Category Archives: Hedonism

Since the 2020 festival season has been wiped out by the pandemic, what about next years offering of rescheduled musical delights? Things dont get bigger than Glastonbury as it celebrates its belated 50th anniversary in 2021. The lineup is yet to be finalised, but if the 2020 offering of Diana Ross, Kendrick Lamar and Taylor Swift is anything to go by, expect more must-see sets than you can run to. 23-27 June 2021

Barcelonas premier sun-soaked music showcase celebrates its own belated 20th anniversary in 2021 with a typically varied lineup featuring headliners the Strokes, Tame Impala and Gorillaz, as well as FKA twigs , Iggy Pop and Young Thug. Come for the music, stay for the balmy all-nighters. 2-6 June 2021

A bucolic wonderland nestled in the rolling Brecon hills, Green Man has a very strong claim to be the most beautifully located festival in the UK. Known for its folk-leaning lineups and championing of Welsh talent, previous notable performances have included homecoming heroes the Super Furry Animals, energetic jazz quartet Sons of Kemet and PJ Harvey. 19-22 August 2021

Dont be alarmed by the J word in the name. Yes, there is ample jazz for the heads in this labyrinthine weekender in Rotterdam, historically including Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, but there have also been crowd-pleasing sets ranging from throwback heroes Toto to soul auteur Janelle Mone and Ms Lauryn Hill. 9-11 July 2021

If you cant bear the thought of crawling back to a damp tent after many hours of drinking and dancing, then a day festival is your solution. Field Day has managed to retain its independent charm in the 13 years it has been running. Now located in the vast Drumsheds complex in Tottenham, north London, you can stay dry while listening to the likes of Bicep, the Black Madonna and Floating Points. 10 July 2021

UK jazz impresario Gilles Peterson put on the first edition of his British festival only last year and impressed with the mix of young upstarts, esteemed veterans and night-time hedonism in the cosy confines of the woods at Abbots Ripton, Cambridgeshire. Its boutique atmosphere makes it the ideal place to discover new talent. 19-22 August 2021

Perhaps social distancing has made you hunger for the sweaty chaos of an enormous moshpit? Look no further than Wireless, the corporate behemoth famed for its ability to snag exclusives from US hip-hop and R&B royalty such as Drake, Travis Scott and Jay-Z. One for the headliners and the superfans. 2-4 July 2021

Houghton is the passion project of Craig Richards resident of the London mega-club Fabric an art and music weekender featuring an emphasis on lengthy DJ sets. Houghton has had a rough run since it began in 2017, having to cancel at the last minute in 2019 owing to bad weather. Next year promises to be a triumphant return, with its 24-hour music licence not for the faint-hearted. 12-15 August 2021

If you want your festivals to be nourishing for the mind as well as the body, Jodrell Bank Observatorys Bluedot could be the ticket, combining talks on space exploration with comedy and suitably cerebral music. Next years headliner is Bjrk, who has designed a special audiovisual set for the setting. 22-25 July 2021

The essence of East Sussexs tiny non-profit Brainchild festival is community. Attendees are encouraged to take part in workshops and maybe even jam with the bands. The music is all about discovery, too: jazz group Ezra Collective, rapper Kojey Radical and sax star Nubya Garcia played some of their earliest shows here. 9-11 July 2021

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From Glastonbury to Bluedot: 10 of the best festivals for summer 2021 - The Guardian

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Plays about art have the potential to be masterpieces or just painfully pretentious. Its a fine line, but the ones that do it well can create a thing of beauty.

There are plenty of discussions to be had about the nature of responsibility and truth when it comes to art, and artists lives have depths of drama, hedonism and anguish to be plumbed for the stage.

From biographies to surreal musings on obsession, here are some the plays about art to seek out:

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John Logans Red was inspired by a trip to Tate Modern, where he saw Mark Rothkos Seagram Murals. He said that as soon as he read the label recounting how they were created, the entire play came to him. Set in fifties New York, Rothko (originally played by Alfred Molina) is under commission to paint a series of murals for an upscale new restaurant. His assistant (a fictional character named Ken initially played by Eddie Redmayne and, later, Alfred Enoch) challenges him on accepting a commercial endeavour. In reality, Rothko told Harpers Bazaar his reasoning, saying: I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.

Yasmina Rezas French three-hander stood the test of time. It ran for eight years in the West End (with everyone from Albert Finney to Richard Griffiths to the League of Gentleman in the casts), and returned for its 20 year anniversary to the Old Vic in 2016 with Rufus Sewell, Tim Key and Paul Ritter. A play about art and friendship, it sees a 15-year-long bond between three men tested when one buys an incredibly expensive, completely white painting or a piece of white shit. The play has been translated into 20 languages, with the English version adapted by Christopher Hampton.

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French pointillist artist George Seurats painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was the inspiration for Stephen Sondheim and James Lapines musical. The story focuses on the painter and his great-grandson, also called George and also an artist, who grapples with the same ideas of artistic inspiration a century later. As the song goes: There are worse things than staring at the water as you're posing for a picture being painted by your lover, in the middle of the summer.

Artemisia Gentileschi's significance in Western art history has only recently been appreciated. In her lifetime, her talents were overshadowed by a sexual assault. In 1612, Agostino Tassi was tried for the rape of the painter when she was just 15, in a case that lasted seven months and gripped Renaissance Rome. Breach Theatre turned the real court transcripts from the trial into a new show. Bringing together myth, history and contemporary commentary, the play asks how much has changed in the intervening centuries and tells the story of a woman who took revenge through her art. The play was supposed to have a Barbican run, but instead streamed online over lockdown.

Nick Dears play, set in 18th century London, compresses the events of ten years of William Hogarths life into one single night. Michael Kitchen, Niamh Cusack and Simon Russell Beale were part of the opening RSC cast in 1986. According to Dear, what started as a play about the political manipulation of art turned into a lurid comedy of sexual manners, telling of the escapades of artists, politicians and royalty, and debating the nature of ambition, gender and the artists responsibility.

Another play that was supposed to open in London only to be scuppered by the pandemic is Jeremy O. Harriss melodrama Daddy. Franklin, a young Black artist about to embark on his first show, meets Andre, an older, wealthy, white art collector. He moves into Andres Bel Air home, where the action takes place in and around a real swimming pool, sunken into the stage. A surreal exploration of art, intimacy, identity and commodification follows, with George Michaels Father Figure playing in the background.

Janet Adler and Margaret Gibb, a pair of conceptual artists described as the most ferociously uncompromising voice of their generation, are the subject of Tim Crouchs experimental 2014 play. Adler has died, leaving her partner behind. Lou, formerly an art student and now an actress making a film about the object of her life-long obsession, Adler, breaks into the artists home unaware that Gibb is still living in it. Adler & Gibb looks at the pretensions of the art world and the way in which people leech off those they admire. Crouch said: The story developed over five years and still, even in rehearsal, I didnt know quite what it was.

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Originally titled Little Dancer after the statue that inspired it, Tony Award-winner Lynn Ahrens new musical imagines the life of Marie, the 14-year-old ballet dancer who disappeared from records after she posed for Edgar Degas. As a young woman, she is pulled between her love and her talent as a dancer, with the musical showing the well-trodden conflict between life and art. Its early days for this play, but we hope there will be more theres always room for a ballet/musical crossover.

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The best theatre plays about art, from Sunday in the Park with George to Red - Evening Standard

The music industry oracles on Black Lives Matter, surviving cancer, and crafting their new album Translation in lockdown.

Taken from the Autumn/Winter 2020 issue of Rollacoaster. Order your copy now.

In the distant future, when the world has been reduced to smouldering dystopian plains, and curious extra-terrestrial life finds itself methodically dredging the decimated earth for past relics, you can count on any Black Eyed Peas record like a cultural time capsule to reflect exactly where humanity was at, at that exact time. Or just before.

You see, throughout the last three decades, the salient pioneers have managed to maintain their status as one of the biggest boundary-pushing groups in the world restlessly warping, reinventing and redefining their addictive olio of pop, hip-hop, dance and conscious rap. The three founding members will.i.am, Taboo and Apl.de.ap harbour a preternatural foresight that has consistently positioned them teetering all-knowingly at the precipice of the next zeitgeist, right before it topples over us. Music industry oracles, if you will.

And their celestial music has soundtracked just about everything in our teen-to-adult lives. Their breakthrough album Elephunk in 2003 with longtime BEP singer Fergie saw their commercial success hit household name status with its breezy, thumping exuberance, tied off with politically-charged track Where Is The Love? (originally written in response to 9/11, but showcasing its heartbreakingly timeless relevance when rebooted in 2016 aimed at Americas gun violence crisis, and then again in an emotional live performance with Ariana Grande following the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing). Monkey Business in 2005 spurred on a hedonistic R&B era with the revved-up energy of Pump It and accessible house party fodder of My Humps. But world domination became irrefutable with 2009s party behemoth The E.N.D., which saw the group focus on our call for dance floor hedonism, with global hits I Gotta Feeling, Boom Boom Pow and Meet Me Halfway. After a years-long hiatus, their ambitious next project, 2018s Masters of the Sun, pivoted to a new era with tech-driven ideas; an intersection of an album meets a socially-conscious, augmented-reality comic book, and saw BEP trade their club prowess for a return to gritty politically-charged jazz flows in hit track Street Livin. Its a song, that no doubt akin to Where Is the Love? with its incensed lyricism and poignant indictment of the criminal justice system and police brutality, has bearing with the current Black Lives Matter protests and riots.

The forward-thinking vanguards have become an irrepressible industry institution propelling, shaping and spearheading whatever comes next. This summer sees the group drop their highly-anticipated eighth studio album Translation their first pop album in 10 years this time turning their focus to a Latin-infused sound with global rhythms and internet-breaking features of Shakira, J Balvin, Nicky Jam, Latin-trap star Ozuna and more.

But 2020 has been a year of uncertainty. No one could have foreseen a global pandemic, or its economic repercussions, or the unjust death of an unarmed black man in Minneapolis triggering global uprising and instilling a collective conscience in people all over the world. In the palm of my hand, my phone and social media feeds are dosing out overwhelming measures of panic, brutality, and polarity. And when I catch up with the trio over the phone from LA, they are impassioned, and hope releasing such triumphant sounds at such a time will help their fans explaining in a Twitter statement: with all the negativity, panic, pain, stress and confusion[we] think some sunshine and joy can lift peoples spirits

Their blueprint for success, like the thundering course of natural waters, are impossible to replicate. But one thing is clear, Black Eyed Peas are going nowhere. I caught up with will.i.am, Taboo and Apl.de.ap and talked about Black Lives Matter, surviving cancer, and crafting their album in lockdown

Rollacoaster: Hello guys, hows it going at this crazy time?

will.i.am: [doing an impression of a posh British accent] Hello, this is Will. Im doing a very rubbish UK accent.

[Laughter] Rollacoaster: Not rubbish at all! Im very impressed. How has lockdown been for you guys?

Taboo: Im in Los Angeles. I live in Pasadena so Ive just been locked down at my home, with my family, and periodically Ive been able to social distance at the studio with Apl and Will.

will.i.am: Yeah, it feels like COVID-19 was a year ago with the rise of this new thing that were dealing with right now. There are soldiers on the street, our city is on fire, businesses are destroyed.

Apl.de.ap: Theres people fighting, you know? The actual looters and then people who have to protest and protect buildings at the same time. Its really confusing.

Rollacoaster: You guys started out with conscious hip-hop, pouring socially astute messages into your music. I mean, Where Is The Love? came out 17 years ago, covering police brutality and systemic racism. With everything thats going on right now, is it kind of devastating to feel like nothing has changed in 17 years?

will.i.am: Nothing has changed for the black person in America. Nothing has changed in 100 years. I mean, theres been extreme progress with Jim Crow being undone, but the systematic racism that still exists in our justice system, nothing has changed.And you have this crippling and manipulating of lives, wickedness being implemented, lives being taken, broadcasted on our phones for us to see it happen. And at the same time, people havent been working. And if you aint working, you havent been making money; if youre not making money youre struggling, not eating. Its tough, so its compound on compound. Its the system giving people a triple middle finger.

Rollacoaster: And because of social media, fans are noticing the artists that are staying silent now. Do you think that musicians have a moral responsibility to use their platform to be vocal?

Apl.de.ap: You have to be mindful of how you react, it cant come from a angry place. You have to really take your time and get the right messaging.

Taboo: And then you have folks like Colin Kaepernick, where unfortunately it didnt go well for him. He got banned from the NFL for making a statement saying that its not right whats happening in our community.

will.i.am: Its not to say that every single musician has to have a moral responsibility, thats not fair. But we do need to celebrate those musicians who do do that. Bob Marley was a godsend. The Clash. Marvin Gaye. I think fans are intelligent enough to know that entertainment is entertainment. You know, not every artist has to be Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, but the ones that do step out we need to do a better job celebrating those people.

Rollacoaster: Looking at your journey so far, your art goes through these massive changes. With your new record, it feels like were at a different iteration of party music now. How do you decide whats next?

will.i.am: Its future casting. Like when we did electro music that was like, this is where its going, lets get on this, lets start collaborating, lets research, lets network like we did for The E.N.D. We saw what was happening in the underground in 2007. So we collaborated with the Boys Noizes and the David Guettas. And with the conscious jazz-influenced hip-hop, we were just students and fans of music of A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul. We travelled around the world and we were like, wait a second, Macy Gray has a whole bunch of demographics that come to our show and Elephunk was born. And then Where Is The Love? was written in response to 9/11. And Monkey Business was an extension of our global travels and selling out venues that got us to arena status. Then after The E.N.D., we took a little break. Taboo fought and beat cancer, and now were students again. Then we did Masters of The Sun which is about police brutality and injustice, and we returned to our origins and made jazzy, street-conscious, social activist music. I was just listening to Street Livin right now and I was like, we could put this out right now with everything thats happening.

Apl.de.ap: Where Is The Love? (Remix) too.

Rollacoaster: Theyre both super fitting with the current times. And its so interesting that you talk about your changing demographics whats been your response to this rise of TikTok and user-generated content, with people out there doing different dance challenges to one of your latest singles Mamacita?

Taboo: Our core audience are the Peabodies, who are the fanbase that weve had throughout the years because they rocked with us no matter what era. When were were doing the jazzy hip-hop, then it was more underground backpack-type audiences, and then when we transitioned to Elephunk there was a broader audience. And now with TikTok, you tap into a younger demographic, and its cool because we come from the dance world, so we see folks doing their own versions of the Mamacita challenge. Its cool to see where people can take it and how inspired they are by our music and our frequency.

will.i.am: TikTok is like hyper-activity, its really not about your video, its about the content you give them for them to make their own visuals, which is a whole new world to engage. You set off activities and you see people compete. Its like when youre at the concert and you point the mic at the audience and they say where is the love, or you sing I gotta feeling, mic to the crowd, they go woo hoo in unison. Thats TikTok. Its call and response. Everybodys engaged. Doing a different version of the same thing.

Rollacoaster: You guys keep talking about this future casting can you explain what you mean a little bit?

will.i.am: Theres a lack of different types of content makers and participants in culture. There are some people that are like, this is happening right now, lets hop on it. Thats the cookie cutter. They see a shape, and they duplicate the shape after the shape already happened. And then theres folks that are like, I wonder whats coming next? Do you think people are going to like this, or do you think theyre going to like the combination of this style and that? Were those type of folks.

And weve seen you implement this future casting every step of the way. The multi-faceted format of Masters Of The Sun was so unique, looking into augmented reality and incorporating music in that way. Do you think were at the end of putting out straight-forward music albums?

will.i.am: I think were at the end of a lot of things. We have this one good friend of ours, who is a conspiracist with a big heart, and he said something to us like two or three years ago. We were all at dinner, and he was like soak it all in fellas, and enjoy this moment because these are the good old days. And he was absolutely one trillion percent correct. Why? Because we cant gather and go to a restaurant together right now, who knows if that experience will ever be the way that it was before, where all twenty people were at a table, eating dinner, freely breathing, laughing out loud.

Rollacoaster: Its so true. The future is a bit of a question mark right now. And how do you think its all going to affect the future of music?

will.i.am: Music will be needed. Theres going to be new types of sounds, new types of social gatherings around music. A whole new underground is being born right now. Every genre from jazz to blues to swing to hip-hop, it all was underground, and somethings being invented right now. Somethings happening right now.

Taboo: And with ways of artists performing, we had the opportunity to perform with some technology, kind of like robots, with automatic cameras that were filming us. Its about respecting the times but also finding creative ways to perform. Its about being creative and pushing the envelope of performances and how we can still create content for the world to get a glimpse of us, and making an effort to give you something other than just a Zoom performance.

Apl.de.ap: I feel like were going to slowly immerse into performing again. Being creative with like drive-in shows. Its going to look funny and there will be separation, but its just about testing it out, you know?

Rollacoaster: How do you guys feel about releasing a new album in the midst of all of this?

will.i.am: Yeah, its kind of crazy. Its like a double-edged sword because you want to be celebratory about an album or a project but then youre realising whats happening in real time, and it just hurts. It hurts because people are bringing up Where Is The Love? every time something bad happens. Our song that we created on the hills of 9/11 is always brought up and we love that song and its a song to provide therapy for folks that need it.

Rollacoaster: Why is your new album called Translation? And how does it mark a new era of Black Eyed Peas?

will.i.am: Translation is empathy, understanding, collaboration. To translate from one culture, and one language into something somebody else can understand, it takes patience, it takes tolerance, it takes educating. Translation is the bridge. And Black Eyed Peas, we bridge the gap, from this culture to that culture. We were the bridge between electronic music and pop. We were the bridge between what was going on in America to the rest of the world with Where Is The Love? Now were bridging whats happening in the Latin community to the rest of the world.

Rollacoaster: Knowing your track record, following this album theres going to be an explosion of Latin music

will.i.am: The Latin explosion has already happened. Its just to the rest of the world with English-speaking countries, they dont yet know the power of the Latin world. Like, Olly Murs is big in the UK, but not around the world.

Rollacoaster: Thats so true

will.i.am: Theres such a disconnect between what happens in the Spanish-speaking countries versus what happens in the English world. The English world is super isolated, like you could be big in freaking Atlanta but nobody knows about you in Ottawa, Canada. Like J Balvin is big in Columbia and also big in all of the Spanish-speaking countries. Olly Murs is big in the UK, but not big in all English-speaking countries. You could be big in freaking Wales, but they dont know you in Hawaii. What do you mean you mean like a whale in the ocean? No Wales bro- I see whales all the time!

Rollacoaster: [Laughter] Yes, that disconnect needs to be bridged. And ultimately, what do you want the impact of the album to be?

will.i.am: We designed it as a playlist because when youre making a playlist you want to make sure every song is a gem. Everybodys like, Ive got my singles, heres a bunch of bullshit songs to surround them with. There are very few albums that have like jam-packed gems, like [Michael Jacksons] Off The Wall, Thriller, [Stevie Wonders] Songs In The Key of Life, Marvin Gayes Whats Going On.

Rollacoaster: That makes sense; every album should really be full of hits. And what were the biggest challenges of tweaking and honing this record in lockdown?

Taboo: During the pandemic when it all went down, fortunately Will was in the studio, making sure that everything sonically went together, and transitioned from one song to another. He stayed focused on the project while everybody had to be isolated, and the studio was his home. It was a labour of love and time and effort to put together this whole project.

will.i.am: One time we were frustrated with how the songs were going. Apl was like, Will, can I be honest with you? You keep saying were missing something and I gotta tell you, I know what were missing and I hope you dont get mad. Its you bro, youre not focused. Youre doing this tech stuff and all this stuff and that stuff, and when we did Elephunk you were 100% there, and when we did Monkey Business you were 100% there, when we did The E.N.D., even though you were doing your tech stuff you were at least 90% there. But right now, youre not even 60% there. And youre frustrated but its you that youre frustrated with, because youre not there. I was like shit. You broke me down.

Apl.de.ap: I kept it simple and I said, Will, we need your all. Thats it. And not being distracted with a million things. I think thats what made the album really tight. Its a playlist to be put on and get the party going. And thats what we really want to say right now.

Taboo: [Laughs] Will had that Michael Jordan moment where he wanted to go play baseball, and then he went back to basketball. And then started winning championships again.

Black Eyed Peas new album Translation is out now via RCA UK.

Photographed over Skype by

Bartek Szmigulski

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Black Eyed Peas On Crafting New Album Translation In Lockdown - Wonderland Magazine

With her rosy cheeks, wide eyes, and frothy wardrobe, Elle Fanning, as Catherine, can look absolutely guileless one second and blood-hungry the next.Photograph by Ollie Upton / Hulu

In his 2011 biography of Catherine the Great (born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, in Pomerania, in 1729), the late historian Robert K. Massie writes of her that more than any other monarch of her day, there was always a wide latitude for humor. Perhaps it was Catherines way of soften[ing] imperial presence with a sense of humor and a quick tongue, as Massie puts it, that enabled her to enact one of the greatest coups dtat in monarchical history: in the summer of 1762, eighteen years after arriving in Saint Petersburg as a teen-age bride to the future Peter III, the (allegedly) impotent and ill-tempered Emperor of Russia, she orchestrated a plan to overthrow him and ascend to the throne herself. Peter died just eight days after the coup, likely at an assassins hand, at a palace called Ropsha. Catherine, who ruled Russia for the next thirty-four years, proclaimed that Peters cause of death was hemorrhoidal colic, and then gave Ropsha to her lover, Grigory Orlov, who had helped her devise and execute the scheme. When it came to seizing power, the empress was deadly serious, which made her good-humored affect all the more threatening. She was a voracious readerof Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers, mostlya hobby that sharpened her mind and her tongue. When she arrived on Russian soil, she was a lamb. By the time she took the throne, she was a viper.

The Greata droll, morbid new ten-episode series about Catherine and Peter that started streaming on Hulu last monthdoes not pretend to be historically accurate: the shows title card comes with an asterisk proclaiming it to be an occasionally true story. The series creator, Tony McNamara, plays fast and loose with the biographical facts that were so painstakingly recorded in Massies doorstopper. For the sake of dramatic expediency, the series compresses Catherines sprawling, ruthless ambitions into a compact, jewel-box time frame. The fictional Catherine, played with flinty cunning by Elle Fanning, does not wait almost two decades before staging her revolt. In the first episode, she looks forward to her new life as an empress with a swooning, girlish romanticism, but her outlook begins to darken almost from the moment she attends her first palace feast. Historians tell us that Peter III was a hotheaded man who was rendered unattractive after a battle with smallpox; he had far more passion for military stratagems than for his wifeor any other woman, for that matter. In her memoirs, Catherine succinctly roasted him as an idiot. In The Great, Peter (Nicholas Hoult) retains the idiocy but is also dashing and debonair, a frattish sybarite with a sadists taste for violence and an insatiable sexual appetite. He coldly greets his bride-to-be by saying, You look taller in your portrait, after staring for long seconds at her backside.

Despite its rollicking biographical liberties, The Great does seem to preserve something of Catherines quick, curious manner. With her rosy cheeks, wide eyes, and frothy wardrobe, Fanning can look absolutely guileless one second and blood-hungry the next. By the end of the first episode, Catherine has come to see that the only way to liberate herself from a tyrant is to learn his ways; that to escape her terrible marriage, she must become terrible herself. In this way, The Great pleasingly avoids smearing a shiny feminist gloss over the empresss story. In the fifth episode, titled War and Vomit, Catherine visits the front lines of a Russian battlefield while carrying a Tiffany-blue box full of macarons, in order to pose for an official battle painting. When she offers a cookie to a bloody soldier who says that he cannot take one, because he has lost his fingers, she proceeds to shove a macaron directly into his mouth. Its pistachio, if thats helpful, she says.

McNamara, who wrote the screenplay for The Favourite, from 2018, has distinguished himself with a style of royal satire that provokes moral and physical repulsion in equal measure. That filmstarring Olivia Colman as a petulant, tyrannical Queen Anne, and Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone as the ladies-in-waiting warring for her attentionsubverted queenly history by foregrounding Annes battles with gout and ravenous sexual demands. It is suggested that perhaps subsisting on a regular diet of mutton and cream at a time when plumbing technology was not very advanced may have led monarchs to smell like ripe gorgonzola, and to act just as sour. The same nauseating sense of hedonism pervades The Great. The show is ostentatiously vulgar (McNamara peppers the word cunt into nearly every scene, as if it is fine seasoning) and gross (I gasped when the archbishop, having informed Catherine that he must check whether her interior wall has been breached, reaches up to moisten two fingers in his mouth). Excess and violence are horrifically intertwined. In a late episode, Peter, afraid that someone is planning to overthrow him, sets up five torture stations at the palace to try to smoke out the traitor. This looks great! he says to the court doctor, surveying the scene from a balcony. In order to prove that she is no traitor (even though she absolutely is one), Catherine offers to sit at the fingernail-pulling station herself. The ensuing closeup, of Fanning writhing in pain, is enough to turn your stomach, but it also makes a point. Nobody is spared in Peters palace, least of all his flaxen bride.

The show is, despite all this, somehow a comedy, full of vituperative one-liners and thistle-sharp insults. (Women are for seeding, not reading, Peter tells Catherine, early in the show. Later, she reads him a passage by Diderot: Man will never be free until the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest.) It is also a visual feast, with lavish set dressings and richly colored costumes. I couldnt help thinking, as I watched, that given the global halt in film production due to the pandemic, The Great may be the last over-the-top period piece to be released this year. There are fatty pheasants and cookie towers, hunting expeditions and ballroom escapades. Hoult prances around in animal pelts, waistcoats, and a comically large cross necklace, looking like a spoiled little boy who raided his mothers fairy box. When Catherine tells him to listen to his people and give them what they want, he snorts, What they want? Its a novel idea. Possibly French? I am a prisoner here, married to an idiot, Catherine says, in a line that echoes the assessment in her memoirs. Like The Favourite, The Great extends great sympathy to its monarch, held captive in a life she did not choose, while also mercilessly skewering her ruthlessness and misplaced largesse. The show may not be historically accurate, but it slices through history like a hot poker, to royaltys rancid core.

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The Great, Reviewed: A Proudly Fictional, Pleasurably Vulgar Spin on Catherine the Great - The New Yorker

John Maynard Keynes lived through two world wars as well as the great depression between them, and as an economic adviser to British and American governments did his best to fend off political disaster. But Zachary Carters solid, sombre intellectual biography begins at a moment when Keynes himself, in his private capacity, seemed to be causing a seismic upset. The Universe totters, Lytton Strachey informed his cronies in the Bloomsbury set in 1922: the cataclysm had happened because Keynes whose previous lovers, conscientiously indexed in his archives, were a troupe of nameless men, among them the shoemaker of the Hague and the clergyman had taken up with a woman, the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova.

By starting with this salacious titbit, Carter enticingly sexes up a book that soon settles down, as Keynes did, to be grimly serious. When he married Lopokova, Keynes gave up the sportive pursuit known in Bloomsbury as buggery and, as he saltily put it, relished being foxed and gobbled by his wife. Cultivating what he called a disgusting and financial state of mind, he became a public man so loftily impersonal that in an obituary in 1946 his former adversary Lionel Robbins called him God-like.

But conservatives have never stopped alluding to his libertine youth as a means of disparaging his assault on balanced budgets and penny-pinching austerity. Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian toff who wore riding gloves when he lectured at Harvard, sniffed that because Keynes was childless, his principles of economic management were short-run indifferent to future outcomes. The slur was recently repeated by Niall Ferguson. In 1983 William Rees-Mogg the proud begetter of jiving Jake, choreographer of the Westminster conga diagnosed Keyness hostility to the gold standard as a symptom of the amoralism for which homosexuals were in his view notorious.

Carter wastes no time on such odious aspersions, and instead interprets the hedonism of Bloomsbury as a positive influence on Keynes, whose ideal aim was the democratisation of fine living. Economy began as a miserly, parsimonious business: the Greek word refers to the virtuous practice of making do with less. Keynes, however, saw it as a doctrine that preached joy through statistics.

Im dubious about Carters claim that KeynessEconomic Consequences of the Peacedeserves to be ranked with StracheysEminent Victoriansand EliotsThe Waste Landas a modernist masterpiece; he does a better job of presenting the economist as an artist manqu when he suggests that Keynes saw money as something illusory a fiction, or what linguists call a floating signifier. Keynes daringly acknowledged his reliance on artifice by describing economic policy as a meaningless ritual, a trick to ensure that we continue spending the abstract, notional contents of our wallets.

The price of peace in 1918 was a grand scheme devised by Keynes that proposed sending money round in a circle, paid out to Germany as funds for rehabilitation and then paid back as reparations. Carter admiringly likens this arrangement to the mad machines in Rube Goldbergs cartoons; it might have held the squabbling world together for a while if President Woodrow Wilson hadnt bluntly rejected the elaborate, deceptive rules of the game.

Economics, for Keynes a form of play, was underpinned by aesthetics. An off-hand metaphor revealed his partiality: in Britains imperial heyday, he said the Bank of England was the conductor of the international orchestra. He reminded governments of their duty to subsidise entertainers, whose divine gift brightened our lives. His utopia was the Covent Garden theatre which is now the Royal Opera House, where he first saw Lopokova dance with Diaghilevs company. When it reopened in 1946, under the auspices of the newly established Arts Council, money ran out before the auditoriums lampshades had been paid for. Women hired as usherettes therefore donated their rationed clothing coupons to buy the fabric. This small sacrifice moved Keynes to tears.

Keynes dies two-thirds of the way through Carters book, which goes on to follow the contested afterlife of his ideas in America. Although Republicans denounced the welfare state as a socialist conspiracy, what John Kenneth Galbraith called reactionary Keynesianism seized on war as the highest form of deficit spending and, rather than diverting funds into something like the NHS, kept the country permanently militarised, poised for campaigns of mass death in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile Keyness dream of making great art and beautiful evenings available to all citizens dwindled into the tacky abundance of the affluent society. Consumption, Keynes declared in 1936, is the sole end and object of all economic activity. What would he have thought of consumerism and the mile-long queues of famished shoppers in car parks when Ikea reopened earlier this month?

In Carters persuasive account, the slippery triangulations of Clinton and Blair are the final betrayal of Keynes: neoliberalism set markets free, unleashed speculators, and opened the way to a globalisation that treated people as disembodied profit maximisers and crammed them into Hillary Clintons basket of deplorables. Finally Carter admits that the Keynesian recipe for peace and prosperity has proved tragically incapable of sustaining democracy. Why did economic losers in the red states allow a demagogue like Trump to rip them off? Why do Tories crave a no-deal Brexit that will impoverish us all?

I do not have satisfying answers, says Carter with a morose shrug, after which he worries that we are blundering back into the moral quagmire that Keynes hoped to avoid. The book ends with an alarming reminder that victories for democracy and equality the end of slavery in the 19th century and the defeat of fascism in the 20th came at the end of a gun.

Keynes rebuffed criticism of his short-run solutions by pointing out: In the long run, we are all dead. True enough, but in the immediate future, as economies stall and societies fray, we may face a fate worse than death. The universe is tottering all over again.

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynesby Zachary D Carter is published by Random House($35)

Excerpt from:

The Price of Peace by Zachary D Carter review how liberals betrayed Keynes - The Guardian

My best mate and I have our birthdays within a month of each other, and we started this year with our feet in the sand on a beach in Thailand, talking about what we wanted from 2020. (Cue mirthless laughter). Its a landmark year for both of us, as its the last year of our 30s I turn 40 in December.

Neither of us are particularly happy about the prospect our voices get high and squeaky when we discuss it but I decided that one way of softening the blow was to have a mad year of hedonism. It was going to be like a Say Yes Night, as seen in Grace and Frankie, where you say yes to everything, even to experience things you might normally be scared of or feel like you dont have time for.

People say things like be glad to be alive when you express unhappiness around a birthday, and while I get the wider philosophical message, it does diddly squat to mitigate the things you are afraid of around such a landmark one. For me, its the knowledge that we still live in a society that lionises youth. Because of gender inequalities, that tends to hit women harder, with greater value and worth placed on our looks. Exhibit A: literally any red carpet event where the men look like theyve just woken up from a nap and the women have clearly spent days on their look.

Admittedly, I didnt take turning 30 well either because landmark birthdays force an unwanted inventory of your life. What you achieved, and more crucially, what you didnt. Turning 40 is similar, but with the additional layer that some things may soon be out of reach, such as having children. I cant say that I definitively want them, or Im sad about it, but I know that when I turned 30, Im pretty sure it was a given that Id have kids by now. Do I mourn what didnt happen or the fact that it may never happen because of biological clocks and whatnot?

The year of hedonism was to overturn that narrative of being past it. To counter the sadness with a lot of fun. To actually be spontaneous for once without over-thinking it. I know that when the clock strikes midnight on my 40th birthday, my bones wont instantly shrivel and become decrepit, but I wanted to use it as an excuse to generate the courage to try the things I always wanted to.

I didnt really date much in my 38th year because I couldnt be bothered, but my 39th year was supposed to be about dating loads. It was about meeting lots of new people, and not putting it off for another year. Travel was also a big one. I was going to try and actually stay at a festival for the whole duration usually I run away after two days because of the lack of showers and garbage. I wanted to finally hire a car and drive around Italy, something I have always wanted to do but kept putting off because the driving on the wrong side of the road scared me. I wanted to do the trek to Mount Everests base camp because I felt it would make me feel strong and capable. Beyond travel, I also wanted to change my personal life by pushing myself out of my comfort zone and socialising with people I didnt know (something Im notorious for hating), and take the next step with newer friendships by going on holiday with them.

But above all, I wanted to live this year with a sense of bravery and limitlessness, because I wanted it to teach me the lesson that age really is just a number, and that I was still capable of having fun, and being fun too.

Coronavirus obviously put a stop to all of that, and while it isnt exactly the worst problem to have, there is a clear sense after three months in lockdown, that this isnt going to be the year I thought I would have. Although I had a tantrum at the lost time I wouldnt get back (yes, you can still have tantrums in your late 30s), that has distilled into a sense of sharpness and focus around what is important. For a start, I had Covid-19, and now that Im in the middle of a slow recovery, I know Im lucky that it wasnt worse. But also, the things that make us scared of turning 40 or any landmark year for that matter almost always come from things externally, rather than how we feel inside.

Internally, I feel amazing. I dont feel past it. I dont feel like Im even halfway done

My friend joked that she is going to start lying about her age, and I said actually, it is important that we dont. Forty feels so bad because we associate it with being ill or things going wrong, or we think we wont be able to do as much, or because we simply havent had the right role models. We think of when our parents turned 40 and maybe we dont want that for ourselves.

Internally, I feel amazing. I dont feel past it. I dont feel like Im even halfway done. Health problems can happen to you at any age, so turning 40 is just a chance to make sure you take care of yourself a bit better, not an inevitability that parts are going to fall off. Being visible and being okay with being 40 is really important to setting the example to others around you, and especially to our kids and nieces and nephews.

So if I didnt get to do my year of hedonism, thats perfectly alright. All turning 40 will do is to sharpen my focus around what it is that I really do want, rather than having to commit to some mid-life crisis bucket list. Life doesnt end or even begin at 40, it just continues, and hopefully for the better. And for now, thats actually all I need or want.

See the article here:

It was supposed to be a year of mad hedonism: how Im feeling about turning 40 after lockdown - iNews

Some of Jamaicas most prominent resorts reopened today as the country reopened its borders for international travel, and more hotel reopenings are on the near horizon along with steady increases in flights from the U.S. to Jamaica.

Crucially, Jamaica will be testing all visitors with COVID-19 nasal swab tests at the airport.

And all travelers to Jamaica must complete a Travel Authorization Form in advance of their trip.

So whats open right now in Jamaica?

The Moon Palace resort in Ocho Rios, Sandals Montego Bay, Riu Ocho Rios, Holiday Inn Resort Montego Bay and Beaches Negril all are welcoming guests back as of June 15.

The Iberostar Grand Rose Hall, Montego Bay also reopened on 15, and several other resorts have targeted July 1 as their reopening date, including:

Sunset at the Palms Negril has announced July 9 as its reopen date. Sunset at the Palms appreciates the thought and planning from the government entities in Jamaica when deciding to re-open our airports to international travelers, said Carol Slee, senior VP sales and marketing for Sunset Resorts. From the beginning of COVID-19, our first concern has been for the health and safetyof our staff and guests. We are now prepared to open our resort with a complete array of enhanced protocols, which will help alleviate concerns and enable our guests to fully enjoy their stay with us.

For example, Sunset at the Palms will now offer in-room check-in, dining by reservation only, and will offer guests the option to forego daily housekeeping if they are reluctant to have staff enter their rooms.

The Royalton Negril Resort & Spa, Hideaway at Royalton Negril, and Grand Lido Negril will reopen on July 15. The Island Outpost group of resorts, which includes Goldeneye, The Caves, Strawberry Hill, and Fleming Villa, will open to guests on Aug. 1, while the luxury boutique Round Hill resort has atentative reopeningdate of Sept. 1.

In line with Jamaicas mandatory COVID-19 protocols, resorts have been quick to adopt cleanliness and safety as part of their branding. Couples Resorts, for example, is touting their Good Clean Fun program, while Royalton Resorts is touting Safety Assured Vacations.

The Couples program will include social distancing protocols in airport shuttles as well as in restaurants and in pool areas, for example; the resort also is including masks among its room amenities and has pledged only to work with excursion vendors who comply with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID-19 safety protocols.

The clothing-optional Hedonism IIs Party Safely plan includes temperature checks, luggage disinfection, PPE and sanitizing stations, and frequent disinfecting of air conditioners and in room surfaces.

In anticipation of Hedonism IIs July 1re-opening, we have spent the last month undertaking preparations and consulting with local and international organizations to make sure our enhanced safety measures are up to the highest standards, said Kevin Levee, general manager of Hedonism II. We look forward to welcoming home our guests and are confident that the iconic Hedonism II experience will shine through, even if its with some adjustments.

Travelers heading to Jamaica from June 15 on can choose from American Airlines and Delta Air Lines flights from several major U.S. gateways. American is flying daily between Miami and Montego Bay, Miami and Kingston, Charlotte and Montego Bay, and Dallas Fort Worth and Montego Bay. Delta has daily flights between Atlanta and Montego Bay and Monday and Tuesday flights between Atlanta and Kingston.

JetBlue is resuming Montego Bay and Kingston flights from New York/JFK and Fort Lauderdale in June, with two or three flights weekly but a plan to ramp up to daily service in July and August.

Saturday-only flights from Boston to MoBay will resume in July as well, as will flights between Orlando and Montego Bay. JetBlues Fort Lauderdale-Kingston service will restart with three weekly flights in July and August.

Southwest Airlines intends to resume service to Montego Bay from Baltimore Washington International Airport and Orlando on July 1, and Spirit has plans to start flying again to Montego Bay and Kingston from Fort Lauderdale the same day. United Airlines daily service from Newark and Houston to MoBay will recommence on July 6.

Travelers returning to Jamaica will enjoy new features at several new properties, including the 57-room Eclipse at Half Moon resort enclave, a dozen new rooms (called the Marumba Studios) at the Geejam Hotel in Port Antonio, an organic restaurant at the Round Hill resort that serves uncooked vegetables and fruit, and a new beach club at the Tryall Club in Montego Bay.

More:

Jamaica Is Now Open for Tourism Here's What to Expect - Caribbean Journal

Bostonians of a certain age fondly recall the heyday of WBCN and its anything-goes hedonism. But the station, which launched in 1968 and went off the traditional airwaves in 2009, was also groundbreaking for its commitment to social justice through independent reporting and commentary.

Thats the focus of WBCN and the American Revolution, the feature-length documentary directed by Bill Lichtenstein. He got his start in journalism as a 14-year-old correspondent for the station in 1970 and went on to become an Emmy-nominated producer for ABC News.

For the past year Lichtenstein has been screening his film to enthusiastic audiences at festivals and in theaters around the country. When the pandemic interrupted the rollout, he began offering the film to listener-supported community radio stations as a digital rental. The partnership has been mutually beneficial: nonprofit stations from Maine to Oregon have shared proceeds, while Lichtenstein has enjoyed a golden opportunity to demonstrate how WBCNs activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s remains relevant today.

We wanted to generate a discussion about the importance of community radio, says Lichtenstein. If you go back to the earliest vision of licensed federal broadcast as an industry, it was always about serving the community, the public interest.

Lichtenstein has partnered with the National Federation of Community Broadcasters to offer the film to its 200 member stations. So far more than a dozen stations, including the legendary WFMU in New Jersey, have screened the film.

We wanted to be involved because we felt like so many stations are trying to figure out how to tap into peoples hearts and minds about the issues theyre seeing right now, says Ernesto Aguilar, NFCBs membership program director. Seeing this film in this moment is really refreshing.

Last week, on the day George Floyd was buried, Aguilar helped coordinate a coast-to-coast simulcast of Sam Cookes A Change Is Gonna Come. Thats the kind of gesture that inspires Matt Murphy, station manager of WERU in central Maine. His station recently presented WBCN and the American Revolution in a Belfast movie theater, then moved the film online once the lockdown began.

Murphy grew up in the Boston area listening to WBCN, and hes not alone.

We had a couple people come to the movie with their BCN T-shirts on, he says.

See original here:

WBCN doc reaches a new audience while boosting community radio stations - The Boston Globe

i-Ds most iconic cover of the 1980s doesnt star a model. It doesnt star a musician, an actor or an artist, either. In fact it doesnt star anyone. For The Happy Issue, no. 54, released December 1987, Editor-in-Chief Terry Jones designed little more than a simple yellow smiley face and the words Get up! Get happy!. The energy conveyed through this symbol a symbol rapidly becoming synonymous with youthful hedonism and inhibition was enough to capture everything the cover needed to. Jonathan Anderson, when imagining what Loewes new collection would look like, and trying to distill a cocktail of inspirations and references, must have felt the same way.

The Smiley looms large in the imagination of ravers and disciples of the Ibiza acid house club scene. For Jonathan, endlessly drawn to the island when creating his collections for the luxury Spanish house, the little motifs of the scene have become far more than just simple reference. In the market for a summer fit that takes in all this history and turns it into something futurist? Ready to swap black and greys for neon yellow and electric blue? Look no further than here.

Loewe Paulas Ibiza collection is an homage to the beloved boutique store of the same name, founded in 1972 by Armin Heinemann and Stuart Rudnick. Armin and Stuart always riffed off the natural world when making their own, and Jonathan has made sure to reinterpret this kaleidoscopic archive in a way that feels fresh and modern. Look no further than the mermaid bag for evidence of this fusion of past and present, a playful take on a classic print, or the waterlily prints adorning long beach-ready shirts and cut-and-pasted in squares across light wash denim jeans and cut-off shorts.

With the addition of the Smiley , the designs also find a fresh new simplicity and energy this season. At the new collections heart are relaxed oversized tees adorned with large Smiley faces printed across them, available in neon yellow, black, white and tie-dye. Elsewhere the Smiley is printed across black and yellow matching two-piece shirt and trousers and splashed across white cotton shirts; its large and unignorable on fraying oversized jumpers and its humble and small on a shirts buttons. Accessories-wise, it lends itself perfectly to over the shoulder neon pouches and bumbags, designed for little more than your phone, I.D. and gum. What more do you really need.

Ecstatic abandon is total in this collection Jonathan says, Part rave, part cyberdog, in acidic neons, faded olive greens and borderline hues of scarlet, sunrise orange and midnight blue. The mood is summery, playful, part leisurewear -- long linen tunics, cropped dungarees and bleached jeans and part classic summer staples -- striped aprs-swim overshirts and soft terry tees. Incorporating reflective silver trousers, day-glo sandals and acetate sunglasses, this is a true uniform for night time.

The world is in a strange place right now but, as Jonathan points out, there is escapism to be found in rave culture, one which germinated in Ibiza. After all, the Smiley doesnt simply mean happiness. If we look at its history, its as much about resistance as it is about partying. The Second Summer of Love, a movement which raged through clubs, warehouses and fields of Britain in 1988 to 1989 -- mere months after Terry Jones enshrined its coat of arms on the cover of i-D -- found inspiration not simply in the sounds of Balearic house discovered on holiday in Ibiza, but in forging connections with each other through clubbing.

The clothes back then mirrored this freedom -- colourful, baggy, makeshift -- and, as we wrote when commemorating its thirtieth anniversary of the Summer of Love in 2018: It was Great Britain loosening its tie, and its reverberations are being felt to this very day. All these principles that dictated the particular style choices of this movement can be found here in the new Loewe Paulas Ibiza collection. The fits are loose, the colours clash in wonderful ways, the accessories make a statement if little else is to be worn with them. Shape and print enhance one another: mermaids swim amongst red corals on maxi-dresses and long robes with ruffled sleeves, Jonathan says, jikin goldfish wander amongst waterlilies on wide-hemmed capri pants, bolero skirts and swimwear. Whether its the print of a poncho resembling the scenes iconic club posters, the psychedelic pink and greens of the tie-dye sweater, or the clashing of a T-shirt in two prints split down the middle, the collection comes alive.

Armins first designs were also, by his own admission, mistakes. Mistakes in explaining to the seamstress and her misunderstanding my poor Spanish. What came out was different to what I'd wanted but I thought, Wow, that looks good! While there may be more precision to what Jonathan does at Loewe, this care-free attitude was a crucial balance to strike when paying tribute to an institution as beloved as Paulas. Ive always said that Paulas Ibiza embodies the spirit of letting go, Jonathan says. With this collection, which sees Paulas Ibiza flourish into a fully-fledged offer for men and women complete with vibrant fragrance and playful accessories, I wanted to capture the breezy spirit of the Balearics and celebrate a moment in time that saw the hedonism of these islands expand to influence subcultures across the world.

Discover the collection

Read the original here:

Summer of LOEWE: The story behind the latest Paulas Ibiza collection - i-D

The Royal was plainly missing and the Ascot was sometimes hard to detect as well, with the racing good, the big names familiar but no crowd energy to propel Flat racings grandest meeting.

For one year only - we assume - the racing won against the hats, the booze, the crush, the posing and the paparazzi, the social climbing and the betting ring din. Boiled down, this years Royal Ascot is pure racing, stripped of the human element: the fizzing gallery that horses and jockeys thunder towards at a meeting that underpins the English social calendar.

The horses won against the traffic, the fashion, the morning rush to be ready, the afternoon clamour to be seen. At the heart of day one was action that might have been anywhere in England, on any racecourse. When the stalls opened the heart beat faster. Each time they crossed the line, a 35-minute void ensued.

Football will not face this problem. The game rolls on for 45 minutes, stops and then starts again. The theatre of racing is stop-start. The first race lasted 1m 26.19secs. The next one arrived more than half an hour later. Into that gap are usually squeezed snapshots of the English at play. As the Bollinger and the beer kick in, the early garden party feel inches towards the kind of hedonism that requires a lot of clearing up.

But Ascot did all it could to bring punters into the biosphere of the Queens course, with a new wine club, afternoon tea by home delivery, a Royal Ascot songbook and an online Racing Hub through which owners could watch their money either paying dividends or going up in smoke. No outfits, no top hats, just the people who pay the bills stuck at home on sofas, occasionally chatting to ITV Racing, for whom Mick Fitzgerald was penned in his own wooden enclosure in the parade ring.

This was about as far from the essence of Royal Ascot as you could go. But it was infinitely better than nothing - and a day for purists to savour. The old debate about how best to promote racing was irrelevant. This week it is all about the horses, the professionals, with 3.7m in prize-money fought over with all the hullabaloo of a Monday morning on the Newmarket gallops.

Theyve done so well to have the meeting. It is still Royal Ascot, said Richard Hannon, trainer of the weeks first winner, Motakhayyel. There arent 60,000 people here, but maybe there are more people at home watching and paying attention than there ever have been. Its fantastic, in what has been a very gloomy few months. It looks like sport is coming back, in the right way, racing is adapting and were showing that we can adapt to new regulations and so on.

John Gosden, the countrys leading trainer, was even more effusive. He said: This country and many countries in the world have suffered horribly from this sinister disease; it has been devastating. Everything that people are going through, let alone the destruction of our economies and people losing jobs. Its a worldwide problem.

So, to be able to come here in this very large amphitheatre in the fresh air, biosecurity everythings very tightly run, we are cleaning our hands all the time. It is a very safe place to be and its lovely to put on top-quality sport with the best racehorses in Europe, great athletes and great jockeys. We understand that its a financial blow for the racecourses, but we are putting a show on and its great that its going out.

That show went out to 120 countries, all of whom had cause to reflect on what sport is, and how it really functions, not to mention the English class system, which boards a carriage and trots down the straight before this meeting starts. Or did. That standard TV news shot of the durability of the monarchy was lost to the nation. But the racing survived, and the good news is that its still beautiful.

Go here to read the rest:

For one year only at Royal Ascot racing won against the hats, the booze, the crush and the posing - Telegraph.co.uk