How has Artemis II landed in pop culture? - CBC

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There have been a fair few Resurrection Symphonies this year, and a positive glut on disc, but Antonio Pappano has form with Mahler and the London Symphony Orchestra can be relied upon to follow where he leads. First, though, the UK premiere of a new work by Dai Fujikura that had precisely nothing to do with the main event but was no less interesting for that. Amber Alchemy, commissioned to celebrate the centenary of Nomura Holdings, was inspired by the beehives atop the Japanese financial company’s London offices. In his programme note, the composer expressed his intention to evoke rather than illustrate, yet it was hard to ignore the orchestral buzz that underpinned much of this engaging 10-minute work. Quivering strings and a shimmer of vibraphones opened proceedings with striking instrumental gestures trailing off in flickering diminuendos. Pappano and the LSO brought a commendable clarity to Fujikura’s intricately interwoven lines, contrasting the music’s romantic outward sweep with its apian inner restlessness. Intention to evoke rather than illustrate… Dai Fujikura with Antonio Pappano at the UK premiere of his Amber Alchemy.

Cinema halls – or dream palaces, as they’re affectionately called – offer a retreat into the realm of make-believe, and everyday drudgery is left at the door. Though set within a single-screen theatre in the Argentinian city of Córdoba, Ramiro Sonzini and Ezequiel Salinas’s hypnotic film invokes a more porous relationship between the screen and its audience. Here, the messiness of life beguilingly sneaks into this domain of fantasies, blurring the borders between public and private spaces. While the luminous black-and-white cinematography lends a dreamy fuzziness to the images, the narrative concerns are grounded in thorny economic realities. A film projectionist at his local cinema called Pelu (Octavio Bertone) is reassigned to the post of a night watchman due to budget cuts at the city hall. The cinema soon becomes his literal refuge: he moves out of his cramped rented flat and secretly takes up occupation at his workplace. He then welcomes a horde of other outsiders, including his unemployed roommate, an ageing drifter and a sex worker who livestreams her erotic shows from the cinema.

“Charles Manson once wrote me a letter saying, ‘If I was as powerful as you claim then you wouldn’t be here,’” Ed Sanders tells me over a video call, savouring the menace in that sentence. Sanders is an American maverick; a musician, poet, activist, journalist and author whose greatest hit remains his bestselling 1971 book The Family, in which he chronicled the lives, crimes and trials of Manson and his followers. Sanders was well placed to report on crazed hippies, having played a pivotal role in launching the US counterculture – though he very much espoused peace, love and consciousness-raising, rather than Manson’s apocalyptic worldview. “I’ve always been a peacenik,” says Sanders. “I got locked in a cell in 1961 for protesting against nuclear armed submarines, and today I’m protesting against the Trumpster. I don’t subscribe to apathy and nihilism.”Aged 87, Sanders is speaking with me as Fugs Film!, a feature-length documentary about the Fugs, the offbeat folk-garage-psych band Sanders initially led from 1964-69, and re-formed in the 1980s, gets its UK premiere this week. “I don’t do many interviews,” he notes. “I’m constantly approached by people requesting them.