The musical legacy of Ken Russell: composers' marble busts made flesh and blood

Robert Powell as Mahler in Ken Russell's 1974 film. Photograph: Alamy

The wild visual imagination of Ken Russell brought classical music to a whole new audience, and made his name notorious in respectable musical circles. His feature films about composers went straight for the jugular – sometimes almost literally, as in his blood-soaked Mahler. He loved the music, but he also loved the sex. He sold the idea of The Music Lovers on the basis that it was a story about a nymphomaniac who fell in love with a homosexual, and sure enough the film opens in a bedroom, with an unbridled romp between Richard Chamberlain as Tchaikovsky and Christopher Gable as his lover.

What music can learn from the movement of birds and fish

Poetry in motion … starlings flock above Brighton's derelict west pier. Photograph: James Warwick/Getty Images

A strange thing about music is the chemistry between the composer and the musician who plays the music. Music written hundreds of years ago comes alive in front of our eyes in the hands of today's musicians. As a composer, as much as I like to be in control, I love the moments and spaces where musicians put themselves in the mix. It creates an incredible chemical reaction – one which I can only imagine as I sit writing the music at my desk.
When I wrote my work for solo viola, Flux, I was particularly interested in the bowing arm – how fast the bow will travel against the strings to make an actual sound, the acceleration of it and the slowing down. Cassette tapes were still around when I was growing up in mid 80s in Japan, and I vividly remember the sensation of the tape winding down when the tape recorder's battery was running down, and how it felt both emotional and romantic listening to the stretched phrases and pitches going down.

Have Harold & Kumar saved the Christmas movie?

Ho ho ho … John Cho and Kal Penn as Harold & Kumar. Photo: Darren Michaels

A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas does to the conventional Christmas movie what Hitler and Stalin did to Poland, except that this time it's a good thing. And it's about time. The Multiplex Christmas Experience has for years now been one of the defacing hallmarks of the season to be jolly, and the parade of horrors is long and deep. Recently we've endured Fred Claus and Four Christmases – both starring the Republican Vince Vaughn, evidently intent on foiling the imaginary war on Christmas singlehandedly – and Affleck and Gandolfini in Surviving Christmas (of which there were, alas, no known survivors), but the rot goes way back. Is anyone nostalgic for Schwarzenegger and Sinbad in Jingle All The Way, or Tim Allen in The Santa Clause?

Saatchi's scathing portrait of the art world: 'Vulgar, Eurotrashy, masturbatory'

Charles Saatchi has launched an incendiary attack on the buyers and dealers who populate the art world. Photograph: James King for the Observer

Charles Saatchi, the most important British art collector of his generation, has launched an incendiary attack on the buyers, dealers and curators who populate the contemporary art world and concluded that many of them have little feeling for art and cannot tell a good artist from a bad one.
Writing in today's Guardian, Saatchi paints a scathing picture of the contemporary art world and says that being a buyer these days "is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar".
He says: "It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, hedgefundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard." Saatchi described the Venice Biennale, scene of the world's biggest contemporary art jamboree, as a place where these people circulate "in a giddy round of glamour-filled socialising, from one swanky party to another".

Charles Saatchi: the hideousness of the art world

Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard. They were found nestling together in their super yachts in Venice for this year's spectacular art biennale. Venice is now firmly on the calendar of this new art world, alongside St Barts at Christmas and St Tropez in August, in a giddy round of glamour-filled socialising, from one swanky party to another.
Artistic credentials are au courant in the important business of being seen as cultured, elegant and, of course, stupendously rich.
Do any of these people actually enjoy looking at art? Or do they simply enjoy having easily recognised, big-brand name pictures, bought ostentatiously in auction rooms at eye-catching prices, to decorate their several homes, floating and otherwise, in an instant demonstration of drop-dead coolth and wealth. Their pleasure is to be found in having their lovely friends measuring the weight of their baubles, and being awestruck.

Rembrandt self-portrait discovered with latest x-ray technology

Art experts excited as high-intensity scan detects hidden self-portrait that confirms painting is by Dutch master

Rembrandt's Old Man with Beard had been dismissed by some as a copy, but the discovery of a hidden self-portrait beneath the paint confirms the attribution, according to expert Ernst van de Wetering. Photograph: Olaf Kraak/EPA

A previously unknown self-portrait by Rembrandt van Rijn has been discovered beneath an oil painting through the latest x-ray technology. Although faint and unfinished, it effectively dispels doubts about the surface picture's attribution to the 17th-century Dutch master, to the excitement of art historians.
The portrait, a monochrome sketch, had been hidden until now by the painting Old Man with Beard, which since the 1960s had been dismissed as a copy by some art specialists, so the discovery is particularly significant.