Carl Craig on the staying power of techno four decades on
Now he might not be a household name, but the Detroit producer, DJ, and record label creator Carl Craig is a key figure in electronic music.
A new documentary about his 35-year career called 'Desire' chronicles the life of the influential DJ from growing up in Detroit to earning fame and global recognition as a leading figure in the city's techno scene.
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The Guardian
14-05-2025
- The Guardian
Enzo review – Laurent Cantet's swan song is a heartfelt tale of youth and desire
The directors fortnight sidebar of Cannes opens with a heartfelt, urgent drama about youth and desire – and destiny, sexuality and class. It is, effectively, the final movie of the late Laurent Cantet, who died last year. Cantet was working on the screenplay with his longtime collaborator and contemporary, Robin Campillo and it is Campillo who now directs – and brings to the movie his usual intelligence and clarity. It is a story of growing pains and not fitting in and the painful mystery of being young. Enzo is a 16-year-old kid from a privileged background, living in a gorgeous villa with a swimming pool; to the intense chagrin of his maths teacher dad and engineer mum he has decided he wants to quit school and work with his hands on a building site as an apprentice. Meanwhile Enzo's elder brother is poised for a prestigious university career. Enzo is embarrassingly mediocre at the job and clearly it is only his family's standing which prevents him from being fired. His father thinks this is a self-harming affectation which might seriously damage his future; he believes Enzo's talent at drawing means he should apply to art school – a far more acceptable middle-class career path. But of course this only makes stubborn Enzo more determined to tough it out at the building site where his incompetence baffles and annoys everyone. And Enzo is drawn to Vlad, a friendly young Ukrainian guy who is conflicted about not going back home to join the struggle against Russia. Enzo is fascinated by the sheer grownup importance of everything Vlad represents: Vlad has a sense of identity and a dramatic dilemma which is gratifyingly real in both its options: stay in France and do manual labour like a real man – or go home and fight? How much more heroic and magnificent is Vlad's existence, how much more real than silly, muddled, spoiled Enzo's dreary life choices? And Enzo's interest in Vlad is romantic in every other sense. Of course, there's something tragicomic and absurd about poor Enzo, absurd and humiliating in the way teenage yearning often is – and Enzo's dad's suspicion of self-harm turns out to be shrewder than he thought. Campillo and Cantet show us that the agonies of being young and existentially rebellious are not simply shallow and callow: they represent a state of idealism which is poignantly brief, like everything else about youth. It is another powerful, absorbing picture from Campillo and a fitting swan song for Laurent Cantet. Enzo screened at the Cannes film festival
The Guardian
12-05-2025
- The Guardian
Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth review
On the first morning of their holiday together in a remote part of Scotland, 42-year-old Sarah convinces her younger sister, Juliette, to clamber on to the roof of their mobile home for a better phone signal. Juliette has three layers of tinfoil wrapped around her limbs and a tinfoil cone hat plonked on her head before she clocks that she's fallen for a prank. It's a pleasing bit of sibling slapstick in Slags, the new novel from Emma Jane Unsworth about desire, dissatisfaction and the ferocious loyalty of sisters. And sisterhood, as Unsworth writes it here, is an unbreakable connection for which no prank antenna is needed. When Sarah takes Juliette on a Highland road trip for her birthday they find themselves revealing secrets and reckoning with their younger selves. Candid and comic, Slags is Thelma & Louise with a campervan and without a clifftop. There are shades of Fleabag, too, in the fractious sisters, the sexual escapades of one countered by the suburban righteousness of the other. The novel focuses on Sarah, with chapters alternating between her teenage self, obsessing over a teacher in a desperately pining first-person confessional, and the adult woman, who puzzles over the percolations of midlife desire (narrated by an older, omniscient authorial voice). The present-day Sarah is single, sardonic, bored with sobriety. She lives in London, where no one seems to party any more and 'everyone was thinking about their gut health, or their crochet, or the state of the economy'. Juliette, by contrast, is married with children, and lives in Manchester. Her husband, Johnnie, is into ice plunges and Andrew Huberman podcasts. Unsworth is especially merciless in her portrait of a particular kind of modern masculinity, captured here in all its absurdity. 'Longevity seemed pointless,' Sarah reflects, 'when you were as tedious as Johnnie.' Johnnie doesn't have much of a role in the novel, but it's often through the minor characters, those merely glanced at in the rear-view mirror, that Unsworth demonstrates the sharpness of her perceptions. Deanna, Sarah and Juliette's mother, for instance, only periodically swings into view. She is a fleeting memory of neglect – abandoning her young daughters on a broken-down train, stumbling into a party humiliatingly drunk – but Unsworth allows her to cast a long shadow. Later, Sarah reflects more forgivingly on her mother's abortive efforts to escape suburban life and 'the stocks of domesticity'. Suburbia, in general, is efficiently demolished here, reduced to 'bin wars, magnolia tree one-upmanship, brick drives, chest freezers, double garages, weedkiller, Chicken Tonight in Le Creuset, Laura Ashley in perpetuity.' Sarah wants none of it, but her job and her life in the city also leave her empty. Unsworth describes how 'late at night, after video calls with the East Coast of America, she often stayed on as a host, alone, in those abandoned Zoom rooms, her own face staring back at her, the glow of the ring-light as hygge as any wood-burning stove, sipping a glass of something moderately alcoholic, feeling a dystopian peace …' It's not quite loneliness, more a beautiful desolation. 'I don't want to sort my life out,' she tells Juliette during a heated drunken argument. When Juliette protests 'But you feel bad', she replies: 'Only sometimes …' One of Sarah's distinguishing qualities is this lack of clarity about what it is that she desires. She belongs, as she explains, to gen X, that 'lost generation', too young to be old, too old to be millennial, sexually liberated and yet still searching for something. Where Unsworth captured the erratic hedonism of twentysomethings in her 2014 novel Animals and the online dysfunctions of thirtysomethings in 2020's Adults, here she plumbs the muddles of midlife. Sarah is a rare female character: she's not a mother, but neither is she full of fraught questions about fertility or menopause. She is, instead, frank about 'getting her rocks off' and the difficulty of how to do that without the aid of drink or drugs. How to contend with sexual desire is a question for the 15-year-old Sarah, too. She shrugs off unhappy sexual encounters, including an experience of indecent exposure, with a swaggering bravado. How that shapes the adult Sarah's attitude to sex is not straightforward, and there's an intelligence in Unsworth's refusal to present clear cause and effect. Comedy, rather than tragedy, is the response she most often prefers. Perhaps this is symptomatic of the Fleabagification of women's stories – where farce somehow feels more truthful than straight-up trauma. Is comedy a deflection or a pragmatic approach to getting on with things in a world of misunderstanding and confusion? Certainly, Slags culminates in a confrontation that is more chaotic than climactic. But this is an undeniably fun read, the levity often lifted by an underlying sense of sympathy, affection and tenderness. Unsworth is riotous, rewarding company. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth is published by Borough (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Channel 4
07-05-2025
- Channel 4
Carl Craig on the staying power of techno four decades on
Now he might not be a household name, but the Detroit producer, DJ, and record label creator Carl Craig is a key figure in electronic music. A new documentary about his 35-year career called 'Desire' chronicles the life of the influential DJ from growing up in Detroit to earning fame and global recognition as a leading figure in the city's techno scene. A warning this report contains flashing images
