Latest news with #Sharp
Edinburgh Reporter
a day ago
- General
- Edinburgh Reporter
Last chance appeal over dream house cancelled at 11th hour
A last chance appeal by a woman to turn a former bank into a dream home has been cancelled at the 11th hour over an administrative error. Pat Sharp has been fighting to have the former hall, in North Berwick, turned into a retirement home for her and her husband Nigel for eight years after buying it for more than double the asking price. However East Lothian Council's planners have repeatedly rejected applications for the change of use insisting the building has to remain a commercial building in the seaside town centre. Last week Mrs Sharp spoke out publicly for the first time about her fight and heartbreak that her husband, who has Parkinson's Disease, is no longer able to move in. And she said she had no idea what would happen if her latest attempt get permission to convert the building into a house failed at the Local Review Body meeting, scheduled to take place this morning. She said: 'If this fails I don't know what we will do. I spend £100 a month maintaining the gardens of the property and we have invested a lot to maintain and bring the hall itself into a maintained state but I can't go on with it forever.' Mrs Sharp and her husband bought the former bank hall seven years ago for £555,555 with the hope of retiring to the town. The couple had precious memories of time with their granddaughters at the seaside resort after losing their daughter Cheryl to cancer when the girls were very young. Former managing director Nigel, 78, was diagnosed with Parkinson's following his retirement and the hope had been that the house would give him the chance to live in an adapted home in the place they loved. Sadly Nigel is now in full time care and will never be able to live in the house, if it is every approved. Pat said: 'Nigel has been robbed of the chance to spend his final years in what we wanted to be our dream home, looking out over the North Berwick coast and remembering all our wonderful times here. it is devastating.' The Local Review Body was due to meeting this morning to hear the appeal against the latest decision by planners to refuse permission for the change of use of the hall. However late yesterday the council confirmed the meeting had been delayed and would now be held once elected members return from their summer holidays. A spokesperson for East Lothian Council said: 'One of the interested parties was accidentally omitted from our notification process so was not informed of the appeal in time for it to be heard at the Local Review Body meeting on Thursday 19 June. It will be heard at the next available meeting in August. The applicant's agent, interested parties and consultees have all been contacted.' By Marie Sharp Local Democracy Reporter Like this: Like Related
Edinburgh Live
a day ago
- Business
- Edinburgh Live
East Lothian gran's plan to turn bank into her dream home halted over 'admin error'
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info A last chance appeal by a gran to turn a former bank into a dream home has been cancelled at the 11th hour over an administrative error. Pat Sharp has been fighting to have the former hall, in North Berwick, turned into a retirement home for her and her husband Nigel for eight years after buying it for more than double the asking price. However East Lothian Council's planners have repeatedly rejected applications for the change of use insisting the building has to remain a commercial building in the seaside town centre. Last week Mrs Sharp spoke out publicly for the first time about her fight and heartbreak that her husband, who has Parkinson's Disease, is no longer able to move in. And she said she had no idea what would happen if her latest attempt get permission to convert the building into a house failed at the Local Review Body meeting, scheduled to take place this morning. She said: "If this fails I don't know what we will do. I spend £100 a month maintaining the gardens of the property and we have invested a lot to maintain and bring the hall itself into a maintained state but I can't go on with it forever." Mrs Sharp and her husband bought the former bank hall seven years ago for £555,555 with the hope of retiring to the town. The couple had precious memories of time with their granddaughters at the seaside resort after losing their daughter Cheryl to cancer when the girls were very young. Former managing director Nigel, 78, was diagnosed with Parkinson's following his retirement and the hope had been that the house would give him the chance to live in an adapted home in the place they loved. Sadly Nigel is now in full time care and will never be able to live in the house, if it is every approved. Pat said: "Nigel has been robbed of the chance to spend his final years in what we wanted to be our dream home, looking out over the North Berwick coast and remembering all our wonderful times here. it is devastating." The Local Review Body was due to meeting this morning to hear the appeal against the latest decision by planners to refuse permission for the change of use of the hall. However late yesterday the council confirmed the meeting had been delayed and would now be held once elected members return from their summer holidays. A spokesperson for East Lothian Council said: 'One of the interested parties was accidentally omitted from our notification process so was not informed of the appeal in time for it to be heard at the Local Review Body meeting on Thursday 19 June. It will be heard at the next available meeting in August. The applicant's agent, interested parties and consultees have all been contacted.'
Straits Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
In Wes Anderson's film The Phoenician Scheme, real masterpieces get a starring role
NEW YORK – At the end of Wes Anderson's new caper The Phoenician Scheme, there are some unusual credits. In addition to the cast and crew, the artworks featured in the film are listed, complete with ownership details. That is because the pieces on-screen are not reproductions. They are, in fact, the actual masterpieces from Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Rene Magritte and other well-known artists. In the past, the 56-year-old American film-maker has faked a Kandinsky and a Klimt. Here, he went for the real thing. 'We have a character who's a collector, who's a possessor; he wants to own things. And we thought because it's sort of art and commerce mixed together this time, we should try to have the real thing,' Anderson said via a voice note. What he ended up with was impressive. The fictional collection of businessperson Zsa-zsa Korda (played by Benicio del Toro) includes Renoir's Enfant Assis En Robe Bleue, which was once owned by Hollywood icon and screen legend Greta Garbo, and Magritte's The Equator. There is also a selection of works from the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany that includes pieces from the 17th century. Getting a collector or an art institution to hand over a painting worth millions of dollars to a film production is not an easy task. The negotiations fell mostly to Mr Jasper Sharp, a curator who had worked with Anderson and his wife, Juman Malouf, on their 2018 exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria, where Mr Sharp is based. 'A film set has vast amounts of light, heat, no climate control, very lax security and people running everywhere with booms, lights and props,' Mr Sharp said in a video interview. 'The walls that (the paintings) will be hung on are made of plywood sometimes. There are less desirable places to hang art, but this was certainly a challenging environment in terms of me trying to persuade (people) that they maybe want to lend an object.' To offset concerns, the production hired a conservator and a registrar to be on set overseeing the paintings. There, in a darkened, fenced-off corner, a security guard watched over the pieces and made sure they would not be exposed to more light than necessary. 'I felt, to have any real conviction in being able to ask somebody to lend an object, we needed to have that sort of support network to assure them that the works would be handled exactly as if they were lending them to a museum,' said Mr Sharp, who explained that this network included insurers, art handlers and shipping services. Still, even with his connections, some of his initial outreach was met with 'howls' of laughter and hang-ups. His search was both creative and practical. After discussing with Anderson what would make sense for Zsa-zsa, a domineering man who prides himself on owning masterpieces, Mr Sharp contacted museums and collectors in the vicinity of the set at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, Germany. Mr Sharp considers the Old Master selections from the Kunsthalle more in the 'best supporting actor' category of the art in Zsa-zsa's abode compared with the Renoir or the Magritte, which draw your eye. Anderson said he thought Juriaen Jacobsz's 1678 painting of dogs fighting over meat was 'an encapsulation of part of what our story is about'. (The film is very much Anderson's exploration of capitalism.) But Zsa-zsa does not just collect classical still-life works and paintings of animals. Mr Sharp said he suggested to Anderson that perhaps the character owned some impressive art from the film's period setting – to show his keen sense of taste, specifically a work of surrealism. Mr Sharp reached out to collector Ulla Pietzsch, who had never heard of Anderson but was interested in the project. 'I wasn't surprised when Wes settled on Magritte,' Mr Sharp said. 'If you think about where Wes grew up in Houston, The Menil Collection has, if not the greatest collection of Magrittes in the US, very close to that. So, he has been looking at Magritte for a long time.' Mr Sharp noted that The Equator is not the most recognisable of Magrittes – there is no bowler hat – but it is enigmatic. Anderson, meanwhile, envisioned that a Renoir would hang in the bedroom of Zsa-zsa's daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton). Mr Sharp found one in the collection of Mr David Nahmad. 'I think it was maybe even in the script,' he said. Knowing that the elder Renoir painted his son Jean as a small child, 'somehow I thought Renoir might have painted somebody in this family, maybe Zsa-zsa'. The loans from Hamburger Kunsthalle remained on set for about a month, but the Magritte was in and out in a day, and the Renoir stayed just a night. Production designer Adam Stockhausen said in an e-mail that he and set decorator Anna Pinnock had full-sized mock-up prints made to roughly place the art and try multiple positions. 'Once Wes finalised the placements, the conservators brought in the art and we swopped with the mock-ups,' he said. Mr Sharp visited the set only once – the day the Renoir was present – but he said he felt the stars of the film were deferential to a portrait of Renoir's nephew that they were able to acquire on loan. This revealed itself in a conversation with Puerto Rican actor del Toro. 'He confessed it made him and everybody quite nervous to have this here, in a good way,' Mr Sharp said. Observing the dynamic between the stars and the star artwork gave Mr Sharp insight into the reasons Anderson had pursued the actual paintings. 'It changed the energy and atmosphere on set as it would do if you lived with an object like that,' he said. As soon as The Phoenician Scheme wrapped, Mr Sharp started to suspect that it would not be the last time he and Anderson embarked on a project of this nature. The film-maker, he said, agreed. 'It's really hard once you've done this for the first time to put it back in the bottle,' Mr Sharp said. NYTIMES The Phoenician Scheme is showing in Singapore cinemas. Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Yahoo
8K TVs Are Stunning Engineering Feats. You Shouldn't Buy One.
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." TVs with stunningly high 8K display panels were initially very niche and mind-blowingly expensive. When it arrived on the market in 2015, the first 8K TV by Sharp cost a cool $133,000, as much as a luxury car. And the screens didn't become available to mainstream consumers until the turn of this decade. It was in 2020 when big-name manufacturers like LG, Samsung, and Sony began offering them. By that time, 8K TVs were much more reasonably priced, but still in high-end territory. You needed to drop around $4,000 (and way up) to get the sharpest TV screen in your living room. I got my initial glimpse of the first mainstream 8K TVs a little before that, in late 2019. With a resolution of 7,680 x 4,320 pixels, these products had four times the pixel density of 4K (3,840 x 2,160) TVs, resulting in sharper and more detail-rich visuals. It was clear to me then that 8K is the future of video entertainment. And it still is—as in, maybe I'll be able to recommend buying an 8K TV at some point in the future. But I can't right now. Today, six years later and several generations of TVs behind us, I still can't find a reason why you should switch to 8K TV, even if it fits in your budget. Here's why. The almost complete lack of native content is the primary reason why you should avoid buying an 8K TV. None of the leading streaming services offer movies and shows in this resolution. YouTube and Vimeo are the only options for 8K content, but there isn't much to choose from there either. A quick search for 8K video on YouTube led me to short clips of beautiful vistas around the world and a few movie trailers, but nothing else. This isn't enough to warrant spending big to get an 8K TV. To make up for the lack of content in their original resolution, 8K TVs will upscale lower-resolution footage to match theirs. Since an 8K TV has four times the pixels, upscaling fills the missing pixels in when displaying 4K content. But there's no actual data with which to do that. And I can't imagine the oomph necessary to fill in approximately 25 million blank pixels. I've witnessed this upscaling multiple times, and its benefits are limited and not worth overspending on. While undeniably sophisticated, it can't bring lower-resolution video on par with content captured by an 8K camera. The footage looks less natural than native content. It's not uncommon to encounter blurry artifacts, which, depending on the content, can compromise an otherwise perfect scene. Speaking of cameras, there are more 8K options on the market than TVs, ranging from Android phones by Samsung and Google to action cameras, all the way to pro-grade tools for filmmakers. I'd suggest an 8K TV to only those who are obsessed with viewing memories recorded in such high resolution—but you'll need an expensive camera or a high-end phone with ample storage to capture those memories in the first place. Even if you have one, the data requirements are massive. Despite being on the market for half a decade, 8K TVs still cost significantly more than 4K units. The most affordable option I found is the Samsung QN800D, which costs a couple of dollars below $2,000 for a device with a 65-inch screen. The tech giant's latest QN900F 8K TV, with a 65-inch panel, on the other hand, comes with a hefty $3,298 price tag. That's a lot of coin, especially considering the lack of native 8K content I mentioned above. For comparison, a 65-inch LG C4 4K OLED TV with stunning picture quality runs below $1,500, while an 85-inch TCL QM7K Series 4K TV goes for $1,700. You can even order the latter with a truly cinematic 98-inch panel for less than $2,500. In addition to a bigger variety of screen sizes and price points, the above 4K TVs will get you superior picture quality and more onboard features (e.g., OLED screens, support for Dolby Vision across all prices, etc.) than today's 8K TVs. Additionally, the products I mentioned are just a small fraction of the high-quality 4K TV options available today. On that note, if you are hellbent on making the jump to an 8K TV today, I have bad news for you: There aren't many choose from. Alongside the Samsung TVs I already mentioned, you can consider Sony's Z9K Series, though this one is expensive and dated, as it has been on the market since 2022. The 2024 LG 99 Series QNED 8K TV is still available at some retailers for around $2,000, offering another reasonably priced option in this product category. However, you can't find it on its maker's official online store, so it's probably getting phased out. Given the lower price of entry into the 8K realm than before, overly eager upgraders can order one today and bide their time until native content becomes widely available. I strongly advise against this strategy, because the 8K TV you bought now will inevitably be due for an upgrade by the time its native resolution goes mainstream.$1997.99 at at at at Between the crucial lack of compatible content, the high price to upgrade, and the limited choice (not to mention that we don't have a clue what minimum internet speed it needs and how much it will cost to stream video from subscription services on it), I don't recommend buying an 8K TV in 2025. The ultra-high resolution these products have is years away from going mainstream, so don't waste your money on one, despite the mesmerizing picture quality it could deliver one day. Rather than spending so much money on one 8K TV, consider investing in an excellent 4K TV and a soundbar, or a full surround sound system. I'd take a similarly (or lower) priced 4K TV over an 8K set any day. And with other review experts sharing the same view and TV manufacturers launching the latest and greatest products with 4K panels, it certainly looks like this trend won't be changing anytime soon.$1498.00 at at at at You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Daily Mirror
6 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mirror
Sky faces another new rival that will offer UK homes a free way to watch TV
Sky is facing stiff competition from the new Freely TV service and now there are even more screens that feature this streaming service. If you want to watch TV without needing an aerial or dish stuck to your chimney then you won't find a much better option than Sky Glass. This premium telly platform, which also now includes a cheaper Glass Air telly, lets homes tune into hundreds of live and on-demand channels via a broadband connection. It's a tough TV to beat but it is being rivalled by Freely. This service launched last year and also offers an instant way to watch TV shows without an aerial. Since it was first unveiled, the list of telly manufacturers making Freely-powered screens has been increasing and now there's even more good news for those considering switching to it. It's just been announced that smart TVs powered by the Roku operating system will soon get Freely pre-installed. That means UK homes wanting to access the streaming platform will be able to choose Roku-powered models made by Sharp, JVC, METZ and Polaroid. This new partnership will bring Freely together with the Roku experience and offer advanced features including personalised content and discovery tools. Speaking about the changes, Jonathan Thompson, CEO, Everyone TV, said: 'Offering freely on the Roku operating system is a major milestone for us, as we continue to expand reach for the free streaming platform. "We're delighted that as a huge global player, Roku has recognised the importance of easy and seamless access to public service broadcast content for UK audiences and I look forward to seeing Freely smart TVs with Roku in market this summer.' Does Freely fully match the Sky Glass experience? Freely does offer a comprehensive TV guide, recommendations and even a new backwards telly feature which lets you go back in time to find things to watch. It's fully powered by your broadband and even offers the ability to pause live TV. Once the compatible TV has been purchased, there are no monthly fees to pay, so you can watch shows, sports and movies without reaching for the credit card. READ MORE: Your iPhone will get a stunning new look and most useful free upgrade in years It's a decent way to watch the telly, but Freely can't match Sky when it comes to channels and overall features. Sky Glass offers instant access to premium channels, and there is also better integration with streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney+. The firm's clever Playlists function also lets you store shows and movies to watch at a later date. One final thing to note is that Sky has worked hard on reducing the latency when watching live sport - that's something Freely can't currently match.
