Live in Nantwich organisers praise community's 'gig-going spirit'
'When it comes together and you see people applauding - there's no better feeling,' said Tim Dougill, organiser of Live in Nantwich.The week of music, which is part of Independent Venue Week, will support two Nantwich venues, The Granary and The Studio, at a time when the live music industry has struggled.'I don't get paid. It's all voluntary. But I just love it,' smiled Mr Dougill, of Moth Events.He has teamed up with Dani Cook of Applestruck Records to organise the festival, who said: 'We're a community that's got a real gig-going spirit."
'Everybody likes to come out for an event.'Ms Cook's claim is backed by the number of tickets sold for this week's performances, with many artists playing to sold out crowds.'No-one starts off playing arenas, right?' Ms Cook said.'So we need to get some bands here and new and up-and-coming bands that can help to support our music ecosystem.'The festival even has an international appeal, with a group of friends flying from Barcelona to hear their favourite artist, Fyfe Dangerfield.
Ouch! is one of the local bands to benefit, playing their second ever gig as part of the festival.Lead guitarist and vocalist Jurijs Kaminovs said the band were "dying" to perform.'Pubs, they're not really receptive to more original stuff,' he suggested, 'you want dedicated music venues for that.'Mr Dougill promised 50% of ticket sales will be reinvested into The Granary to support more music events in the future.
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NBC News
10 hours ago
- NBC News
Bryan Cranston had the sweetest reaction to praise for daughter's work on ‘The Pitt'
The highest compliment Bryan Cranston can receive has nothing to do with his own acting career. 'The Studio' star was a proud dad on TODAY on June 10 when asked about his daughter and fellow actor Taylor Dearden. She received a host of accolades earlier this year for her performance as Dr. Melissa King on the inaugural season of Max's acclaimed hospital drama ' The Pitt.' 'Well, Taylor is a wonderful, hard-working actor,' Cranston said. 'She grew up in this business with my wife and I being actors. And so, we're so proud of her.' Dearden is the only child of Cranston, 69, and his wife of over 35 years, actor Robin Dearden. The younger Dearden's first television appearance came in a role in a 2010 episode of the legendary show 'Breaking Bad' starring Cranston. She also appeared in Netflix's 'American Vandal' in 2018 and three episodes of the Apple TV+ drama 'For All Mankind' in 2022. 'When I hear praise for Taylor's work on 'The Pitt,' it means more to me than anything anyone could ever say to me about my work,' Cranston told Craig Melvin, who is a father of two. 'You know, you're a proud dad. And I'm OK. I could retire after you hear that.' Dearden plays a young resident with a sister who has autism on 'The Pitt,' which details a chaotic and traumatic day in an emergency room at a Pittsburgh trauma center. It's the first day on the job for Dearden's character, who is neurodivergent. In real life, Dearden is neurodivergent, which she spoke about with NPR in April in connection to her role. 'I told them that I relate to this character because I see a lot of the neurodivergent parts of Mel as something I experience all the time,' she said about the show's creator, R. Scott Gemmill, and executive producer John Wells. She said Wells asked if she was comfortable sharing that part of herself in the role. 'And I realized it's, like, you know, I can mask only so much, and I'm really ready for people to know,' she told NPR. 'I tell everyone I meet because there are certain social behaviors that might seem odd. And so I usually have to tell everyone I meet, like, in case I do this, just so you know, it's not on purpose. So it was great for them to let it be my decision completely. I feel like it's the right move.' Watching his daughter's career blossom and spending time with family is what led Cranston to declare in January 2024 that he's planning to ' hit the pause button ' on his own career. He clarified previous rumors that he had been planning to retire by saying on TODAY that he more just wants to take a break to spend time with his wife and pursue other interests. 'I've been married to the best person in the world for 35 years,' Cranston said at the time. 'But she has been the 'plus one' in this industry, right, and I want to change that. I want to move that out of that kind of imbalance and go away with her and just kind of … she's looking forward to having me back, and not having to follow me around.'
New Statesman
2 days ago
- New Statesman
The revenge of the young male novelist
Photo by Larry Ellis/Express/Getty Images Tales of Cruising London: Sex on the Heath and Other Places, by James Hatcher. All Google searches led to Tales of Cruising London: Sex on the Heath and Other Places, by James Hatcher. It was the only book I could find, but it was not the book I wanted. It was a book 'about men, about sex, and about himself'; I wanted a book about myself. At the time that meant young, male, and at least provisionally straight. Finer search terms than 'young male sex novel', of course, would have turned up much smarter matches. The canon itself largely comprises young male sex novels. Even our most revered critic James Wood remembers his Penguin Modern Classics 'seething like porn'. With hindsight, names like Byron, Lawrence, and Roth are obvious. Less obvious, however, are the equivalent contemporary names. Critics have been scratching their heads about where the literary dude went for some time now, and all the while the numbers seem to show a declining pool of reading dudes. In 2021, Megan Nolan wondered if men lacked the 'cool, sexy, gunslinger' figure that once lured them to fiction. 'Lots of agonising' went into Johanna Thomas-Corr's June 2022 New Statesman piece on this subject, which concluded that we should 'make room for genuine mischief and mess, experimentation and individuality'. As well as the straightforwardly literary, these pieces detect something sociological at stake too: a sense that young men are not being given the cultural mirror they need to inspect, understand and organise themselves. Lately the itch has gotten hotter. In March, Compact magazine published an article titled 'The Vanishing White Male Writer'. For that cohort, Jacob Savage wrote, 'the doors shut' in the 2010s, and never reopened. In April, novelist and critic Jude Cook announced his founding of new press that would look for young male voices. As Cook told me: 'If you go to your Foyle's or Waterstone's fiction table it's a sort of 80-20 split, and the men that do appear got published 30 or 40 years ago.' There's no deliberate plot against men, but there is an 'affinity bias', since publishing is 'a female-dominated business'. As it sometimes can, 'the discourse,' following the announcement, 'got slightly out of hand'. An agent named a Rising Star by Bookseller wrote that 'publishing truly trolls itself'. Cook pointed out to me that Bookseller's 10 fiction picks for the same month included zero male authors. However greatly exaggerated the death (or murder, or suicide) of literary man has been, for two months at least it seems all the young dudes are back in town. My teen self would have thrilled at the Spring-Summer 25 collection. Six new novels are out in May and June, mostly debuts, by authors in and around their thirties. So: if there is a crisis of literary masculinity – or, indeed, a crisis of masculinity itself – are these novels any salvation? The writers in question hail from both flanks of the pond, and come with some amusingly familiar Atlantic differences. The stateside authors have penned thinkpieces on the state of publishing, have been compared by their peers to Woolf, Tolstoy and Hemingway, and have arrived enterprisingly at an unambitious term for the movement they now represent: 'The New Romanticism'. One wrote his novel explicitly to reverse civilisational decline explicitly by restoring the Novel of Ideas. By contrast, one of the British authors told me he 'had absolutely no ideas' and warned 'there's a lot of guff in there'. The other agreed: 'No, I've not yet stitched together a civilisational project with which to justify my literary efforts.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe But it's not like you can dodge the culture wars either way. Cancel culture drives half the plots. In different books, students are 'pronoun people… with hair the colour of toilet cleanser', hold placards 'loudly disavowing their parents, or their relationship to the means of production, or their genitals', and hound a professor to suicide for sleeping with one he taught. How, formally, have the novels responded to this keenly felt political presence? Two of the six exhibit mid-century mannish conventions. Noah Kumin (otherwise best known as the founder of the Mars Review of Books, an iconoclastic and self-consciously countercultural New York literary magazine) has written Stop All the Clocks, a pulpish mystery thriller with AI and Elizabethan poetry thrown in. And Oxford academic Thomas Peermohamed Lambert's Shibboleth delivers an English comic campus novel. The latter, perhaps tellingly in a band of green authors, is at once the most obedient and the most finished of these books. If it seeks comparisons to Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis quite knowingly, it seeks them quite successfully too. Then we have two books resembling late-20th-century American 'everything novels', of near-Victorian scale. English teacher John Pistelli's Major Arcana is a well-told ricochet that starts with a vibrant suicide. Three-pieces-a-week political columnist Ross Barkan's unflaggingly bright New York saga Glass Century involves three generations of a family, five decades of world events, and 600 pages. These two contains the half-dozen's highest descriptive and emotional moments – and not just because they are the only ones unabashed about trying for them. Lastly, there are two brief, tentative novels that you could imagine poised shyly at the edge of an otherwise all-female contemporary shelf. Despite their smaller descriptive milieus, Dimes Square playwright Matthew Gasda's daringly delicate The Sleepers and critic Leo Robson's delicately daring The Boys feel the most timely. Where the beefy works flaunt canonically angry ids – there are ravenous iPad fetish porn binges in Major Arcana and more than one ankle-trousered couch quickie in Glass Century – the slim novels offer something meeker. The central romance of The Boys never repeats or surpasses a chaste first kiss. The Sleepers is bleaker still: a loveless boyfriend loses erections as his girlfriend turns away from him and to her phone, and apologises 'like a little boy' after confessing his porn habit. 'What do you want me to say?' he asks. 'I watch porn and am sad and repressed and depressed.' Characters are also nervous to lose themselves in aesthetic experience. The Boys justifies a moment of poetic rapture on both sides: before, the character explicitly reminds himself to notice a moment of profundity; after, 'I was soon shaken out of my reverie.' Literate characters who airily cite names like Plato, Wilde, and Shakespeare now come with disclaimers acknowledging their hopeless eccentricity. You sense some anxiety that literary man is unwelcome even at the peripheries of culture. Last time this issue flared up, the New Statesman's correspondent suggested that the 'financial, reputational or sexual' dividends of literary stardom had dried up. And it is true that these books are out on small presses after their writers made their names through other channels; they achieved eminence as political columnists, academics, playwrights, scenesters, salonnieres, and editors. It is also true that only a rare young penman will find intelligent and ambitious young Tina Browns 'swept off [their] feet' by a 'literary lothario' (the fortune of the young Amis, whose ghost shadows all these debates). Actually, a likely candidate for genuine literary status is BookTokker and Tuber Jack Edwards, who told me how posting one short video to his hundreds of thousands of followers moved an obscure Dostoevsky novella, White Nights, from the back rooms to the shop windows of bookshops. But laments for literary lad don't just mourn individual glory. Flick through the catalogue of a writer who has asked where literary man went, and you are quite likely to find he has also asked where bohemia went. Today's sensitive souls know well that they missed a life where their odd passion was a normal hobby by just a few decades. As Bertrand Russell said, discussing youths or artistic natures, 'Very few men can be genuinely happy in a life involving continual self-assertion against the scepticism of the mass of mankind, unless they can shut themselves up in a coterie and forget the cold outer world.' American novelist John Updike claimed not to write for ego: 'I think of it more as innocence. A writer must be in some way innocent.' We might raise an eyebrow at this, from the highly successful and famously intrusive chronicler of human closeness. Even David Foster Wallace, the totem effigy of literary chauvinism, denounced Updike as a 'phallocrat'. But if we doubt such innocence of Updike, pronouncing as he was at the flushest height of fiction's postwar heyday, we might believe it of these new novelists, writing as they are and when they are. Without a promise of glory, and facing general scepticism, they have written from pure motives. They are novelists as Updike defined them: 'only a reader who was so excited that he tried to imitate and give back the bliss that he enjoyed'. So it may be no bad thing if none of these novels quite fetches the reviews Wallace's masterpiece Infinite Jest did ('the plaques and citations can now be put in escrow. … it's as though Wittgenstein has gone on Jeopardy!'). These guys want to start a moment, not end one. They more want to write novels than be novelists. It is hard to say what relief these books might bring to a societal masculinity crisis, but in composing them their authors have displayed at least the two simple virtues Updike wanted to claim for himself: 'a love of what is, and a wish to make a thing'. [See also: The decline of the Literary Bloke] Related
Scotsman
30-05-2025
- Scotsman
Theatre reviews: Tongue Twister Shades of Shadows Saria Callas
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Tongue Twister, North Edinburgh Arts Centre ★★★★ Grown Ups, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★ Shades of Shadows, The Studio, Edinburgh ★★★★ Saria Callas, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★ It's Children's Festival time; and at the sparkling new North Edinburgh Arts Centre, one of Scotland's leading makers of theatre for children, Greg Sinclair, is rolling out his latest show Tongue Twister. It's a remarkable show at many levels, both because it uses and reflects on language in ways that international theatre for children often tends to avoid, and because of the lavish, surreal energy of its visual and physical response to that verbal content. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Tongue Twister | Imaginate Sinclair begins by telling us that he has been fascinated by tongue twisters ever since since his grandad taught him to say 'She sells sea shells on the sea shore"; and on designer Karen Tennant's luminous stage - backed by two huge sun-like circles in which words occasionally appear - he runs through a series of wild and hilarious visual variations on the theme, rolling around the stage in great frothy layers of sea-blue and white fabric. He goes on to to introduce tongue twisters in a dozen different languages, from Japanese and Swahili to Gaelic, riffing merrily, for example, on images suggested by the French tongue-twister 'dans ta tente ta tante t'attend'. In the end, what Sinclair and his team create is a glorious 50 minute tribute to that wonderful, universal, playful moment when human beings pause in the grown-up business of dealing with the content of language, and begin to amuse themselves by toying with the forms of it. And Tongue Twister not only celebrates that moment, but explodes it into whole episodes of visual and verbal silliness, as wild and surreal as they are funny, and joyfully human. Grown Ups | Imaginate If Greg Sinclair is a children's theatre maker who works by effectively becoming a child for the length of the show, I was also struck by two EICF shows, this week, which invited children to laugh (which they did, most heartily) at the sight of adults making a complete hash of being grown up. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Grown Ups, by the Compagnie Barbarie and Bronks of Belgium, is a slightly overlong but brilliantly staged piece pf slapstick about a team of four grown women failing to cope with a series of mysterious water leaks onto the stage. Shades of Shadows at The Studio, meanwhile - by Tangram Collective of France and Germany - is an exceptionally beautiful and clever shadow-play piece about two women trying to sit down for a cup of tea together, that had the children in the audience chortling with pleasure, for a blissful 45 minutes. Shades of Shadows | Florian Feisel And out beyond the children's festival, this week's Play, Pie and Pint drama came as a harsh reminder of how repressive societies can simply forbid essential forms of play and creativity, including those as basic as singing and dancing. In Sara Amini's powerful but awkwardly structured monologue, Saria Callas, she plays an Iranian woman brought up under the repressive rules of the Islamic Republic, yet as rebellious as any teenage girl, and desperate to become a singer. As an adult, and a single mother in London, she finds that her beloved son has inherited her love of performance, and - like her - wants the freedom to express himself as he is, whatever the cost. And although Saria's story takes a while to reach this crisis-point, there's no doubting the tremendous strength and charisma of Amini's performance, as a woman not only inspired by the greatest singers of both Iranian and European culture, but fully capable of making the same kind of impact on an audience, given half a chance.
