Big Chill Blog - Sunday 3 August 2008

On Sunday, it's hard to think past the fact that the mythic Leonard Cohen, will be serenading the crowd tonight. But there are plenty of other worthy acts vying for our attention on this final day of the festival, and we have to do something to bide the time. Saturday's bountiful sunshine has been kidnapped by a dirty swathe of cloud, [...]

Now in its fourteenth year, the Malvern valley festival offers a melange of jazz, folk, ambient, dance, comedy and spoken word performances, alongside an art trail, moonlight cinema and Victorian fairground, to name just some of the other attractions Highlights from the Big Chill, Saturday 2 August

Jamie Woon is the first act to grace the Open Air stage on Saturday, and already a change to the programme. [...]

"£150,000 wrapped up, please"

"Yes, hello, I’d like to pay off my mortgage with a pickled fish" isn’t the most likely of banking requests, but then it’s not everyday that somebody has a Damien Hirst trevally-in-formaldehyde worth as much as their house. Darren Walker, a childhood friend of the Leeds-born artist, hopes to make £150,000 from the fish, a gift Hirst made to the Farsely chippy where Hirst’s brother worked, [...]

The Selected Poems of Michael Hofmann are a study of dislocation. From the bitter tenant (“the pubic scrub of this street, I am growing to hate”) to the disenfranchised son struggling with his father (“as though I’d spoken in asides for twenty-five years”), this volume showcases Hofmann’s talent for portraying discord.

Born in Freiburg, Hofmann, who writes in English but “can still play in German” and has lived in England, [...]

Arnold Wesker is one of Britain’s most prolific playwrights, best known for his 1960 trilogy that depicted the struggles of working-class Jewish life. All Things Tire of Themselves is his first poetry collection. Regret, disappointment and love lived are the principal themes of these melancholic meditations, and Wesker sets the tone with an opening admission of artistic inadequacy: “Poets are blessed./The rest of us/Are animals of prose.”

Inadequacy prevails in [...]

Death of a Liberalman

David Mamet’s announcement that he has foresworn “brain-dead liberalism” for a more Hobbesian strain of conservatism (“I do not think that people are basically good at heart”) prompted page three coverage in the Independent and nearly 400 posts on the Village Voice blog, which carried the original article. Amidst the consolatory Chekov extracts and “Welcome home David” back-patting, Jennifer Matsui wrote: “Now that he [...]

If you teach us, do we not learn?Jewish students at Yesodey Hatorah school who boycotted an exam on the Merchant of Venice because they found it anti-Semitic, were backed by their head teacher, despite damaging their key stage 3 assessment results and demoting the school from 1st to 274th place in performance league tables. An ex-teacher of the school blogging on the Talkback message board for the [...]

And so to the 2008 Oscars: best film went to Juno, best actress to Ellen Page for Juno, best actor was Johnny Depp for Sweeney Todd and best supporting actress went to Cate Blanchett for her gender-bending turn as Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. These would have been the results if the public had decided, according to the E-Poll/Reuters survey.

Instead, the Coen brothers came away with [...]