Culture

Villagers don’t know exactly when the craft emerged but at present local women with deft hands make brocade dresses and many other products to serve the needs of locals and tourists who want purchase a souvenir. Can Ty village is a small village with only about 270 households. All villagers are Mong ethnic people who mainly live on farming on mountain fields and growing corn, potato, and cassava. At leisure time after harvest, most of them weave brocade. The principle raw material is locally grown flax fibers. Flaxes are planted on the field by strewing them. After being harvested, they are dried and split to yarn for weaving. Linen cloth is manually woven. … [Read more...] about Can Ty brocade weaving village

PULLING OUR LEGS Great news for fans of slightly twisted, gleefully brutal cringe-comedy: seven years after the end of Pulling, Sharon Horgan and Dennis Kelly are making a new sitcom. Their pilot, The Circuit, deals with a dinner party gone hideously wrong. … [Read more...] about The populist: items of interest this week

David Bowie was a man of many monikers — Dukes, Majors, Space Oddities, Starmen, and the like — who never met a day he didn’t use to radically transform himself. It’s fitting that he would see his final days as an opportunity for a metamorphosis of another kind, this time from the flesh into the infinite, but it’s still hard to fathom the legend’s verve in decamping to a Soho studio while dying from a cancer kept secret from everyone but his inner circle, chiseling away at an album we were meant to hear freshly as news hit that he’d passed away. And yet this is the legacy of the performer’s 25th and likely final studio album Blackstar: It eases us into the idea of a world without a David Bowie, as it warmed him up to the notion of an end to suffering. What’s doubly gutting about is that it represents yet another new direction for an artist who’d already taken so many. Bowie flew back out into the cosmos for real this time, … [Read more...] about The 15 Best Albums of 2016

With that, he used one of his favorite genres, his culture and personal life to tell a story that is more than just a horror film. “I hope I can do this genre that I am absolutely in love to interrogate the system that is obsessed with black culture but doesn’t give a fuck about black lives,” he said. “I hope I can use this genre to interrogate a system that mines black women for their culture, ideas, compassion, wisdom and perseverance but does not give them enough options to shine in this light.” … [Read more...] about ‘Bad Hair’: Justin Simien Says Psychological Horror “Interrogates The System” Obsessed With Black Women And Culture – Sundance

“However, OkCupid has a couple [of] features that will be rolled out in the next couple months which we think will help address the problem. The first will allow a user to hide their profile from all users by default, and to only be seen by people they actively ‘Like’ or send a message to. The second will give the user an option of using a connected Facebook account to block any of their friends that are also on OkCupid.” … [Read more...] about Why Online Dating Is Killing Your Anonymity

The Picasso Route can be explored in a day but there are plenty of other things to see in the area. The town of Gandesa – about 30 minutes’ drive north-east – has a wine-making cooperative in a vast, turreted art nouveau “wine cathedral” and tours can booked of its interior. There’s also the impressive Centre d’Estudis de la Batalla de l’Ebre, a museum dedicated to one of the defining events of the Spanish civil war – the Battle of the Ebro – with interactive displays and powerful filmed interviews with survivors. … [Read more...] about Picasso’s lost paradise: how a corner of Catalonia brought inspiration

The word "festival" itself represents an attempt by promoters to draw line between today's EDM and 90s rave. From bluegrass and folk to indie and heavy metal, music festivals take place all over the US. Some have their own problems with excessive drug/alcohol use and rowdy, mob-like behaviour (remember the arson and riots at Woodstock in 1999?). But festivals don't have the media stigma or face the punitive legislation and policing that raves do. Older and shrewder by the late 2000s, the early 90s pioneers involved in Hard Events and Insomniac (the company behind Electric Daisy Carnival) learned how to work with the system, going through the bureaucratic hoops required to get permits, and providing the level of intensive security, entrance searches and overall safety provisions that would give political cover to their local government enablers. In contrast with the 90s ethos of throwing raves in exotic and out-of-the-way places such as abandoned buildings, remote farms, and desert … [Read more...] about How rave music conquered America

The chaperoning mum, the concerns about school and the alcohol-free rider are all reminders that Yelich-O'Connor only turned 16 last year: useful, because talking to her, you could easily forget. On the one hand, she talks like a teenager – there's a lot of likes and you knows and awesomes and rads – but nevertheless, for a 16-year-old who had never left New Zealand before this year, and who currently finds herself in the middle of a vertiginous rise to stardom, she appears almost weirdly unfazed and self-possessed. She seems to view what's happening to her – the record sales, the gushing celebrity endorsements (everyone from the Weeknd to Elton John), the "wave of shit" she's provoked by offering some fairly negative opinions in interviews about Justin Bieber and Lana del Rey – with a kind of cool, wryly amused detachment. By the time she arrived in the US, she notes, Royals was so big that fans turned up at the airport and outside her hotel. "Which was weird," … [Read more...] about Lorde: ‘I’m just a freak’

A coy flutter, a sly smirk: "I met Kanye West yesterday." You wouldn't expect such breathless name-dropping from New Zealand's Lorde, AKA 16-year-old minimalist wunderkind Ella Yelich-O'Connor. Given she is the first woman to top Billboard's Alternative Songs chart in 17 years with her EP The Love Club, much has been made of her in-song rejections of celebrity and pop culture mores. Her click-soul breakthrough track Royals decries the enforced fantasies of Hello! culture and rap videos full of diamond watches and Maybachs, while on Team she snarls: "I'm kinda over getting told to throw my hands up in the air." She's touted as the voice of a savvy new generation, yet her aesthetic at this first London show – which sold out in four minutes – is more classical than counter-cultural. Her black-lace outfit recalls pre-Raphaelite Kate Bush or Vampira, her sneers are pure Dietrich, her cat-claw poses totally, well, Cleo Rocos. She's a freshly fired antique. … [Read more...] about Lorde – review

In tandem with Electric, Super makes listeners who heard Elysium as a farewell rather than just another stop along the way feel rather foolish for thinking that age (Tennant is 61, Lowe 56) could wither the Pet Shop Boys’ commitment to pop music. You wonder, in fact, if these two albums with Price were partly inspired by a desire to rebut the idea that dancefloor pop is something you outgrow, a narrative arc they probably find trite and depressing. It may be a coincidence that the sentiments of the album-closer Into Thin Air – one friend or lover trying to persuade another to flee a bad situation and start afresh somewhere new – echo those of Two Divided Zero, the first song on their first album, but it’s certainly telling. Escapism, adventure, reinvention, companionship: the qualities that drew the Pet Shop Boys into pop in the first place entrance them still. They remain, now and forever, the pop kids. … [Read more...] about Pet Shop Boys: Super review – punchy, urgent and laser bright