Daily Archives: June 23, 2017

LOS ANGELES, June 23 Check out this new trailer for Battle of the Sexes that serves up the ultimate showdown between men and women in the form of a tennis match.

Emma Stone and Steve Carrell star in this film about the famous 1973 clash between tennis greats Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

The synopsis of the film reads: The electrifying 1973 tennis match between World number one Billie Jean King (Stone) and ex-champ and serial hustler Bobby Riggs (Carell) was billed as the Battle of the Sexes and became the most watched televised sports event of all time. The match caught the zeitgeist and sparked a global conversation on gender equality, spurring on the feminist movement. Trapped in the media glare, King and Riggs were on opposites sides of a binary argument, but off-court each was fighting more personal and complex battles. With a supportive husband urging her to fight the Establishment for equal pay, the fiercely private King was also struggling to come to terms with her own sexuality, while Riggs gambled his legacy and reputation in a bid to relive the glories of his past. Together, Billie and Bobby served up a cultural spectacle that resonated far beyond the tennis courts and animated the discussions between men and women in bedrooms and boardrooms around the world.

The film also stars Sarah Silverman, Andrea Riseborough, Elisabeth Shue, Bill Pullman and Alan Cumming.

Battle of the Sexes is set for release on October 20.

A screengrab from Battle of the Sexes that stars Emma Stone and Steve Carrell among others.

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Emma Stone, Steve Carell face off in 'Battle of the Sexes' (VIDEO) - Malay Mail Online

22nd Jun 17 | Entertainment News

A record breaking Irish independent film starring Ardal O Hanlon and Pat Shortt

For a country that loves the cinema so much, the Irish have a lot of trouble capturing the essence of what makes us so unique on the big screen. Director Tom Ryan is set to buck this trend with his sophomore outing; Twice Shy.

The coming-of-age drama centres around a young, unmarried couple (played by Shane Murray-Corcoran and Iseult Casey) as they make the journey from rural Ireland to London to deal with an unplanned pregnancy. The film flashes back to chronicle their relationship and turbulent lives that led them to the situation, with growing up, parental distresses and inabilities to communicate throwing up roadblocks in their fairy tale romance.

Twice Shy has no hesitations about latching on to the zeitgeist of modern Ireland, hitting many hot-topic buttons like the 'Repeal the 8th' movement, and the inadequate provisions for those suffering from depression. It's refreshing to see a take on Ireland that doesn't feel like a Hollywood imitation, but a more candid outlook on our lives.

Bringing together the impressive newcomers and TV veterans in Pat Shortt and Ardal O'Hanlon, coupled with a soundtrack filled with familiar Irish stars, director Ryan delivers a confident follow up sure to appeal to the Irish audience it is made for.

Twice Shy is in selected cinemas Friday 23rd June.

Richard Waters (@RichMWaters)

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Twice Shy Brings The Irish To The Big Screen - TV3 Xpos - TV3.ie

Attuned to the emerging alternative galleries and performance spaces in downtown Manhattan, the journal, published out of Ms. DeAks SoHo loft, turned the spotlight on art at the margins: performance art, video art, conceptual art and outsider art. She had a special affection for street art, which she once called information from the middle of the night.

Ms. DeAks critical style was personal, quirky and inventive, with adjectives like nuancical popping up unexpectedly.

You couldnt tell if it was a Joycean toying with the language or a problem of translation, Mr. Robinson said in an interview. She was a poet.

The prose was a calculated affront to the rarefied theorizing that surrounded minimalism and dominated the slick art journals.

Theres something rotten about a structure that produces terminological pollution and calls it theory, like a mob-controlled waste disposal company, Ms. DeAk once wrote. The goal was to destroy the criticship of critics, she was quoted as saying in an unpublished article for Artforum magazine in 1974.

It was also to get there first, even if that meant writing about art still in the studio. As a part-time assistant at the alternative gallery Artists Space, Ms. DeAk organized a series in 1974 devoted to video, performance art and readings that included Laurie Anderson, Kathy Acker, Adrian Piper and Jack Smith. She was later among the first critics to notice Jean-Michel Basquiat, before he began showing in galleries.

She continued to beat the bushes in the early 1980s as a contributing writer for Artforum, where she and her fellow critic Rene Ricard covered the downtown scene like a zeitgeist tag team. Ms. DeAk later wrote an occasional column for Interview magazine. Called The New According to Edit DeAk, the column was based on her Polaroid pictures of gallery openings and parties.

The critic William Zimmer, in The SoHo Weekly News, summed her up succinctly: DeAk has been everywhere before anybody.

Edit Deak was born on Sept. 16, 1948, in Budapest, to Bela Deak and the former Vira Csatkai, a teacher. Little is known about her early life.

At 18 she married Peter Grosz, an artist, who later changed his surname to Grass. Soon after, the couple, traveling separately in the trunks of two cars, crossed the border from Hungary into Yugoslavia and, after a stay in Italy, made a beeline for Manhattan, determined to plunge into the New York art world.

Ms. DeAk also changed how she rendered her last name; capitalizing the a, she seemed to think, made it seem more American. She used a lowercase d at the beginning of her career and an uppercase d later.

Her marriage to Mr. Grass ended in divorce. Her survivors include a sister, Eva.

Ms. DeAk earned an art history degree from Columbia in 1972. In her senior year, she took a seminar on art criticism given by Brian ODoherty, the editor in chief of Art in America. Also in attendance were Mr. Robinson and Mr. Cohn, who became her fellow conspirators in the creation of Art-Rite.

The magazine, published irregularly until expiring in 1978, envisioned the alternative art scene as a social collective and itself as an enabler. It invited Dorothea Rockburne, Pat Steir, William Wegman and others to design its covers, and made space in its pages for artists to write or show their work.

In 1976, Ms. DeAk, with Mr. Robinson, Sol LeWitt and Lucy Lippard, helped found Printed Matter, a publisher and distributor of artists books.

When Ingrid Sischy, the director of Printed Matter, took over as editor of Artforum in 1979, she saw a kindred spirit in Ms. DeAk, who had contributed gallery reviews to the magazine for several years someone who blurred the boundaries between art, fashion and night life and practiced art criticism as theater.

Ms. DeAk, in return, delivered prescient articles on the Italian Neo-Expressionist painters and the post-Conceptual artist Joseph Nechvatal.

Poor health and heavy drug use sidelined Ms. deAk for the last two decades of her life. The scene she covered so vividly retreated into distant memory, but traces of her presence lingered.

In 2007, as developers converted a loft at 151 Wooster Street in SoHo into a luxury condo, they uncovered a wall decorated with graffiti by Mr. Basquiat (then using the tag SAMO), Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000, seminal figures in the graffiti art movement.

It turned out to be Ms. DeAks old apartment.

A version of this article appears in print on June 23, 2017, on Page B15 of the New York edition with the headline: Edit DeAk, a Champion of Artists Outside the Mainstream, Dies at 68.

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Edit DeAk, a Champion of Outsider Artists, Dies at 68 - New York Times

The signs appeared quietly. In isolated blips at first, and then with increasing frequency, till they could no longer be ignored. In 2014, it was the single visual identifier of Wes Andersons The Grand Budapest Hotel. In 2015, Drake championed it in his Hotline Bling video, inspired by legendary light-and-space artist James Turrell. In 2016, the ubiquity of a particular dusty blush hue led to its christening as millennial pink by New York magazine, and with that, its takeover of the cultural zeitgeist was complete.

But pinks road to reinvention hasnt been easy. Though it only came to be associated with femininity fairly recently (after the end of World War II, canny advertisers began directing pastel pink appliances and upholstery towards women largely as an antidote to the military-inspired fashions and textile rationing of wartime, according to Bloomberg), the tag has proven to be nearly impossible to shake off. Thanks, however, to an uptick in dialogue about gender fluidity, spurred by television shows such as Transparent and Orange Is The New Black, and a more vocal, visible fight for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) rights, the global lexicon began to slowly stretch beyond reductive gender-binary terms. And pink has emerged as the surprising symbol of this blurring of lines. To be specific, it is the aforementioned millennial pink, a colour that was everywhere you looked last summeron sneakers, sofas, social media feeds.

According to the New York magazine feature: Its been reported that at least 50 percent of millennials believe that gender runs on a spectrumthis pink is their genderless mascot. And somewhere along the way in its journey to post-gender, pink also became post-pretty. Heck, pink became cool. Free of its gender-normative shackles, it finally had the leeway to have personality, layers, subjectivity.

Reading the global tea leaves, Pantone, a company that sets industry standards for colour, picked, in an unprecedented move, the blending of two shades for its 2016 Colour of the Year: Rose Quartz (a warm rose) and Serenity (a cool blue). In many parts of the world, we are experiencing a gender blur as it relates to fashion, which has impacted colour trends throughout all other areas of design, explained Pantone Color Institute executive director Leatrice Eiseman in a press release.

This year, although it was a yellowish shade of green that got top billing, Pantone included two shades of pink at opposite ends of the spectrum in its Spring 2017 colour report: Pale Dogwood, a soft blush, and Pink Yarrow, a deep fuchsia. But why should Pantones choices matter to us?

Because Every December for the last 26 years, Pantone predictsand consequently helps influencethe single hue that the design world will go nuts about for the next year, according to business magazine Fast Companys design offshoot Co. Design.

And go nuts it does. In 2017, pink has gone rogue, proclaimed a recent piece in The Guardian. Spring/Summer 2017 runways saw pink displaying its full potential: from powdery at Sanchita, Huemn (both from India) and Givenchy to bright at Cline and Balenciaga, to bold at Haider Ackermann and Valentino. The SS17 menswear shows, too, got their dose of pink, courtesy Gucci, Topshop and Ackermann (again). Raf Simons sold-out collaboration with adidas includes a pastel-pink version of the iconic Stan Smith shoe, and Nikes newest Air Force 1 Jewel Swoosh sneaker for men comes in Pearl Pink.

Guccis Alessandro Michele, whose love for the colour is well-documented, told The New York Times at his Resort 2018 show in Florence last month: Pink is very powerful. It makes you feel sweet and sexy, also if you are a man. A recent piece for Esquire answered the question, Should you wear pink?, with a resounding, Hell yes, you should. Vogue.com ran a piece last year titled Why Pink Is The Most Radical Colour In The Rainbow Right Now, with the writer stating: Its tough to think of a single hue with which to fly your freak flag and subvert gender norms better than pink.

In other words, pink now sends out a message loaded with a subtext. Its impossible to discuss the politicization of this colour, and indeed its projection as a signifier of strength rather than frailty, without mentioning the Gulabi Gang, Indias fuchsia sari-wearing group of female vigilantes. The groups leader, Sampat Pal Devi, explained this sartorial choice to Vice magazine back in 2008. In rallies and protests outside our villages, especially in crowded cities, our members used to get lost in the rush. We decided to dress in a single colour, which would be easy to identify. We didnt want to be associated with other colours as they had associations with political or religious groups. We settled on pink, the colour of life. Its good. It makes the administration wary of us.

A movement that harnessed the power of pink early on was the 2009 Pink Chaddi Campaign, in response to right-wing group Sri Ram Senes attack on young women at a bar in Mangaluru. Nisha Susan, one of the organizers, wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian: It amused us to send pretty packages of intimate garments to men who say they hate us.

Then, in a blend of attempted feminism and right-wing nationalism, the RSS womens wing, Rashtra Sevika Samiti, recently held a summer training camp for young girlsoutfitted in pink-border salwar kameezesto teach them how to protect themselves and also guard (their) country, its traditions, its sanskriti and its languages, as the Samitis Chandrakantha, chief guest at the camp event, put it.

Pink may have started rubbing shoulders with politics, but sports is an arena its long been shut out of. Serena Williams pink-pleated tennis outfits at last years US Open, which the athlete described to the US Vogue with obvious delight, made headlines because it embraced the eye-catching colour. The candy-colour shade has been Williams favourite since girlhood, and regularly creeps into her beauty routine, tooa petal lip here or cotton candy nail polish there, reports the piece. I always try to wear it, Williams said. Yesterday, I had a rose-colour eyelid, which was fun. Closer home, in a surprising move not likely influenced by the global trend, Force Indias new Formula One cars for the 2017 season were unveiled in an arresting Pepto-Bismol hue.

But nothing made as loud and as globally resonant a statement as the Womens March in January, when pink-knit pussy hats flooded the streets of Washington, Berlin, Paris, Melbourne and beyond in support of womens rights, LGBTQ rights and racial equality, as well as, of course, in staunch defiance of then freshly inaugurated US President Donald Trumps blatant misogyny and sexism. The pink pussy hat later found its way on to the head of every model at Missonis autumn/winter show in Milan this spring, and temporarily atop the Fearless Girl statue in New Yorks financial district, boldly facing down the Wall Street bull.

Los Angeles-based screenwriter Krista Suh, whose brainchild, The Pussyhat Project, led to the viral sartorial movement, told The Atlantic: Femininity, whether its in a man or a woman, is really disrespected in our society. What were trying to do with this project is embrace pink, embrace the name pussyhat, and not run away from that.

And so it was that pink came to be a symbol of power, of resistance, of revolution, while still holding on to its notions of womanhood. It is everything all at onceboth a reclaiming of femininity and a disavowal of it.

First Published: Fri, Jun 23 2017. 11 47 AM IST

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The politicization of the colour pink - Livemint

I was truly shocked when a slim majority voted for Brexit a year ago, on June 23. It was to be the first shock caused by an election outcome in 2016 in which populists whipped up popular resentment and won. The question troubling me since: When is it going to stop? When's the world coming to its senses?

When you haven't got the benefit of hindsight it's hard to tell major bumps along the way, a cluster of exceptional incidents, from real historical trends. Is history running its course or is the zeitgeist drunk at the wheel but could still come to its senses before crashing into the wall?

I feared Brexit, further propelled by voting Trump into office, might not have been a freak phenomenon but a historical turning point that could usher in an age of reactionary politics, and even sustained decline. The West really might be well past its heyday, once and for all.

Strangely enough, it's almost always the people shouting to want to make this, that or the other great again who will very likely achieve the exact opposite. How great will Britain really be after Brexit? How great will America be after Trump's reign of angry incompetence has run its course?

The West had shaped the last few centuries on a global scale - not always for the better, but surely to its advantage. Now it showed serious signs of self-combustion. Looking for historical parallels, I thought, we might be witnessing times that the late Romans witnessed before us.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Particularly from a liberal German perspective, the world turned a darker shade last year. Brexit in June and Trump in November shook many Germans' belief and trust in two long-time allies and important role models.

Most historically aware Germans very much appreciate what the United Kingdom and the United States did after the Second World War: Rebuild Germany from the rubble after a terrible war ignited by her own doing. That's what I call true greatness.

The Western Allies fostered reconciliation, even though the reflex to punish Germany for her systematic and large-scale misdeeds must have been formidable. Without the foresight of the liberal minded leaders of those two Anglo-Saxon countries West Germany, and therefore today's reunited Germany, would not have become a post-war democratic power in its own right.

After the First World War, the Entente powers chose to fiercely punish Germany, eventually resulting in another world war. After the Second World War, a broadminded approach towards Germany under the leadership of the UK and the US fostered a period of peace and prosperity never seen before in European history.

You could argue that America and Britain also had their own interests at stake: An economically dependent and politically unstable Germany would not have made for a good buffer state against the Soviets, who quickly turned from a wartime ally into a Cold War foe.

After Brexit and Trump, it looked like populism and anti-internationalism might not just discredit two longstanding role models, but could spread further: Marine Le Pen in France, Norbert Hofer in Austria, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Lech Kaczyski in Poland, Viktor Orbn in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and Germany's homegrown populist movement, Alternative fr Deutschland (AfD), were all vying for or already in power.

Beginning with the Brexit referendum in June 2016, the below chart depicts some of the outcomes of votes which pitched populist candidates or ideas against more moderate or liberal candidates and ideas. Each vote had its very particular national setting, so this overview is also food for thought if those votes can and should be thrown into the same basket.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Some of the votes were close calls, like the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election, or the Turkish referendum that granted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sweeping new powers. Other votes that observers thought might be tighter races were clearer cut, like the presidential election in France, in which right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron battled it out.

For now, it looks like the populist movements have lost some momentum, probably because people realise that the world order really is in a fragile state - one more kick and the whole thing might come tumbling down. Therefore, the underlying question might be, if those voting for populists are really convinced of those policies or if they are more concerned with throwing a wrench in the works, to send a message.

Germany is voting for a new Bundestag in a general election in late September 2017. This will also be a vote on the liberal-leaning policies of incumbent Chancellor Angela Merkel. The broad sentiments that underpin the success of populist movements are still simmering. The jury is still out on whether we have reached peak populism yet...

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A Year After The Brexit Vote: Have We Reached Peak Populism Yet? - HuffPost UK