listen.

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