Derek

Screenshot: FXWhat We Do in the Shadows sets its sights on even more absurdity and silliness as the most devious vampires on Staten Island deal with a whole host of new problems. In season four’s cliffhanger ending, we saw Guillermo ask his friend, Derek, to turn him into a vampire. That went... well... watch for yourself. Let’s run it down. We have Guillermo de la Cruz (Harvey Guillén) struggling with his unsuccessful attempt to become a vampire at the end of season four, after having been led on by his master, Nandor…

Neil Bartlett vividly remembers his first glimpse of Derek Jarman’s work: covertly watching the film Sebastiane (Latin dialogue, glistening flesh) on Channel 4 in 1985. “How I managed to do that without my mum and dad finding out,” he marvels. “I was captivated. That’s when Derek became public property – Mary Whitehouse and her cohorts were frothing at the mouth. And my young man’s cultural gaydar went: ‘Oh, what’s this?’”As a painter, writer and film-maker, Jarman was a unique figure in British culture: an icon of the…

Lyndsey McDougall, the singer of Belfast alt-punk band New Pagans, has spent years studying embroidery crafted by Irish women through the 19th and 20th centuries as part of research for her PhD. Through hours spent in the archives at museums and libraries examining centuries-old pieces, McDougall came to understand that the needlework told stories: of mothers raising funds for their families to emigrate and wives creating the material culture for their community’s organisations – and of women flexing their skills for…

JoJo Gomez Okimura was 16 when she first met Stephen “Twitch” Boss at a convention for the hit Fox competition series “So You Think You Can Dance.” She enrolled in Boss’ class and was overjoyed when he called her up onstage to assist him. “I was so nervous, but he made me feel so safe onstage with him,” she says about her first interaction with her idol. “He made me feel seen.” Whether she was auditioning or dancing in class, Gomez Okimura says she felt valued and secure in the “SYTYCD” alum’s presence. Boss had a similar…

Image: LoungeflyThis holiday season Loungefly adds more fairytale glimmer to its collection with a new, sequin-bedecked Disney Princess release. The fandom fashion house and its VP of Creative, Liz DeSilva, revealed to io9 the latest drop in the Disney royalty-inspired line featuring Mulan and chatted with us about the brand’s global impact.Sabina Graves, io9:  I know there’s been at least a few releases in this specific series. Can you tell me a bit about what inspired them? I love that it looks like they’re taking…

Out on the shingled plains of Dungeness, Prospect Cottage is easily spotted: the black clapboard, the yellow paintwork, the John Donne lines written on the gable end. There is the garden, planted with sea kale and driftwood, and in the near distance, the nuclear power station, hulking and grey against the pale Kent sky. Today, as most days, there is also a smattering of visitors, hair wild and coats billowing, here to see the place where Derek Jarman spent the last years of his life.Jarman retreated to this unlikely…

If you were to write a history of your mother, who had left her ancestral home in Kumasi, Ghana, for London, the heartland of the old empire, how might you do it? One option would be to sit her down, as Derek Owusu’s narrator does in the epilogue of his novel Losing the Plot, and ask her direct questions. Yet this approach has limitations: when asked by her son Kwesi whether she was excited to be on the plane that brought her to Britain, the nameless mother replies with a terse “Yeah”. A follow-up question about what she…

In 2020, poet and podcaster Derek Owusu won the Desmond Elliott prize for his debut novel, That Reminds Me, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age narrative about K, a young Ghanaian man who’s grown up in Britain, which Owusu began writing in the wake of a mental breakdown. He now follows it with Losing the Plot, a playfully pointed title for a book that is very much a companion to its predecessor, not least in terms of its category-confounding form.The paragraphs that make up its short, impressionistic chapters often…

Tyson Fury will be stepping into the ring to defend his heavyweight title when he goes toe-to-toe with Derek Chisora III for the third time at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium next month.  The ‘Gypsy King’ is the hot favourite, having won the previous two fights against his opponent. He is also preparing to fight Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk for the undisputed championship early next year. Should Chisora lose, many suspect he will retire. Nonetheless, an upset isn’t off the table.   If you’d like to watch the boxing match…

In Sebastiane, Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress’ 1976 film, the soon-to-be-martyred Roman soldier is warned by his friend Justin to stop fighting against their pagan authorities. “The truth,” Sebastiane responds, “is beautiful”. As they speak, Justin tends to the wounds of the third-century saint in an act of love that has the potential to endanger both of them if they are caught by their tyrannical overseer or their fellow soldiers. This moment of intimacy is luxuriant; where there could be a palpable sense of terror,…