Photos show stars embracing art-inspired fashion at the 2026 Met Gala - St. Albert Gazette

The woodland is stuck to our skin. Sound designers Elena Peña and Dave Price are hunched next to me, burying a microphone into mossy ground. Composer Dom Coyote is listening on headphones, crunching out a rhythm with his boot before shucking his shoes for a subtler sound. “It’s got to be socks off, Dom,” says Price. Coyote obliges, the balls of his feet soon covered in dead conifer needles. “Do you wish you’d had a pedicure now?” Peña asks. It’s a short drive from Bristol to this patch on the Mendip Hills, where pine cones and rowan berries scatter at the entrance to the trees. We’re on the hunt for sounds to orchestrate a staging of Max Porter’s novel Lanny. The adaptation by Somerset-based Bea Roberts moves the spectral story of a lost boy and a mulch-guzzling creature from commuting-distance-to-London to commuting-distance-to-Bristol, with director Nancy Medina wanting the show’s sound to exist within the city’s historical music scene. “A kind of trip-hop world,” says Coyote, who is exploring this idea by replacing electronic beats with those of the natural world. “So we need to go and play the forest.” Every sun-dappled object becomes an instrument.

Ed Gamble does not like seeing himself on screen. “I know a lot of comics who struggle with watching themselves,” he says. “No one should be having to look at their own face so much. It feels simultaneously arrogant and also the most self-flagellating thing you can do.”Unfortunately for him, he is inescapable. Gamble presents the BBC’s wildly successful companion show to the Traitors, The Traitors: Uncloaked, along with the hugely popular podcast Off Menu, with the comedian and current Celebrity Traitors contestant James Acaster. Over the summer, Gamble hosted a new show, Unacceptable, in which comedians try to stand up their worst opinions – a format produced by Romesh Ranganathan, surely the only comic with a heavier workload than Gamble. Another series starts next month. A special for Amazon Prime, based on Gamble’s last two standup tours, will also be available this month. He is, of course, grateful and delighted about all this. It’s a long time since I’ve met someone so self-aware and willing to acknowledge their many privileges without a hint of chippiness. Lord and lady of the castle … Gamble with Celebrity Traitors host Claudia Winkleman.

a tiny handbag for your smartphoneThere’s now room for your AirPods, chapstick, and car key fob on the back of your phone, thanks to a stretchy silicone pocket by Los Angeles-based Ninja Labs. The company has introduced a MagSafe version of its Flex Pouch, a small, expandable compartment that attaches magnetically to compatible smartphones. It can be pulled off whenever you want, turning an ordinary phone into a tiny, stretchy handbag that’s ready to hold all the little things that tend to disappear into our pockets. The pouch can accommodate anything from a single credit card to a thick stack of twenty, according to the company. Lip gloss and wireless earbuds can be squeezed inside, along with a handful of loose change. The contents press against the soft silicone, creating a lumpy silhouette that changes depending on what’s packed inside. Empty it out, and the pocket shrinks back down.images courtesy Ninja Labsmemory silicone stretches to twice its original sizeThe design relies on Ninja Labs’ proprietary silicone blend, which can stretch to twice its original size before returning to its familiar shape.

We recommend titles on fiber art, weaving, and textiles, plus Megan O’Grady on a new John Berger biography. So much has been said about John Berger over the past five decades that it almost feels trite to pile on. You know the familiar takeaways: that the critic and novelist taught us how to look and pay attention, believed art belongs to the people, exposed how the male gaze shapes our perception. So, it’s especially astounding that a new biography by Tom Overton has managed to both capture the scope of Berger’s influence and reframe him, first and foremost, as human. Author Megan O’Grady, who reflects on many of the same questions as Berger in her recent book How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, penned a sensitive review of the biography and its approach to addressing the complex personal life of this near-mythologized figure. It’s a poignant, refreshing read, and reminds me of the conversation around the sanctification of artists and writers like James Baldwin, whose work gets flattened in the process. In fact, how we tell the story of an artist’s life (and afterlife) just might be our primary preoccupation this month.

Hundreds protested at Colombia’s national museum in Bogotá this weekend, days after the country’s far-right government ordered the removal of objects addressing political violence, women’s rights, and LGBTQ+ history — including a rainbow Pride Flag — in a move straight out of the Trumpian playbook. Inside the museum, images taken by locals showed stripped-down gallery walls bearing the haunting silhouettes of dismantled pamphlets and photographs; at the entrance, rows of police in riot gear stood at the ready to suppress demonstrators with water cannons and stun grenades. Under the order of President Abelardo De La Espriella, approximately 30 artworks referencing LGBTQ+ and feminist movements, victims of state violence, and the “Acuerdo de Paz,” the 2016 peace negotiations between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the government, were removed from display at the Museo Nacional de Colombia last week.

‘I’d like to have known her that bit longer, really. Those eight years went very, very quickly. I loved the child. I lost her. And that seemed to me to be the end of everything really, when she’d gone.”Ray Lee, now 90, lost his daughter Anne on 21 October 1966. It was the day her primary school, along with several surrounding houses, in Aberfan was engulfed by an estimated 100,000 tonnes of slurry from one of the colliery spoil tips that overshadowed the Welsh mining village. Anne was one of 116 children killed, alongside 28 adults.‘It seemed to be the end of everything’ … Ray Lee, who lost his daughter Anne in the disaster. Photograph: BBC Studios/Mei WilliamsGaynor Madgwick (nee Minett) was in the same school and was the same age as Anne when the disaster struck, but she was catapulted back to the far wall by the initial impact and, although severely injured, survived. Her grandfather dug her out. When she asked her father that evening, in hospital, where her brother and sister were, he told her they had both gone to heaven. Marlene Gerlach remembers screaming and screaming for her three children across the unrecognisable school site. They all survived.