The sale included more than 500 paintings, books and collectibles found at Peter Firmin's home.
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Bagpuss creator's artwork sells for £400k at auctionBBC Culture
The Shards brings the cocaine-addled teens of a 1980s prep school to life with a cast of newcomers and a heavy dose of sleaze One of the first things Ryan Murphy’s TV adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards will make you ask is: where the hell are these kids’ parents? The answer is simple. This is Los Angeles in 1981, and these fabulously benumbed kids aren’t being helicopter-parented. They’re going to parties, drinking whiskey, listening to Ultravox’s Vienna on repeat and doing copious amounts of cocaine. It’s a complete vision of Ellis’s dully hedonistic America. The FX series follows a character named Bret Ellis – a thinly-coded version of the author – in senior year at an exclusive Los Angeles prep school whose controlled, Joan Didion-coded world begins to unravel with the arrival of enigmatic transfer student Robert Mallory. At the same time, in the post-Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer era, a serial killer known as The Trawler draws ever closer to Ellis and his increasingly paranoid circle of friends. Ellis (the real one) first released his autofictional story The Shards as a serialized podcast between 2020 and 2021 before expanding it into a novel in 2023. Continue reading...
His classic car is in a workshop being restored, but Sheeran admits it was not insured.
Switch 2, PlayStation 5, PC; House House The creators of Untitled Goose Game return with an online, open-world adventure that delivers slapstick silliness and bucolic majesty in nearly equal measure Radiant sunsets glinting on lapping waves; bushland valleys that beckon with secrets; modernist buildings sat atop craggy ridges: Big Walk’s setting is as arresting as it is beguiling – a kind of architectural fever dream transplanted to a handsome Australian wilderness – but it is the images created by players that lodge deepest in the mind. Here’s one that has stuck with me: in the black of night, cicadas kicking up an almighty din, I had lost my partner. Panic. Despair. Fear. Then, there in the far distance, I saw him signalling in my direction. He was relentlessly spamming a gigantic, ball-shaped lamp on and off, the ground around him flicking from inky dark to warm pastel pink and back again, like a single Christmas light blinking from afar. This kind of encounter is common in Big Walk, the brilliant and whimsical new online co-op puzzler from House House, the Melbourne-based studio behind the 2019 viral hit, Untitled Goose Game. Rather than playing as a honking, mischief-making goose as you do in that game, you are a bug-eyed, gangly limbed kind of bird person (think Pingu as drawn by Mondrian) for whom getting separated from your mates is all part of the fun. That’s somewhat because this rugged terrain is dense with vegetation and cliffs to fall down, and also because the game makes ingenious use of proximity and direction-based voice audio. Step out of earshot of your party and you will find it difficult to call for one another (unless, of course, you’ve picked up a Fisher-Price-like walkie-talkie). Continue reading...