lemonwade

Movies: I hear good things about Julia Roberts and Lucas Hedges in “Ben Is Back,” but my pick for the weekend is “Mary Queen of Scots.” TV/Streaming: “Blue Planet” is now on Netflix. “Road to Christmas” is the latest holiday fare from Hallmark. Music: The best-selling albums of 2018 are “The Greatest Showman,” “A Star is Born,” and “Hamilton.” Books: Can’t wait to catch up with Rebecca Makkai’s much-lauded novel, “The Great Believers.” Sports: I’m thrilled Robinson Cano is coming back to New York, for the Mets, though he’s on the down swing of his career. Finally: Two-and-a-half weeks until Christmas and I’ve only dissed the holiday once!

Kendrick Lamar leads the nominations for the 61st annual Grammy Awards, unveiled Friday morning. He earned a total of seven nominations, including album of the year for the Black Panther soundtrack. That album’s song “All the Stars,” written by Lamar and SZA, also is up for record of the year, song of the year, best rap/sung performance and best song written for visual media. Lamar also Read more »

My friend Michael Musto saw Broadway’s “The Cher Show” and writes: ‘While Chas Bono is represented in the show—as a baby and also referenced as a growing child, who Cher wishes Sonny would let her spend more time with—you never learn that Chas came out as a lesbian and later transitioned as Chaz. Is Broadway trying to eradicate trans existence, like Trump is? I asked Chaz’s publicist why Chaz has such low visibility in the show and he replied, “No idea.” I also asked a spokesperson for the production for a comment, and she replied, “The creative team behind The Cher Show feel it is Chaz’s story to tell.”

The Art Newspaper reports: ‘The Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson is bringing ice blocks harvested off the coast of Greenland to central London. Ice Watch, which was first installed in Copenhagen in 2014, followed by Paris in 2015, consists of pieces of glacier that slowly melt to “make scientific data explicit, so we can feel it”, Eliasson says. “The idea is to make tangible what on earth is going on or what is going on with Earth.”’

Jonathan Jones writes: ‘The color of the year comes as a huge relief. I might have predicted sewer-water grey or perhaps the livid yellow of the high-visibility vests worn by France’s gilets jaunes movement, a color that screams distress like an Edvard Munch painting. From a Britain approaching the black hole of no deal Brexit to Malibu’s ashen burnt-out villas, the hues of these uncanny times must surely be disturbing. Not so, claims Pantone, the authority on color for the design industry. Today it has announced that the color of the year for 2019 is a kind of muted terracotta or pastel desert adobe, the sort of tempered earthen tone that might well have graced floors and walls in those Californian homes before they were devastated by November’s wildfires.’

From Beyoncé and Jay’s Louvre takeover to Troye Sivan’s sweaty warehouse reverie to CupcakKe’s gloriously NSFW dildo party, these are the 25 visuals that Pitchfork couldn’t look away from this year.

David Shulman writes: ‘Peter van Ham’s Alchi, the third volume of a monumental trilogy published by Hirmer on the Buddhist art of western Tibet, must be one of the finest art books ever produced. Its subject, the site of Alchi, sits on the bank of the Indus River in Ladakh, in the high mountain ranges to the east in what is now the Indian state of Kashmir, some thirty-five miles northwest of the capital city of Leh. Unlike Guge, the subject of van Ham’s second volume, Alchi is relatively accessible—good roads now connect Alchi to Leh and (a little less smoothly) to the haunting monastery of Lamayuru, still farther to the north and west.’