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Entertainment

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Entertainment

My fiancee, my foreskin and me: the comic who turned adult circumcision into a jaw-dropping show

To be with the woman he loved, Max Olesker had to convert to Orthodox Judaism – which required an unwelcome operation. He relives a painful and sometimes infuriating journey When Max met Eliana at the Edinburgh fringe, the romcom vibes were strong. Shots, songs, falling headlong in love. Less vibey was the conversion Max Olesker had to navigate to marry his Orthodox Jewish beloved. The comedian had always thought of himself as Jewish – when his parents married, his mum converted to a less rigorous branch of Judaism. But to the Beth Din, the rabbinical court, that didn’t count. To be with the w

The Guardian
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Entertainment

‘The output of a lunatic asylum’: what the Bloomsbury group can tell us about mental health

From Virginia Woolf’s horrifying views on eugenics to James Strachey’s seminal translations of Freud, the Bloomsbury set didn’t only experience mental illness, they shaped how society thinks about it ‘As an experience,” Virginia Woolf wrote in 1930, “madness is terrific and not to be sniffed at … In its lava, I still find most of the things I write about.” Woolf’s 1941 suicide by drowning in the River Ouse, her pockets weighted with stones, is usually framed as evidence of her tortured genius. But a new exhibition at Charleston in Lewes radically excavates this narrative while challenging idea

The Guardian
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Entertainment

Andrew Scott drama Elsinore leads British independent film award nominations

Elsinore is in contention for 12 Bifas, including for Scott’s highly praised performance, while Clio Barnard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, Ashley Walters’ Animol and Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care are also recognised Elsinore, the drama in which Andrew Scott plays the actor Ian Charleson as he takes on Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the last months of his life, before he died of Aids in 1990, has emerged as the leading contender for the British independent film awards (Bifas). The film, which is directed by Simon Stone and co-stars Olivia Colman, Billie Piper and Johnny Flynn, received 12 n

The Guardian
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Entertainment

‘His voice was too queer – so they silenced him’: how Spain’s national poet Lorca finally became a gay icon

The significance of the poet and playwright’s homosexuality was repressed in Spain for decades – but a spate of recent work, including the film La Bola Negra, is redressing the balance for a new generation Patricia Langa parades on to an invisible stage in a basement room of Instituto Cervantes in central London, locked into the character of Conchita, a professional mourner loosely based on the sorrowful heroines of Federico García Lorca’s 1936 play, The House of Bernarda Alba. “His voice was too loud, too queer, too alive for those around him, filled with jealousy and hatred,” she tells her i

The Guardian
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Entertainment

Juan Atkins built a cybernetic future for music – but invested it with humanity

The Detroit techno pioneer, who has died aged 64, blended funk and electronics with information-age philosophy to create music of huge power and influence Juan Atkins, the originator of techno who died on 31 October, spent his lifetime translating a fascination with the future into sound. He was the oldest of the founding fathers of techno known as the “Belleville Three”, along with his junior high school friends Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May. He was the first of the trio to buy a Korg MS-10 synthesiser, and also taught the others how to DJ on turntables. His work in the duo Cybotron alongs

The Guardian
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Entertainment

Ghost Town review – the phantoms and lost souls haunting a Japanese city after the 2011 earthquake

Katharine Round’s documentary puts cameras in taxis where drivers and fares reflect on the disaster’s impact and talk of crowds of spectres and disappearing passengers In a manner similar to Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, in which journeying lulls passengers into greater intimacy, this nocturnal taxi odyssey through the tsunami-hit city of Kamaishi on Japan’s east coast clears the road for the subconscious to manifest. Conversations between the drivers and their customers drift back towards the cataclysm of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami with an undertow of grief, loss and absence. But at

The Guardian
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