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      Monty Python and the Holy Grail turns 50

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 29 April • 1 minute

    Monty Python and the Holy Grail is widely considered to be among the best comedy films of all time, and it's certainly one of the most quotable. This absurdist masterpiece sending up Arthurian legend turns 50 (!) this year.

    It was partly Python member Terry Jones' passion for the Middle Ages and Arthurian legend that inspired Holy Grail and its approach to comedy. (Jones even went on to direct a 2004 documentary, Medieval Lives .) The troupe members wrote several drafts beginning in 1973, and Jones and Terry Gilliam were co-directors—the first full-length feature for each, so filming was one long learning process. Reviews were mixed when Holy Grail was first released—much like they were for Young Frankenstein (1974), another comedic masterpiece—but audiences begged to differ. It was the top-grossing British film screened in the US in 1975. And its reputation has only grown over the ensuing decades.

    The film's broad cultural influence extends beyond the entertainment industry. Holy Grail has been the subject of multiple scholarly papers examining such topics as its effectiveness at teaching Arthurian literature or geometric thought and logic, the comedic techniques employed, and why the depiction of a killer rabbit is so fitting (killer rabbits frequently appear drawn in the margins of Gothic manuscripts). My personal favorite was a 2018 tongue-in-cheek paper on whether the Black Knight could have survived long enough to make good on his threat to bite King Arthur's legs off (tl;dr: no).

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      Pedro Almodóvar attacks Trump as ‘catastrophe’ in New York speech

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 29 April

    Spanish director compared the US president to Franco and said he wondered whether it was appropriate to visit country while he is in power

    The veteran Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has launched a broadside against the US president, Donald Trump, while accepting an award in New York.

    Speaking on stage at the Lincoln Center on Monday evening, he said he had been in two minds as to whether to travel to the US to pick up his Chaplin award.

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      ‘I felt caught between cultures’: Mongolian musician Enji on her beguiling, border-crossing music

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 29 April

    She started singing in her family’s yurt before a Goethe-Institut residency led her to jazz and life in Munich. The distance from home is ‘bittersweet’ – but both styles, she says, are about trusting your instinct

    Growing up in the icy Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, singing was as natural as speech for Enkhjargal Erkhembayar. “Every day after my parents came home from working in the local power factory, they would gather with a group of friends in our yurt to unwind and someone would always begin to sing,” she says. “Soon, we would all join in, singing old folk songs to keep warm and to express ourselves long into the night.”

    As Enji, 33-year-old Erkhembayar is now taking this music into international concert halls, having forged a beguiling hybrid of Mongolian folk music with acoustic jazz improvisation. She anchors her performances in the circular-breathing vocal style of Mongolian long song – a folk tradition where syllables are elongated through freeform vocalisations – her delivery tender and delicate, full of yearning emotion.

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      ‘I didn’t know they existed’: US exhibition highlights rarely seen Picasso artwork

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 29 April

    Gagosian, New York

    In collaboration with the artist’s daughter, an ambitious new exhibition finds unusual ways to pair better-known pieces with those lesser seen

    Hosting a showing of Pablo Picasso ’s art isn’t like putting together your normal gallery exhibition. For one thing, gathering the art of the prodigious Spaniard requires a lot more overhead than most shows. As Michael Cary, the resident Picasso expert at Gagosian gallery, told me: “Picasso shows are museumy. Most of them have lots of loans from museums, so these kinds of exhibitions are very costly to put on, with all the insurance and shipping and assorted costs with bringing these works to New York City.”

    Yet there are great rewards for exhibiting Picasso. It is a huge prestige boost to any gallery that manages to pull all that art together, and the celebrity factor tends to drive tons of engagement from visitors. Moreover, just selling a single piece can put the whole enterprise in the black.

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      Jeremy Deller’s fake Roman mosaic review – is that a smiley face on the ancient ship’s flag?

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 29 April • 1 minute

    North Yorkshire coast
    With its swooping whale, snapping seal and mischievous god, the artist’s tricksy new work, made with Coralie Turpin, is just one of the fun-filled additions to Scarborough’s reinvigorated Wild Eye coastal art trail

    It would be too simple to say that Jeremy Deller is interested in history. It would be more accurate to say he’s interested in things that aren’t there; or things that were once there; or perhaps things that could have been there. Protesting miners, deceased soldiers, inflatable sites of pagan worship have all been created or re-created by the Turner prize-winning artist, who has now turned his hand to a “speculative [Roman] mosaic” for Scarborough’s Wild Eye coastal art and nature trail.

    Created with sculptor Coralie Turpin , Deller’s mosaic is a “semi-trick” – a suggestion of a Roman masterpiece that has been uncovered on the shores of the seaside town with genuine Roman history. On the cliffs above the work sits the remains of a Roman signal station, and the mosaic is fragmented and inaccurate as if made from memory rather than a photograph, generating a sense of authenticity. “In 100 years’ time – or whenever – when this is all underwater and it is rediscovered, someone will think ‘Fuck, there was a Roman villa here,’” says Deller.

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      Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley review – a delightfully grounded romance

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 29 April • 1 minute

    This irresistible love story braids the personal and the political – from Brexit to who gets to use the spare room as an office

    There are not many romantic novels that include Brexit, Boris Johnson’s ICU stay and the “Edstone”. Then again, not many political novels begin with a classic meet-cute. Jessica Stanley’s UK debut, Consider Yourself Kissed, is – to misquote Dorothy L Sayers – either a political story with romantic interludes, or a romance novel with political interludes. It is also the kind of book that, for a certain kind of reader, will immediately become a treasure.

    That meet-cute, then: Coralie, a young Australian copywriter, and Adam, a single dad, swap homes for a single night. Adam looks like a shorter, younger Colin Firth; Coralie waits in vain for him to tell her that she looks “like Lizzy Bennet, a known fact at school”. Coralie considers Adam’s neat bookcase of political biographies, including – to her joy – those of Australian politicians. Adam considers Coralie’s piles of “those green-spine books by women”. They fall in love, books-first, fairly instantly. And the reader who knows immediately that battered green spines mean Virago Press, and that what is being implied by Coralie’s careful collection is key to not just her character, but the character of this novel as a whole – that reader will also be irresistibly, hopelessly in love by chapter three. (If this meet-cute does nothing for you, you’re in the wrong place.)

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      Where Dragons Live review – reflections on family life in an extraordinary setting

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 29 April • 1 minute

    In this warm documentary, three siblings clear out their enormously grand childhood home in Oxfordshire where among the happy memories are those of cruelty

    This warm, gentle documentary from Suzanne Raes is about a family – and a family home – that might have interested Nancy Mitford or Wes Anderson. Maybe it takes a non-British film-maker to appreciate such intense and unfashionable Englishness; not eccentric exactly, but wayward and romantic. It is about a trio of middle-aged siblings’ from the Impey family who take on the overpoweringly sad duty of clearing out their enormously grand childhood home in Oxfordshire. The huge medieval manor house Cumnor Place, with its dozens of chimneys, mysterious rooms and staircases was bought by their late mother, the neuroscientist Jane Impey (née Mellanby), with the proceeds of the sale in 1966 of a postcard-sized but hugely valuable painting, Rogier van der Weyden’s Saint George and the Dragon .

    Impey died in 2021 and her husband, author and antiquarian Oliver Impey, died in 2005; this left their grownup children with the task of coming to terms with the memory of growing up in what is clearly an extraordinary place. It is magical and chaotic, haunted by these two dominating personalities, full of books, papers, paintings (who knows if there is another one that might be as valuable as the one Mrs Impey sold to buy the place?), huge grounds with a swimming pool, bizarre objects and items everywhere which speak of Oliver Impey’s preoccupation with the image of the dragon.

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      Do Ho Suh: Walk the House review – all the des res of one man’s life, right down to the towel rails

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 29 April

    Tate Modern, London
    The Korean conceptualist invites us into all the spaces he’s lived in, re-created full-size in paper, polyester and fabric. It’s a bit like a vast portrait made in Homebase

    Home is where the art is for Do Ho Suh. The Korean conceptualist has spent his career ruminating on and exploring the places we live in, creating ghostly, beautiful facsimiles of the houses and apartments he’s called home.

    And now those fragile, wispy, delicate buildings have been transported and rebuilt in the middle of Tate Modern. A traditional Korean hanok house looms over you as you enter. It’s not made of bricks and mortar or wood and screws, but paper, carefully wrapped around the artist’s childhood home and rubbed with graphite, exposing the texture of the material beneath. The paper is yellowed and mildewed from months of being left exposed to the elements, but it has survived as a sort of memorial: to childhood, architecture, migration, the past.

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      Five UK museums ‘alive with ideas and energy’ shortlisted for Art Fund prize

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 29 April

    Museums in Belfast, Cardiff, Perth, Warwickshire and County Durham compete for £120,000 Art Fund Museum of the Year award

    Five UK museums, all “alive with ideas and energy”, in Belfast, Cardiff, Perth, Warwickshire and County Durham are to compete for the world’s largest prize given to a museum.

    The Art Fund Museum of the Year prize offers the winner a gamechanging prize of £120,000, with £15,000 going to each of the other finalists.

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