ordinary

Steve Messam is known for his ephemeral large-scale site-specific installations — often at historical or architectural relics — that prompt the viewer to reimagine the everyday. Spikes in different shades created with inflatable hand-stitched fabric protrude from his works. The artist was in India for the Madras Art Weekend, where he created an autorickshaw with long inflatable purple spikes shooting out from its interiors. Earlier this year, during the Mumbai Urban Art Festival organised to mark the 150th anniversary…

"With modern times often full of heaviness and darkness, how do we find the strength to survive and grow?" singer-songwriter asks Valerie June, an expert at covers, takes on latter-day Duran Duran with her very own rendition of “Ordinary World.” While many artists covering songs tend to stay true to the original, June’s version is more stripped-down, her stark vocals contorting around the rhythm to emphasize the meaning of the Nineties anthem: Persisting through darkness.…

There is a houseplant, the hanging saxifrage, that in German is known – or used to be known – as Judenbart, “Jew’s beard”. This is not to be confused with the species of tradescantia still known in English as “the wandering Jew” – Google it, and you will find articles of advice for gardeners with unselfconscious titles such as “methods for the control of wandering Jew”. The Judenbart is mentioned twice in Walter Kempowski’s An Ordinary Youth, first published in 1971 and now appearing for the first time in English…

Credit: Shutterstock/Macrovector Organized crime casts a long shadow, driving violence and an illicit economy. But our research, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, has uncovered some more subtle dimensions to its influence, too. We've found that organized crime can undermine the civic honesty of ordinary, law abiding people. …

Ordinary Human Failings is a considerably more interesting book than it claims to be. It’s pitched as a procedural thriller of sorts – an unsolved murder, the cops closing in, an ambitious journalist snooping around. While there may be a depressing commercial logic to this framing, it does the novel scant justice; those plot elements amount to little more than a deftly handled framing device. Beyond lies a subtle, accomplished and lyrical study of familial and intergenerational despair, a quiet book about quiet lives. And…

Megan Nolan’s lauded debut novel, which excavated with painful precision the interior life of a young woman beholden to a toxic partner, was called Acts of Desperation. Her follow-up could share the same title: in Ordinary Human Failings, the Irish-born, London-based author and journalist proves desperation is her special subject.Her canvas, however, is considerably wider this time – a welcome development – and Nolan paints a horribly compelling, more narrative-driven tale. It begins in 90s London with a young tabloid…

As It Happens6:09Canadian photographer captures extraordinary beauty of ordinary pigeons with award-winning shotLiron Gertsman usually doesn't bother taking pictures of pigeons.But when he spotted a pair of them preening each other affectionately in White Rock, B.C. — their iridescent green and purple feathers shimmering in the sunlight — he was moved to take out his camera. "I definitely overlooked pigeons for a while. But that changed when I captured this picture because I just saw them shining in a new light," the…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeHilary Swank finds a renewed sense of purpose in the first official trailer for her forthcoming film Ordinary Angels.Based on a true story, the poignant movie sees Swank lead as Sharon, a struggling hairdresser who becomes invested in helping a recently widowed father, Ed (Alan Ritchson), raise his two young daughters. Shortly after his wife’s death, Ed’s youngest becomes critically…

It was a brazen case of daylight robbery. In 1985, a couple walked into an art gallery on the campus of the University of Arizona and left 15 minutes later with a rolled-up Willem de Kooning shoved up the man’s jacket. In 2017, the painting was finally recovered – not by the FBI, but by a trio of house clearance guys in New Mexico. It had been hanging for 30 years on the bedroom wall of retired teachers Rita and Jerry Alter.How an ordinary couple like the Alters pulled off one of the biggest art heists of the 20th century…

This hybrid book, which is not quite a memoir and not quite a conceptually linked essay collection, begins with the death of a young Irish woman called Grace Farrell, whose body was discovered outside St Brigid’s Church in Manhattan’s East Village on 20 February 2011. Having arrived in New York from Ireland in 1993 with the dream of becoming an artist, Farrell was 35, homeless, and an alcoholic when she froze to death in an alcove of the church on Avenue B on the coldest night of the year.Carmel McMahon came to New York a…