But a little-known stand-up comic who was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and who usually plays to a few hundred people in pubs, will perform at the vast venue in September after persuading management that he could fill the seats.

Eddie Kadi, 26, who moved to the UK aged eight, said: "When I first approached the O2 Arena, they laughed at me and said 'No way'." They suggested that he try to play at its smaller sister venue, indigO2.

The performance at the 2,000-capacity indigO2 ( Read more... )
View full article here

Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction
February 6 - May 9
The Phillips Collection in Washington, USA

More than 125 paintings, drawings, watercolors and sculptures provide a largely unexplored facet of Georgia O'Keeffe's artistic career. Her experimentation with abstract art has generally remained out of the public eye; this exhibition hopes to reveal some of the artist's most radical creations and attempts to explore her role in history as one of America's first abstract ( Read more... )
View full article here

The former frontman for The Jam will receive his award later this month and perform at the event which takes place at the O2 Brixton Academy in south London.

The bash, officially titled the Shockwaves NME Awards 2010, is to be hosted by Jarvis Cocker and will be staged on February 24.

The winner of the Godlike Genius award is chosen by music magazine NME to honour a figure or group who has helped to shape the musical landscape over the years and ( Read more... )
View full article here

The other appears cynical and improvised; it?s hilarious, yes, but in a way that makes you want to wince, or possibly put out your own eyes with the nearest biro.

Obama has a knack for linking the medium to the message. For his huge-spending presidential campaign, he harnessed social networks to make the army of Democrat volunteers across the US feel like a tiny band of carol singers.

And his speech to the Muslim world last Thursday wasn?t merely for his immediate ( Read more... )
View full article here

Jennie and Patricia want to "preserve standards and traditions". So they throw balls for a lot of well-bred girls wearing wedding dresses and pearls. "We have so many multinationals who are here asserting themselves," they explained. "We should have something to be proud of." Thus began Teens and Tiaras, the latest in Channel 4's Cutting Edge series.

Hmm, traditions. I wonder what they mean by that? At one stage, they were asked whether a girl from a council estate ( Read more... )
View full article here

Axl (Fernando Tielve) is a dreamy Spaniard in search of his long-lost father and prone to bouts of binge-drinking that leave his memory wiped come next morning. Vera (Deborah François) is a dark-eyed Belgian beauty who gets involved with a beardy musician (Michiel Huisman) yet somehow contrives not to find out his name. The film's movement is desultory and maddening at times, and the director's reliance on his cast's powers of improvisation is ill-advised; nothing so determinedly shambolic could ( Read more... )
View full article here

A host of rivals to the market-dominating Kindle electronic reader has given newfound hope to publishers that they will finally be able to dictate their own terms after being at the mercy of Amazon.

Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. stable includes publisher Harper-Collins, could hardly contain his glee during an earnings call last week, although the box office success of "Avatar" probably also had something to do with it.

"Without content, the ever larger and flatter screens, the tablets, ( Read more... )
View full article here

This is one of the least offensive ? and few non-libellous ? lines in "Droppin' Names", the most ear-catching track on rapper Dirt Nasty's eponymous album. It's not exactly the kind of music you'd expect to hear on the iTunes of one of the most successful directors of family films in Hollywood.

Of course, it could be a different Chris Columbus whose 4,022 songs have popped up as a shared playlist on iTunes in the crew hotel, the day after my visit to the set of his latest ( Read more... )
View full article here

It was a far cry from the theatre's glory days, when, from the mid-1950s onwards, it pioneered the best of new British writing and set Theatreland alight by staging the first production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger.

Yesterday it was confirmed that the Royal Court has firmly reasserted itself at the vanguard of theatre when it was nominated for 15 prestigious Laurence Olivier Awards, placing it ahead of its subsidised rivals, the Donmar Warehouse and the National Theatre, and the ( Read more... )
View full article here

The week-long Easter festival has been shaken to the core after an apparent suicide attempt by its technical chief and the disappearance of the director amid allegations of a massive fraud totalling over ?2m (£1.7m).

Austrian state prosecutors announced at the weekend that they were investigating eight people connected with the event on suspicion of deception and embezzlement. "We expect our inquiries to take months," a spokesman said. "It involves non-existent companies and offshore bank ( Read more... )
View full article here

Thankfully, there are barbers like Daniel Rouah, an impeccably-dressed Parisian-in-exile on Baker Street, and last year's Gillette Barber of the Year. He appears on television, collects antique shaving paraphernalia, hates beards, and says things like: "It's sexy to see a picture of a woman shaving a man," in a thick French accent. He also gives free shaving lessons to enlighten the British male on the finer points of this tiresome morning ritual.

"Always shave first thing in the morning, ( Read more... )
View full article here

From earlier collections such as Mean Time to a sneak preview of her next volume, The Bees, an exhilarating harvest of 34 poems reveals Duffy as a poet who covers the stormy waterfront of desire, devotion and despair. From distant yearning to wild new passion through absence, boredom and infidelity, to break-ups, grief and solitude, she commands every conjugation in "the syntax of love". Versatile, restless, moving as adroitly between verse-forms as she does between the stages ( Read more... )
View full article here

Celebrity chef Gino D'Acampo and Hollyoaks actor Stuart Manning killed the animal with a knife when they were left without meat during the reality series.

Chief Inspector David Oshannessy, from the RSPCA, said ITV was fined 3,000 Australian dollars (£1,903) and will pay 2,576 dollars (£1,634) in costs.

He said: "It's a reasonable result. It reflects the fact that all animals are protected by the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act.

"The animal was killed ( Read more... )
View full article here

Ghosts. All right, it's not the right word. I don't mean something white and flitting, or an armoured man with his head held under his arm. The presences in Nash-world are something far less defined and less definable. It is haunted all through. Or that's partly it. But I'm not sure that even Nash found the right words for his spell.

In his essay "The Life of the Inanimate Object", he wrote about "the endowment of natural objects, organic but not human, with powers or ( Read more... )
View full article here

Part of the reason for this was simple. Amateur cameraman who are soldiers (rather than professional cameramen attached to a military unit) tend to be too busy shooting with bullets to do it with film as well. So, if you feel that a shot of the YMCA tea van visiting a barracks in County Down was what was missing from your understanding of the greatest global conflict in recent history, you may have been disappointed. And if it wasn't, you probably felt that you had seen shots of blazing German ( Read more... )
View full article here

On one occasion, dining with Duke Ellington at the house of the Queen's cousin, Gerald Lascelles, Dankworth even stepped in at the piano when the Duke found he'd forgotten one of his own tunes halfway through ? not an act many would have been capable of, or dared to do.

With Dankworth's death we see the passing of a generation; men and women who enriched British musical life and wove jazz into the fabric of so many other art forms. One reason he will be so missed and remembered so fondly ( Read more... )
View full article here

The lavish contents of Versace's Italian home at Villa Fontanelle at Moltrasio on Lake Como in Northern Italy went on show at Sotheby's ahead of an auction on 18 March. The auctioneers have recreated rooms from the lakeside property - including his bedroom, complete with giant stone statues of naked Greek pugilists - for the display and sale.

Included in the collection is a painting by Johann Zoffany, depicts Major George Maule, which was thought to have been lost but ( Read more... )
View full article here

But as well as raising hundreds of thousands of pounds, it looks set to reignite the cross-Atlantic charity single war which began when "We Are The World" written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie for famine relief in Ethiopia wiped the floor with Sir Bob's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" a quarter of a century ago.

The American offering this time is a re-recording of that same song sung by Snoop Dogg, Celine Dion and Pussycat Dolls among others: not quite in the same league as the 1985 ( Read more... )
View full article here

Shute wrote wartime aircraft adventures and Ambler produced sophisticated Europe-set 1930s thrillers, but what links them (apart from their former paperback ubiquity) is their ability to tell 20th-century stories filled with enthralling action sequences and characters you care about. This basic storytelling skill lately seems to have become buried within vast self-important volumes, so it's a shock to note the brevity of most Shute and Ambler novels. Like their heroes and heroines, the authors ( Read more... )
View full article here

Almost impossible demands in the hi-tech age, and coming from most artists, they?d sound unbelievably pompous. In the case of the new album from Gil Scott-Heron, however, they?re just about right. (Indeed, at just 28 minutes long, you ought to make time for two back-to-back listens.) The 60-year-old jazz man, who can rightly claim to be a godfather of rap music (along with The Last Poets and Iceberg Slim), has been around since the days when missives such as ?Whitey on the Moon? and ?The Revolution ( Read more... )
View full article here