Posted in Middle East, Art on Sep 11th, 2007 No Comments »
Saifedean Ammous, writing in 3quarksdaily has a great piece on the Arabic TV show The Prince of Poets, which uses the same format as American Idol. Except instead of the competitors being wannabes popstars they’re young poets who recite their poetry before the Simon Cowells of the Arabic Verse world.
The judges are ‘5 […]
Posted in dublin, Planning, Art, Images, Ireland on Sep 4th, 2007 4 Comments »
‘Well the plinth has arrived on O’Connell Street’, posted GrahamH on the Archiseek forum at the end of August, ‘it’s located to the northern end of the taxi rank, at the junction with Cathal Brugha Street.’
This created a certain amount of interest on the forum, as many were eager to discover what last minute addition […]
Posted in aesthetics, Spain, satire, Art on Aug 8th, 2007 4 Comments »
Satire is a funny old game.
A couple of weeks ago the Spanish government announced a new pregnancy incentive. It guaranteed a payment of 2,500 euro to the parents of every new child born in the country. The Barcelona-based satirical magazine El Jueves (Thursday in Spanish) decided to comment. The result was the above cartoon, which […]
Posted in cinema, Art on Aug 1st, 2007 No Comments »
I have to admit that reading the news today that the modernist Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni died yesterday at the age of 94 shocked me.
Not because his death occurred within a few hours of the other great European film director Ingmar Bergman, but because I realized I’d never seen any of his films. […]
Posted in Art on Jul 13th, 2007 No Comments »
When Walter Benjamin was a child he came upon a poem in a children’s book that was to feature prominently in his understanding of the catastrophes surrounding in his own life. It was called Bucklicht Mannlein or The little hunchback.
When I go down to the cellar
There to draw some wine
A little hunchback who’s in […]
Posted in Helvetica, Typeface, Art, Images on Jun 28th, 2007 6 Comments »
A movie about typeface! Are you fucking serious? Apparently he was. We both have the same job, and some of that requires a working knowledge of different sorts of font. ‘Okay’, I said, ‘its one thing selecting the right font for a document that’ll be read by a maximum of 15 people in order to […]
Posted in Art, books on Jun 21st, 2007 10 Comments »
In an excellent article (sub req) on the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in the latest edition of the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton explains why the ‘once obscure Soviet philologist is now a star of the postmodern West’ and, in doing so, provides a very handy critique of postmodernism.
Just as Bakhtin’s […]
Posted in Art, music on May 31st, 2007 1 Comment »
Last time I spent a couple of weeks in our over-moneyed wee island, I ended up flying home to France on a Sunday. Consequently, I managed to bury my disgruntlement, on the plane, in that day’s copy of the Observer. Mark E Smith’s analysis is, once again, spot on - this proves me, gan dabht, […]
Posted in Joanna Newsom on Feb 9th, 2007 No Comments »
When it comes to female songwriters with a distinctive vocal style opinion is very much divided. For some, their voice make grown men loll their tongue out like thirsty dogs, while others would be happy to trap them in the attic and set fire to the building.
Take Amy Winehouse. Two bloggers expressed widely divergent views […]
Posted in Art, Images on Dec 18th, 2006 No Comments »
A very long time ago on this blog, there was mention of a certain Twenty Major and his almost Proustian interest* in the naming of female genitalia. In a spirit of digression, this reminded me of a poetry class back in college where the brandname of ‘Silk Cut’ cigarettes was referred to.
In Elizabethan times a […]