Her incendiary collages of vintage black pinups made her one of the most influential artists of her time. Now she’s battling the ‘insanity’ of Trump’s America

Lorna Simpson is holed up in Los Angeles with her actor daughter right now. She’s been spending lockdown doing one of her favourite things: reflecting on how people present themselves when out in public. All this people-watching has put her in mind of the 1990s, when she would go wig-hunting in Fulton Mall, a blue-collar shopping centre near her home in New York.

“Shop after shop sold all sorts of wigs,” says the 59-year-old. “Human hair, yak hair, synthetic hair.” Simpson bought as many as she could, in every style she saw: from platinum-blonde “Lana Turner” wigs to fake afros and braids. She transferred photographs of each one on to panels of felt before hanging them alongside such seemingly disconnected phrases as: “First impressions are the most lasting.” The wigs were a “surrogate”, she says, a way to explore “the person we see ourselves to be”.

Just as the Caucasian figure in contemporary art is seen as universal, the black figure of African descent should be too

Any society, or self, constructed to always separate itself from the other is doomed

Lorna Simpson: Give Me Some Moments is at Hauser & Wirth’s website

Joseph Gilgun and ne’er-do-well pals are back – and planning to rob a circus. Plus: is change afoot in Devs? Here’s what to watch this evening

With so many conversations now happening online, all eyes are on our decor. It may even help me find a buyer for my strange yellow filing cabinet

An awful lot is being made of what is on the bookshelves behind people who broadcast or are interviewed in their homes. Thankfully, mine are at a right angle to the computer so you cannot see any of the titles. In fact, until adjustments were made, it looked as though the shelves were completely empty, which was rather shaming. The books had to be pulled forward, to make it clear they existed, without compromising their anonymity.

I was keen to have a nod to my football team, West Bromwich Albion, in the back of shot. A scarf seemed a bit naff, and my treasured West Brom gnome just too odd. I even considered a jigsaw puzzle of the face of one of our greatest ever players, Tony “Bomber” Brown. Unfortunately Bomber, as gentle a man as you could ever meet, looks like a serial killer in this particular picture.

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A teenager bonds awkwardly with her cousin as they take the bus from a rural community to New York so that she can have a termination

The four words in this title are the four possible replies to bureaucratic tick-box questions about the frequency of your various sexual experiences. A young woman here must answer them, before she is allowed to have an abortion. However rigid and blandly routine it seems, the four-part answer grid is cleverly designed to get information about vulnerability: it is so easy instinctively and evasively to deny a difficult question structured as a yes/no, but much harder to check the “never” box, when “rarely”, “sometimes” and “always” are coolly offered as equivalently non-judgmental options.

The lead character in Eliza Hittman’s tough, realist drama is confronted with this central, four-part inquisition about her life in one brilliantly controlled, enigmatic scene. Theoretically, it is just a bit of form-filling that doesn’t appear to promise any real revelation to the audience. Yet it does just that, delivering a penny-drop moment of realisation. Or perhaps it’s more of an ambiguous hint and all the more disquieting for that.

Related: Sleazy bosses, exploited barmaids: US cinema finally discovers the left behinds

Coronavirus prompted an emergency operation to house rough sleepers in Travelodges and Holiday Inns. In many ways it has been a success – but what happens next?

To begin with, Clare Sutcliffe found the shift from sleeping in a doorway in Soho to a king-size bed in a central-London hotel very disorientating. After 15 months sleeping rough, she found it hard to relax and really believe she was in a safe space.

“The first couple of nights, I couldn’t sleep with the light off,” she says. “This might sound mad, but I was a bit scared. It was different; when you’re used to sleeping out in the open outside and then all of a sudden you’re in a bed, in a room, with a door that shuts.” When she arrived at the hotel five weeks ago, she was a skeletal six-and-a-half stone; since then, with three meals delivered to her room every day, her health has begun to improve.

Elizabeth Sankey’s engaging documentary reclaims the genre from snooty cinephiles – and proudly pronounces When Harry Met Sally a masterpiece

With affection and brio, Elizabeth Sankey reclaims the genre of romantic comedy in this watchable documentary; that is, she reclaims it from the gendered snobbery of white, male, middle-aged reviewers who fall over themselves to praise horror movies or thrillers or superhero films but turn their noses up at romcom. (If La La Land had been marketed as a romcom, wonders Sankey, would it have got the same Oscars and saucer-eyed critical praise?)

Now, I’m putting my hands up here, although I still can’t handle Nancy Meyers’ The Holiday (2006), and I still worry that romcom tends to be all rom and no com, a conservative genre that often dislikes the subversion of comedy. I absolutely agreed with Sankey’s masterpiece rating for When Harry Met Sally … (1989) – what person of taste and judgment wouldn’t? – and I enjoyed her praise for While You Were Sleeping (1995), which she discreetly juxtaposes with the comparably themed The Big Sick (2017). But could it be that there is a kind of dual response going on here – straightforward reverence for a small number of romcom greats and a kind of guilty-pleasure celebration for the stratum of standard-issue romcom product below that, which maybe isn’t all that great but nonetheless foregrounds women’s experiences in the way no other genre does?

(Atlantic)
The singer whose personal life has become a public spectacle drowns out the noise with these bold yet subtle R&B tracks

By anyone’s standards, Kehlani Parrish has experienced a pretty tumultuous rise to fame. She pulled off the not-inconsiderable feat of emerging from a TV talent show with her musical credibility intact. While still a teenager, her cover band PopLyfe reached the final of America’s Got Talent – on YouTube you can still see her belting out We Will Rock You for the edification of Piers Morgan – but when they failed to win, she quit the band, declined an offer from the show’s host Nick Cannon to join a rap group he was assembling and rescued herself from a life of penury by releasing her own mixtape.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.

For his latest drama, Corneliu Porumboiu revived a language unique to the valleys of La Gomera in the Canary Islands; a steep learning curve for his actors – and our writer

Try to imagine the least film-noir scene possible and you might come up with a group of five-year-olds learning to whistle. It is late morning, pre-lockdown, in a classroom at Nereida Díaz Abreu school on La Gomera in the Canary Islands, and the teacher – a bent knuckle crammed in his mouth – is relaying instructions in a piercing, swooping, set of whistles. The kids look quizzically skywards, then collapse in hysterics, although most eventually nail it.

“Touch your left ear with your right hand,” the teacher reiterates in Spanish.

Related: The Whistlers (La Gomera) review – thrilling Romanian corrupt-cop noir

We say to the kids: when you go to Tenerife and say you’re from La Gomera, people will ask you if you can whistle

From cycling soundtracks to anti-nuclear protest music, we celebrate the work of the late Florian Schneider and the groundbreaking group he co-founded

Kraftwerk’s first new and original music since 1986, this single started as a commissioned jingle for the Hanover Expo 2000 world’s fair, but returned Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider to the UK Top 30. The trademark mix of subtle techno grooves and melody find them – of course – peering into the 21st century.

Grigory Sokolov
(Deutsche Grammophon, 2 CDs, 1 DVD)
He last gave a concert in the UK in 2007, so any opportunity to hear one of the world’s finest pianists is welcome, though this is uneven

For over a decade now, the British government’s stringent visa requirements for visiting musicians from outside the EU have ensured that Grigory Sokolov has not played in Britain. The Russian gave his last recitals here in 2007, and as he no longer performs concertos, and shuns studio recordings, opportunities to hear a pianist who many regard as one of the finest alive today get fewer by the year. This compilation at least brings us more or less up to date, with performances taken from recitals that Sokolov gave in 2019 in Zaragoza, Wuppertal and in the Tyrolean village of Rabbi, where the great Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli had a house, and where a festival is now held in his memory.

Vinnie and the gang decide to rob a circus, as Joseph Gilgun’s hit comedy – part-Shameless, part-Ocean’s Eleven – returns for a second run

At first glance, Brassic (Sky One) looks as if it might have been the first quarantine comedy. The second series begins with Vinnie (Joseph Gilgun) skulking around the fictional Lancashire town of Hawley in full DIY hazmat get-up, with his hood up over a hat, a scarf pulled over his face, and sunglasses, despite the weather being a near-permanent state of grey drizzle. It even goes a bit Tiger King, when a robbery takes an unexpected feline turn.

But Brassic is only accidentally of the moment: there’s far too much non-social-distancing going on, for a start. It was filmed last year, while the first series was airing, and it became Sky’s biggest original comedy in years. That’s no surprise. It had an easy appeal and a raucous sense of humour, with real heart behind the madcap antics.

Her freaky, filthy tracks frequently break the internet – most recently with a guest spot from Beyoncé – but the Houston rapper won’t let the internet break her

• ‘We do what we want, for ourselves’: why it’s a golden age for women in rap

Given that her lyrical prowess has made her one of the hottest rappers in the US, it’s hardly surprising that Megan Thee Stallion is good at anecdotes. We’re talking over Zoom – Megan looking impeccably high-glam, worthy of a Real Housewives reunion – as she regales me with how she ended up recording a remix with her idol.

“I got a call: Beyoncé wants to do a remix to Savage,” she says, shaking her head with disbelief. “And I was like ... what? Shut up. Shut up. You’re lying. Beyoncé don’t want to get on nothing with me. Come on, it’s me! I know I’m Megan Thee Stallion, but dang!”

I can’t be mad at the next girl for wanting to be the best. Why can't we both agree that we bad?

Coming live from Melbourne, London and Huddersfield, the Last Leg presents its take on the week’s events. Plus: VE Day 75: An Evening Celebration

The lighthearted TV responses to lockdown have been abundant so far, from video-linked episodes of Have I Got News For You to Matt Lucas’s sketches and Grayson Perry’s Art Club. Yet, none have quite managed to capture the mix of anxiety, uncertainty and unexpected humour many of us have been experiencing – which is where the Last Leg comics come in. Live from Melbourne, London and Huddersfield, the trio will present their typically incisive take on the week’s events. Ammar Kalia

Mark Cousins’ latest encyclopedic romp is a glorious enterprise that unearths footage from some of the greatest film-makers ever – all of them women

A perfect lockdown gift has landed, one which might have sounded daunting in ordinary times: a 14-hour documentary about female directors, which goes live from next week on BFI Player. This glorious enterprise unearths footage from some of the greatest movie-makers of this century and the last – all of them female. At the same time, the BFI is showing 36 of the hundreds of films mentioned, so that viewers can enjoy full immersion over weeks, possibly awarding themselves a degree in, say, The Cinema of the Second Sex afterwards.

Narrated by women including Tilda Swinton and Thandie Newton, Women Make Film – A New Road Movie Through Cinema is the latest encyclopedic romp from the Northern Irish film historian and documentary-maker Mark Cousins, who previously directed the 15-hour television series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, in 2011. The new documentary will be released in palatable chunks over five weeks from 18 May, and aims to open a conversation on the lost legacy of women behind the movie camera.

Related: Angry young women: how radical, female film-makers defined the spirit of '68

(New Deal)
With his fourth solo album the acclaimed producer faces down the confusion of modern life with intoxicating calm

Blake Mills has picked up Grammy nominations for his production work on Laura Marling’s Semper Femina, John Legend’s Darkness and Light and Perfume Genius’s No Shape. However, the fourth solo album by the 33-year old Californian former touring guitarist should turn the spotlight towards his own work. Mutable Set is intended as a “soundtrack to the emotional dissonance of modern life”. Themes range from precious people and experiences to disappointment and isolation, though this isn’t conventional singer-songwriter fare.

(Air Texture)
Shuffling Mestizo melodies meet eerie techno in this stellar compilation taken from Ecuador’s pulsating club scene

While most would name Colombia as the home of South America’s forward-thinking club scene, neighbouring Ecuador has quietly been carving out its own dancefloor identity in recent years. The country has produced breakout talents such as DJ Nicola Cruz and home-grown labels like ZZK and Wonderwheel Recordings, operating under the social restrictions of a largely Catholic state and in the midst of devastating austerity measures. Most of its key players reside in Quito, and bring together a community at the capital’s inclusive nights, including Cruz’s La Sagraria.

Often marked by downtempo, undulating house rhythms and samples of Andean pan flutes and instruments such as the lute-like charango, their output is organic-sounding. Yet Place: Ecuador, a new charity compilation, showcases a grittier and more kinetic side to the scene. It’s the fourth release in New York label Air Texture’s location-specific charity series (previous editions have covered Georgia, Colombia and the Netherlands), benefiting the indigenous Waorani people’s legal battles against the Ecuadorian government’s sale of their land for mineral rights.

I have always maintained a professional relationship with my two female lodgers but spending more time together recently led to a lapse in judgment

I share my house with two female lodgers. We’re all single at the moment but we have always maintained a professional relationship with each other. In the current circumstances, we are obviously spending more time together. The other week, the inevitable happened. After a few drinks, I ended up getting intimate with one of them on the sofa. The following day, she didn’t bat an eyelid but we agreed to put it down to too many beers.

The thing is, I now see her in a new light. She is 20 years younger than me and I find her sexually attractive. I’m struggling to keep that line drawn. We still have a great relationship, sharing drinks and a chinwag, but I feel different. Should I tell her how I feel and run the risk of everything going pear-shaped?

People who love boozers always said it was the atmosphere, not the alcohol, that attracted them. The lockdown has proved us right

Some forgotten heroes – or mistreated victims, if you prefer – of the coronavirus outbreak are pubs. People who love pubs always said it was the atmosphere, not the alcohol, and people who didn’t love them thought we were just spinning them a line. Now we have proof, because we are drinking as much as we ever did and yet we complain almost constantly.

That debate has ended, anyway, because the people who miss pubs now talk only to each other. We start off complaining about the pub, then segue, almost shyly, into: “Are you managing to drink quite a lot?” “Jesus Christ, you should see the state of my recycling bin. It only got collected two days ago. Today I had to climb into it to compress the cans with my body weight.” “I actually can’t carry as much beer as I want to drink,” said one friend. “One night, I ended up buying a bottle of gin.”

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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photo taken March 2020

photo taken March 2020

photo taken March 2020

photo taken March 2020

photo taken March 2020

photo taken April 2020

photo taken April 2020

photo taken April 2020

photo taken April 2020