Culture

Grade: B- There was much to hope for with this game. Its developer is Rocksteady – the studio which gave us the superb Batman: Arkham series. A lot of money was poured into it, and a lot of time (the release date was much delayed). The premise is a winner, too: the Suicide Squad – Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang and King Shark (a massive bloke with a shark’s head) – are dispatched to murder the noisome goody-goodies of the Justice League because, y’know, alien invasion, mind control etc, etc. Who wouldn’t be tickled by the prospect of having Harley slap Wonder Woman upside the head with a giant mallet, or – a boy can dream – seeing King Shark stuff the top half of the Flash in his mouth in one go so just his legs are sticking out?

Bruno Dumont was always a bit off. Initially he was bundled in with the directors of the so-called 'New French Extremity', alongside Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, and Gaspar Noé (a label bearing all the hallmarks of lazy journalese – though all the filmmakers involved did have a predilection for past-the-watershed violence). But then neither did Dumont's output sit easily within social realism. He was not the straightforward heir to Bresson that many critics wanted him to be, despite the seeming austerity and reliance on non-actors in early films such as L’humanité (1999) and Flanders (2006).

In the year 2000, in a small east German town, work began on the construction of an organ that had one purpose: to perform John Cage’s ORGAN2/ASLSP (1987) for precisely 639 years. The late avant-garde composer’s only instruction for the piece was to play the piece ‘as slowly as possible’. And so in 2001 – the instrument finally ready – the world’s longest organ recital began in St Burchardi church, Halberstadt, with a rest lasting 17 months before the first chord commenced droning in 2003. It consisted of two G sharps and a B. Two weeks ago, I – along with several hundred others – made the pilgrimage to the town to witness the work’s latest chord change.

In the wake of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s exhibition Black Atlantic about its founder’s ties to the slave trade comes the Royal Academy’s Entangled Pasts, less of a mea culpa than an examination of conscience by an institution which, although hailed by its first president Sir Joshua Reynolds as an ‘ornament’ of Empire, was innocent of direct links to slavery.

Poetry is politics in the Yemen. When the last Imam of Yemen, who was also the hereditary ruler, was deposed in a coup in 1962, it was a local poet who announced the change of regime on the radio, in verse of course. And the current al-Houthi regime in the north of the country, like all its predecessors, asserts its legitimacy, confounds its enemies and rallies its supporters through poetry. As an aspect of their cause, they have consciously avoided high-Arabic poetry – a literate, urban cultural form – and have made use of the zamil tradition, which immediately speaks not of the palaces of emirs and princes, but takes the listener to sit beside the farmers and Bedouin shepherds in the villages and hills.