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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/16/man-booker-international-prize-serves-up-victory-to-the-vegetarian-han-kang-deborah-smith | Books | 2016-05-16T20:45:09.000Z | Alison Flood | Man Booker International prize serves up victory to The Vegetarian | South Korean author Han Kang and her translator Deborah Smith, who only began learning Korean seven years ago, have beaten writers including Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and international bestseller Elena Ferrante to the Man Booker International prize.
The Vegetarian by Han Kang review – an extraordinary story of family fallout
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Han, who will share the £50,000 award equally with Smith, took the award for The Vegetarian, a three-part novel described as “concise, unsettling and beautifully composed” and an “uncanny blend of beauty and horror” by judges. It tells of “a completely ordinary wife” who decides to become a vegetarian as she seeks a more “plant-like” existence. The controversial decision provokes cruelty from her husband and from her father, and obsession from her sister’s husband, as the woman, Yeong-hye, dreams obsessively about becoming a tree.
“It’s almost an outlandish story - a story that could topple over into crude horror or melodrama, or just over-emphatic allegories, but it has extraordinary poise and tact and control,” said chair of judges Boyd Tonkin. “And that’s done both by Han Kang and by this amazing translation from Deborah Smith … The point about this prize is that it’s totally equal between the author and the translator, and we feel this strange and brilliant book has absolutely found the right voice in English.”
Smith, who is 28, decided to become an English-Korean translator when she completed her undergraduate degree at the age of 21, and saw the lack of translators in the field. She had not learned any foreign languages before, but moved to Korea to achieve her dream. She has subsequently founded the non-profit publisher Tilted Axis Press, and has translated Han’s novel Human Acts.
At the prize ceremony, held at the Victoria & Albert museum in London on Monday night, Han told the Guardian she felt “extremely honoured”. She added: “It is a very precious thing – winning this prize, my friendship with Deborah. This book and this prize has bought me many things.”
On stage, the writer, whose next novel will be published in Korea next week, admitted winning a prize for a book she wrote a decade ago felt “very weird ... I want to share this joy with my family and friends, but they must be fast asleep in Korea right now.”
Han, an award-winning and successful author in South Korea, was one of the first authors Smith discovered in Korea.
Han Kang: ‘Writing about a massacre was a struggle. I’m a person who feels pain when you throw meat on a fire’
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“The thing that kept me interested in it was something you can really tell from Kang’s books: the novels they write in Korea aren’t really similar to those from the US or the UK because in Korea everyone officially debuts by writing short stories,” Smith told the Guardian earlier this year. “You do a couple of collections, then you move on to doing a novel. The ‘linked novel’ is regarded as a literary form in its own right.”
The Vegetarian was one of 155 books submitted for the Man Booker International, with judges chaired by Tonkin selecting a shortlist which also featured the final novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, The Story of a Lost Child, and Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in My Mind. This is the first year the Man Booker International has been awarded to a single book, rather than a body of work, following its merger with the Independent foreign fiction prize. Previous winners of the Man Booker International include Philip Roth, Chinua Achebe and László Krasznahorkai.
Tonkin called The Vegetarian “an unforgettably powerful and original novel that richly deserves to win the Man Booker International prize 2016”.
“Told in three voices, from three different perspectives, this concise, unsettling and beautifully composed story traces an ordinary woman’s rejection of all the conventions and assumptions that bind her to her home, family and society,” he said. “In a style both lyrical and lacerating, it reveals the impact of this great refusal both on the heroine herself and on those around her. This compact, exquisite and disturbing book will linger long in the minds, and maybe the dreams, of its readers. Deborah Smith’s perfectly judged translation matches its uncanny blend of beauty and horror at every turn.”
Translated fiction sells better in the UK than English fiction, research finds
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Last week, research conducted on behalf of the prize revealed that the sales of translated fiction in the UK have grown from 1.3m copies in 2001 to 2.5m in 2015 against a falling market. It also showed an “outstanding” increase in sales of translated Korean fiction, up from 88 copies in 2001 to 10,191 in 2015.
“Korea has a very strong fiction culture, with lots of good writers and a thriving literary scene. It would be a very good outcome if we saw a bit more of that reflected in this country,” said Tonkin, who was joined on the judging panel by the writers Tahmima Anam and Ruth Padel, and academics David Bellos and Daniel Medin. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jul/20/notre-dame-on-fire-review-high-adventure-ripped-straight-from-the-headlines | Film | 2022-07-20T13:00:20.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | Notre Dame on Fire review – high adventure ripped straight from the headlines | Veteran French director Jean-Jacques Annaud serves up some high-octane film-making with this old-fashioned disaster movie, composed in a docu-realist style, about the catastrophic fire that engulfed Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral in 2019. With dramatic reconstructions, digital effects and the splicing in of amateur video, social media material and genuine news footage – President Macron himself appears at one stage to be talking to an actor playing the fire chief – Annaud rips a pretty swashbuckling adventure from the headlines. A terrifying blaze, flying buttresses about to collapse and molten lead pouring from the roof on to the believers below; and Annaud cheekily intersperses the thrills with a querulous old lady who keeps calling the fire brigade because her kitten has got out on to the roof: France has, as they say, picked the wrong day to quit smoking.
‘Fire is the perfect villain’ – how the Notre Dame blaze became an explosive film
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There are some startling scenes, all apparently accurate, showing cathedral officials desperately trying to rescue the most precious possessions: the Crown of Thorns, a vial of Christ’s blood, a fragment of the true cross and a nail from the crucifixion. And no one even murmurs the possibility that these are medieval artefacts. As far as these people are concerned: these are the real thing, and this glassy-eyed belief in their authenticity, and the ecstasy at their deliverance, is somehow more important than issues around the incompetence that caused the fire in the first place: it gives the film a slightly reactionary sheen.
That’s not to say it isn’t perfectly watchable and it gives us in the UK food for thought. How long before the Houses of Parliament go up in flames in exactly the same way?
Notre Dame on Fire is released on 22 July in cinemas. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/oct/31/parents-sent-me-to-therapy-you-tell-us-the-films-that-scarred-you-as-kids | Film | 2019-11-01T05:00:09.000Z | Guardian readers | Parents sent me to therapy': you tell us the films that scarred you as kids | The Birds
I was about four years old, being babysat by my cousin who was more interested in snogging her boyfriend and didn’t realize I was watching it. Freaked me out to such an extent that I would scream my head off whenever we went to the beach and a seagull came within a few feet of me, and even now I can’t stand the evil buggers. Thanks cousin Catherine! steena
My sister and I nagged and nagged our parents to let us watch what may have been the first UK TV showing of Hitchcock’s The Birds. They relented with a “don’t blame us if you have have nightmares”. We were fine up until the moment Rod’s mum finds that guy laid out in his trashed kitchen. The genius of that scene is that there is no big jump shock with a blast of discordant music, just a slow pan to where he lays with both eyes pecked out and a horrified gasp from the poor lady. We had nightmares. ID9879446
'I didn't sleep well for months': the films that terrified our writers as kids
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This movie literally traumatised me for life. Saw this as a kid and there are scenes engraved on my memory that terrify me still. It’s not really a very scary movie, but I think I was just too young to have seen this and the angst of the unknown threat of these crazy birds haunts me still. I think Hitchcock would be rather thrilled actually. Parmenidas
A Night to Remember
The Titanic story 1958. No great effects just unrelenting tension and lots of stiff upper lips. I don’t remember much about it, I already knew the ending, but it terrified me and to this day I won’t watch anything about the Titanic. I’m 70. thepree
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros.
I guess I was about five years old when one evening I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on TV. My mum had gone out shopping and unbeknownst to me my dad had gone upstairs for a nap. The scene where they drink the fizzy drink and float up towards the spinning blade freaked me out and I screamed in horror only to realise I was alone in an “empty” house. (My dad did not wake up). So I ran outside still screaming, leaving our front door wide open. Opposite our house there were builders who were kind enough to take me in and I waited for what seemed like hours for my mum to come home. tpmv75
An American Werewolf in London
A truly great film, for many reasons, but the real terror for me didn’t come from ground breaking special effects of lupine metamorphosis.
The loneliness of a late night tube station, the sheer horror of the masked Nazis slaughtering an all-American family, the strange and creepy emptiness of a London hospital ward at night, and most of all, Brian Glover telling a racist joke over a pint in the Slaughtered Lamb, with an unexplained pentangle on the wall next to the dart board. dylan37
I didn’t see the film, but walked past the local cinema and saw a number of posters promoting it. I was terrified by nightmares for weeks afterwards. jonnyjonny
I saw An American Werewolf in London at a local youth club in Hastings when I was 14, well I say saw, I managed half an hour of it and had to leave the room, I was bricking it!
For a couple of years after, walking back from my friends’ homes involved going around a dark corner garden plot with old trees and mature bushes, very poorly lit, I would literally run as if I was in a 100m race around that corner until I got home!
Even today, werewolves still scare the bejesus out of me. The one in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was particularly traumatic!! TruthSayer666
My dad let me watch the first half hour when I was about 10, it was another decade before I could bear to watch the rest. steventudor
I still feel nervous outside when the moon is full … My family find it hilarious. Joanne Ogarro
Superman III
The part in Superman 3 where the computer turns the woman into a kind of human robot hybrid terrified me. BradGoodman
One Saturday afternoon you’re watching a lighthearted Superman adventure about super computers, the next you’re watching some poor woman sucked into said machine, screaming for her life as the machine starts welding bits to her horrified, agonised face. I was seven or eight when I first saw it, it leapfrogged Robocop & Terminator as the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen. David Perkins
Superman III – you know which bit. dothestrand
Psycho
I saw Psycho as a teenager and in the 55 years since then, when alone, I have NEVER had a shower without checking that all doors and windows are locked. pineapplesage
Mars Attacks!
I was less than 10 and had already watched a bunch of slasher/horror movies with no effect on my psyche, but Mars Attacks – with those creepy little aliens and their seemingly all-powerful technology – straight up traumatized me! I got barely any sleep for months, nightmares galore when I did fall asleep, and all sorts of anxiety, to the point that parents sent me to therapy. The therapy didn’t help at all and I never even came close to understanding why Mars Attacks freaked me out so bad. I love horror and sci-fi cinema, but it’s been over 20 years and I still haven’t watched Mars Attacks a second time. It did become a running joke for my whole family and about 10 years ago my dad gave a DVD copy to me as a gag birthday gift – which I gave to a neighbor as soon as he left! Jolly McMaster
I watched The Exorcist when I was 10, didn’t have an effect on me. Mars Attacks on the other hand, nope. Terrified. I’m scared of movie aliens, even ET. The only one that doesn’t scare me is, ironically, the Xenomorph. VickyRagDoll
Suspiria
Dario Argento’s Suspiria. Photograph: Allstar/Anchor Bay Entertainment/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
My most profound horror experience was seeing Dario Argento’s Suspiria for the first time at 12. Other than Hammer fare on TV with my dad, I had never seen a horror film before, and this was thrust on me via a random video rental of my friend’s dad. The mobile video van (ahh the memories) had a “rent 2 for the week” policy, and he rented French Lieutenant’s Woman as the other title. I remember we put in the other tape every so often to “calm down”. I’ve never had such an intense experience watching a movie, and it kickstarted a lifelong love of euro-horror an Argento obsession, and a film degree. I now dread to think how many times I’ve “upgraded” Suspiria in my collection. Didescharlie
Scary from the start for no reason you can readily determine London61
When a Stranger Calls
I did a lot of babysitting as a teenager and student. This terrified me. I always made sure I knew exactly where to find the phone in someone else’s house (no mobiles then). I still shiver thinking of it. Janetgilbert
A Tale of Two Cities
In 1958, when I was seven, my mother took me to see A Tale of Two Cities. I have never forgotten the guillotine scene at the end. Realised for the first time what the death penalty was and imagined the horror of someone having having their head cut off. ormond
The Company of Wolves
Photograph: Ronald Grant
The only movie I ever walked out of, about a quarter of the way through. As soon as the man started changing into a wolf, I really thought I was going to faint with horror. I’m an animal lover and a big fan of dogs, so I don’t know exactly what it was; but even now, as an elderly woman, I still can’t watch it. I was a grown woman when I had this terrified reaction, and I still don’t know why it hit me so hard. grumpyoldgirl
Angel Heart
Absolutely terrified us (teenagers having a pyjamas party). We could not sleep at all that night, and we had to take turn to go to the bathroom while the others kept watch behind the door (there was a little window in that bathroom, and we were scared to death that we might see those red eyes). And I spent the next few months with my duvet pushed back on my bed, so that I could be sure I would not come across a mummified hand in it. gladarvor
Angel Heart was a truly disturbing horror film, Robert de Niro was terrifying, couldn’t look at a boiled egg in the same way after seeing that. ukbazza
Edward Scissorhands
Photograph: film co handout
I saw Edward Scissorhands at about 6 years old, and was utterly terrified for years. I eventually had to swap bedrooms, as I was so convinced he lived in the built-in cupboard in my bedroom at the time. And still had to keep a torch by my bed to check all dark spaces in the new one bedroom.
Still haven’t watched it again in the 25+ years since. It may well not actually be that scary, but having to move bedroom again, which would just be a massive hassle and hard to explain to the wife. Rugly
The Power
My Dad was on a business trip. So my Mum and I thought we’d watch a film together to keep each other company. She selected The Power (1968). I was nine.
It’s not a great film. But it has the esteemed honour of recording celluloid’s first “death by centrifuge”. The bulging eyes of the hapless victim, as he lolls from the pod, still inform occasional nightmares. I am 52. ferger
The Neverending Story
Neverending Story was bone-chilling as a nipper. Now it’s on Netflix, I watched it recently for the first time in about 30 years, which felt like just about enough time to confront that childhood trauma. The interminably slow horse drowning scene in the swamp of despair is still quite intense! I wonder how kids today would react to it. JacksSR
Nothing comes close to Artax sinking in the Neverending Story, I mean COME ON! That plus the whole Nothing wiping everything out with sadness ... god I’m covered in goosebumps just thinking about it! Terrifying! asantesana | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/mar/29/louis-gossett-jr-movies-roots-color-purple | Film | 2024-03-29T19:07:40.000Z | Andrew Lawrence | Louis Gossett Jr: king of Hollywood’s strong, silent types, from Roots to The Color Purple | Preparation went out the window when Louis Gossett Jr became the third Black person to win an Oscar, in 1983, for his supporting role in An Officer and a Gentleman. He had planned to accept the award with his seven-year-old son, Satie – but the boy got stage fright at the last minute and stayed rooted to his seat. The speech Gossett had in mind? “It’s no use,” he told the capacity crowd at LA’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. “It’s all gone.” So he kept things short and sweet, thanking his family before pivoting to his fellow nominees – a tough crowd that included James Mason and John Lithgow. “All you other four guys,” Gossett said, raising his statuette, “this is ours.”
What really distinguished him, besides being 6ft 4in, was the dignity, class and humanity he brought to each part
That was Gossett in essence: magnanimous, dignified, always hitting the mark. After the announcement of his death on Friday, at age 87, Gossett was remembered as a trailblazer who never hesitated to share his spotlight with equally deserving people and causes. Wendell Pierce, of HBO’s The Wire, saluted Gossett as “one of the great American actors of our generation”, while the Oscar-nominated Rustin star Colman Domingo called him “open and generous” and “kind beyond measure”.
With more than 200 screen roles to his credit, Gossett worked pretty much nonstop for more than a half century, including as Ol’ Mister – Domingo’s father in the remake of The Color Purple. But what really distinguished him, besides being 6ft 4in, was the dignity, class and humanity he brought to each part. Perhaps that’s because Gossett had experienced so many personal lows even as he appeared to have established himself as a Hollywood star. In his 2010 autobiography, An Actor and a Gentleman, Gossett said he had dealt with his career frustrations by drinking and drugging to excess, to the detriment of his relationships and marriages, before finding purpose in social activism. Over the years, Gossett has spoken out for HIV/Aids awareness and urban violence. His Eracism Foundation has the ambitious goal of eradicating racism full stop.
That commitment to service, along with his quiet magnetism on screen, would make Gossett as respected as Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier – co-starring with the latter, his idol, in the celluloid and Broadway productions of A Raisin in the Sun.
Gossett bunked with marines during his stint filming An Officer and a Gentleman. Photograph: Danny Moloshok/Reuters
Gossett’s singular knack for putting his stamp on roles was especially prominent in Roots, the slavery-to-civil rights TV miniseries that ABC wasn’t even sure it could show in the deep south in 1977. Gossett had considered turning down the role of Fiddler, insulted to have been pegged for the submissive Uncle Tom character. But upon further review, he came to see Fiddler as someone who was doing all he could to survive an oppressive plantation regime and imbued the character with a humanity and regality all his own. The role became Gossett’s onscreen breakout (no mean feat in a deep ensemble that included LeVar Burton, John Amos and Ben Vereen), and Gossett went on to earn an Emmy for outstanding lead actor for a single appearance in a drama or comedy series.
For his Oscar-winning role as the drill instructor Emil Foley in An Officer and a Gentleman, Gossett bunked with a company of marines miles away from set while Richard Gere, Debra Winger and his other co-stars stayed with the production in Washington’s Port Townsend. “They put the steel in my butt, so that when I’d walk on the set and shout, ‘Get down and give me 50’ to the cast, by God, they’d do it,” Gossett told the Los Angeles Times.
One of the best to ever do it! Thank you, Lou… for everything!
💜🙏🏾💜 pic.twitter.com/p6YjIo3WMx
— LeVar Burton (@levarburton) March 29, 2024
He expected his hard work to pay off with meatier offers, perhaps some even as a leading man. Before the Oscars ceremony, four Black picketers carried a large white sign outside the pavilion that read: “Academy Awards, a racist affair for 54 years, here goes the 55th.” But after following Poitier and Hattie McDaniel into Oscars history, Gossett said he hoped good Black acting roles would “catch on like the measles”.
“You shouldn’t call anything racist if it’s improving,” he told reporters. “I think [the protesters] should lighten up, if you’ll pardon the expression. I hope Blacks will get more of a chance to show their wares. I’m going to give [the Oscar] to my son.”
Louis Gossett Jr – a life in pictures
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He pushed his agent to seek out respectable roles as physicians, police chiefs and involved fathers – “anything but those stereotypes reserved for Black actors”, he said during an interview with the Television Academy Foundation. And while the roles failed to resonate on the same scale, they did run the gamut – from the Negro Leagues legend Cool Papa Bell to the Egyptian president Anwar El-Sadat. For millennial gospel TV hounds, he’s the sinister patriarch on the BET+ church music soap opera Kingdom Business. To gen Xers who came of age during Reagan-era war games (ahem), he is fondly remembered as Chappy – the lionhearted F-16 pilot from Iron Eagle, AKA the poor man’s Top Gun. (This one’s for you, Chappy.)
1:22
Three memorable roles played by Louis Gossett Jr – video
It didn’t matter if Gossett was slumming it in some bloated production or sharing scenes with Hollywood heavyweights; he had an uncanny way of elevating the experience. To lose him now, and so soon after the deaths of Andre Braugher and Lance Reddick, in some ways feels like a special class of Black acting nobility faces extinction. Gossett – dean of the strong, silent types who do their best work on the fringes – leaves behind a void Hollywood wasn’t prepared to fill. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/09/former-arcadia-staff-pursue-compensation-over-redundancies | Business | 2021-02-09T18:16:19.000Z | Sarah Butler | Former Arcadia staff pursue compensation over redundancies | Hundreds of former Arcadia staff are lining up to claim compensation after being made redundant following the collapse of Sir Philip Green’s fashion empire.
Two no-win no-fee legal firms say they have already gathered almost 200 potential claimants who they say may not have been properly consulted before losing their jobs.
Aticus Law has at least 150 potential claimants lined up while Simpson Millar has already signed up 10 claimants from across the Arcadia Group, and had enquiries from dozens more.
Usdaw, the shopworkers union, said it was consulting with members and would consider seeking compensation for those affected. The union is already backing a similar claim for former Debenhams workers.
Up to 12,000 people are set to lose their jobs at Arcadia after its main brands, Topshop, Topman, Miss Selfridge, Wallis, Burton and Dorothy Perkins, were sold off to online specialists Asos and Boohoo who have not taken on the group’s hundreds of stores.
There is a legal duty to consult collectively with staff in shops or other locations where more than 20 redundancies are made.
Workers who were not properly consulted are entitled to a “protective award” of up to 90 days’ wages, capped at £4,353 each, if an employment tribunal finds that a company has not conducted a proper consultation process with them ahead of their dismissal.
Damian Kelly, head of employment law at Simpson Millar, said: “While some companies are struggling because of the pandemic, they still have a duty under current employment law legislation to carry out a proper consultation with staff at risk of redundancies. Where that does not happen, employees can bring a claim for a protective award.”
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Deloitte, which is handling the administration of Arcadia, said: “It would be inappropriate for us to comment on the employee consultation process. However, we absolutely recognise it is a very difficult time for all those impacted by the administration of the group.”
Lawyers have previously won protective claims for workers at BHS, which collapsed in 2016, and electrical goods chain Comet, which collapsed in 2012 as well as numerous other collapsed firms. The complex claims, which begin with an application to conciliation before Acas before usually going to tribunal, can take up to two years to reach conclusion.
The claims against collapsed businesses are usually met by the government-backed Redundancy Payments Service, part of the Insolvency Service, rather than the companies themselves. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/09/andrew-keen-internet-not-answer-interview | Technology | 2015-02-09T19:15:20.000Z | Jon Henley | The great internet swindle: ever get the feeling you've been cheated? | During every minute of every day of 2014, according to Andrew Keen’s new book, the world’s internet users – all three billion of them – sent 204m emails, uploaded 72 hours of YouTube video, undertook 4m Google searches, shared 2.46m pieces of Facebook content, published 277,000 tweets, posted 216,000 new photos on Instagram and spent $83,000 on Amazon.
By any measure, for a network that has existed recognisably for barely 20 years (the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, was released in 1993), those are astonishing numbers: the internet, plainly, has transformed all our lives, making so much of what we do every day – communicating, shopping, finding, watching, booking – unimaginably easier than it was. A Pew survey in the United States found last year that 90% of Americans believed the internet had been good for them.
So it takes a brave man to argue that there is another side to the internet; that stratospheric numbers and undreamed-of personal convenience are not the whole story. Keen (who was once so sure the internet was the answer that he sank all he had into a startup) is now a thoughtful and erudite contrarian who believes the internet is actually doing untold damage. The net, he argues, was meant to be “power to the people, a platform for equality”: an open, decentralised, democratising technology that liberates as it empowers as it informs.
Instead, it has handed extraordinary power and wealth to a tiny handful of people, while simultaneously, for the rest of us, compounding and often aggravating existing inequalities – cultural, social and economic – whenever and wherever it has found them. Individually, it may work wonders for us. Collectively, it’s doing us no good at all. “It was supposed to be win-win,” Keen declares. “The network’s users were supposed to be its beneficiaries. But in a lot of ways, we are its victims.”
The Internet Is Not the Answer review – how the digital dream turned sour
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This is not, Keen acknowledges, a very popular view, especially in Silicon Valley, where he has spent the best part of the past 30-odd years after an uneventful north London childhood (the family was in the rag trade). But The Internet is Not the Answer – Keen’s third book (the first questioned the value of user-generated content, the second the point of social media; you get where he’s coming from) – has been “remarkably well received”, he says. “I’m not alone in making these points. Moderate opinion is starting to see that this is a problem.”
What seems most unarguable is that, whatever else it has done, the internet – after its early years as a network for academics and researchers from which vulgar commercial activity was, in effect, outlawed – has been largely about the money. The US government’s decision, in 1991, to throw the nascent network open to private enterprise amounted, as one leading (and now eye-wateringly wealthy) Californian venture capitalist has put it, to “the largest creation of legal wealth in the history of the planet”.
The numbers Keen reels off are eye-popping: Google, which now handles 3.5bn searches daily and controls more than 90% of the market in some countries, including Britain, was valued at $400bn last year – more than seven times General Motors, which employs nearly four times more people. Its two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are worth $30bn apiece. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, head of the world’s second biggest internet site – used by 19% of people in the world, half of whom access it six days a week or more – is sitting on a similar personal pile, while at $190bn in July last year, his company was worth more than Coca-Cola, Disney and AT&T.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon also has $30bn in his bank account. And even more recent online ventures look to be headed the same way: Uber, a five-year-old startup employing about 1,000 people and once succinctly described as “software that eats taxis”, was valued last year at more than $18bn – roughly the same as Hertz and Avis combined. The 700-staff lodging rental site Airbnb was valued at $10bn in February last year, not far off half as much as the Hilton group, which owns nearly 4,000 hotels and employs 150,000 people. The messaging app WhatsApp, bought by Facebook for $19bn, employs just 55, while the payroll of Snapchat – which turned down an offer of $3bn – numbers barely 20.
Andrew Keen: ‘The internet compounds our rage.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Guardian
Part of the problem here, argues Keen, is that the digital economy is, by its nature, winner-takes-all. “There’s no inevitable or conspiratorial logic here; no one really knew it would happen,” he says. “There are just certain structural qualities that mean the internet lends itself to monopolies. The internet is a perfect global platform for free-market capitalism – a pure, frictionless, borderless economy … It’s a libertarian’s wet dream. Digital Milton Friedman.” Nor are those monopolies confined to just one business. Keen cites San Francisco-based writer Rebecca Solnit’s incisive take on Google: imagine it is 100 years ago, and the post office, the phone company, the public libraries, the printing houses, Ordnance Survey maps and the cinemas were all controlled by the same secretive and unaccountable organisation. Plus, he adds, almost as an afterthought: “Google doesn’t just own the post office – it has the right to open everyone’s letters.”
This, Keen argues, is the net economy’s natural tendency: “Google is the search and information monopoly and the largest advertising company in history. It is incredibly strong, joining up the dots across more and more industries. Uber’s about being the transport monopoly; Airbnb the hospitality monopoly; TaskRabbit the labour monopoly. These are all, ultimately, monopoly plays – that’s the logic. And that should worry people.”
It is already having consequences, Keen says, in the real world. Take – surely the most glaring example – Amazon. Keen’s book cites a 2013 survey by the US Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which found that while it takes, on average, a regular bricks-and-mortar store 47 employees to generate $10m in turnover, Bezos’s many-tentacled, all-consuming and completely ruthless “Everything Store” achieves the same with 14. Amazon, that report concluded, probably destroyed 27,000 US jobs in 2012.
“And we love it,” Keen says. “We all use Amazon. We strike this Faustian deal. It’s ultra-convenient, fantastic service, great interface, absurdly cheap prices. But what’s the cost? Truly appalling working conditions; we know this. Deep hostility to unions. A massive impact on independent retail; in books, savage bullying of publishers. This is back to the early years of the 19th century. But we’re seduced into thinking it’s good; Amazon has told us what we want to hear. Bezos says, ‘This is about you, the consumer.’ The problem is, we’re not just consumers. We’re citizens, too.”
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Photograph: Brad Barket/Getty Images
One chapter of the book is devoted to Keen’s lament for Rochester, the home town of Eastman Kodak – a company that in 1989, the year Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, was worth $31bn and employed 145,000 people. It filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Just the previous year, as a timeline at its headquarters records, 380bn photographs were taken around the world – 11% of all the photographs ever taken – and the number of images hosted by Facebook (a business whose model is the monetisation of friendship and whose product is, essentially, us and our lives) was approaching 500bn. Meanwhile, 55,000 Kodak pensioners are out of luck.
Silicon Valley talks about the digital economy creatively “disrupting” what went before; Keen thinks a better word might be “destruction”. He insists he is “not a Luddite. I have no objection to the destruction of the old – providing there’s something to take its place. This isn’t a technological issue; it’s a question about the world we want to live in. Look, I’ve sat in the back of enough dirty cabs and been insulted by enough drivers to know the taxi business is very far from perfect. It needs to modernise, become more accountable.
“But Uber? It’s a platform. They say everyone can become a driver, but are these jobs? My problem with Uber is not that it’s new, not even that it’s sweeping away a whole old system – it’s that it’s replacing it with … nothing. This is the gig economy. The so-called ‘sharing’ economy is actually dominated by a few companies, worth tens of billions of dollars. Do we really want to live as a precariat, perpetually selling ourselves on one network or other? Take it further: can the internet really replace healthcare, education, government? Can teachers and lawyers and doctors be replaced by a tiny group of online superstars? Some people think they can. They think the internet is the answer. I think the internet is more like the question for our 21st-century future.”
Keen confesses to being “perhaps a bit of a content snob, although only in the sense that I value skilled labour and appreciate good content”. He is, he says, particularly concerned by the impact of the internet’s “culture of free” on the creative and media industries. “If there’s no exchange of cash for your article, your photograph, your movie, your book, your song, how else are you supposed to make money?” he asks. “It’s not an original point, sure. But it’s been almost 50 years since the first computer-to-computer communication now; 25 years since the birth of the web. We’ve constantly been told: wait, don’t worry, it’s a young medium, something will emerge … But nothing has. For creatives, this has been a disaster.”
The internet is not the answer – Tech Weekly podcast
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The number of photographers’ jobs in the US has fallen by 43%, he notes; the number of newspaper editorial jobs by 27%. He cites US singer-songwriter Ellen Shipley, who calculated in 2012 that one of her most popular tracks was streamed 3.1m times on the internet radio Pandora, for which she received a total of $31.93, and points to the 45% of revenue skimmed off all independently produced content on YouTube. Meanwhile, the internet’s inherent “1% model” is functioning perfectly: in 2013, Keen notes, the top 1% of music artists received 77% of all artist-recorded music income. Blockbusters do brilliantly; most of the rest withers.
“These new monopolistic platforms are more powerful, more wealthy and fundamentally indifferent to creativity,” he argues. “So I think when we look back, we might see that what we have now is actually lot worse than what we started with. Maybe, even, big media is not as evil as everyone makes out. Publishing houses, record labels, the Guardian – how much money have you guys lost over the past few years? – were and are made up of people who care about quality content, and they’re being swept away. We’re destroying the old, and what are we replacing it with? Anonymous people on Reddit spreading rumours, angry people on Twitter, celebrities online with millions of followers, selling their brand?”
Rather than encouraging creativity, stimulating competition, creating jobs, distributing wealth and promoting equality, Keen argues, the internet is in fact doing the reverse. Socially and culturally, it’s the same: “Rather than creating more democracy,” he writes in the introduction to The Internet is Not the Answer, “it’s empowering the rule of the mob. Rather than encouraging tolerance, it’s unleashed such a distasteful war on women that many no longer feel welcome on the network … Rather than making us happy, it’s compounding our rage.”
Google’s Larry Page. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images
Not, he says again, that he would ever try to argue that the web has not helped us to communicate: “Even I wouldn’t dare do that. There’s obviously a huge amount of very real communication on the web.” But he does have his issues with social media.
If the “winnowing away” of 19th- and 20th-century industrial society is producing an “ever more atomised, more fragmented, more individualised” world in which “we are all basically our own brands – having to invent and reinvent ourselves because the old associations, the old certainties, the old identities are vanishing”, then, Keen argues, the internet is the perfect platform for us to do that. “That’s what we do, distribute our brands,” Keen says. “With the twist, of course, that in this particular economy, we’re also the product. The illusion of social media is that we want to be social; the reality is we’re selling ourselves. Or, at least, we think we are: actually, it’s selling us. We’re all working for Facebook and Google.”
What about social media’s role in organising protest and as a catalyst for change – in, for example, the Occupy movement, or the Arab Spring? Even there, Keen has his doubts. “It may have helped undermine old autocracies, but now it’s descending into chaos and warring tribes just like on the ground. We’ve thrown out the information gatekeepers and what we’ve got is propaganda.” During the July 2014 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he points out, Israel was employing 400 students to run Facebook pages in five languages, while Hamas’s military wing, al-Qassam, was busily tweeting its line to thousands of followers.
Not much on social media is truly social, he argues. “We personalise,” he says. “So, you know, it’s kind of social, but in a very personalised way … One of the most troubling things for me about social media is the lack of diversity. It’s like going to some expensive US college. You only meet people like yourself.” Then there’s the whole privacy issue: “The internet is becoming structurally parochial, like a village. So not only does everyone from the NSA to the big internet companies know pretty much everything there is to know about us, but we’re all clustering in these tighter and tighter little ideological and cultural networks. There’s no serendipity, no stumbling upon random people or random ideas. Everything is pre-ordained; you’re served with what they know will suit you.”
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Plus, of course, the internet is increasingly full of angry people. “It’s not that the net made us angry,” says Keen, “but it has become the funnel for our anger. We’re all now in the business of blaming someone else, we’re all obsessed with the meaningless indiscretions of strangers, and we have a platform for it. The internet’s a really great tool for persecuting people we don’t know, who we’re utterly indifferent to, about stuff that is essentially irrelevant. Stuff that, in a pub, we’d forget about in 30 seconds.”
Look, he says, at Justine Sacco, the PR executive famously shamed – and fired – after tweeting: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!” In a pub, says Keen, “We’d say, ‘That’s a stupid thing to say,’ and move on. We wouldn’t throw her out, complain to her employers, get her fired, put her in the stocks to be publicly pelted …”
So if the internet is actually the question, what’s the answer? A different internet altogether, Keen believes. Socially, he thinks, we’re all going to have to become “a whole lot more tolerant. Get over this fury at strangers.” But mainly, he thinks the time has come for “the regulators and the entrepreneurs to understand that they have to work together. That this conversation really has to happen; that we have to realise the internet has not been an unmitigated success.”
Because there is, he believes, something “quite disturbing, really quite problematic, going on at the root of our culture about this networked world that we’re slipping and sliding our way into. About how we engage with other people; how we think about society, politics, values. There has been a profound, structural change in the way we all do business: personally, socially, culturally and certainly economically. A very major shift in how we organise society. And we all need to wake up to that.”
Andrew Keen’s The Internet Is Not The Answer is out now (Atlantic Books, £16.99). Buy a copy for £13.59 including free p&p at bookshop.theguardian.com. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/oct/29/time-series-two-review-bbc-jodie-whittaker-shines-a-light-on-the-idiocy-behind-our-legal-system | Television & radio | 2023-10-29T22:00:02.000Z | Lucy Mangan | Time series two review – Jodie Whittaker shines a light on the idiocy of our legal system | Jimmy McGovern’s 2021 prison drama Time won plaudits by the bucketful. It starred Sean Bean as an inmate navigating the penal system and his conscience, and Stephen Graham as a decent warder being blackmailed by prisoners who knew his son was serving a sentence elsewhere. The series bagged Baftas for best actor (Bean) and best miniseries that year. It was McGovern at his best, his political viewpoint on show, but – bar a few tiny descents into agitprop – pressed into the service of a story about guilt, redemption and the flawed institutions and systems that comprise our approach to justice and prisons.
Now, in this second series, McGovern has recruited a co-writer, Helen Black, and turned his attention to the women’s estate. This time we follow three inmates and their relationships with one another, rather than with the warders. Each is a little too clearly designed as a vehicle for a particular set of problems created, aggravated or failed by their time in prison, but the essentially fine and compassionate writing – plus three sterling performances – generally prevents this from hobbling the story. Siobhan Finneran returns as chaplain Marie-Louise, her faith still moving her to try and make a dent in the mountain of troubles facing her charges, though you can often see the quiet resignation to their fates in her eyes.
Of the main three newcomers, there is Orla (Jodie Whittaker), who we first see rushing her three children through breakfast and off to school so that – unbeknown to anyone – she can make her court appearance after being charged with fiddling her electricity meter. She is taken straight from the courtroom to start a six-month sentence. It seems like Kafkaesque idiocy because it is. There is no one to pick her kids up and the rules don’t allow enough phone calls for her to sort out the kind of childcare snafu every mother has experienced – but multiplied by a million. And from this tiny acorn of petty bureaucracy a mighty oak of catastrophe will grow.
Travelling in the van that will take them all to a prison 60 miles from their homes is 19-year-old prison veteran and heroin addict Kelsey (Bella Ramsey – born in Nottingham, for those of you who missed their native accent in Game of Thrones and wondered what the American actor from The Last of Us was doing here). There are no cavity searches in women’s prisons without reasonable suspicion, so Kelsey is able to carry on using for a few days before returning to methadone. When she discovers she is pregnant, by dealer boyfriend Adam, Kelsey abandons the idea of an abortion when lifer Abi (Tamara Lawrance) informs her that sentencing judges generally go easier when you’re pregnant. The growing foetus provides her with a reason for getting clean, as well as the chance of a place on the mother and baby unit.
Abi’s is the only violent crime, and she is the closest equivalent to Bean’s character in the first series – another unusually middle-class prisoner, coping with a doubly alien world as she struggles with her guilt, the impossibility of redemption and her own extraordinary grief.
She becomes a pariah once the truth of her story is known but – as she points out in a couple of slightly unconvincingly ex-cathedra-ish speeches – she is at least partly the scapegoat for each woman’s own guilt and failings. Black doesn’t deal in simple goodies and simple baddies any more than McGovern did.
The oppressive environment and physical threat that lurked everywhere in the men’s prison first Time round are (largely) replaced here by the mental suffering created by the very different positions of women in society and the ramifications for the families they are taken from. Unsupported mothers (Orla is single, her mother an unsafe alcoholic) lose their children to foster care. Homes and jobs – which already paid barely enough to survive on and often led to the crimes in the first place – are lost. Relationships and pregnancies with bad men create a web of extra complications. McGovern and Black do not make their main or supporting characters out to be saints, but they do give full emphasis to the known fact that most women are imprisoned for low-level, non-violent crimes such as Orla’s – the kind that often wouldn’t get a man incarcerated – or as a result of being forced into illegalities by the men who control them.
With three characters to attend to, it does feel as if the writers’ attention is being stretched too thinly as they try to cover slightly too much ground, from how you deal with an unexpected period in a cell without sanitary towels to the intergenerational effects of abuse and neglect. But, like the first series, it brings attention to a terrible problem and demands a search for answers.
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Time aired on BBC One and is available on BBC iPlayer | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/feb/12/perth-festival-embraces-communal-confrontation | Culture | 2019-02-12T00:16:38.000Z | Simon Miraudo | Perth festival embraces communal confrontation | Waiting outside the abandoned men’s asylum, I’m about to be led hand-in-hand to Sunset hospital, where I’ll become one of its first new intakes in more than 20 years. I’m not going alone.
A few dozen other men and women are also stepping back in time for the world premiere of Perth festival’s interactive theatre piece Sunset, which is inspired by the actual sanctuary-turned-heritage site that once housed forgotten men and became forgotten itself.
We’re all committed to being committed – so long as it’s just for an hour or so.
The spirit of Perth: how creativity blooms in a city on the periphery
Wendy Martin
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I’ll admit, I was suspicious of Sunset’s intentions. The creatives emphasised in their pre-show remarks that this would be merely the first artistic “activation” of the space – but it is a building whose history is tinged with tragedy and trauma, which now lies languishing in a suburb where the average house sells for $2.3m. The sad stories of the real and destitute men who once sought solace here would be told – or exploited – for our fleeting entertainment.
But Sunset turned out to be an exhilarating confrontation with memory, a yearning to face our tragedies and traumas head on – and performed with stunning skill. It is a communion with the dead and, as I’d learn from the opening weekend of Perth festival, reckoning with our ghosts, and our mucky history of wilful ignorance is a powerful process. By design, this year’s festival – the final year under the curation of the artistic director, Wendy Martin – is making us all go through that process together.
Sunset is ‘a yearning to face our tragedies and traumas head on’. Photograph: Toni Wilkinson
Sunset is directed and choreographed by Maxine Doyle, who helped conceive Sleep No More – the New York interactive and immersive sensation in which you walk through a hotel as Macbeth unfolds around you.
You don’t do much walking in Sunset; after being individually summoned by a nurse and natty maitre d’ you are instead directed to rickety chairs scattered in a mess hall, to watch the STRUT dance company bring to life sorrowful stories of the hospital’s ex-inhabitants. The auditorium isn’t air-conditioned and the dancers are sweaty; the creeping scent of body odour is a feature, not a bug, I swear.
The show, which moves you around the space for different experiences and angles, shares obvious influences with Sleep No More, such as Club Silencio from Mulholland Drive; the “dance of death” from The Seventh Seal; and the Overlook Hotel from The Shining – particularly as its characters’ memories flicker in and out of existence. Its 70 minutes passed too quickly.
The next night held the opposite of a stress-nightmare: Thornton Wilder’s quaint, Pulitzer Prize-winning Our Town, acted out by a troupe of novice locals. You might wonder what the play, penned in the 1930s and set in New Hampshire, has to offer today’s residents of WA. It’s the hiring of three First Nations actors in lead roles, and familiar everyday citizens in supporting – yet substantial – parts, which asks the people of Perth to see themselves and their past more clearly than lily-white adaptations ever could.
The sparse show is staged in the open air of the State Theatre Centre courtyard, in the round. Acts one and two are intentionally mundane, dominated by its endearingly unpolished stars, including some drama teachers, their schoolchildren, an Uber Eats driver and, most bravely, a theatre critic.
The third act, however, packs a wallop, as one of the three trained performers, Abbie-lee Lewis, wrestles with the afterlife and mourns the humdrum world she left behind and failed to appreciate while alive. She is heartbreaking; I’m glad they left this job to a pro.
Abbie-lee Lewis and Ian Michael in Our Town. Photograph: Daniel J Grant
As far as communal experiences go, little can top Boorna Waanginy: The Trees Speak, a $1m spectacle where Dreamtime stories are projected on to the towering flora of Kings Park at night, turning the hilltop environment into a breathtaking shadow play of a long-lost era.
On Friday and Saturday, its walkway was trekked by more than 115,000 people, surpassing the total number of visitors in 2017, when its premiere was marred by unseasonal rain.
This year, it’s met by a record-breaking heatwave. Even the elements are doing their part for this commentary on climate change.
Perth festival opens with an exquisite million-dollar spectacle – and an urgent warning
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On the journey, we heard how Indigenous people survived on Whadjuk land for 50,000 years without inflicting damage. I paused like many others at a section in which the lights were shut off one by one to mirror our impending extinction. The throng of visitors were seated, spellbound, on the grass – maybe because it was also a pretty good make-out spot as far as public community events go, but maybe also because the message was genuinely, finally resonating.
In Our Town, a planted audience participant asks, “Is there any culture or love of beauty in Grover’s Corners?” Many in Perth wonder the same of their own city. Like Grover’s Corners, Perth can seem small and panicked by encroaching weather. These arguments thin during summer, when culture swarms us and everyone temporarily stops threatening to move to Melbourne.
In 2015, 1 million people watched The Giants walk for Perth festival, reminding us how big our town was. Now, in 2019, we’re being asked to imagine what else we could be.
Perth festival runs until 3 March. Boorna Waanginy ended on 11 February. Sunset ends on 17 February. Our Town ends on 23 February | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2017/jan/16/wiley-five-key-moments-in-his-career | Music | 2017-01-16T16:07:34.000Z | Joe Muggs | Wiley – five landmarks in the godfather of grime's career | Between the legions of scoop-necked DJ bores and the sub-Sheeran mopers it’s easy to get disheartened about the lack of personality in modern British pop. But at least we have Wiley. Even within grime’s playpen of extroverts, he is a wildcard, a high priest of obstreperousness who seemingly lives to upset applecarts – playing games with persona and reality, rampaging through the music industry, pouring out an endless stream of consciousness through his lyrics but also whatever social media platform takes his fancy at the time. He’s constantly walked a line between gangster coldness and a childlike openness, and between truly avant garde brilliance and shameless pop ambition.
He’s picked fights with almost everyone in grime, from the most spectacularly petty to the deadly serious, yet somehow as he matures (he just turned 37) he manages to retain his place as the scene’s patriarch. He should probably be a bigger national and international star than he is, but the way he has constantly splurged out his work, self-sabotaged and evaded expectation means that he displays the polar opposite of the gimlet-eyed ambition of his one-time brother-in-arms Dizzee Rascal, and can be very confusing to all but the most avid observer. Nonetheless, he has just released one of the best and most focused albums in his career, The Godfather, and against all odds seems as energised as he’s ever been.
Trying to do a “best of Wiley” is a fool’s errand, as aside from the vastness of his official and unofficial work, his moments of greatness are as likely to be a Twitter outburst as a lyric, and some high points are often entirely dependent on understanding the context within the soap opera of his life and the grime scene. However, here are five moments out of many where he shines bright, each of which offers a window into the world of one of the truest individualists of the modern musical world.
1. Back and forth with Eksman
It’s worth having a dig through YouTube for recordings of Wiley MCing on drum’n’bass DJ sets in the 90s for two main reasons. First, as an indicator of just how long he’s been honing his craft: the first ones are from 1996, and already on this rapid-fire to-and-fro with drum’n’bass mainstay Eksman from 1998 his flow and enunciation are impeccable. And, second, to understand that his roots are in the rave. This was his school, where he learned the weird and extreme sonorities that would feed into his groundbreaking electronic productions, and you can also see the hyperspeed patter of drum’n’bass as the launching of the relentless stream of verbal momentum that has characterised his entire life since. Although his style is pretty much standard for the time, and the subject matter is hype, threats and boasts, you can already see his leftfield inventiveness in throwaway oddities like “wipe my feet on your face just like a doormat, I’m coming through the catflap”.
2. Working with Dizzee
Where it all coalesced. Having earned his stripes in drum’n’bass and achieved stardom in UK garage as part of Pay As U Go Cartel, the years 2001 and 2002 saw Wiley find his voice in all respects. The eerie “Eskibeat” instrumentals he was selling by the tens of thousands on white label 12in singles, and the varied MC talent of the original lineup of Roll Deep Crew were among grime’s defining sounds. But it was his to-and-fro with his young friend and protege Dizzee Rascal on rave sets and tapes that probably did more than anything else to signal to the world that something new had arrived. Their falling out – apparently over hot-headedness and petty crew politics that led to Dizzee’s stabbing in Ayia Napa – is one of the great creative tragedies of modern pop.
3. Sorry Sorry Pardon What
In a typical flurry of activity, Wiley released five album-length Tunnel Vision mixtapes in just six months at the end of 2006. This one opened the last, as well as forming a B-side to an official single release later in the year. In a multilayered bit of self-referentiality, he samples Dizzee’s vocaling of his own 2003 Ice Rink instrumental – which itself was possibly the most perfect expression of the deep emotional complexity of his Eskibeat style – then rides the rhythm himself on some of the most cantankerous, I’ll-fight-the-lot-of-yer form of his life. Notable for world-class language mangling like “blood, you’re the one who got smacked in the grilliam”.
4. Step Three Freestyle
And, talking of language mangling, here’s one of those classic moments where Wiley’s musical vividness of expression just seems to spill over, beyond the meaning his words are capable of containing. At the same time as he was having his biggest major label pop hit, Heatwave, he was also returning to the Big Dada label to say: “Let’s go and make magic / I couldn’t quit grime if I wanted to / it’s been a long time, I’m an addict / for me it’s just a habit / and this fire in my belly right now / rudeboy you have never had it / had it, had it, never had it / had it, had it, never had it / never never never never never never never never.” It’s that rave MC glossolalia – also constantly resurgent in his tendency to burst out with “budududu badadadada” as part of lines – that will never leave him and which keeps the momentum going within the track and his career.
5. Bring Them All/Holy Grime ft Devlin
And here he is, in 2016, with a fellow rapper with whom who he’s fought and bickered over the years. For every time Wiley has wistfully looked to the big money of US success, or found himself at the top of the British charts with a dance track by accident or design, he can’t stop himself falling back to the pleasures of just MCing over a soundsystem-testing beat. As ever, he’s commentating on his own life and on anything that falls into his field of vision, prodding, testing, trying ideas out. For all that grime, at the start of the century, seemed like an explosion that couldn’t possibly do anything other than burn out, a decade and a half on, Wiley and his fellow elder statesmen Skepta, JME, P Money, Ghetts, Devlin, Flowdan and a whole lot of others are doing a shockingly good job of making it look like there’s life in the old dog yet. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/aug/31/agatha-christie-by-lucy-worsley-review-in-search-of-the-elusive-author | Books | 2022-08-31T08:00:23.000Z | Alex Clark | Agatha Christie by Lucy Worsley review – in search of the elusive author | If Agatha Christie remains elusive, it’s not for the want of those trying to find her. Janet Morgan’s official biography of 1984 and Laura Thompson’s equally detailed but ultimately more impressionistic portrait of 2007 have both been updated and reissued; and there are numerous other analyses that try to understand how the woman who routinely described herself as a housewife became Britain’s bestselling novelist of all time. Enter historian Lucy Worsley, whose declared intention is to rescue Christie, who died in 1976 at the age of 85, from the misperceptions that cling to her life and her works of fiction.
In service of the former, she revisits the most notorious episode of Christie’s life: her disappearance for 11 days in December 1926, prompting blanket media coverage, an extensive police search and, after she had resurfaced at a hydropathic hotel in Harrogate, widespread suspicion that her tale of memory loss was an elaborate publicity stunt. In terms of the novels, Worsley’s focus is on debunking the assumption that Christie invented and epitomised what has become known as “cosy” crime fiction, pointing to the darker elements of her work, its modernity, and its increasing interest in psychological themes.
Is she convincing? Up to a point. These ways of thinking about Christie are not entirely new or unfamiliar, and although Worsley has evidently done due diligence among her subject’s correspondence and personal records, there are no major revelations. It’s more, perhaps, that she brings a clear-eyed empathy that allows her to acknowledge Christie’s limitations and prejudices without consigning her to the silos of mass-market populist and absentee mother.
Christie in her Berkshire home, 1950. Photograph: Daily Mirror
Sometimes, this is a stretch. Worsley is correct to argue that dismissing the books as formulaic – algebraic, indeed – is a way of diminishing Christie’s power to graft an apparently impenetrable mystery on to an evocatively imagined and interestingly peopled setting, and to repeat the trick over and over again; such reductive ways of characterising the work of popular writers are still very much in evidence. Her gift for dialogue and for manipulating social stereotypes, as Worsley demonstrates, was formidable, keenly attuned to the proliferating class anxieties of the 20th century; numerous characters are, interestingly, transitional or dispossessed in some way, at odds with one view of her as a writer of the country-house elite. (This approach gets only so far when it comes to discussing her reliance on racist tropes, and particularly antisemitic slurs, on which Worsley maintains that we must accept her as a product of her class and time, but also that we must squarely face the reality of what she writes and not try to excuse it. The issue here is that, fundamentally, the circle cannot be squared and rests largely on whether one believes bigotry is, at some level, historically inescapable.)
This doesn’t quite amount to the claims made in one eyebrow-raising passage in the biography, in which Worsley appears to argue that Christie has common ground with the modernists whose defining moment came as her first novels were published: “What if the middlebrow and the modernist could actually be the same thing?” she writes. “A more inclusive definition of modernism might mean that you can also find it in works that don’t necessarily bludgeon you in the face with the shock of the new in the manner of Ulysses.” If you are going to rescue one writer from misunderstanding, it’s as well not to visit the same ignominy on another. And as much as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’s ingenuity relies on the disruption of accepted narrative convention, I don’t think it has a lot in common with Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.
A Very Elusive Woman does, however, paint an intriguing picture of Christie as an upper-middle-class Victorian and Edwardian child whose life, then and later, encompassed significant losses and reversals of fortune, emotionally and materially. Perhaps counterintuitively, Worsley’s plummy-chummy tone bolsters rather than detracts from the seriousness with which she has evidently taken her task, as if she’s attempting to translate the sensibilities of a bygone era and mindset to contemporary life. Of Christie’s first husband, Archibald, whose adultery sparked that 1926 flight, she confides that a photograph of him impressed on her “an essential fact” that she hadn’t hitherto appreciated: “He was incredibly hot.” When Agatha is patronised by a chemist from whom she’s trying to learn about poisons, Worsley simply says: “Urgh”.
Where Worsley excels is in her descriptions of Christie’s day-to-day life; we hear virtually nothing of her political opinions as she lives through two world wars, for example, but we do glean a sense of her exceptionalism in the news that she consistently ignored air-raid sirens and simply turned over in bed. And she reports Christie’s almost compulsive buying of properties, her quiet, near-clandestine funding of her second husband’s archeological career and her love of rich food in a way that allows us to understand the version of home, love and stability she was trying to recreate. This may be the first biography I’ve read where my attention was genuinely piqued by the discussion of the subject’s tax affairs. Has Lucy Worsley tracked down Agatha Christie? Not quite, but her nose for diverting byways may suffice.
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Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman is published by Hodder & Stoughton(£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/16/armchair-woodchoppers-guide-surprise-bestseller-norwegian-wood | Books | 2015-11-16T07:00:07.000Z | Alison Flood | Armchair woodchoppers' make DIY timber guide surprise bestseller | A practical guide to chopping, stacking and burning wood the Norwegian way, detailing everything from the drying time of a birch tree felled in winter to the correct sharpening of a chainsaw, has caught the imagination of British readers and is setting bestseller lists on fire.
Lars Mytting’s Norwegian Wood combines both eminently practical information about tree types and wood-stacking methods (the Norwegian Sun-Wall Woodpile, for example, is “a real classic – where regulations permit it”) with a history of the practice, and personal stories from the Norwegians who spend months preparing for their frigid winters.
“Liv Kristin and Peder Brenden, from Brumunddal, build classic cord stacks with 24-inch logs. Peder handles the chain saw and Liv … does the splitting and stacking, usually in the mornings, after mucking out the cattle,” writes Mytting by an image of the pair. Another log pile “was made by Arthur Tørisen, formerly a postmaster at Kvam, in Gudbrandsdal, when he was 76”, he writes. “New heights of artistry are possible if you combine chunky and finely chopped logs with unsplit branches.”
Published in Robert Ferguson’s English translation in October, Norwegian Wood soared to No 2 on Amazon’s UK bestseller chart later that month, ahead of Jamie Oliver’s latest cookbook. Independent publisher MacLehose Press has rushed through four reprints to keep up with demand.More than 20,000 copies have already sold in the UK. Published in 2011 in Norway as Hel Ved (Solid Wood, an expression referring to a person’s good character), the book has sold 300,000 copies internationally, and is translated into 10 languages.
‘Completely gripping’ ... a Swedish Gränsfors American Felling Axe, pictured in Norwegian Wood. Photograph: Lars Mytting/PR
“We’ll have 60,000 in print by Christmas,” said editor Katharina Bielenberg at MacLehose. “It has completely exceeded all our expectations. It’s a book which makes people smile … and even though it’s quite a detailed DIY manual, people sit and read it cover to cover – they find it completely gripping.”
Mytting remains astonished by its performance. “I think if I had known the sales potential of it, and the success it would have, I wouldn’t be finished writing it yet,” he said. “But without anyone knowing, the time was right for it.”
Mytting described the book as “both a useful how-to guide, and a tale from a cold country … a non-fiction book carrying with it the dream and the ambience of being self-sufficient … in your own cabin”. It appears, he says, to be appealing to “the armchair woodchopper” as well as enthusiasts.
Snippets of wisdom about what you can tell about a person from his woodpile (“low pile: Cautious man, could be shy or weak”) to how in Norway, “discussions on the vexed question of whether logs should be stacked with the bark facing up or down have marred many a christening and spoiled many a wedding when wood enthusiasts are among the guests”, are also included.
A Norwegian television programme based on the book that aired in 2013 was followed by a six-hour programme showing nothing but an open fire in a hut. One million people tuned in during the course of the show. “People actually followed it,” said Mytting. “They’d comment on Twitter ‘time to get on a new log’, or complained ‘when will they burn spruce? There’s too much birch now’. There was no end to the detail.”
At Waterstones, non-fiction buyer Bea Carvalho said Norwegian Wood’s unexpected success was “thoroughly deserved”.
“It’s a pleasingly unusual and very special book which celebrates our relationship with nature through the ancient practice of woodchopping and stacking,” she said. “We see it as a key gifting title this Christmas.”
According to Carvalho, “publishing in the nature genre has been particularly strong recently, and books that celebrate rural practices of working with the land are proving especially popular. The Shepherd’s Life, James Rebanks’s love-letter to farming life in the Lake District, for example, has been so successful that it has made the shortlist for this year’s Waterstones Book of the Year.”
Chopping and stacking wood, Mytting believes, “is a very healthy thing to do for a modern person”. “So much of our life is based on a digital lifestyle. Chopping wood is so extremely different,” he said. “It’s a hands-on experience, which is only you, with simple tools, and very organic material – old trees that have spent up to 200 years growing, that are heavy and stout and really give you resistance when you chop them. It gives you a reward that is exactly equal to the effort you put into it.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/17/cobham-brings-in-laird-boss-as-chief-executive-bob-murphy-david-lockwood | Business | 2016-08-17T07:57:46.000Z | Sean Farrell | Cobham brings in Laird boss as chief executive | Cobham is replacing Bob Murphy as chief executive, four months after the engineering group issued a profit warning and was forced to raise £500m from shareholders.
David Lockwood, chief executive of Laird, will take over from Murphy by the start of 2016.
Cobham, which supplies radar and other electronic products for industries including defence and aviation, said Murphy was leaving by the end of the year to pursue other opportunities after four years in charge.
The company warned in April that annual profit would be lower than expected. At the same time it launched a £500m rights issue, completed in June, to strengthen finances partly weakened by debt taken on to buy US communications equipment maker Aeroflex in 2014.
This month the company reported a 36% drop in first-half profit, leaving it needing a big improvement in performance to meet full-year targets.
The company’s performance was also affected by delayed shipments at its wireless communications business and lower demand from oil and mining customers for flying services in Australia.
Lockwood has run Laird, which makes wireless systems and materials to protect electronics from heat, for the past four years. Before that he was vice-president of global defence and security at BT Global Services and worked at other companies including the aerospace and defence groups BAE Systems and Thales.
John Devaney, Cobham’s chairman, said: “David has a background in defence and communications technology which are at the heart of Cobham. We look forward to him joining the company and thank Bob for his contribution.”
Lockwood will be paid a salary of £690,000 a year and will be eligible for bonuses at Cobham. Laird said Lockwood would leave on 5 September and would be replaced by Tony Quinlan, the company’s finance director.
Cobham shares, down 40% this year, rose 5% to 168p in early trading on Wednesday. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/nov/22/fun-engaging-quick-indoor-cricket-could-be-due-for-a-global-revival-spin | Sport | 2023-11-22T10:45:45.000Z | Tanya Aldred | The Spin | ‘Fun, engaging, quick’: indoor cricket could be due for a global revival | If you love cricket but hate the idea of winter nets – the waiting in line, the chilliness, the squeaky-trainered quiet – then perhaps an energetic game of indoor cricket might appeal. But trying to get your head around the different formats of the game and how it exists in the UK is like navigating your way through a particularly tangled bag of damp knitting.
Historically, there are two forms of indoor cricket. The first is played in a general sports hall, with the idea of roughly recreating outdoor cricket – but inside. Sometimes matting is laid down but there are no specific laws and no particular formats, with the game often springing up on an ad-hoc basis. The second is “official” indoor cricket, played with a tension netted court and a pitch 30 metres long, 10-12 metres wide and 4-5 metres high – a format played especially in Australia, but also big in New Zealand and South Africa, with international contests and a World Cup.
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The England and Wales Cricket Board runs two competitions: a girls’ indoor competition for under-13s and under-15s, and an Indoor National Club Championship. Both fall within the general sports hall category.
The ECB took over the running of the girls’ competition from the Lady Taverners. It is open to all schools, and is played from January through to Easter. The county winners compete in five regional venues across the country, then the five regional winners play at Lord’s in the national finals in the week before May half-term.
There has been a generous increase in the number of schools entering, with 1,903 signing on the dotted line for 2024, an increase of 400 since 2015.
“It is really encouraging,” says Sue Laister, the ECB’s competitions manager for the women and girls’ game. “As well as being an easy game to play, the fact that it is eight overs a side means that it can be played within 45 minutes to an hour, which is the usual length of a school lesson or a lunchtime.
“It is easier for schools to organise compared to outdoor cricket, as schools usually have access to a gym or sports hall, and you need less specialised equipment.” The teams use a plastic bat and there is one innings, no lbws, two overs maximum per bowler, and players have to retire once they reach 15 – though if the rest of the team are out they can bat again.
Action from the 2023 Girls U13 Schools Cricket Finals at Lord’s indoor cricket centre in May. Photograph: Sarah Williams Photography
“It is a really good introduction to the game,” says Laister. “Everyone gets involved, it’s a fun, engaging, quick format.”
Approximately 500 teams around the country then play in the ECB-run Indoor National Club Championship. The winners of each county competition play in a regional final, with a national final in March, again at Lord’s. This is a six-a-side competition, with 12 overs a side (maximum three overs per bowler) and matches are completed in around an hour.
Separate from that are the Bucs (British Universities and Colleges Sport) indoor cricket leagues, which are very popular, partly due to the nature of university terms, which leave little time for outdoor university cricket in the summer. In fact, the University of Kent won the ECB’s Indoor National Club Championship in 2023, beating the University of Sheffield in the final.
Jen Barden is the cricket development manager for the Lancashire Foundation. She remembers indoor cricket carrying on through the winter 20 years ago and recognises that there is a bit of a gap in provision now, but there is a reason for that: “It is a high-cost activity. In an hour only 16 kids will have taken part and you need to hire a venue and have an umpire as well.” Lancashire don’t generally run competitions but they are happy to lend advice and equipment to anyone who wants to. “It depends a bit on who has the bug in a particular area.” Barden remembers a purpose-built tension net indoor cricket centre in Rochdale, “but now the nearest one is in Birmingham”.
Action from an England v Australia 21 and under match at the 2017 Indoor Cricket World Cup. Photograph: Action Indoor Cricket
Which brings us to Action Indoor Cricket England and its chairman, Duncan Norris. Norris is the England delegate to the World Indoor Cricket Federation, and Action Indoor Cricket, based in Birmingham, is in charge of domestic, national and international teams and tournaments.
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“In the 80s and 90 there were over 60 cricket centres with tension nets and there was huge participation,” he says. “People like Mike Gatting and Asif Din all started out playing the format as an additional form. Unfortunately, the commercial model is very tricky to make work in this country with high rates and the activity being very seasonal. So gradually most of those centres closed.” There are now only four tension net centres left in the country – all Midlands based – in Derby, Nottingham, Leicester and Birmingham.
Norris’s involvement came when he bought the Bristol indoor cricket centre (which later closed after the financial pressures of Covid) from administrators in 2009 and reinvested in it. He was then brought in as a consultant by the ECB before “in 2014 the ECB asked my company to govern, manage and develop the game and we signed a memorandum of understanding”.
He is a huge believer in the tension net version of indoor cricket – both as a way to develop cricketers and as a participation sport.
Mike Gatting, batting for England, sets off for a run during an indoor match against South Africa at Lord’s in 1991. Photograph: Robert Hallam/Shutterstock
“It’s a very pressured competition and everyone has to bat, bowl and field, there is no hiding place. In the last 30 years cricket has changed dramatically, it has got shorter and more dynamic – and you see indoor skills on outdoor pitches more and more. In the indoor format the fielding skills are electric.”
Between September and March, at the Birmingham Centre in Stockland Green, Action Indoor Cricket puts on 24 weeks of evening leagues, Monday to Friday, and 24 weekends of national competitions for all age groups from under-11 to masters (50 plus). He is extremely proud of the numbers of people who come to play the game. “This is approximately 1,000 matches during the winter months, with 16 players involved per match – in the summer, a club will do well to fit in 40-50 games.” The players also come from diverse backgrounds, with 60% of those playing in the local midweek leagues having an Asian background.
Perhaps most noteworthy of all, Norris thinks the game is about to enter a new realm – something that may catch the eye of the ECB and even the International Cricket Council. “Globally the game is about to explode, now that the UAE has come to the party with three big centres in Dubai.”
This is an extract from the Guardian’s weekly cricket email, The Spin. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/30/ellen-page-being-out-became-more-important-than-any-movie | Film | 2016-02-10T10:47:30.000Z | Sophie Heawood | Ellen Page: ‘Being out became more important than any movie’ | Within a few minutes of meeting the actor Ellen Page near her Los Angeles home, we’re talking about what she enjoys doing around here, which is going surfing with her girlfriend, artist Samantha Thomas. She likes to watch Thomas, the more experienced surfer, examine the waves. Thomas tells her which way to turn, based on movements in the water that Page can’t even see. “Particularly on days where there are onshore winds, so it’s kind of rough, she’ll say, ‘Oh, a wave’s coming at you, it’s a right, go right’ and I’m just like, ‘What are you looking at? You can read the ocean like that?’ It’s really hot,” she adds, the excitement in her gentle voice suggesting that she is quietly, but madly, in love.
There is nothing hugely remarkable about any of this, especially here in California, except that until February 2014 Page would have been unable to have such a conversation with a journalist. The actor who starred in Juno, Hard Candy and Whip It, all films about tough young women who go against the grain, was living a lie. She was pretending to be straight, or at least “lying by omission”, as she puts it, intent on fulfilling her acting ambitions without any adverse attention, even though she had been out of the closet with her loved ones for years. But the double life had started to take its toll on her sanity, so she decided, a month before the event, that she would come out during a speech at a Las Vegas conference for counsellors of young LGBT people. “I’m here today because I am gay,” she revealed, halfway through an eight-minute talk, to a standing ovation that began before she had even finished. It was Valentine’s Day.
Page was only 26, but had been acting professionally since the age of 10; at 20, she was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her role as the eponymous pregnant high-school student in Juno. The gulf between her public and private lives had been growing long enough. “I felt, let’s just please be done with this chapter of discomfort and sadness and anxiety, and hurting my relationships, and all those things that come with it,” she says now, sitting in the corner of a restaurant, in a baseball cap, sipping a green tea. “I felt guilty for not being a visible person for the community, and for having the privilege that I had and not using it. I had got to the point where I was telling myself, you know, you should feel guilty about this. I was an active participant in an element of Hollywood that is gross. I would never judge somebody else for not coming out, but for me, personally, it did start to feel like a moral imperative.”
The day after the speech, she flew straight to Montreal to do reshoots for her role as Kitty Pryde in X-Men: Days Of Future Past, and everyone there told her she seemed totally different. “And I was totally different! Just the immediacy of how much better I felt. I felt it in every cell of my body.”
I'm very proud of the movie [Freeheld], and one of the things I'm most proud about is how it's so not de-gayed
Videos of her confessional moment soon hit YouTube, and have now been viewed by more than 5 million people around the world. It seems extraordinary that the sexuality of one young person in a secular democracy can still make headline news, but then Hollywood is an extraordinary place. As Page herself says, “It’ll be amazing, the day when it’s not a thing, when an actress doesn’t feel like she needs to make a speech. That’s obviously the goal.”
When we meet, she has just finished shooting a film called Freeheld, which she both co-starred in and helped produce; it has been her passion project to get the story behind it turned into a movie. She and Julianne Moore play real-life couple Stacie Andree and Laurel Hester who, in 2005, fought to have their relationship officially recognised so that Hester, a New Jersey police detective who was dying of cancer, could leave her pension to Andree. Page plays Andree, the upfront young car mechanic who gets angry with her older lover for keeping their relationship a secret.
The film got a mixed reception on its US release last year. The New York Times review called it “as generic as the bullet points in a gay rights brochure” and declared that “the lives behind this movie deserve better”, laying some of the blame with screenwriter Ron Nyswaner. Nyswaner responded in a speech at a Los Angeles awards ceremony, claiming that the final production was not true to his script, that it had been “de-gayed” to make queer lives look more mainstream: “The gay characters were idealised, their edges were smoothed out, the conflict between them was softened.”
‘I felt guilty for not being a visible person for the community, and for having the privilege that I had and not using it.’ Photograph: Amanda Friedman/The Guardian
Page and I meet the morning after Nyswaner’s speech, and when I bring it up, it is the only time I see her upset. She says Nyswaner has already apologised personally, “but it was a hard day yesterday”. Her speech falters. “Sorry, it clearly affected me. I’m glad he wrote the apology, because… sorry, it was such a shock to me. I mean, I love the movie, I’m very proud of the movie, and one of the things I’m most proud about is how it’s so not de-gayed. Look, it’s hard to make any independent movie, particularly one that stars two women, and this one also happens to be two, you know, gay women. You will never be able to please everybody, but I cannot even begin to speculate why he would have said that.”
Does Page wish more people had seen the film?
“Of course! But the thing about movies now is they can have really, really long lives.” She points out that people can find it later online, and that if it didn’t have “the life in the American theatre that I wish”, that’s not the end of the story.
I have to ask her what it was like being married to Julianne Moore, which, despite the whole terminal cancer thing, must have been pretty great. Page laughs. “She’s the best, yeah, and she’s an extraordinary person, too. She’s obviously one of the best actresses, I think, ever.” She was thrilled when Moore signed up, because they had never met; now, they are close friends. “She’s just a wonderful, utter delight of a human, who just loves her job and works so hard. And has an awesome family.”
Juno, in 2007, was the film that sent Page’s career stellar. Photograph: Twentieth Century Fox
Ellen Page, real name Ellen Philpotts-Page, grew up in Halifax, in the Canadian maritime province of Nova Scotia. Her father was a graphic designer and her mother a French teacher; Page talks about photos of her as a student in France, before motherhood, “in these beautiful clothes and a really short haircut. She’s stunning.” They divorced when Ellen was tiny, so she spent her childhood between their two houses, a fortnight in each, something she says may have given her an aptitude for “being in new spaces all the time”.
The young Page lacked her mother’s talent for French, “but my mom is so passionate about what she does that it made me respect teachers. I was fortunate that I had something ingrained in me, that I had to do well at school.” She became self-sufficient: riding her bike to the woods, jumping in the lake, playing soccer at a high level. She loved Nova Scotia’s remoteness: “You’re just surrounded by so much beauty and stillness.”
But her mother had family in the big city, Toronto, and on one visit they all went to see The Phantom Of The Opera. “I think that was the only show there, ever, and we couldn’t even sit together.” She learned the words to all the songs; she gives me a few lines of The Music Of The Night, giggling. “I asked my mom, ‘What school do I go to to learn to be Christine?’ and she said, ‘You go to university.’ And I was like, ‘You’ll come with me, right?’ She was like, ‘Honey, by that time, I think you won’t want me to.’ I was like, ‘No, don’t say that!’”
Page left home to work as an actor even sooner than that. She joined the drama club at school, where a casting director spotted her and put her in a television movie, Pit Pony, which became a TV series. “It’s just mind-boggling, what I do now. I sometimes think, what if I was sick that day the casting guy came into school?” There followed more Canadian TV and films, and another movie shot in Europe. She grew very independent; she was supposed to be accompanied by chaperones on set, but because her parents both worked full-time, “we’d finagle it so, say, the horse-wrangler’s daughter was my chaperone”.
At 16, she moved to Toronto on her own, then went to Los Angeles to star in Hard Candy, an astonishing film about a paedophile and a teenage girl who turns the tables on him. I tell her it blew my mind. “Yeah, Hard Candy was intense. My dad came with me to do that. But they were always cool with the subject matter, they trusted me. I think back now to the idea of your daughter moving out at 16, when you’re a child actor,” she pauses. “But I was so disciplined. I knew this was what I wanted to do.” In the film, her character tortures the older man, handing him a noose in a potential forced suicide. “I remember getting ready for those scenes, I was 16, and I was almost separate from myself: shocked by it, and curious, and excited. It was a very exhilarating feeling, and very addictive.”
The trailer for Freeheld
But it was Juno, in 2007, that sent her career stellar, with nominations for the Oscars, Golden Globes and Baftas. At the Oscars, the film won best original screenplay. Thankfully, Page, who was 20 at the time, had an industry mentor to look out for her; by then she hadn’t built her own life in Los Angeles. “I basically lived with Catherine Keener when I was going through Juno’s awards season time, which was wonderful but crazy. It’s like a lot, you know? We’d met when we worked on a film together that nobody saw.” (An American Crime, a true story in which Keener’s character tortures the younger Page; the film never made it to the cinemas.) “So she was really protective and kind.”
After a trip away, Page landed back in LA on her 21st birthday. “I got to Catherine’s house and she had a surprise party for me. I came in and she’d put up balloons and stuff. But I didn’t know anybody, so everyone wore name tags.” Which is how she met her close friend, film director Spike Jonze, wearing his name on his shirt. Peaches, the electro pop star, is now a good friend, too; they met, “weirdly, when I was in Amsterdam with her friend Har Mar Superstar, writing a show we sold to HBO that never got made. I’m crazy about Peaches. I’m going to see her do a show tomorrow.”
‘It’s just mind-boggling, what I do now. I sometimes think, what if I was sick that day the casting guy came into school.’ Photograph: Amanda Friedman/The Guardian
But it’s not all famous friends and parties. After shooting Whip It, directed by Drew Barrymore, Page retreated for a month – not to a Caribbean beach, but to an eco-village in Oregon with total strangers, where she studied permaculture and went to sleep and woke up with the sun. “We created giant composts. We’d pee in a bucket with hay in it, then put the pee buckets on the compost.”
Did she ever think, I’m a movie star now: I could just press a button and get out of here?
“No! I loved it. When I left and everyone in the class was holding hands in a circle, I was fully sobbing. One of those kinds of cries where you’re just… I would not have anticipated that’s what my response would have been. I was ugly crying. There was something really special about it, because I’d gone from shooting Juno to Whip It, and then straight there. And all of that was so incredible, but I was clearly desiring something that really felt connected to the earth. And that’s where I met my best friend, Ian Daniel, who’s been my soul twin ever since.” Daniel is a gay man from Indiana, who had driven to Oregon in an old school bus powered by vegetable oil; he describes their friendship as a “love story”, but not a love affair.
I think my gayness was already playing its role in regards to my career
The soul twins now have a job together, presenting Gaycation for Viceland. The series was Page’s idea, and it involves them going to parts of the world where coming out doesn’t win you a standing ovation: Jamaica, Japan, or lunch with a US Republican senator. In a Brazilian favela, they visit a man who prides himself on murdering gay people. “He said things like, ‘If I’m in my car and I see a gay person, I run them over.’ The moment he walked into the room, it felt like a black hole sucking something out of me. I haven’t experienced anything like it. He didn’t know that we were gay.” Did the thought cross her mind that she could kill him, right then? “Yeah, you do stand there thinking, well, what am I doing?” The man left the room before they could say any more. Other encounters have been more aggressive, with people screaming in Page’s face. “And then the cameras turn off and they hit on the lesbian: that happens a lot. They’re like, ‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’ Fuck off!”
They made another film with a young man who “for whatever reason, wanted us to be there when he came out to his mother, which was one of the most intense experiences of my life.” Did his mother not wonder why there was a camera crew in her kitchen? “He told her that his media friends were here, and she was just sort of like, ‘Cool.’ It was weird, and believe me, we had a conversation about it: is this OK? It was really what he wanted. But before his mother got there, he asked me, ‘How did you do it?’ So I shared that with him. But when I’m looking at the edits of the show, if it’s me talking about myself, it makes me cringe a little. The goal is to go and look at the LGBT culture, at the joy and the liberation.”
In recent years, Page has spoken publicly about domestic violence, trans rights, gay suicides, inequality. “And the thing that I would say you get the most hate about, on social media, in my experience, is if you tweet anything about women’s rights or feminism. It blows my mind. But it’s the thought of not being a feminist that actually blows my mind. I feel that, at least now, there seem to be more women who are willing to say, ‘Yes, I’m a feminist.’ It’s shocking to me that that would ever be an issue, to not say that. I really struggle to wrap my head around that.”
With girlfriend, the artist Samantha Thomas. Photograph: Gregory Pace/BEI/Shutterstock
Otherwise, life is pretty peachy. Page recently bought a modernist house in the Hollywood Hills and says that LA really feels like home now. She and her “awesome girlfriend” have a cute dog called Patters, who gets posted a lot on their Instagram feeds. Plus, Justin Trudeau is the new Canadian prime minister. “And it’s exciting, not only that he got elected and that Stephen Harper’s finally gone, but because the Liberals have a majority in parliament.”
Actress Ellen Page comes out in speech to Human Rights Campaign event
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I ask if coming out has affected the roles that are offered to her, and she has to take a breath, nod, sigh. “I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t something I feared, and that’s the big reason so many people haven’t come out. For me, being out within my life became far more important than being in any movie.”
Of course, Page wasn’t exactly getting the typical romcom parts anyway. “Totally. I think my gayness was already playing its role in regards to my career. I’m not naive to that element of the business. I hope it changes.”
We discuss the gender pay gap in Hollywood, and an essay that Jennifer Lawrence wrote about it. “The issue is also about how many female writers there are, female directors, even female soundtrack composers,” Page adds. “I just mean, pretty much every facet of this industry. In my circle of friends, it’s something we talk about all the time. And I feel like there’s finally a conversation happening.”
Freeheld goes on general release next month.
This article was edited on 10 February 2016, to correct a misspelling of the name of Page’s dog, and to clarify the title of Vice’s new TV channel on which Gaycation is broadcast. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/mar/01/john-oliver-last-week-tonight-donald-trump-hbo-drumpf | Television & radio | 2016-03-01T17:14:56.000Z | Ellen Brait | John Oliver launches anti-Trump campaign: #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain | Donald Trump may have finally met his match.
On Sunday night, John Oliver spent 22 minutes of his weekly HBO show, Last Week Tonight, attempting to convince the American public once and for all that Trump is simply a “litigious serial liar” who “always seems to be in the same mood: smug yet gassy”.
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“Donald Trump is America’s back mole,” Oliver said. “It may have seemed harmless a year ago, but now that it’s gotten frighteningly bigger, it’s gotten hard to ignore it.”
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The late-night host presented various arguments against the Republican candidate, many which have been made before, including: his tendency to lie, his inability to take criticism, his failed business ventures of the past, his inconsistent policies, and his initial refusal to disavow former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.
But his most original argument came at the end of the segment, when he campaigned for those hoping to overthrow Trump to begin referring to him as Drumpf.
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“The very name Trump is the cornerstone of his brand,” Oliver said. “If only there were a way to uncouple that magical word from the man he really is.”
According to biographer Gwenda Blair, who wrote the book The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate, the Trump family originally went by Drumpf, before “the family changed the spelling of its name”.
Drumpf does not hold the same power as a name like Trump, according to Oliver. While Trump is the sound “produced when a mouthy servant is slapped across the face with a wad of thousand dollar bills”, Oliver said, Drumpf resembles “the sound produced when a morbidly obese pigeon flies into the window of a foreclosed Old Navy”.
Oliver urged the public to make use of this new name and proposed the hashtag #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain. But he didn’t stop there. He also announced a new website, DonaldJDrumpf.com, which is selling hats emblazoned with “Make Donald Drumpf Again” and also offers a “Drumpfinator” Google chrome extension that will replace the name Trump with Drumpf in web browsers. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/oct/28/lewis-hamilton-wins-fifth-formula-one-f1-world-title-mexico-grand-prix | Sport | 2018-10-28T20:52:50.000Z | Giles Richards | Lewis Hamilton wins fifth Formula One world title at Mexico Grand Prix | Measured even by the exceptional standard he has set in dominating Formula One Lewis Hamilton, in taking his fifth title in Mexico, has unquestionably raised the bar to new heights. We, like he, should revel in his achievements. If motor racing’s history is defined by drivers, this must surely now be considered the Hamilton era. Delivering the championship was proof, were any needed, that not only is he at the peak of his powers but that as things stand no one can match him.
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Max Verstappen won the race for Red Bull but Hamilton’s fourth place was enough to seal the title. The Briton knew what he had to do and delivered, as he has so often this season.
A celebratory win would doubtless have been welcome but Hamilton’s remarkable run to the title has repeatedly been defined by his ability to play the long game, exercising the judgment of champions to optimise every situation. Daring and committed when required but also exercising ruthless control when called for. At the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez he faced a tense race, struggling with tyre wear and vibration but he was calm and considered in conceding places when necessary and carefully bringing his car home.
Hamilton and Mercedes entered the weekend sticking to their gameplan of taking each race as it comes and the British driver insisted he would race as normal from third on the grid. They were unable to quite do so as Mercedes were left at the end wondering just where their performance had gone. Yet Hamilton and the team wanted to close it out in Mexico and did so with disciplined attentiveness. He needed only seventh place or better to take the title and ensured he did so.
When the celebrations in Mexico City finally die down, Hamilton may consider his fifth title, equalling the great Juan Manuel Fangio and only two behind Michael Schumacher’s record, as perhaps the most satisfying of his career. His first for McLaren in 2008 will never be forgotten but this was the climax to a season when the 33‑year‑old had admitted Ferrari and Sebastian Vettel had presented a challenge like no other he had faced.
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That he has closed it out with two races remaining perhaps does a disservice to just how hard he has had to work. The season had opened with Ferrari and Mercedes evenly matched but the Scuderia took the advantage in the development war, giving Vettel the faster car from the British Grand Prix onwards. With the points gap between them now so cavernous it is worth noting that until the German Grand Prix, the 11th meeting of the season and only eight races ago, the lead had changed hands five times. Before Germany, at Silverstone, Vettel was leading by eight points.
Hockenheim perhaps summed up the difference between the two and began the run that gathered an almost inexorable momentum, which culminated in Mexico. Hamilton won in Germany from 14th with Vettel crashing out after an error in the wet. On the podium the British driver stood, arms outstretched, head raised to the heavens amid glowering skies, thunder, lightning and torrential rain. Had a flight of valkyries swept across the track it would have been almost fitting as Hamilton enjoyed the blow he had struck.
Lewis Hamilton celebrates securing his fifth Formula One world title, at the Mexico Grand Prix. Photograph: Dan Istitene/Getty Images
It was the first in what turned into a barrage. He left Germany with a 17-point lead, one that would not be surrendered again and went on to win six of the eight races since then. Indeed the numbers brook no argument. He has nine wins to Vettel’s five and nine poles to Vettel’s five. He has endured a mechanical retirement where Vettel has had none and until Mexico had only twice not finished on the podium.
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Which reflects why it is he, not Vettel, who takes the crown. Where Hamilton has been almost flawless, after a string of misjudgments across the season by the German and Ferrari their chances had all but gone. Vettel had to win in Mexico and managed only second, in front of his teammate Kimi Räikkönen.
Verstappen’s win was a fine drive as he took the lead into turn one and held it throughout the race. It is his fifth victory and his second this year makes it two in row in Mexico after he took the flag here last year. In a race where tyre wear dominated the Dutchman proved to have the measure of his rubber and the opposition, with a composed performance that once again proves what great potential he has.
Hamilton had made a great start into second but with the Mercedes struggling for pace and heavy on its tyres he could not hold the place. A nervy lock-up that sent him off when being passed by Vettel was the most dangerous moment in a race when he was extraordinarily circumspect in ensuring he did not over-engage in battles at the expense of the war.
Expectations had been high that Hamilton would take the championship at the last round in the US yet, denied there, it was but a postponement. Hamilton, like all the great champions, knew how to turn the screw and end it with clinical finality in Mexico, a race that was ultimately only the coda to a peerless collection of performances. A fifth title was deserved vindication of a season Hamilton will long treasure and fair warning that he has more to come. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/sep/05/saracens-wasps-premiership-rugby-union-match-report | Sport | 2020-09-05T14:05:00.000Z | Michael Aylwin | Owen Farrell red card cost Saracens dear against resurgent Wasps | Owen Farrell has always trod a fine line with his tackling technique; now it threatens what is left of Saracens’ season. A red card on the hour for a high tackle on Charlie Atkinson, Wasps’ replacement fly-half, means the England captain will almost certainly miss Saracens’ date in Dublin in a fortnight.
Their European quarter-final against Leinster has long been their sole focus in this, the season the European champions were relegated from the Premiership for abuse of the salary cap. Such offences do not apply to European competition, but red cards do. Farrell’s tackle technique, sometimes low on the use of arms, has caught up with him.
“He clearly got it wrong,” said Mark McCall. “He’s made huge improvements to his tackle technique. Today’s incident was a little different, because he’s chasing a kick and trying to make a difference for his team and got it slightly wrong. We hope the player he hit is OK. I think he is. But it’s a real shame.” Lee Blackett, the Wasps head coach, confirmed Atkinson was “pretty healthy”.
Farrell did use his arms for this tackle. He was aiming high on the upper body, but Atkinson dipped slightly at the last split-second, and his arm connected forcefully with the head.
Farrell buried his own head in his hands, even as he hit the floor. He knew what this misstep meant. The morality police might bear in mind that no player makes these mistakes on purpose, considering what is at stake for both tackler and tacklee. Nevertheless, the referee issued the card straightaway.
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Atkinson, who is only just out of school, left the field for an HIA. Farrell waited on the touchline to console him, but any remorse he may feel will be lost when the super-slomo gifs of the incident are circulated and the verdicts dispensed on social media. Even those on the disciplinary panel may struggle to find mitigation.
All of which is to overshadow somewhat the rest of the story in Barnet, which on another day may have been headline-worthy in its own right. Wasps followed up their victory against all odds last Monday at Bath with a win against almost as many.
Saracens have been building towards that quarter-final, blending their heavyweights back into the team, collecting otherwise-meaningless wins.
It seemed they would do the same against a weakened Wasps. They opened smoothly, working Elliot Daly over for the first try in the third minute, looking a million dollars. But this Wasps squad are turning into their new head coach, which means they are insatiable and hard in defence. They ruffled Saracens at the breakdown and Jimmy Gopperth would kick all of the penalties that came his way, which was four in the first half, part of a 23-point haul for their captain for the day. Wasps ended up leading at the break 12-7.
Again, Saracens came out of the sheds in top form. Farrell pulled back three points and a few minutes later he sent Daly streaking clear. Daly timed his pass to Sean Maitland immaculately for the game’s second try. Saracens back in front.
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The home team’s discipline, even before Farrell’s moment, was poor throughout. Gopperth had Wasps level again just before he took them into the lead with the penalty accruing from the red card.
Despite Alex Goode landing a penalty on his 300th appearance to draw Saracens level, Tom Willis barged his way over for the try that took Wasps into a lead they would not relinquish.
Their season goes from strength to strength. No matter the personnel, the performances, notwithstanding a slip at home to Sale the round before last, keep coming, high on character despite significant disruption. Even here, they lost Sione Vailanu to injury in the first half. This win keeps them nestled among the play-off contenders.
Saracens now face their own exercise in regrouping, two weeks before the only match that means anything to them, before they slip away for their year in purgatory. Their reserves of character have long been established. Leinster in Dublin without Farrell will test them to the limit. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/sep/20/frieze-london-art-fair-2018-opera-singer-laure-prouvost- | Art and design | 2018-09-20T14:23:16.000Z | Mark Brown | Frieze London art fair returns with gossiping opera singer | Visitors to one of the world’s most important art fairs may want to be careful what they say to their friends this year: the conversations could be repeated in public by an opera singer.
The Turner prize-winning artist Laure Prouvost will present a live work at Frieze London that will explore and comment on the increasing scrutiny of personal data.
Diana Campbell Betancourt, the curator of this year’s Frieze Projects, said Prouvost would work with an opera singer “overhearing intimate conversations and performing these in an outburst of song in different places throughout the fair”.
Other live events will include a piece by Liz Glynn involving dancers moving in response to sales, rumours of sales and volumes of people at the fair; and Camille Henrot installing five public telephones as self-help hotlines answering some of life’s “most absurd problems”.
The artist Julia Scher will employ two older women dressed as roaming security guards in vivid pink uniforms at the giant marquee in a piece that “explores a theme of elderly women being some of the most invisible people in society”, said Campbell Betancourt.
The Frieze art fair first pitched its giant marquee in Regent’s Park, central London, in 2003. It has grown massively, with versions in New York and next year, for the first time, at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles.
Uriel Orlow’s Bounds (#2) (2015), a chromogenic photograph mounted on diasec. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Laveronica arte contemporanea
It is primarily commercial but has a blizzard of other strands – including talks, performances, films, live works, free-to-view sculpture – which make it one of the most important events in Britain’s visual arts calendar.
Tim Marlow, the artistic director of the Royal Academy of Arts and curator of this year’s talks at Frieze Masters, said Frieze “changed the landscape of London and the art world”, bringing an energy and sense of common purpose to this time of year.
“It is very interesting that there are certain artists who in the past wouldn’t touch an art fair with a bargepole,” he said. “There is never a problem asking an artist to get involved with the talks programme, or any form of curated projects.”
Marlow said it showed how boundaries were increasingly blurred between the institutional and the commercial. Examples of that might include the first year of an emerging artist prize, funded by a group of young collectors, in which the winner will be rewarded with an exhibition at Camden Arts Centre. Tate will once again get £150,000 to spend at the fair on works for its collection.
Other events include the Frieze Debate at the Royal Institution where a panel of museum directors will debate museums in the 21st century.
At the heart of Frieze will be the 160 commercial contemporary art galleries selling works by artists including David Shrigley; and the 130 galleries at Frieze Masters selling works which might include bronze vessels from ancient China, medieval sculpture, or works of art by Degas, Kandinsky or Derek Jarman. The Dickinson gallery will recreate Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture garden from St Ives, complete with pond.
Frieze London and Frieze Masters take place in Regent’s Park, London 5-7 October with previews on 3-4 October. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jul/23/jonas-vingegaard-tour-de-france-time-trial-cycling | Sport | 2022-07-23T16:59:43.000Z | Jeremy Whittle | Jonas Vingegaard sure of Tour de France success despite time-trial scare | Rarely has a team dominated the Tour de France as completely as Jonas Vingegaard’s Jumbo-Visma have this year’s race. There is still the chance of one more stage win for Wout van Aert, the cycling everyman, a rider even more complete than his Danish team leader, when the peloton sweeps on to the Champs Élysées early on Sunday evening.
The Tour itself is already won, Vingegaard relaxing enough to smile in disbelief as he crossed the finish line of the penultimate stage, Saturday’s individual time trial, in which he gained further distance on double Tour champion Tadej Pogacar of UAE Team Emirates, albeit only by a handful of seconds.
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As Van Aert took another stage win, Vingegaard sealed his first Tour de France victory in the final time trial of the 2022 race, from Lacapelle-Marival to Rocamadour, although not without a heart-in-mouth moment when he almost crashed on a curving bend.
“I was actually feeling like I wasn’t taking big risks but in the corner the surface wasn’t regular and I didn’t take the right angle, so yes, it was a near miss,” he said. “After that, I was thinking the stage [win] was a bonus. There were only two or three corners left, so I took it really easy.”
Even so, he emphasised his superiority over Pogacar, the outgoing Tour champion, increasing his lead on the Slovenian by a further eight seconds to win the Tour, barring a disaster, by almost three and a half minutes.
The 25-year-old Dane also won the final mountain stage to Hautacam on Thursday and has never shown any vulnerability, despite Pogacar’s numerous attacks. Yet some in the Tour convoy have criticised Pogacar and his team for arriving at the Tour “over-raced”. The 23-year-old started winning as long ago as February and that form continued right through to June, when he won his own national tour. But at times during this Tour de France, he has seemed a little short of the cutting edge that brought him his past two wins.
Jonas Vingegaard, wearing the overall leader’s yellow jersey, cycles past Rocamadour during the 20th stage of the Tour de France. Photograph: Thomas Samson/AFP/Getty Images
“I’m happy that it’s over,” Pogacar said. “It’s been a good three weeks with its ups and downs. We had some bad luck in the team, but I think the battle between me and Jonas was really something special. It’s going to be an interesting couple of years ahead for us.”
While Van Aert’s talent took him to yet another stage win, his third this year, in the final “race of truth”, the reality is that he has been the star of this year’s Tour, while his less flamboyant Danish teammate has demonstrated the resilience, endurance and infallibility that marks out all Tour champions.
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With respect to all those in the peloton, this has been a two-horse race, dominated by the duel between defending champion Pogacar and Vingegaard.
After the time trial, Pogacar acknowledged that he had made “some mistakes” and that he had to learn from them. For now at least, the Dane has the upper hand.
Between them the pair won four of the Tour’s five summit finishes, with Tom Pidcock of Ineos Grenadiers playing gooseberry with his barnstorming success at Alpe d’Huez. While Pidcock was explosive, his veteran teammate Geraint Thomas was the Tour’s Mr Consistency.
“I’ve always been pretty consistent,” Thomas, who dipped in 2021 to finish 41st after crashing, said. “I guess to turn it around from last year, to be on the podium, is going to be really special.”
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Even so, the Welsh rider, showing the maturity and guile that has always characterised his best performances, was at times reduced to the role of an interested onlooker. Despite that, and the ambivalence towards him from his Ineos Grenadiers team management, Thomas clung on to claim his third podium finish in four Tours.
Thomas admitted that, with only the ceremonial laps of the Champs Élysées to come, it might be time to celebrate, but added that he was happy to wait until Sunday night.
“In the past, when Froomey [Chris Froome] won, the protocol was drink as much as you want, but not for me this year,” he said. “When I won, I limited myself to two. I’ll do the same tonight, as it can be hard, Paris, if you switch off mentally.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/apr/09/capture-castle-review-watford-palace-musical-dodie-smith-bohemian-novel | Stage | 2017-04-09T13:53:06.000Z | Lyn Gardner | I Capture the Castle review – musical labour of love oozes romance | “I
write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” There are few more famous first lines in English literature than the opening confession of would-be writer 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain in Dodie Smith’s 1948 novel I Capture the Castle.
The Mortmains are bohemians living in genteel poverty in a crumbling Suffolk castle. Dad James is a blocked writer, and stepmother Topaz an artists’ model who favours dancing naked in the rain. Eldest daughter Rose is tired of poverty and dreams of having an endless supply of peach-coloured towels.
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Smith’s first line remains intact, as does the beating, yearning heart of the novel in Teresa Howard and Steven Edis’s musical, which is clearly a labour of love, treating its source material with affection and care. Howard’s book captures Cassandra’s shrewd yet innocent narrative voice and the production is helped enormously by a delightful performance, all foal-like gawkiness and sharp-eyed observation, from newcomer Lowri Izzard in the lead role.
Howard’s lyrics are often witty, too: “He’s a sculptured Donatello / He’s a new song by Novello” sings the cougar-like photographer Leda (Shona White) about Stephen (Isaac Stanmore), the castle gardener who suffers unrequited love for Cassandra. This is a piece in which almost everyone is in love with the wrong person. Edis’s music seldom has an earworm catchiness, but it borrows with magpie smartness from the sounds of the 1930s and billows and aches with romantic feeling while largely avoiding the sentimental. Some feat.
Luke Dale, Shona White and Julia St John in I Capture the Castle at Watford Palace theatre, then on tour. Photograph: Richard Lakos
There is such a lot to like here, from Ti Green’s brilliant design, in which the crumbling castle for which the Mortmains cannot raise the rent, is constructed out of chairs and ladders like a gothic Ikea, to Shona Morris’s movement, which comes into its own during Cassandra’s desperate journey to London.
Aspects still need work: the rich American brothers Neil (Luke Dale) and Simon (Theo Boyce), the latter the heir to the local hall and the man at whom Rose sets her cap, are dull as ditchwater. But then, they are in the book, too. Ben Watson’s father doesn’t quite have the right comic tone, and Kate Batter has a thankless task as Rose, whose desperation turns to gold-digging and back to desperation again.
I can’t help wondering if this show might have missed its moment as a stage adaptation, particularly as its bohemian middle-class sensibility and absurd romantic flamboyance is magnified in the theatre in a way that doesn’t happen on the page: its characters seem a mite irritating, and the scenario quaint. There were times when I was irresistibly reminded of the Twitter account, book and TV show Very British Problems. Yet there were moments when the production made me well up. Most noticeably on Cassandra’s birthday, when Stephen’s hard-worked for present is overlooked in favour of one from wealthy Simon. For all its flaws, this old-fashioned show is full of integrity and will bring pleasure to thousands who love the novel. Including me.
At Watford Palace until 22 April. Box office: 01923 225671. Then touring to Octagon, Bolton, and Oxford Playhouse. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/jun/04/this-weeks-new-tracks-sharon-van-etten-and-angel-olsen-lil-nas-x-and-m | Music | 2021-06-04T10:00:37.000Z | Kate Solomon | This week’s new tracks: Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen, Lil Nas X and Mø | Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen
Like I Used To
I strongly believe that if Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen teamed up to sing anything up to and including Las Ketchup it would be a moment so emotional we’d all emerge three minutes later with dewy eyes and a strong urge to become better people. So you can imagine what they’ve done with this swirling eddy of a song. Exhaustingly amazing.
Lil Nas X
Sun Goes Down
Fresh from his tryst with the prince of darkness, Lil Nas X has gone deep into his feelings on this melancholic reflection on his journey out of the closet. It’s a deceptively straightforward song for all that it grapples with – depression and suicide, internalised homophobia, racism – his voice uncharacteristically serious. Who would have imagined that the man who had his horses in the back would one day bare his soul like this?
Mø
Live to Survive
Praise be to whoever rescued Mø from Diplo’s breezy tropical clutches because this is a fine return to form for the Danish singer: a thumping, melancholic survival banger peppered with absolutely sensational 80s pop-rock drum fills that flip the whole thing into hyperdrive. Scandi-pop is back, baby. Let’s go.
Anne-Marie and Niall Horan
Our Song
Ah, the collaboration absolutely no one was asking for, and it’s exactly as inoffensive as you’d expect from Anne-Marie and the third-best One Directioner (though it does feature enjoyable delivery of the word “ra-di-o”). It’s also accompanied by the lowest stakes on-the-lam video ever, where the pair draw attention to themselves by wearing what is essentially wedding attire and parading about in a pastel green car. Not exactly Bonnie and Clyde.
Bleachers
Stop Making This Hurt
The world’s premier Springsteen tribute act is back with producer extraordinaire Jack Antonoff channelling the Boss into a skittery break-up song. It feels as if it’s trying to say one thing and do another, with the gang vocals attempting to build to euphoria, but coming off a bit like a bunch of lads worse for wear on the train after a match. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/09/leonard-barden-chess-columnist-guardian-online | Opinion | 2018-12-09T19:00:22.000Z | Paul Chadwick | No move is a good move for the Guardian columnist 63 years in post | Paul Chadwick | If chess column-writing were ranked, Leonard Barden would surely be grandest of grandmasters. He has written the Guardian’s column every week since September 1955. He has supplied a daily chess column to the Evening Standard since 1956 without a day missed except for Easter Fri/Mon, 25-26 December, and the Whitsun and August bank holidays. And since March 1974 he has written a chess column for the Financial Times weekly, except Christmas week.
Intending to explore reasons for the strong international interest in the Guardian’s coverage of the recent chess world championship held in London, I emailed Barden partly to tap his knowledge. He courteously postponed – “I’ll reply late this evening, am rushed with deadlines right now.”
About half a million people around the world – notably in Europe, the US and India – were at times following the Guardian live blog of the 12 drawn matches and eventual tie-breaker victory of Norway’s Magnus Carlsen over Fabiano Caruana from the US. The online audience for Barden’s column quadrupled.
The Guardian’s sports editor, Will Woodward, says: “We liveblogged once in 2016 – the final, tie-break game – it did do very well (350k). This year, because of that, we started with liveblogging the first game, with an idea that we would liveblog the critical games and/or the last one if needed. The reaction to game one – over 300k – was such that we felt we should try and do every one. It involved a scramble ahead of the second game to sort this, and happily Bryan Armen Graham, our deputy sports editor in New York, who did the first one (and the only one in 2016), was able to do them all.”
‘A quality of confidence.’ Magnus Carlsen (right) and Fabiano Caruana on the final day of the World chess championship. Photograph: Frank Augstein/AP
Woodward is still working out reasons for the popularity. “We are finding that a portion of our readers like to follow big events, rather than particular sports, wherever they come from – and this was the biggest event in chess. Carlsen himself is [a] pretty magnetic character and it looks like people feel pretty drawn to him. And there is no doubt that the amount of tech [that] chess experts and aficionados can bring to analysing the game in real time is pretty awesome now.”
It seems only right to pay tribute to Barden’s sustained contribution. The sinews of newspapers are composed of his kind of commitment. The reliable regularity with which papers cover a diverse mix of life – not just the headline controversies – is an unremarked but important element of their value to society.
Barden, born August 1929, passed time playing chess in air-raid shelters during the second world war. The Guardian’s then chess correspondent, Julius du Mont, lived nearby and Barden began to help with the column, checking proofs and contributing bits. After du Mont’s death, the column became his.
Barden was 1954 British champion and an England international. Did the column help his game? Research, yes; practical side, no. During the world championship he would receive the moves from Moscow via Teletype at United Press International in Fleet Street, type the game score, deliver to the Guardian, check proofs at 11pm, and take the 12.30am home from Victoria station.
He says: “It was even worse at the British championship, where I phoned daily reports during the 7-8.30pm adjournment and on at least one occasion lost my chance of the title through trying to write and phone my report, analyse my unfinished game, and snatch a bite to eat. So no, writing for the Guardian didn’t overall help my playing results.”
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Technology has made great changes. Barden wrote several well-received books on openings. “But now most of the opening systems I recommended 50 years ago would be condemned as unsound by the machines,” he notes, without rancour. “Internet chess makes it possible now to play 20 or more online blitz games a week (which I still do) without inconvenience, and this is a major reason for the growing popularity of chess at all levels.” In a blitz game, players have three to five minutes to make all their moves.
Barden has played and known several world champions. What sets the great apart from the very good? “All had in different ways an air of authority and certainty about them, all had the knack in analysis of quickly spotting and evaluating the key moments in a game, and allied to this a quality of confidence in their own accurate and objective judgments.”
To check my estimate of his total Guardian columns, I emailed the years multiplied by weeks per year: “63 x 52 = 3,276, less a few holidays presumably?”
Barden’s reply: “63 x 52 + 8 Sept – 9 Dec, as stated no deductions.”
Checkmate.
Amended 11 December 2018 to add the reference to Barden’s Financial Times column. Unaware of it, I hadn’t asked him about it during our initial exchange, and modestly he hadn’t mentioned it. After publication he remembered, and let me know, that the daily column for the Evening Standard takes a break for the Whitsun bank holiday too.
Paul Chadwick is the Guardian’s readers’ editor | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/sep/16/arts-council-england-visual-arts-north | Culture | 2017-09-16T23:04:25.000Z | Vanessa Thorpe | Turner prizewinners lead calls to rescue fund that lit up visual arts in the north | Jubilation rang out across the north-east when England’s four-yearly arts grants were announced early this summer. Cash was being spent outside the capital, it seemed, with fresh funds for a fistful of struggling creative groups. But, amid the celebrations, the team behind one of the area’s most productive and longstanding visual arts organisations, Locus+, was dismayed. All support from Arts Council England had disappeared overnight.
This weekend stars and leading figures from the art world are demanding that the council look again at its decision. In a strongly worded appeal, Locus+ is alling on Sir Nicholas Serota, chair of the council, to save a “small but robust organisation” with a “global reach”. Mark Wallinger, Richard Wright and Douglas Gordon, all winners of the Turner prize, are among more than 500 key names to sign the letter.
The list also includes Turner nominees Gavin Turk, Mona Hatoum, Simon Patterson, Jane and Louise Wilson, Fiona Banner, Richard Wilson and Cornelia Parker. All want to express their shock and the fear that the loss of funds will strip the country of a wealth of expertise and skill.
“I feel passionately about Locus+,” Wallinger told the Observer. “They are completely exemplary as a commissioning agency because of their breadth and scope. They are world-class, so I really don’t understand.
“It is quite stupefying all they have managed to achieve. And they were a complete joy to work with. They are both inspiring and enabling.”
Wright, a fresco painter who won the Turner prize in 2009, and was due to work with Locus+ again, said: “While many other arts organisations have been motivated by fashion and personal career development, Locus+ have insisted on the quality of the work produced and have unstintingly supported artists regardless of practical considerations, while often working within limited budgets.”
The organisation, behind such startling projects as Douglas Gordon’s burning grand piano and Katie Paterson’s touring piece of moon rock, has given artists the means to create unique artworks since 1993, when it was born from the work of the Basement Group, founded in 1979. But its roots extend further, back to the first such visual arts organisation in the country, Projects UK (1983-1992).
For the art critic and author Louisa Buck the length of experience at Locus+ is important, but more relevant still is the work they continue to do: “They still have a huge ground base of contacts, as well as the kind of sensitive approach, putting artists first, that is rare. There may be new groups doing this work with artists, but the council should realise it is not easy to do it well.”
There may be new groups doing this work with artists, but the council should realise it is not easy to do it well
Louisa Buck, art critic
Wright added that he sees the traditions of Locus+ as “a vital conduit between the fostering of grassroots activities and the establishment of internationally important practices of artists, for over 30 years”.
“They are true believers and have helped to make impossible things,” Wright said. “In helping Chris Burden to realise his Ghost Ship project in 2005 they enabled an artist to achieve a lifelong dream, and in so doing helped to develop the practice of an artist who will prove to be of huge significance in the future.”
In the letter to Serota, John Kippin, the chair of trustees for Locus+, writes: “The organisation has an enviable track record and reputation for the quality of its commissioning of new works by artists at various stages of their careers, regionally, nationally and internationally.”
Jon Bewley, the director and one of only two full-time staff, explained this weekend that he had felt forced to make his plea public because he has had no explanation for the withdrawal of funding decision.
A spokesperson for the council said: “We make a significant investment in visual arts in Newcastle Gateshead. Our national portfolio application programme was a competitive process, and during the balancing phase we looked at the breadth of practice and audience engagement of organisations and we preferred other stronger applications.”
The statement said that the Arts Council is aware of the disappointment at Locus+ and added that staff in Newcastle have discussed the verdict with its team: “They explained the balancing process to them and reiterated that we want to continue to work with them to see if we can support them in other ways.”
Under June’s funding announcement, £86m went to 46 arts organisations in the north-east which were included in its coveted four-yearly “national portfolio”, which the council calls “the backbone of England’s cultural infrastructure”. While Locus+ lost this coveted status, 10 organisations in the area won it for the first time.
The artist Simon Patterson, who worked with Locus+ on Landskip, his colourful 2000 spectacle involving military smoke grenades at Compton Verney House in Warwickshire, remains bewildered. “They are an extraordinary organisation which fulfils a unique role in the world of art. They help artists to realise daring works that would otherwise be impossible to achieve within the constraints of the realm of public art, the commercial gallery or public museum sector. Through sheer chutzpah, and at incredibly short notice, they persuaded the mayor of Sydney to allow the installation of Manned Flight 1999, a work comprising a large man-lifting kite, between the columns of Sydney town hall in 2002.
“The inexplicable decision of the Arts Council England to withdraw funding from this institution of record would not only be a cultural disaster for the north-east of England, but also for the rest of Britain.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/01/only-supposed-blow-bloody-doors-off-boris-gove-brexiters-labour | Politics | 2016-07-01T12:31:30.000Z | John Crace | You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off' | John Crace | MondayFirst as satire then as tragedy. On Sunday I wrote that the Labour shadow ministers were resigning at such a rate that it wouldn’t be long before Cat Smith, a Corbynite MP with almost no parliamentary – or life – experience was sitting on the opposition frontbench. Sure enough, when the prime minister came to make his statement on the referendum, there she was just a few places down from Jeremy Corbyn as the new minister for young people and looking hopelessly out of her depth after more than 100 more senior backbenchers had declined shadow ministerial posts. One Labour MP was offered three jobs and turned them all down.
To add to the sense of chaos, the one new shadow minister who should have been in the house wasn’t: Clive Lewis, the new shadow defence minister who has not yet had time to familiarise himself with Westminster, was stuck knee-deep in the Glastonbury mud when he should have been leading defence questions. Meanwhile Chris Bryant resigned as shadow leader because Corbyn wouldn’t deny he had voted for Britain to leave the EU. And yes, I had joked the previous day that Corbyn had put his X in the wrong box.
Tuesday
The current line from the Vote Leave camp, voiced most strongly by Iain Duncan Smith in the absence of Michael Gove and Boris Johnson who have both used the period of post-referendum uncertainty to catch up on their sleep, is that the reason no one has any sort of plan about how to implement Britain’s exit from the EU is because it was never their job to come up with a plan and that it was up to the remain camp to work out what should happen. It used to be the hard left that dealt in dialectics. But one person who did thoroughly take on board the “no plan is the best policy” theory was Roy Hodgson, who on Monday evening masterminded England’s embarrassing defeat to Iceland in the Euros. Roy had been so determined that nothing should be left to chance that he had come up with an absence of plan that even ruled out the possibility of Iceland being worse at penalties than England. As a Spurs fan I did feel slightly embarrassed that five of my team’s players had taken part in such an abject display. But then I thought it might be quite therapeutic for the rest of the country to go through the same agonies I experience on all too many weekends.
Wednesday
The reason for Michael Gove’s absence has finally been revealed in both a Daily Mail column and leaked email from his wife, Sarah Vine. Here I can reveal some exclusive extracts that didn’t make the headlines. “Friday morning and Mikey and I are really tired. ‘I’ve won,’ squeaked Mikey. ‘You mean, we’ve won,’ I replied, sternly. ‘Sorry Mummy,’ he said. ‘I meant “we”. Can I have bitty?’ The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Apparently some members of the media want me to explain what Mikey’s government, led by me, is going to do next. How selfish these people are. The referendum campaign has been absolutely exhausting for me and the last thing I need is to take tiresome phone calls from interfering busybodies. Besides, I have to make sure that Mikey gets a proper job in my new government and I don’t think Boris is at all trustworthy. Not like me and Mikey who would never stab anyone in the back. That’s just not our style. Hang on, Mikey is just going out. ‘Don’t forget to bring me back a new government, Mikey, or you’ll never get bitty again.’ Sorry, where was I?”
Thursday
You have to admire the Labour media team. On a day when the wife-swapping in the Tory party could have dominated the news agendas, Labour managed to get blanket coverage for something that most parties would have been happy to see buried. The event in question was the publication of Shami Chakrabarti’s report on antisemitism in the Labour party. Shami didn’t get things off to the best of starts by saying Labour should try to resist the temptation of saying “Hitler” too often. Stick to Goebbels or Himmler instead. Next, Ruth Smeeth, a Jewish Labour MP, was reduced to tears by a Corbyn supporter who she says accused her of being a traitor to the Labour cause. If that wasn’t all bad enough, Corbyn appeared to compare the Israeli government with al-Qaida and Islamic State. At which point Chakrabarti had to announce she was going to reopen her inquiry. Meanwhile, back in the Commons, Philip Hollobone, the Conservative MP for Kettering, was complaining about Lindsay Lohan’s tweets about Kettering on referendum night. These are the people who are governing us.
Friday
Battle of the Somme centenary commemorations – as it happened
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The 100th anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme has not passed without both the leave and remain campaigns using it to their advantage. The leavers insist that the 20,000 attacking soldiers who died on 1 July 1916 would have wanted to leave the EU, while the remainers are equally certain they would have wanted to stay. Both sides might have been better off shutting up and visiting the memorial to those whose bodies were never recovered at Thiepval in France. There aren’t many places that have reduced me to silence, but Thiepval is one. It also nearly cost me my marriage just days into my honeymoon in 1985, as I insisted we spent the first three days touring the first world war battlefields before we drove further south towards the Lot. If you’re looking to mug up on the battle, I can recommend Lyn Macdonald’s Somme. Her book was first published in 1983 and she was one of the last historians to record the personal accounts of many of the men who fought there. Read and weep.
Digested week digested: Is this a dagger which I see before me? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/feb/16/abc-warns-staff-of-agenda-driven-criticism-after-news-corp-pounces-on-aboriginal-land-comment | Media | 2024-02-16T02:50:06.000Z | Amanda Meade | ABC warns staff of agenda-driven criticism after News Corp pounces on Aboriginal land comment | The Weekly Beast | When the ABC Indigenous affairs editor, Bridget Brennan, said “always was, always will be Aboriginal land” in a live cross on News Breakfast on Australia Day, the Murdoch media pounced, labelling the comment controversial, divisive and partisan.
The Dja Dja Wurrung and Yorta Yorta woman was reporting from an Indigenous ceremony and trying to explain what the day meant for First Nations people.
Inevitably, the ABC managing director, David Anderson, was asked about the statement this week at Senate estimates, giving The Australian a follow-up story: ABC probes ‘always was, always will be’ broadcast.
Brennan’s boss, ABC news director Justin Stevens, fired off a note to staff, saying the corporation’s journalists were working in an environment that is “increasingly agenda-driven and sometimes clearly hostile”.
He said the attacks were often targeted at women, culturally diverse and First Nations staff. (Just ask RN Breakfast and Q+A host Patricia Karvelas, who is subjected to repeated criticism by sections of the media.)
“The volume and nature of the Australian’s constant criticism of individual ABC employees is disproportionate and unfair, and looks to be agenda-driven,” Stevens said in a note seen by Weekly Beast. “Criticism of anything we publish can be directed at me and the ABC News leadership rather than targeting individual journalists in this way.”
The Australian’s editor-in-chief, Michelle Gunn, defended the paper’s reporting.
“The Australian’s coverage of the ABC is not agenda driven,” Gunn told Weekly Beast. “The report in question is a straightforward and accurate news report of a Senate estimates hearing.”
‘Editorially justified’
The Australian may be disappointed to learn the public broadcaster’s ombudsman, Fiona Cameron, has investigated the Brennan comment – after receiving 25 complaints – and found the ABC did not breach its standards for due impartiality and diversity of perspectives.
A screen grab from The Australian website of ABC journalist Bridget Brennan’s Australia Day coverage. Photograph: The Australian
In a report published on Friday, Cameron said Brennan’s statement could have been “more explicitly referenced as the widespread and deeply felt perspective of her community, to avoid any suggestion that it was a statement of her personal opinion”.
“On balance, and in the context of live television, we accept the ABC submission that this was not a statement of Ms Brennan’s personal opinion but rather the view of the community [of] which she is a part and that the comments were editorially justified in the circumstances outlined,” she said.
Question time
Luke McIlveen. Photograph: Nine
All credit to Nine’s Luke McIlveen for the self-deprecating comment he made at a town hall meeting with journalists after he was appointed executive editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age.
The former Murdoch and Daily Mail editor said words to the effect of: ask me questions. I hope I do a better job than the last 10 questions – and drew a laugh from the tough crowd.
He was referring to the historical article “Ten Questions with Luke McIlveen” which had been making the rounds of the newsrooms, with journos aghast at the editor’s mocking of the former SMH writer David Marr and praising of radio shock jock Ray Hadley.
Jury duty
Sky News Australia’s headline new show for 2024 is The Jury, described as an attempt to “combat political correctness” and give “the average Australian a voice”.
Hosted by Danica De Giorgio, the show will have its third outing in front of a studio audience – and a jury of 12 – on Sunday.
No laughing matter: the context missing from a Sky News report on Steven Miles and youth crime
Amanda Meade
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Previous shows have debated “NDIS cost-effectiveness” and “should Australia reduce its immigration rate?”.
Weekly Beast understands the topic for this Sunday night – “Does Australia need the ABC/public broadcaster?” – was a bit tricky to pull off as it’s not easy to get an ABC supporter on Sky News.
The network’s after-dark lineup is not a big fan of the ABC.
Huge lineup and some very fiery (and fun!) debates tonight on The Jury, 8pm on @SkyNewsAust @SMacedone @keithjpitt @greencate @Craig_Foster @clarezrowe @CMMortlock pic.twitter.com/ZFezczYPaE
— Danica De Giorgio (@DanicaDeGiorgio) February 11, 2024
“Wondered if you would be keen to represent the ‘yes’ case! Chris Kenny representing no!”, one pitch from a producer asked an ABC fan. “We’d need you to be in Sydney for the shoot. Would only take an hour.”
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The pitch reminded us of the last time Kenny, an associate editor at the Australian and avowed ABC critic, pleaded for someone to appear on his Sky News “documentary” about the ABC to mark its 90th birthday. Kenny said at the time it was easy to get critics of the ABC on Sky but he couldn’t find any supporters of Aunty prepared to talk to him. It was former ABC broadcaster Quentin Dempster who fronted up last time, but we haven’t heard back from Sky about who will plead the case on Sunday.
Perpetual error
Channel Nine has distanced itself from a potential misstep by producers of an upcoming documentary about the mushroom lunch that left three people dead and a fourth fighting for his life.
Erin Patterson has been charged with murdering three people at the lunch in her home in the rural Australian town of Leongatha on 29 July and the proceedings are ongoing. She has consistently denied the charges and maintains her innocence.
The production company Perpetual Entertainment published a blurb on its website complete with a title that experts say had the potential to run foul of Australian contempt laws, material which we have decided not to repeat.
The University of Sydney’s Prof David Rolph, an expert in media law, told us: “Where a matter is before the courts, the principle of sub judice contempt apply. It is risky to publish material about a criminal case which will be tried by a jury. Even if the material talks in terms of allegation, there is still a risk that a fair trial may be prejudiced.”
When we contacted Pepetual Entertainment, they said the website blurb was a mistake and it was immediately taken down.
“We are in production of a documentary called The Deadly Mushroom Mystery that details the events surrounding that fatal lunch,” they said.
“Obviously it cannot be broadcast in Australia at the moment whilst the trial is pending.
“I am having that error corrected now.”
Nine sources said the broadcaster had no hand in producing or naming the program and it would not be broadcast in Australia before a criminal trial was over.
A spokesperson for Nine said questions about the content or title should be directed to the production company.
Hairy moment
We’ve seen plenty of videos of TV reporters being harassed by passers-by as they do stand-ups to camera but this wholesome interaction between Channel 9’s Darwin reporter Georgie Dickerson and a woman devoted to fixing her hair was charming.
Some journos have their hair & makeup professionally done, or most of us, do it ourselves…
Me on the other hand - am offered help from people passing by. 🤷🏼♀️ pic.twitter.com/xv8HJMcBXI
— Georgie Dickerson (@GdDickerson) February 14, 2024
Climate coverage win
The Walkley Foundation says it has “listened to the many journalists” and decided to add a new award category for coverage of science and the environment to the mid-year Walkleys.
When the Walkleys categories were reviewed last year, recommendations for a separate science and environment were rejected, sparking dismay among climate and environment reporters.
Now journalists covering medical and advanced science, innovation, climate change, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, deforestation and air, earth and water pollution, across all forms of media, will be able to enter. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/jul/18/cliff-richard-wins-damages-from-bbc-over-police-raid-footage | Media | 2018-07-18T16:42:55.000Z | Jim Waterson | Cliff Richard wins £210,000 in damages over BBC privacy case | Cliff Richard has won his privacy case against the BBC and will be awarded an initial payment of £210,000 in damages, over the broadcaster’s report that the singer was being investigated about historical child sexual assault claims.
In a decision that the BBC warned represented a serious blow to press freedom, Mr Justice Mann awarded Richard £190,000 damages. The singer was awarded a further £20,000 in aggravated damages for the corporation’s decision to nominate its story for the Royal Television Society’s scoop of the year award.
The judgment, handed down in central London on Wednesday morning, came almost four years after the BBC broke the news that South Yorkshire police had searched the singer’s home in relation to the accusation.
Cliff Richard case redraws boundaries of media law
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The BBC said it would appeal against the decision.
The singer appeared in court to hear the verdict, accompanied by his friends Gloria Hunniford and Paul Gambaccini. Reacting to the judgment afterwards, Richard said: “I’m choked up. I can’t believe it. It’s wonderful news.”
He cried with relief after the ruling was announced. As he left with his legal team, fans gathered outside and sang a refrain of the singer’s hit Congratulations.
Further damages relating to the financial impact on Richard – resulting from cancelled book deals and public appearances – are yet to be assessed but could be substantial.
The ruling will have enormous implications for how the British media reports on ongoing police investigations where no charges have been brought, with newspaper editors and media lawyers saying the ruling was tantamount to new legislation.
The judge was critical of the BBC and the decision to push out the story without a response from the singer in order to scoop rival outlets, adding that its coverage, which included flying a helicopter over the singer’s Berkshire home, had been “somewhat sensationalist”.
But Mann made clear it was the simple decision to factually identify Richard as the individual under investigation – in line with previous standard British journalistic practice – that prompted his decision.
Media experts alarmed at consequences of Cliff Richard ruling
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The BBC warned that the judgment created new case law and represented a “dramatic shift” against the ability of journalists to report on police investigations.
Following the ruling, the Conservative MP Anna Soubry, a former journalist, asked Theresa May in the House of Commons whether it was time for the government to consider introducing “Cliff’s Law” banning the naming of criminal suspects by the media until they were charged. The prime minister said it was a difficult issue, since publication of a suspect’s name sometimes encouraged other witnesses to come forward.
Fran Unsworth, BBC director of news, speaks outside the Rolls Building in London after the high court judgment. Photograph: Victoria Jones/PA
The BBC’s director of news, Fran Unsworth, apologised to Richard and said there were elements of its coverage that should have been handled differently. But she warned about the wider consequences of the ruling for press freedom.
“We are sorry for the distress that Sir Cliff has been through,” she said. “We understand the very serious impact that this has had on him.” But, she added, “the judge has ruled that the very naming of Sir Cliff was unlawful. So even had the BBC not used helicopter shots or ran the story with less prominence, the judge would still have found that the story was unlawful, despite ruling that what we broadcast about the search was accurate.”
Unsworth continued: “We don’t believe this is compatible with liberty and press freedoms, something that has been at the heart of this country for generations. For all of these reasons there is a significant principle at stake.”
Richard later told ITV News that senior managers at the BBC had to “carry the can” for running the story.
“If heads roll then maybe it’s because it was deserved ... It’s too big a decision to be made badly. It was nonsense.”
Other news outlets also raised concerns about the impact on their reporting.
The Cliff Richard ruling is a chilling blow to press freedom
Roy Greenslade
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“Arrests will go unpublicised,” said Tony Gallagher, editor of the Sun. “Suspects will assert privacy rights. Police probes impeded. Victory for (alleged) criminals and money-grabbing lawyers. Terrible for media.”
Richard’s lawyer, Gideon Benaim, was highly critical of the BBC. He said the singer had never expected after 60 years in the public eye to have his “privacy and reputation tarnished in such a way”.
The BBC had refused to apologise and insisted it had run a public interest story, Benaim added. He said serious questions should be asked about why the organisation had tried so hard to preserve its “exclusive” story.
Unsworth and Jonathan Munro, another senior BBC manager who was also involved in the decision to broadcast the footage in 2014, looked on as they listened to the judge criticise the decision.
The judge concluded that Richard had privacy rights and the BBC “infringed those rights without a legal justification”.
Cliff Richard looks on as his lawyer, Gideon Benaim, reads a statement following the singer’s victory in the high court. Photograph: Victoria Jones/PA
“It did so in a serious way and also in a somewhat sensationalist way,” he said. “I have rejected the BBC’s case that it was justified in reporting as it did under its rights to freedom of expression and freedom of the press.”
Richard strongly denied the claims that he sexually assaulted a young boy following a Billy Graham rally in Sheffield in 1985, and no charges were brought, prompting the singer to sue the BBC for a “very serious invasion” of his privacy after it flew a helicopter over his home to film police during the raid.
Richard has said he spent £3.4m bringing the privacy case, which the BBC said it had felt obliged to fight because it insisted its coverage was fair and proportionate.
The singer had already settled out of court with South Yorkshire police for £400,000 before the start of the trial, though the judge ruled that the police could be responsible for 35% of any further damages.
The police worked with the BBC and provided the broadcaster with advance knowledge of the raid. This followed an approach by one of the corporation’s journalists, who had learned of the investigation. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2023/sep/26/dior-opens-paris-fashion-week-with-feminist-sloganeering-on-the-catwalk | Fashion | 2023-09-26T17:44:00.000Z | Jess Cartner-Morley | Dior opens Paris fashion week with feminist sloganeering on the catwalk | The patriarchy is so last season. Dior opened Paris fashion week with a diatribe against sexism spelled out in Barbie pink and McDonald’s yellow, illustrated by a loose-fitting summer wardrobe which designer Maria Grazia Chiuri said was “a rejection of the fashion industrial system which dictates women must conform to an hourglass idea of perfection”. Giant video screens splashed images of housewives in makeup and Marigold gloves, and of curvy models bending obligingly over cars, while feminist placard slogans flashed with neon urgency behind the catwalk.
The words: “Take your hands off when I say no, take your eyes off when I say no” were spelled out on video screens as the first model marched past in loose black layers, a punky choker and black shoes. The second model was defiantly un-pristine in unbuttoned shirt cuffs and tails. However, how the glossy, logo-stamped designer handbag she carried gelled with the words: “Capitalism won’t take her where she really wants to go” on the screen behind her was left notably unresolved at this show.
“Monsieur Dior always emphasised the waist, but I don’t want to do that any more,” said Chiuri before the show. “The idea that we have of Dior comes from the famous images of the New Look, where what you see is always a silhouette, a body. I want to see instead the woman’s face and think about her personality.”
Dior designer Maria Grazia Chiuri. Photograph: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
The video installation was created for the occasion by artist Elena Bellantoni, and was commissioned to support the message of a collection which celebrated the ease of unwaisted silhouettes, simple workwear styling and practical kitten heels. There was a pop art spirit to the 7ft screens, with their billboard-sized letters in cheerful newsstand colours. “Women in fashion don’t have to be passive – we can be critics too,” said Chiuri.
Women will be in the spotlight throughout this Paris fashion week, where 67 shows are planned over eight days, as Sarah Burton and Gabriela Hearst present farewell collections for Alexander McQueen and Chloé respectively. But while the goodbyes will be emotional, fashion is hardwired to focus on the future, and the real story of the week is intrigue over the round of designer musical chairs which these two departures will prompt.
A model walking the runway at Dior’s Paris fashion week show. ‘Monsieur Dior always emphasised the waist, but I don’t want to do that any more,’ said the fashion house’s designer, Maria Grazia Chiuri. Photograph: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
Burton and Hearst are both central figures in the industry. Burton took the reins of the McQueen brand following the untimely death of its founder. Hearst departs Chloé after only two years, but has had a significant impact by her determination to put sustainability at the heart of mainstream fashion at Chloé. Both women leave high-profile vacancies which could catapult a new name to industry fame.
The rumour mill is also abuzz with chat that Alessandro Michele, who parted with Gucci last year, is to make a return to the fashion frontline. Fashion shows in New York, London and Milan this month have so far followed in the groove of the consumer appetite for wearable, simple classic pieces and “quiet luxury” over trend. Trend-watchers believe there is a vacancy in the system for a designer with a bold new aesthetic vision of the calibre Michele provided during his flamboyant reign at Gucci. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/03/what-if-the-wife-of-a-colonial-monster-had-left-behind-brutally-frank-secret-memoirs | Books | 2020-07-02T17:30:01.000Z | Kate Grenville | What if the wife of a colonial monster had left behind brutally frank secret memoirs? | Elizabeth Macarthur – the wife of early colonist John Macarthur – is a minor footnote in Australian history, celebrated for keeping the Macarthur sheep empire going while her famously aggressive husband was going to court in London. From the letters she left, our picture of her is of the perfect wife: uncomplaining, devout, unfailingly cheerful. Yawn.
But when you look more closely at that picture, it falls apart. She was married to a bullying, ruthless, cunning man.
Jessie Tu: 'I will probably never read another novel by a straight white male'
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What if Elizabeth Macarthur had left behind brutally frank secret memoirs? What if they told the real story behind the myth of the devoted 18th century wife?
That’s the idea behind A Room Made of Leaves.
This book had its starting point in the gap between those relentlessly cheerful letters and what I thought was the likely reality of her day-to-day life with such a man. My guess was that all those goody-gumball letters she left must have been, to put it bluntly, fiction. I decided to tell the “real” story behind that fiction, by creating the memoir in which Macarthur told the truth about her life.
A portrait of Elizabeth Macarthur hangs in the entrance hall of Elizabeth Farm. Photograph: James Horan/Sydney Living Museums
It would be a book that exploded the stereotypes we have about women of the past: that somehow they were so different from us that they didn’t mind lives that we’d find unbearable in their complete lack of freedom. Those women could only speak within the bounds of what was permitted to them: letters that could be read by the whole household, novels that would only be published if they weren’t too shocking. If we take those documents at face value, we come away with a comfortable prettified version of what must have been hell for countless numbers of them.
The savage glaze of irony that colours every sentence of the novels of Jane Austen is as far as any of those women could go towards letting us see how it really was for them. Elizabeth Macarthur’s imagined memoirs would – in a way no woman of her time could do – take the image of the devout, demure, compliant and uncomplaining woman and blast it open.
As I wrote, that idea grew into a bigger one: not just to tell a story that hadn’t been told, but to question the whole idea of stories. Stories are a way of wrapping up in a tidy bundle all the ambiguities and contradictions that are part of the real. A good story makes hard things easy – you don’t have to think about them again.
Women aren’t the only ones whose complicated truths have been replaced by false stories. In the Australian context, old stories about colonisation and Indigenous people have only relatively recently been exposed for the self-serving myths they were. Wherever one set of people has power over another, they’ll construct a story about their dominance that makes it seem acceptable. As the old saying goes, history is written by the victors.
Elizabeth Farm, Parramatta, the home of John and Elizabeth Macarthur. Photograph: Doug Riley/Sydney Living Museums
Far from being any kind of biography of Elizabeth Macarthur (that has already been done, in Michelle Scott Tucker’s Elizabeth Macarthur: A Life at the Edge of the World), this is a kind of anti-biography, raising questions about where stories come from, and how much we should trust them.
Draft by draft this became a book about secrets and lies, fake stories and hidden truths. The structure of the book came to embody that: it’s a series of truths and lies nestled one inside the other like Russian dolls, each one breaking open to reveal another layer in a playful dance of possibilities.
Photograph: Text
The innermost layer is the real letters of the real person Elizabeth Macarthur, but even that layer cracks away to reveal them as clever fictions constructed by Macarthur herself. In turn the letters are embedded in the “long-lost memoirs” of Elizabeth Macarthur, which in turn are framed and distanced by bookends that Elizabeth Macarthur tells us she wrote in order to set the record straight. Outside the bookends is an editor, someone called Kate Grenville, who claims to have found the memoirs, and beyond that again is the author Kate Grenville, admitting – to no one’s surprise – that the entire thing is made up.
Misinformation, fakery, lies for commercial or political gain: this is the toxic air we breathe daily. How to sort out the true from the dangerously fake – in fact, even to remember that sorting has to be done – is the challenge. We’re living through a time in which lies and deception have a reach and power and effectiveness that’s unprecedented.
My mother taught me the joy of reading. I remember her through books
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In writing this book, I did a great deal of research from the letters and official documents of the time. I spent a lot of time in the places where the story took place, both in the UK and Australia (especially Elizabeth Farm where Macarthur lived for 40 years and where, in my fiction, she wrote and concealed her scandalous memoirs). I found out a lot I hadn’t known about sheep and saw first-hand the descendants of the original Macarthur flock.
I took some liberties with relatively minor aspects of the historical record. But I’ve made a story that’s plausible, at the same time as it is fundamentally a work of the imagination.
For most of the writing, the book’s working title was Do Not Believe Too Quickly. That’s what I’d like readers to take away from this book: to be reminded not to take any story – including the one they’ve just read – at face value.
A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville is out now through Text Publishing | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/us-news-blog/2012/oct/02/taylor-swift-boston-deaf-school | Music | 2012-10-02T15:43:21.000Z | Amanda Holpuch | Taylor Swift sends cash to Boston deaf school but decides not to play there | An irony-laden internet campaign to get Taylor Swift to perform at a school for the deaf has failed – but the institution will still be awarded a substantial sum of cash.
Users of 4Chan and Reddit gamed an online contest to send Swift to perform at whichever school in the US earned the most votes by encouraging people to vote for the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
Swift, her management and contest sponsors removed the school from the contest because of the way it obtained votes, according to the school’s principal, Jeremiah Ford.
Taylor Swift: ‘I was literally about to break’
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Ford told the Boston Globe that Swift and four other organizations instead chose to give $10,000 apiece to the school.
“Are we the winner? Absolutely,” Ford told the Globe.
The competition attracted nationwide attention in August when Reddit and 4Chan decided to take over the contest. Some critics accused the websites of being insensitive towards the hearing-impaired community.
Others voted for the school in an effort to bring awareness to the hearing impaired community’s ability to appreciate music. Ford also appropriated the trolling campaign and publicly welcomed the opportunity to have Swift perform at the school.
Swift, along with event sponsors Chegg, Papa John’s pizza, CoverGirl and American Greetings, pledged $10,000 each to the school. VH1’s Save the Music program also donated $10,000 worth of instruments to the school, which has discussed reviving its music education program. Horace Mann students will also receive tickets to Swift’s next local performance.
Earlier this year, online trolls successfully sent Pitbull to the most remote Walmart in the US as part of a contest to get the rapper to perform at whichever store location received the most Facebook likes. The journalist who started the trolling campaign joined Pitbull at his performance in Kodiak, Alaska – population 6,256. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/22/eu-ignoring-climate-crisis-with-livestock-farm-subsidies-campaigners-warn | Environment | 2019-05-22T13:50:56.000Z | Tom Levitt | EU ignoring climate crisis with livestock farm subsidies, campaigners warn | The EU is disregarding the climate emergency by continuing to give out billions of euros in subsidies to climate-intensive livestock farms at the same time as promising to cut emissions, say campaigners.
Under the Paris climate agreement, the EU and its member states have committed to reduce emissions in the European Union by at least 40% by 2030. The EU’s farming sector has shown no decline in emissions since 2010, with meat and dairy estimated to be responsible for 12-17% of total greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet the EU continues to pay out an estimated £24bn of taxpayer money – nearly a fifth of the EU’s total budget – to support livestock farms across Europe, the majority of which are climate-intensive.
“Instead of pouring billions of euros into industrial farms that drive climate change, the EU must support farmers to produce less and better meat, and to provide meat and dairy alternatives,” said Greenpeace’s EU agriculture policy director, Marco Contiero.
The EU’s subsidy payouts to farmers are due to be replaced by next year. The EU Commission’s draft Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform proposals, published last year, include an objective to take action on climate change. However, they set no targets for reducing livestock numbers. The EU agricultural commissioner, Phil Hogan, has previously been reported as dismissing the sector’s emissions footprint.
Compassion in World Farming campaigner Peter Stevenson said the EU was “deaf to the scientific arguments” that a reduction in EU production and consumption is necessary to tackle climate change.
Former EU Environment commissioner Karl Falkenberg pointed the blame at MEPs in the EU Parliament’s all-powerful agri-committee for blocking reforms. More than half the politicians on the committee have declared interests as farmers, former farmers, CAP payment recipients in another capacity, current or former partners in agricultural businesses, or have spouses who own farms.
“It is mainly made up of farming or rural MEPs who want to be members of the committee because it gives them a way to get re-elected. The entire EU Parliament might not take the same line as the committee, but if we get a bad policy from them it is harder to change,” Falkenberg told the Guardian.
The thinktank Rise Foundation has said Europe’s meat and dairy production would need to halve by 2050 to meet global targets for reducing climate emissions.
Nearly a fifth of the EU's budget goes on livestock farming, says Greenpeace
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MEPs from the European Parliament’s environment committee proposed earlier this year to restrict subsidy payments for livestock farms that don’t cut their stocking density – the number of animals they keep in the space available. Greenpeace says the move would help incentivise farms to turn towards less intensive farming.
The EU Commission has argued that greenhouse gas emissions at global level could increase if EU production was replaced by imports. It has also pointed to research showing that the least intensive farms are more reliant on EU farm subsidies than more intensive ones.
“We should be using the CAP to lower emissions, but there is a danger of scaring off EU production to other countries,” said Allan Buckwell from the Institute for European Environmental Policy, who called for measures, including a meat tax, to tackle meat and dairy consumption as well as production in Europe.
The EU farming lobby group Copa-Cogeca said livestock farmers contributed to preserving grasslands, keeping rural communities strong and helping provide consumers with a balanced diet.
“Many of the studies that call for a reduction of livestock do not consider the actual implications that a shift in production would have. Land would be abandoned and other benefits for the environment would be lost.
“Farmers are already looking into how to reduce emissions from livestock farming and working with research to come up with viable solutions – such as reducing livestock enteric methane emissions through special feed supplements – that do not jeopardise livestock production in the EU and are also sustainable for farmers,” said a spokesperson.
The EU Commission said the next CAP would require member states to show how they will be using it to bolster climate action, including from the livestock sector. It said it was also supporting research into ways of reducing emissions from livestock and promoting alternative protein crops. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jul/07/richard-linklater-boyhood-john-patterson | Film | 2014-07-07T05:00:02.000Z | John Patterson | Boyhood: Richard Linklater is the auteur of adolescence | Athree-hour time-lapse epic of the everyday, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is a watershed moment in his two-decade career as an American film-maker, the third or fourth actual or near-masterpiece he has made in the last decade, and likely the first to nab a best picture nomination at next year’s Oscars. Boyhood enlarges by one enormously substantial and rewarding contribution that small group of truly great movies about childhood and adolescence, joining Stand By Me, Mud, The Spectacular Now, Forbidden Games and The 400 Blows.
Like Dazed And Confused, School Of Rock and The Bad News Bears, it demonstrates again that Linklater has inherited Truffaut’s instinctive feel for the lives and cares of children and teenagers. And unlike six of his other movies, which all unfold within a 24-hour period, Boyhood takes its time – 12 years of shooting time, in fact, during which a dopey six-year-old Texas kid named Mason (Ellar Coltrane) ages over a decade of real time into a smart, cool and absolutely plausible high-school senior.
But what matters here is the life all around him, pieced together tapestry-style by Linklater from myriad tiny incidents into a vibrant sense of the way life actually feels, a steady accretion of small moments – with very few bombshells – that taken collectively exert an immensely strong emotional hold. Ellar’s divorced parents (Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette) are forever circling each other warily, his dad an irresponsible dreamer, his mom a little impractical and overwhelmed, but robust enough, while Ellar’s big sister (played by Linklater’s own daughter Lorelei) is a likable wiseass. There’s a succession of houses and apartments, new towns and new schools, new friends and new bullies, and step-parents who come and go, including a couple of violent, scary booze-hounds. There are beautiful moments with Ellar’s errant but loving dad, who takes his kids out campaigning for Obama in 08, debates with his son about the merits of Star Wars, wants to know way too much about his daughter’s first boyfriend, but really comes through when his son asks him how to talk to girls. By then we’ve already seen a younger Mason with a lingerie catalogue, realising, with a giggle, why pictures of half-naked ladies are naughty and fun. Then there are real girls, and first love, and heartbreak, and all of it.
None of this is in itself revolutionary. The drama resides in moments that are familiar from every child’s early life, and many a family-orientated movie or TV show has worked this turf before. What is masterful is Linklater’s application of Gorges Perec’s idea about the movies of Ozu: that they are not extraordinary, but infra-ordinary. Life here is a mosaic, and every last tile is exquisitely wrought and perfectly juxtaposed. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jan/01/the-pandemic-has-allowed-us-to-see-so-much-what-will-we-do-with-our-newfound-clarity | Life and style | 2021-12-31T19:00:27.000Z | Brigid Delaney | The pandemic has allowed us to see so much. What will we do with our newfound clarity? | A retreating ocean is often the first sign of a tsunami. The water along the shoreline is dragged back dramatically, exposing parts of the shore and seabed that are normally underwater.
It’s helpful to frame the first two years of the pandemic in similar terms to this ocean drawback. Detaching from our own specific circumstances, and our own specific pandemic pain, we have a unique opportunity to actually see the metaphorical seafloor of the world.
Exposed by the pandemic were the often invisible systems that organise our society. These systems are comprised of everything from the expectations of ongoing and unlimited growth via the systems of capitalism and globalisation, to the systems of class, systemic racism and patriarchy, to the more localised systems of government and public service, to the social systems of the nuclear family and individuals, and how our communities, cities, households and green spaces are organised.
Guardian Australia readers respond: how has the pandemic made you rethink life?
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Also exposed in the drawback of two pandemic years has been our internal seafloor – that of our own psyches.
We got to see what we are made of, with previously unimaginable circumstances creating a chance to really test ourselves, see where we fracture and where we are strong.
Just like a tsunami, we can expect further devastation to come. But this exposure of our systems could also show us how to rebuild stronger.
So what did we see when the virus exposed what’s underpinning our lives and our very selves? And what will we do with this newfound clarity?
Economics writer George Megalogenis wrote that the “wicked genius” of Covid was to seek out where the holes and gaps were in our open economic model. In his Quarterly Essay titled Exit strategy: politics after the pandemic, Megalogenis identified that the weak points in Australia’s pandemic response were in the areas that the government had privatised.
“Covid says ‘You’ve left me a gap in your safety net – I’ll start killing’,” he told Richard Fidler’s Conversations in 2021.
Life on the ward: ‘It’s difficult separating family members from loved ones’
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“Australian privatisation was where the weak points were. The commonwealth contracts everything out in aged care” and “the damage done last year in Victoria was when the virus got out of hotel quarantine – also staffed by contract workers including security guards and cleaners who were under trained, underpaid and unaccountable.”
But at least until Omicron came along in the final weeks of 2021 – apart from a few notable exceptions including the slow vaccine rollout, the privatisation of aged care and hotel quarantine and lack of support for the university sector and the arts – Australia’s government systems turned out to be robust enough to largely protect the population and the economy. Australia suffered a relatively low death and infection rate compared with the rest of the world, due to border closures and a high level of compliance with lockdowns. And the economy was spared the worst, largely due to the Jobkeeper and Jobseeker schemes.
The approach of the federal government (and its NSW counterpart) has changed in response to the rapid emergence of the Omicron variant, stressing the “personal responsibility” of citizens and dramatically changing requirements for testing and isolation – with as yet unknown consequences.
But in the initial waves of infection in 2020, according to the ABS, if “Australia had experienced the same crude case and death rates as three comparable countries – Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom – there would have been between 680,000 and 2 million cases instead of the 28,500 that did occur, and between 15 and 46 times the number of deaths”.
Still, the pain was not evenly distributed.
While wealthier, white-collar workers were able to work from home (and during lockdown have access to more green spaces and beaches), the brunt of exposure to the virus was found in more working-class jobs such as manufacturing, in insecure work such as food delivery and the gig economy, and in migrant and female-dominated care work, especially in the so-called “LGAs of concern”.
Healthcare staff have been quitting in record numbers – due to illness, stress and burnout – and the majority of them are women. According to the Grattan Institute, women also bore the brunt of the economic and psychological impact of the virus, and their lifetime economic disadvantage will be compounded.
As we face Omicron with soul-deep weariness, that sense of uncertainty rises again
Lenore Taylor
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According to a report by Australian Unions, “government responses have not adequately addressed the way the Covid-19 crisis is reproducing and deepening existing structural inequality faced by women, and intensifying work and family pressures. In many ways, government policies have made it worse.”
Then there is the looming “shadow pandemic” of worsening mental health outcomes. During lockdowns, suicide rates were down but self-harm increased, particularly in young people. This does not bode well for a mental health system that was already under pressure.
Two years in, despite this mess at the crossroads of capitalism, gender, class, intergenerational disadvantage, race and work, we have not moved to fix the systems that underpin inequality.
Character test
On a more personal level, the pandemic revealed the limitations of the nuclear family – and the need for a “village”. Healthy families need other people around to help – friends, aunts and uncles, teachers, grandparents and neighbours. Part of what was exposed on the seabed was the necessity of communities and personal support systems to stay connected to families, and acknowledgment in a person’s workplace of the whole load an employee might be carrying in their life – not just in their work.
Work bled deeply into domestic life and domestic spaces, much more work fell to women, parents found it impossible to work and supervise schooling at the same time, and many families felt overwhelmed and marooned without access to the village.
And then there’s the even more personal reckoning – a glimpse at our own psyches. Were we resilient? Calm? Kind? Or fearful and fretful?
The great Stoic philosopher Epictetus said: “Circumstances don’t make the man, they only reveal him to himself.”
The ‘backbone’ of regional Australia under strain as volunteer groups suffer pandemic burnout
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And so it was here.
The past two years have shown us what we are made of – and provided to us the sort of character test that only usually comes round with world wars and depressions.
While countries such as America are experiencing high levels of public rage and anger, over everything from mask mandates to slow service in restaurants, in Australia the rage hasn’t been as marked, although it has been there in anti-lockdown protests and in our shops.
Australia’s low level of mortality and relatively high level of compliance with lockdown rules – particularly in 2020 – are probably connected. There was the sense of caring for the stranger and not wanting to do something to endanger people in your community. This sense of cohesion bodes well for a healthy society – it’s something hopeful to hang on to.
So what will we do with our newfound clarity? Seeing the truth of one’s own lives laid bare by the pandemic will no doubt prompt some to reorganise.
And there’s a certain amount we can reorganise in our own lives. Maybe you have already started remaking things that were revealed during the pandemic to be broken.
Friendships that were revealed to be too one-sided or unfulfilling may have been jettisoned, marriages and relationships ended, jobs quit, fitness regimes embarked on, cities swapped for the coast or country. Maybe the pandemic accelerated what was always going to happen. Or maybe it gave you a nudge of the carpe diem kind, or maybe the unique pressures of lockdowns broke the back of things that would otherwise have drifted along for decades to come – intact mostly, but never really stress-tested.
Changing these elements that make up our lives – our friends, our partner, our job, family, our health and fitness, the place where we live – seems big. It’s remaking our lives. Swapping Larry for Barry, Bondi for Berry, making sales for making soap, while enormous within the unit of one life, is not grand stuff that alters the course of human history.
Australia suffered great trauma during the Covid pandemic – and fixing mental health should be our first priority
Julia Gillard
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What’s needed are systemic shifts that lead to a reorganisation of society that can better absorb large shocks – and to support each other through those shockwaves. It’s ground-up stuff.
The pandemic began in Australia in March 2020 – but for me, it will be forever linked with something that started earlier. November 2019 and the skies were red and full of ash. We all wore masks that summer … just a different sort.
The past two years and the things we’ve seen have given us a taste of the radical planetary reorganisation that will need to occur when the climate crisis really bares its teeth.
Like all painful experiences, once this chapter of the pandemic is over, we will want to forget. With all our lovely distractions back – bars and restaurants and gyms and hairdressers – we can paste over the issues all of us have with our set-ups and our systems. We think a move to the country – our own personal revolution – is change enough. But of course it is not.
We have seen the bottom of the seafloor in all its ugliness, beauty and degradation. Such clarity is a dark gift. The real work is ahead. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/apr/24/kirsty-merryn-our-bright-night-review | Music | 2020-04-24T09:00:05.000Z | Jude Rogers | Kirsty Merryn: Our Bright Night review | Jude Rogers' folk album of the month | As a spring like no other in our lifetime begins, Kirsty Merryn’s second album takes us into darkness. It begins at Twilight, literally, and moves us towards Dawn, taking in beaches, waterfalls, Westminster and ruined convents as we go. We encounter thieves, sailors and monks on the way. It all feels impossibly risque.
The New Forest-born, London-based Merryn has been a dedicated explorer since her 2017 debut LP, She & I, which comprised originals about neglected women in history, their stories constructed like folk narratives, giving them authority. But this is more of a mood piece, piano-led, every touch of a key like a warm breath on the neck, withan oakiness that recalls the early 70s solo albums of Sandy Denny. (It fits that Merryn supported Richard Thompson at the 2019 Sidmouth folk festival.)
Contemporary subjects are never far from Merryn’s eye. The title track looks at women who lost sanctuary during the dissolution of the monasteries, urging: “Courage, sisters.” Mary is structured like a traditional courting song, but takes place in a near-future where seafronts have been tarmacked, and woods felled. Traditionals softly creep into the album’s edgelands, such as Outlandish Knight, in which a woman outsmarts her pursuer. Well-known folk regulars provide support throughout, including singer Sam Kelly, and Show of Hands’ Phil Beer.
Merryn’s voice is also a balm for the soul right now, wide-open and heady. Her production offers spaciousness; at times, it recalls Talk Talk’s more bucolic moments. Elsewhere, it often plays like more mainstream crossover record, softly delivering its bliss. You can imagine Merryn’s dreamy, mellow tones soaring over Radio 2 with no trouble at all.
Also out this month
The intriguingly titled Muggington Lane End is the solo debut by Trembling Bells’ vocalist Lavinia Blackwall. Never a typical folk rock performer, Blackwall updates the late-60s sound of baroque chamber pop. Imagine songs veering off from the Village Green Preservation Society-era Kinks, delivered by a wayward, confident choirgirl. Eliza Carthy and Ben Seal’s Through That Sound (My Secret Was Made Known) sees folk regular Carthy delving into her love of wayward jazz. The Lute Girl’s late-night smokiness suits her particularly well. The Unthanks’ Diversions Vol 5: Live and Unaccompanied is also their most striking record yet, Rachel, Becky and Niopha Keegan’s voices bare, bruising and stark together on stage. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/14/chicken-meat-exported-africa-belgium-tested-insecticide-fipronil | World news | 2017-08-14T11:51:31.000Z | Daniel Boffey | Belgian chicken meat exported to Africa is tested for banned insecticide | Samples from the carcasses of egg-laying hens are being tested for fipronil over fears that meat sent to Africa from Belgium may have been contaminated with the banned insecticide.
Meat from older chickens that have spent a lifetime producing eggs is not sold on the domestic market in any significant amount, but is frozen and shipped to Africa, in particular to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a former Belgian colony.
Let’s face it – too much of the food chain is broken
Lucy Siegle
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Retained samples of meat already sent abroad are being tested in Belgian laboratories for the insecticide, which is potentially harmful to humans. Egg-laying hens due to be slaughtered next month for export have already been found to have been treated with the banned substance, it has emerged.
Johan van Bosch, the general secretary of Belgium’s national association of egg traders, said: “There were a lot of hens that were supposed to be slaughtered in September and October. Older hens. They have had the treatment with the fipronil.”
Van Bosch, who said there was no evidence as yet that the scandal had widened to Africa, added: “We have samples of everything we have sent. [Meat from egg-laying hens] is sold all over the world but our first export market is Africa. In Belgium we are mostly used to eating broilers, younger chickens, not the older chickens. We used to use the older chickens for soup here but not any more. It is a matter of taste.”
It is unlikely that chicken meat sold in European markets has been contaminated, as broiler chickens bred for consumption have very short lives. The lice the disinfectant is designed to kill by attacking the nervous system would not have time to develop, making treatment of the chickens unnecessary.
Fipronil is widely used to rid household pets such as dogs and cats of fleas, but is banned in the EU for the treatment of animals destined for human consumption, including chickens.
The World Health Organization says fipronil is moderately hazardous in large quantities, posing a potential danger to people’s kidneys, livers and thyroid glands.
On Saturday, Spain joined the list of 15 other EU member states, along with Switzerland and Hong Kong, who are known to have received eggs from farms treated with fipronil. About 700,000 potentially contaminated eggs are believed to have been distributed to the UK.
As yet, there have been no reports of contaminated eggs in Africa. However, Belgium exports 35m eggs a year to the Congo alone.
One poultry farmer, Willy De Vloo from Veurne in north-west Belgium, told the Flemish newspaper De Standaard he was expecting 1.5m eggs he had already sent for export to Africa to be returned to him. “Soon they will send all my eggs back,” he said, adding that he also had 800,000 eggs on his farm to destroy.
Farms in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Germany have been blocked from operating in recent weeks after farms were discovered to have used disinfectants containing fipronil.
The Belgian egg industry is preparing to ask the European commission for compensation for the fall in sales, the rise in prices and the harm to consumer confidence. The administration in the French-speaking Belgian region of Wallonia also said it was looking to keep its industry alive “by granting a guarantee to the bank credit but also by lending a direct loan to the companies affected by the crisis of contaminated eggs”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/oct/30/degrees-of-separation-what-connects-seinfeld-to-steve-bannon | Culture | 2021-10-30T12:00:02.000Z | Larry Ryan | Degrees of separation: what connects Seinfeld to Steve Bannon? | SeinfeldAll 180 episodes of the 90s’ most misanthropic sitcom have arrived on Netflix, but not everyone is happy. Some viewers have complained that the new transfer puts Jerry Seinfeld’s show in a different aspect ratio: from an older square format to widescreen … yada-yada … now the picture crops out some sight gags and just seems slightly bizarro.
Square format? Jerry Seinfeld. Photograph: Andrew Eccles/NBCU Photobank
Motion impossible: fallout
It’s not the first time modern technology has caused problems. HD TVs can make even visually stunning films look like cheap soap operas, through motion smoothing – a process to reduce blurring (good for on-screen sport). But Tom Cruise was there to save the day: in a slightly awkward 2018 video, he explained how to adjust TV settings to undo this flat fiasco.
Tom Cruise, Top Gun star and HDTV expert. Photograph: Allstar/Paramount
Tick-tock
Twenty years ago, celebrity-watchers gasped when Cruise and Nicole Kidman ended their decade-long marriage. But the Australian actor kicked on nicely – the following year she played Virginia Woolf in The Hours and won an Oscar (a feat TC is yet to manage). Also among its nine Oscar nominations was the film’s score by Philip Glass.
Nicole Kidman, Cruise’s ex and The Hours Oscar winner. Photograph: Getty Images
Boulanger-y
Prior to becoming one of the world’s most recognisable living composers, Glass studied under notoriously exacting music teacher Nadia Boulanger. Others taught by the Frenchwoman include Leonard Bernstein, Quincy Jones and Aaron Copland. Another was Errol Morris, the celebrated documentary-maker. Glass has made music for several of Morris’s films, notably 1988’s The Thin Blue Line.
Tough music teacher Nadia Boulanger, 1963. Photograph: Getty Images
American grifter
In 2018’s American Dharma, Morris profiled far-right rabble-rouser Steve Bannon. Long before helping Donald Trump, Bannon worked in investment banking: in the 90s, he grabbed a slice of a rights deal for Seinfeld, during the sale of its production company. Estimates vary on how much he made, but the two-shirt-wearing nationalist isn’t thought to be in on the profits from the reported $500m streaming deal with Netflix. Serenity now!
Steve Bannon: far-right rabble-rouser … and Seinfeld royalties earner
Watch Seinfeld co-creator Larry David has managed even more series of Curb Your Enthusiasm than his original endeavour, with season 11 now on Sky/Now. Pret-tay, pre-tay good.
Eat In The Soup Nazi episode, an exacting chef terrorises Jerry and co in the name of perfect soup: try making a jambalaya for the full effect. More soup for you! | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/15/roger-stone-guilty-verdict-wikileaks-hacking-case-latest-news | US news | 2019-11-15T18:31:55.000Z | Lauren Gambino | Roger Stone: Trump adviser found guilty on all counts in WikiLeaks hacking case | Roger Stone, a self-described “dirty trickster” and longtime adviser to Donald Trump, was found guilty on Friday of obstructing a congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The verdict makes Stone only the latest among a growing list of people once in the president’s inner circle who have been convicted on federal charges. News of Stone’s convictions came as dramatic testimony at the public impeachment hearing unfolded on Capitol Hill.
A jury found Stone guilty on all seven counts, including lying to lawmakers about WikiLeaks, tampering with witnesses and obstructing a House intelligence committee investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to tip the 2016 election.
Democrats condemn Trump's 'witness intimidation' after Marie Yovanovitch testimony – as it happened
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Trump reacted immediately, asking on Twitter if the conviction amounted to “a double standard like never seen before in the history of our Country?”
“So they now convict Roger Stone of lying and want to jail him for many years to come. Well, what about Crooked Hillary, Comey, Strzok, Page, McCabe, Brennan, Clapper, Shifty Schiff, Ohr & Nellie, Steele & all of the others, including even Mueller himself? Didn’t they lie?” Trump tweeted, naming political opponents whom he frequently targets.
....A double standard like never seen before in the history of our Country?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2019
The verdict, in a trial arising from investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 US election, is not only a blow to Stone but renews scrutiny on then candidate Trump’s activities at a time when he faces an impeachment inquiry that could derail his presidency.
The 67-year-old Stone, who also calls himself an agent provocateur, was charged earlier this year, including on accusations of lying to the House intelligence committee during its investigation Trump-Russia hearings as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry.
He is allowed to remain free until his sentencing, set for 6 February. Stone had denied the allegations.
Stone’s colorful trial in federal court was as much about the rough-and-tumble world of politics, as it was about hair-splitting legal arguments, such as whether Stone truly lied about WikiLeaks since that website was never explicitly mentioned in the intelligence committee’s publicly stated parameters of its investigation.
The trial featured multiple references to The Godfather Part II, a Bernie Sanders impersonation, and testimony by political heavyweights including the former Trump campaign chief Steve Bannon and former Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates, each of whom said they believed Stone had inside information about when WikiLeaks might release more damaging emails about Trump’s Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.
Bannon testified in court that he believed Stone was the “access point” to WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential election, even as he denied that the Trump campaign had direct contact with the activist website or its founder, Julian Assange.
Prosecutors accused Stone of telling lawmakers five different lies related to WikiLeaks andAssange, which in 2016 dumped a series of damaging emails about Clinton that US intelligence officials and Mueller later concluded had been stolen by Russian hackers.
Some of those lies relate to the existence of certain texts or emails, while others pertain to Stone’s conversations with Trump campaign officials and a supposed “intermediary” with WikiLeaks in early August 2016 whom Stone identified to lawmakers as being comedian and radio talkshow host Randy Credico.
Prosecutors said Stone did not actually start talking to Credico about WikiLeaks until later that month, and the actual person to whom he was referring in testimony as an “intermediary” was the conservative author Jerome Corsi whom Stone dispatched in an email to “Get to Assange!” and get the emails.
Corsi was not called as a witness in the trial.
Stone, a close Trump ally who has the face of former president Richard Nixon tattooed on his back, was also accused of tampering with a witness, Credico, when Credico was summoned to testify before Congress and speak with the FBI.
Both Stone and Credico, who took the stand in the case, have since said that Credico did not act as a WikiLeaks back channel. Credico testified in court that Stone pressured him into supporting lies he span to Congress, even threatening his pet dog, Bianca, which he has owned for 12 years.
In emails and texts, the jury saw messages that Stone had sent Credico that included comments like “Prepare to die,” “You’re a rat. A stoolie,” and “Stonewall it. Plead the Fifth. Anything to save the plan,” in a reference to a famous Nixon Watergate quote.
He also repeatedly urged Credico to “do a Frank Pentangeli” – a reference to a Godfather II character who recants his congressional testimony against a mobster amid intimidation.
A lawyer for Stone dismissed the Pentangeli reference, saying Credico had done impressions of the character in the past, and said the “odious language” they used was just part of how they interacted. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/jun/16/australian-election-2016-turnbull-shorten-coalition-greens-labor-briefing | Australia news | 2016-06-15T21:55:23.000Z | Calla Wahlquist | Today's campaign: tabloid declares open season on asylum seekers | It had to happen, I’m just surprised it took this long.
The Daily Telegraph has declared open season on asylum seekers.
Or rather, it has declared that Bill Shorten has declared open season for people smugglers by apparently laying out the welcome mat, a visual gag deployed to great effect on the Tele’s front page, to asylum seekers.
According to the Tele, Labor will give permanent residency to all 30,000 people now languishing on temporary protection visas, which the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, warned will cause chaos.
Guardian Live election special event with Lenore Taylor and Katharine Murphy
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Border protection has not really been the vote winner this election that it was in 2013. Indeed, the only parties really gaining traction on it are the Greens, who oppose Australia’s offshore detention system as inhumane, and Pauline Hanson, who wants to ban all Muslims.
So the Coalition could probably use a little chaos.
As Game of Thrones watchers know: Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder.
The big picture
First let’s unpack that story in the Daily Telegraph article, which says Labor would give its legacy caseload of 30,000 asylum seekers permanent residency and “full work rights”.
Labor’s policy statement on asylum seekers says it would abolish temporary protection visas and “commit to processing people as quickly as possible and placing those found to be genuine refugees on permanent protection visas”, which is not quite the same. Moving on.
Reporters Daniel Meers and Simon Benson write:
Immigration minister Peter Dutton last night told the Daily Telegraph Labor’s border security policy was now “weak, equivocal and constantly changing”.
The potential for post-election rebellion appears to be far more widespread than was revealed at the beginning of the campaign, with public records confirming a total of 50 candidates or MPs opposing strong border protection.
Border protection was a stronghold of the Abbott government that has been adopted wholeheartedly by the Turnbull government, so watch this space today.
Meanwhile, both leaders are out talking about the economy, with the jobless figures for May released today.
Labor has announced details of a $68.6m policy to deliver “local jobs for local people” in 20 “communities of opportunity”, which are as yet unnamed communities with high rates of disadvantage and unemployment and low levels of education.
The program will apparently involve coordinators running jobs expos and workplace mentoring to connect unemployed people with training and employment in areas of skills shortage. It will also provide a “working communities fund” to address problems preventing employment in that area, such as a lack of affordable childcare, poor literacy skills or poor English language skills.
Sticking on jobs, Labor has pledged $100m toward Arrium steelworks in Whyalla, South Australia, doubling the SA government’s commitment of $50m.
And finally, the rise of the Nick Xenophon Team has caused continued rumblings from the major parties.
The latest salvo comes from the ALP national secretary and campaign director, George Wright, who wrote a letter to the Australian Election Commission asking it to investigate an alleged breach of financial disclosure laws by Xenophon’s now defunct fundraising arm, Support Nick Xenophon.
It apparently sold Xenophon merch online, including stress balls saying “Give Nick the Squeeze” and bags that say “Nick is Fully Sick”. Full details at the Australian.
On the campaign trail
Team Turnbull arrived in Sydney yesterday evening, after two days in Perth, and Malcolm Turnbull joined his wife, Lucy, and the New South Wales premier, Mike Baird, at a service at St Andrew’s Cathedral for the victims of the Orlando massacre. He’ll remain in Sydney today to talk about the economy, with a suspected guest appearance by Scott Morrison.
Bill Shorten, meanwhile, is returning to Adelaide after his latest visit was cut short by a need to tour areas of flood damage. This will be his third visit to SA of the campaign; his first, you’ll recall, was marked by that rather alarming snog ambush.
The campaign you should be watching
The former independent Lyne MP Rob Oakeshott announced on Friday that he would run as an independent for the neighbouring seat of Cowper, and, according to a poll commissioned by GetUp!, he’s in with a shot.
The poll showed Oakeshot’s primary vote was 28.4% compared with the sitting National MP Luke Hartsuyker’s 39.4%.
My colleague Paul Karp writes:
Oakeshott told Guardian Australia his primary vote of 25% in the poll suggested the result was “about 50/50 two-candidate preferred”.
“After five days of campaigning I’m really uplifted by that result, it shows a 13% swing against the Nationals already,” he said. “And it also shows a level of frustration within the community about local and national politics that is going to be expressed at the ballot box.”
If you’re wondering why Cowper: Oakeshottt said that while he hadn’t moved since resigning from parliament in 2013, the electorate boundaries had, and he no longer lives in Lyne.
And another thing(s)
The Queensland MP Bob Katter has made a campaign ad that even the Liberal National party senator Ian Macdonald thinks is offensive.
The add in question shows two men, marked as ALP and LNP respectively, putting up a “for sale” sign for Australia. Cut to Katter, who writes a decisive “NOT” on the sign and then blows on a smoking gun. The camera pans up and we see two bodies lying some distance away.
Very bold of Bob Katter to take a pro-murder stance to an election
— Rob Stott (@Rob_Stott) June 15, 2016
Katter released the ad on his official Twitter feed yesterday, three days after the Orlando shooting. He told the ABC he thought it was funny and anyway, he’d approved it weeks ago.
Said Macca:
Mr Katter’s video advertisement seems to encourage murder and gun violence to promote his strange views on a serious policy issue.
In other campaign add news, Scott Morrison has released a bizarre shouty music mashup attack add alleging the Greens have “infiltrated” the Labor party.
Morrison said it was not an attack campaign but a “scare campaign.” Political editor Lenore Taylor delicately tore its central premise to shreds here, so I’ll leave you with this burn from Bill Shorten:
"ScoMo should spend more time on his day job as Treasurer than his night job as amateur YouTube producer" 🔥🔥 #ZINGER https://t.co/2Obuy8WPLi
— Alice Workman (@workmanalice) June 15, 2016
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Join Lenore Taylor and Katharine Murphy in Melbourne on Tuesday as they host a Guardian Live election special event featuring a panel of prominent political guests | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/25/kings-of-summer-film-review | Film | 2013-08-24T23:01:04.000Z | Philip French | The Kings of Summer – review | Reading on mobile? Click here to view video
This touching fable concerns some suburban Ohio teenagers who react against their essentially kind parents whose solicitous behaviour they find overbearing and move out of their homes during the summer holidays to a house they've built in the woods. Quirky, funny, occasionally too whimsical and at times implausible, it's rather like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn meeting the cast of Rebel Without a Cause. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/quiz/2014/mar/30/kurt-cobain-nirvana-quiz | Global | 2014-03-30T00:05:00.000Z | Phil Mongredien | Kurt Cobain and Nirvana quiz – how much do you know? | 1.With which city’s music scene were Nirvana synonymous?
Seattle
New York
Norwich
Reveal
2.How did Cobain describe his paramour Courtney Love live on Channel 4’s The Word in late 1991?
'A crack-smoking Satan worshipper'
'The best fuck in the world'
'Ever so nice'
Reveal
3.Which Velvet Underground song did Nirvana cover on a tribute album?
Heroin
Venus in Furs
Here She Comes Now
Reveal
4.What did Cobain wear at the 1992 Reading festival?
A gimp outfit
A hospital gown
A Luton Town football kit
Reveal
5.Which musician is credited on Nirvana’s debut Bleach but doesn’t actually feature on the album?
Chad Channing
Dave Grohl
Jason Everman
Reveal
6.What role does Spencer Elden play in the Nirvana story?
He was the original drummer
He is the baby on the cover of Nevermind
He performed 'interpretative dance' moves on stage at the 1992 Reading festival?
Reveal
7.The day after Cobain’s death was announced, how many words did the Guardian devote to its news story?
125
568
2,436
Reveal
8.Which set of songs wasn’t recorded by Nirvana?
I Hate Myself and I Want to Die; Oh the Guilt; Verse Chorus Verse
Radio Friendly Unit Shifter; Endless Nameless; Big Cheese
We Die Young; Down in a Hole; Sea of Sorrow
Reveal
9.When Cobain flew home to Seattle for the last time, which fellow rock star shared first class with him?
WASP’s Blackie Lawless
Queensrÿche’s Geoff Tate
Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan
Reveal
10.Which Nirvana song was inspired by Patrick Süskind’s book Perfume?
Scentless Apprentice
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Heart-Shaped Box
Reveal | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2001/mar/19/pressandpublishing.mondaymediasection4 | Media | 2001-03-19T09:12:28.000Z | Ian Johnson | When the Sun demands six spreads in a week, I fear for my soul' | Friday December 1
Cold Feet series three is almost at an end, Christmas is coming and I'm looking forward to my first holiday in six months. Stumbling into the regular Granada publicity meeting expecting the usual perfunctory round-up of Barrymore specials, Audience Withs and Richard and Judy crises, I sit down to buff my nails. But I am wrenched from my end-of-year torpor by a new programme on the agenda - and amazingly, it's up for grabs. A long-repressed desire to be Phil Oakey's love-child resurfaces as the head of press describes this new series as the bastard offspring of Big Brother and The Monkees. Before you can say Hit Me Baby One More Time, Popstars is mine.
Monday December 4
LWT's entertainment chief, Nigel Lythgoe, has spent the summer searching the country for wannabe pop talent with former Spice Girls PR Nicki Chapman and Polydor A&R director Paul Adam. The results of their search is known only to a few production staff and the aspirant pop stars' immediate families. In a procedure of which MI5 would be proud, I'm made to sign a confidentiality agreement before I'm even allowed to see photos of the chosen five. All we have to do now is keep them under wraps for a couple of months until they are revealed midway through the series. A hard task, but one that LWT's stringent security plan should cover.
Not for long. Freelance journalist Paul Scott is on the phone just moments later. He knows the names, ages, home towns, current whereabouts and gym membership details of the band members. It is no longer a case of whether the press will find out who's in the band, but how long before they do.
We need to keep the publicity pot boiling without giving too much away, and with billboards across the country proclaiming "Nigel Pick Me", what better distraction for the press than a 50-something TV executive with a cartoon on-screen identity and a bad haircut. Nasty Nigel is born.
Monday January 15
The show is on air and causing a media sensation, DJs, TV presenters and columnists all have an opinion on Nigel's audition techniques and "Nasty Nigel" is a household name. Nigel achieves a lifetime's ambition when he appears on the cover of Media Guardian, but as the tabloid hysteria increases, I begin to worry about the nature of the pact we have signed. The extent of Nigel's celebrity status becomes apparent when Top of the Pops magazine demands that he reviews the month's singles.
Tuesday January 16
The world is going completely mad. I am woken at 7.30am by Kiss FM which gives me 10 seconds' notice before putting me live on air. Either I take them to meet the band or they reveal the band's address. My offer to sleep with DJ Bam Bam as an alternative gets a lukewarm response.
Wednesday January 17
Such is the show's zeitgeist appeal that even the losers are cover stories. Heat magazine wants Big Claire from Glasgow and Darius "the pain in the Arias". (Copyright, Daily Star.) But there's a problem: Claire's bosses at Kwik-Fit won't allow her to take an extended lunchbreak - her moment of fame is slipping through my fingers. We even offer to pay Kwik-Fit for lost income, but they don't bite. But a last-ditch compromise is agreed and we do the shoot in her works canteen as her colleagues look on. Fame costs and here's where you start paying.
Friday January 19
Amid the publicity whirlwind, a crisis emerges. It's increasingly clear that we have a leak in the camp. Someone is spilling the beans - too many tabloids seem to know intimate details of where the band are living, where they are from and who they've slept with. Most alarmingly, they know about the Kym Situation [that she has two children]. A steady stream of "exclusive" stories are offered to keep the five's names out of the papers until the band is revealed onscreen. The tabloids agree readily: a revealed band does not sell papers, a real-life soap opera does.
Saturday January 20
Things appear to be under control and after a hugely successful webcast with Nasty Nigel, we retire to a West End bar for a celebratory drink. But I'm only two sips into a pina colada when the phone goes - the Sunday People is planning to break ranks. My increasingly desperate attempts to persuade the paper's editor to keep the Popstars secret fall on deaf ears. Under a banner headline on page 11, Noel, Danny, Kym, Suzanne and Myleene are revealed to the nation. Arse.
Sunday January 21
The band are gutted. Kym threatens to nut Paul Scott. I sympathise with the response but professional integrity prevents me from endorsing this course of action. Instead, we stick to the line that 10 hopefuls are still under consideration and the final five have not been chosen. It would be an unmitigated disaster if the line-up was to change but it is still a remote possibility, and there are five replacements at the ready in the highly unlikely event that one of the chosen band should walk out.
Monday January 22
A large number of journalists now know the final line-up and are using this as ammunition. My sidekick, Joe Stroud, and I must provide a steady stream of tabloid fodder to keep the hounds at bay. It is a pact with the devil - when the Sun demands six double-page spreads in a week, I fear for my soul. Nigel, Darius, Claire and a host of other wannabes step forward to fill the void.
Tuesday January 23
Meanwhile, Kiss FM are still on my case. They want an interview with the band and are prepared to go to any lengths to get one. Their powers of investigative journalism did not stop with finding out the band line-up. They know my home address, my parents' home address, where I went to university - and have dredged up details of a particularly embarrassing medical complaint from my teens of which my mother is, even now, unaware. Martyr-like I decide that if the world is to find out why I was christened Buster Gonad at college, then it is a price I am prepared to pay. I don't answer the phone before 8am ever again.
Thursday January 25
Taking a break from the maelstrom, Nigel decides to hobnob with the glitterati at the South Bank Show awards. Amongst the great and good of the artistic community, the man who brought Ice Warriors to ITV is mobbed by journalists asking how he is coping with his new-found fame. While Nigel is besieged, Dame Antoinette Sibley looks on bemused.
Friday January 26
Things are getting out of hand when a meeting with ITV network bosses is interrupted by Sunday Mirror hacks, who have brought the woman who beat Nigel in a childhood tap-dancing contest 40 years ago down from Liverpool to London for a Tearful Reunion. That'll teach him to tell family anecdotes to Media Guardian.
Saturday March 3
The show is going stellar and the Popstars also-rans want a slice of the action. Joe, who has taken on the roles of bag-carrier and nursemaid as well as Popstars' publicity assistant, gets them on to the guest list at the newest celeb hang-out, Red Cube. Life enters the twilight zone when Jordan and her celebrity breasts contact the office and demand to be fixed up with Darius. Dane Bowers, her erstwhile beau, has been critical of Mr Danesh in the press, and she can smell the heady perfume of revenge mixed with tabloid headlines. Popstars failures now rank above D-list footballers and Big Brother contestants.
Monday March 5
Finally, we have made it to the point in the show when the five are officially revealed and it's time to show them off at a press conference at Heathrow. They sing, they charm, they head off to shoot their first five magazine covers and I breathe a sigh of relief.
Monday March 19
For the first time in weeks, the LWT phone lines are not in a state of meltdown. Polydor has taken on the lion's share of the band's publicity in the lead-up to the release of the debut single, and I move on to my next project, a politically sensitive film of the events of Bloody Sunday. I cancel my subscription to Smash Hits and pick up a copy of Don Mullan's definitive account of the events of 30 years ago, Eyewitness Bloody Sunday. That weekend I attend the first day of filming in Derry in which Granada Film will recreate the civil rights march that led to the tragedy.
Painfully aware of the political sensitivities of the project, I keep my English head down as 6,000 Derry residents turn out to take part in the film. Suddenly a group of teenage extras rush over to ask a question. Worried that I might reveal flaws in my knowledge of the civil rights movement, I steel myself for an interrogation. "You're that bloke off Popstars, aren't you - what's Myleene really like?"
You couldn't make it up.
Ian Johnson is a press officer for LWT. He takes up the post of head of publicity for drama and entertainment at the BBC next month. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/jun/21/what-ive-learned-from-cooking-with-chefs-online | Food | 2020-06-21T11:00:15.000Z | Rachel Cooke | Keep it simple: what I've learned from cooking with chefs online | The last time I watched Massimo Bottura on Instagram, life in his kitchen was, as ever, a little chaotic. Bottura’s wife, Lara, glamorous in white jeans, told a rambling anecdote at the top of her voice. His son, Charlie, somehow ended up with whipped cream on his cheek. His daughter, Alexa, could as usual be heard hurriedly translating her father’s running thoughts from Italian to English. As for the Michelin-starred chef himself, he was in particularly fine voice. “Ragazzi! Ragazzi!” he shouted, trying (and failing) to get everyone’s attention. Italy’s lockdown having finally been eased some days before, however, the mood was also valedictory. Freedom – and work – now beckoned once again: perhaps this would be one of the last times the Botturas would entertain us at home. “This is a real leftovers meal,” Alexa explained, as her dad made an elaborate pile of some dry-looking chocolate breakfast pancakes, a few slices of banana, and a large dollop of preserved cherries.
Gazing at this toppling confection, I wondered vaguely if he was taking the piss. But, no. At the stove, more serious work was under way. “Look!” instructed Alexa. “This is a pasta that thinks it is a risotto.” In a pan into which he had crushed some plum tomatoes, Bottura tipped a bag of tiny macaroni – the kind you might usually add to soup. He then added a ladle of broth made from the liquid in which he’d cooked (separately) both some mussels and some pork belly, and stirred. Things, it must be said, did not look terribly promising. In the mix, we could see two pale cloves of garlic, bobbing like white sharks in a blood red sea, and a small, floating tree in the form of a huge bouquet garni. He stirred some more. He added some more broth. And on and on. Finally, he threw in the mussels and pork, a few lumps of cold butter (“to bring down the temperature and to make it creamy!”), and a sprinkling of orange zest, grated from a fruit that was roughly the size of Jupiter, and which had been sent to him by a kind friend in Sicily. Pronto. The pasta was now ready for the table.
If there’s joy in all this cooking, there’s melancholy in it, too. It reminds us powerfully of what we miss
To what culinary rules, if any, did this improbable dish subscribe? I’m still not sure, though pork and mussels are, I know, often eaten together in Spain. But then, Kitchen Quarantine isn’t intended to be what we might call a precision-based venture. Filmed on Alexa’s mobile phone at the family home in Modena (the Italian city that’s also home to Bottura’s three Michelin-starred restaurant, Osteria Francescana), the family’s Instagram series, broadcast nightly throughout Italy’s long and severe lockdown, is a confidence-builder for cooks everywhere – not because it tells us exactly what to do, but because it reminds us that, if we keep things simple, they’ll usually come out all right in the end. A bit of this. A bit of that. Stir, taste, repeat. This is improvisational cooking for dummies – albeit dummies who might have a certain flair for drama and a decent supply of parmesan. To watch Bottura eat cold mozzarella on toasted day-old focaccia is to know that when it comes to food, the good and the elaborate are not necessarily the same thing.
Kitchen Quarantine began almost by accident. Stuck at home, and having been furloughed from her job at Maserati, Alexa filmed her father cooking the family’s supper. It was a spur of the moment thing. But then, as she told the New Yorker, she focus-grouped the result on FaceTime. People told her that they liked what they saw and wanted more, so she duly kept going. Thanks to her efforts, the charming, warm, lovable and deeply Italian Bottura family have since become something of an internet sensation: more than half a million people watched the video in which Massimo made béchamel sauce. Last month, he won a special achievement prize at the Webby awards in recognition of this “inspirational” project.
Bottura’s shaggy-haired charisma – in spectacles, he looks more like a shrink than a chef – has certainly played a big part in the success of Kitchen Quarantine: who wouldn’t want to be sequestered for a while with so energetic a man? But he’s hardly the only cook to have migrated to the internet. Across the world, restaurants have been closed for weeks, and while in some countries they’re now beginning to reopen – Osteria Francescana is once again taking bookings; there will even be, for the first time in its history, tables available on Sundays – in the UK, they’re not expected to reopen until July. With time on their hands, and a desire both to inspire and to remain present in the minds of their customers, where else might professional cooks usefully appear?
Those keen on cookalongs can go high end, and watch other Michelin-starred chefs: you might also like to road test Jason Atherton’s Social Kitchen Isolation (Atherton’s empire includes the Pollen Street Social), in which he makes chicken and leek pies and Thai curries. Or they can go mainstream: the executive chefs of both Wagamama and Nando’s are online now, should you be yearning for a certain kind of katsu curry or peri-peri chicken. My favourites, however, are the demos available from Bread Ahead, the excellent bakery in Borough Market (every day at 2pm; an ingredients list is published in advance if you intend to join in); from Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich of Honey & Co. (roll your own vine leaves); and from Padella, Tim Siadatan’s genius no-bookings pasta restaurant (though he posts less frequently than some, the good news is that his demo of perfect pici cacio e pepe is already up). But whether high or low(er), these offerings all have one thing in common. What’s great about them is that unlike, say, cookery shows on TV, there’s no padding or guff; any cosiness is real, not staged. And herein lies the secret of their infectious accessibility. Direct and intimate, you absorb small tricks of the trade without even realising it.
But if videos aren’t your thing, there are other options. I love Home Cooking, a podcast by Samin Nosrat, the American cook best known for the Netflix series based on her book Salt Fat Acid Heat: especially the fourth episode, in which she and her co-host, Hrishikesh Hirway, discuss everything from chocolate mousse to what to do with a surfeit of ginger, after which they’re joined by special guest Yo Yo Ma (listening to him talk about the Parisian bakeries of his childhood is wonderful – almost, though not quite, as good as listening to him play Bach’s complete cello suites). Or maybe you prefer to read. In the wake of Covid-19, several new platforms for food writing have sprung up, among them Vittles, a “food newsletter for novel times”, whose contributors include Ruby Tandoh, and In Digestion, a weekly survey of the best food media on the web “and why you should care about it”.
Jason Atherton’s Social Kitchen Isolation Photograph: @_jasonatherton/IGTV
The overall effect of this mass shift to the internet is, broadly speaking, one of democratisation. Not only is all this information free. The playing field is more level: whether a cook is young and little known, or older and long-established, they’re all using the same means to get across their message. In lockdown, moreover, everyone is muddling through, even the most skilled among us: Srulovich seems to approach his fridge just as trepidatiously as the rest of us right now – which is reassuring. It’s not that perfection has been consigned to the past; rather, that it has been redefined. It is messy and human. When Bottura was making his risotto-style pasta, a rogue mussel landed in his pan ahead of the others. For a while, he did not notice (I felt like I was watching a panto: “Look!” I wanted to shout. “It’s there, behind that tomato!”). When he finally did spot it, though, he was eager to point it out. “If my clumsiness doesn’t worry me, why should yours worry you?” he seemed to be saying, prodding the alien mollusc with his wooden spoon. In this world, a shrug is everything. It may be more reassuring even than knowing your weighing scales are accurate and to hand.
I have to admit that there are days lately when my laptop is a very useful bit of kitchen kit. But I’m not entirely convinced this shift will be permanent. Or perhaps I mean that I hope it won’t be. If there’s joy in all this cooking, there’s melancholy in it, too. It reminds us powerfully of what we miss. For one thing, where are all the people? Who, I sometimes ask myself, am I doing all this cooking for? How good it would be to have people round, to hear them coo over my star anise-scented chicken pilaff and my salted chocolate blondies (my two great triumphs so far).
Massimo Bottura and his global movement to feed the hungry
Read more
For another, there are our shuttered restaurants, about which, with every day that passes, I worry more. We miss them a lot, whether Pizza Express or… well, think of your own favourite: that beloved place that you turn to first for comfort or celebration. It is said that people are trying to replicate restaurant experiences at home, and I think there’s truth in this. Those serious restaurants that have ploughed their efforts into home delivery are doing brisk trade, even if this cannot, for their owners, begin to make up what they are losing financially: I’m planning to order from Orasay, Jackson Boxer’s marvellous London fish restaurant, for my birthday next month. I’ve also taken to replicating, as others also have, certain restaurant twiddles at home. The other night, I put a load of chips (oven chips!) in a newspaper cone, which I then placed inside a pewter tankard that belonged to my dad – a stab at making us feel we were eating our goujons of sole in a certain swanky West End place rather than in our basement kitchen.
Honey & Co’s Sarit Packer Photograph: @honeyandco/Instagram
In truth, I’ve had enough both of my screen and of my own cooking for now. Food and people: they cannot, and should not, be separated. I long to be out in the world again. I long for the clatter of cutlery, and the sound of strangers laughing; for the good-humoured crush of a bar, and the murmured approval of a maître d’. I want a wine list, even if it is overpriced, and napkins as big as sails. I want a little pat of butter, and a basket full of warm bread. I want proper chips, and I want pudding, even if I’m full. I want to run for the bus afterwards feeling slightly tipsy, and go to bed thinking of whatever delicious thing it was that I ate – a dish made with love and skill and with which I had no involvement whatsoever save for the fact that I willingly scoffed it all down. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/09/stella-creasy-on-open-secrets-and-sexual-harassment-i-was-propositioned-by-senior-people | Politics | 2023-10-09T13:00:11.000Z | Emine Saner | Stella Creasy on open secrets and sexual harassment: ‘I was propositioned by senior people’ | Before Stella Creasy became the Labour MP for Walthamstow in 2010, she was hoping to have “a life”, she says with a smile. “I’d spent a lot of my 20s doing politics – as a local councillor, working in parliament, studying.” She had already stepped back from Waltham Forest council in 2006 and worked for a thinktank, but when the Walthamstow MP Neil Gerrard, who had been in the seat since 1992, announced the following year that he would be standing down, she decided to go for it. Perhaps surprisingly for a politician, Creasy doesn’t, as far as I can tell, have a career path mapped out: she laughs and brushes off the question when asked what job she’d want should Labour win the next election. Instead, opportunities arise and, if they seem a good fit, Creasy goes for it. She stood for deputy leader in 2015 (she came second), is chair of the Labour Movement for Europe, and is now in the running for a new job – chair of the Committee on Standards, parliament’s watchdog. “One of the things that I have been working on with a number of different people for a while is addressing concerns about why we don’t take sexual harassment, abuse ...” She pauses briefly. “What it is about this place, which makes the laws on those issues, but we can’t make progress.”
A poll for Channel 4 News last year found one in 10 Westminster staffers had experienced sexual harassment. Just how prevalent is it? “I think if you ask most MPs, if they were honest with themselves, they will say there’s a lot more behaviour that is unacceptable and needs to be challenged, than is coming forward in the complaints process. People talk about there being lists of people to avoid – lists, plural. That should tell you there’s a problem.”
Creasy is less worried about the Westminster bars and drinking culture than what might be happening in offices. “We’re all in enclosed little offices.” She gestures as if to say look around – we’re in her office, and two young people are at their desks in the adjacent room. “Many of the stories and concerns I’ve heard are about power imbalances. A lot of young people get into politics because they have political ambition, so one of the things we have to end is the culture of senior people who become aware of disclosures who say, ‘don’t complain, because you don’t want to get labelled as that person’.” Creasy says she has heard from “a number of people” who were deterred from making a complaint. “We’re still at that point of ‘find a way to avoid them, don’t be on your own with them’ rather than, ‘actually, this is completely unacceptable’. And that damages us all.”
Creasy has not, she says, been sexually harassed during her time as an MP, but she was when she worked in parliament as a researcher while she was still a student. “I was propositioned by senior people, who now – and I still see them around – would not remember at all, because it was just something that they could do,” she says. They were not people she worked for. But was it implicit that she would get on in her career if she agreed? “Well, it was offering to talk about my career in the bedroom,” she says. “I mean, I was young but I spotted the trap in that.” She laughs grimly at the awfulness of it then adds: “I was terrified. But I also experienced that in other workplaces, so it’s not unique to politics. One of the things I’ve always hated is people saying ‘you’re not a wallflower, so you were able to cope’. No one should have to ‘cope’.”
She worries about any culture in which it is complaints that drive change, “because it takes an awful lot to complain. We’re asking a lot of the people who experience these problems to come forward, and be the person whose head is above the parapet. It’s one of the reasons we need to continue to work on harassment policies, so we’re not waiting for complaints to come forward. You need systems in place, to not just deal with the excesses, but actually change the culture.”
It isn’t a problem only Westminster faces, of course. When we meet, the allegations of rape and abuse against Russell Brand are all over the news, along with questions about who enabled his alleged behaviour, and what TV executives knew. “What I think is so powerful about the Russell Brand example, and what’s happening in parliament, is the open secret thing – people, when they get to a position of leadership, turning the other way, or minimising it. That in itself takes away the urgency of change.”
Who would be an MP these days? When Creasy, 46, was getting involved in politics in the mid-90s, there was “the excitement that the political movement I was part of could win an election, because it was always a bit theoretical. For the younger generation who’ve never had that experience of a progressive government, whose experience of politics over the last seven or eight years has been pretty divisive and toxic – and that division has been within political parties as well – it’s not been a hopeful time, generally. So there is a reasonable question – you must be a weirdo to want to do this.”
From lying prime ministers to cruel and nonsensical policies and scandalous deals to revelations about bullying and sexual harassment, people’s opinions of our elected representatives have never been lower. Maybe it’s pessimistic, but does Creasy look around the Commons and think perhaps people have a point? “There are people that you do think, ‘no, please don’t do that’ because they’ve become the exemplar rather than the exception,” she says. But contempt for politicians is hardly a new thing, she points out. The joke in her family, she says, “is that when I told my mum I was standing, she was like, ‘Have you considered being an estate agent?’ I think what worries me more now is that people are losing hope.”
At the beginning of Creasy’s parliamentary career, constituents at least talked to her for a while before they got angry. “Now, they’re angry. They also think that you probably won’t do anything – not that you can’t, but you won’t – and then they’re mildly surprised if you respond. One of the things I think is a common experience of lots of MPs is sometimes if you get abusive messages, and you write back, they’re like, ‘Oh my God, you read it’. As if we’re so disconnected now, such an elite, that we can’t even read an email. That’s quite a damning indictment of who we are, and why we do what we do.”
Creasy doesn’t seem worn down by it personally, and she is very careful not to look as though she is complaining. Nothing about people’s anger surprises her, “because this is the first generation that isn’t going to progress in the way that its predecessors did.” And politics has, she says, “been heavy on blame, short on solutions for so long. Populists on all sides go around saying ‘if you think life is crap, that’s who you should blame’. That anger, that fire, is there and it’s dangerous because it’s also impotent. It doesn’t actually change anything. I am not a masochist, I don’t do this job for the fun of it. You do it because you can make a difference.”
Creasy spent the first part of her childhood in Manchester before moving with her family to Colchester. Relocating from a leftwing city to a rightwing environment politicised her: “What I think is frightening and sobering to me now is we’re even more divided than we were in the 1980s. I think the rot is even deeper.” She didn’t particularly have ambitions of becoming a politician, but she was always a campaigner, learning an early lesson of principles over popularity when she campaigned to get Nestlé products out of her school vending machine in protest at the baby milk scandal. “In an all-girls’ school – no chocolate! It lasted a day,” she says with a laugh. “It was like, oh, you’ve always got to think about what happens next, haven’t you?”
She has been a backbencher since 2015, and fought off an attempt to have her deselected during the Corbyn years. When Creasy put herself forward for the standards committee chair (Harriet Harman is the other nominee so far), the Conservative MP David Davis, supporting her, said he wanted “a non-establishment character … someone who doesn’t mind rocking the boat”. She has been scathing about the lack of maternity rights for MPs, which forced her to bring her 13-week-old son into a Commons debate, and she hasn’t been afraid to criticise policies she doesn’t agree with, such as Keir Starmer’s pledge to keep the two-child benefit cap. Does she feel like an outsider? “Not at all,” she says. “I feel very much part of the Labour movement. I just don’t think that you should be unquestioning.”
Women MPs receive a disproportionate amount of abuse, and for Creasy, having something of a profile, the sheer volume of it means, she says, “you almost don’t see the death threats, the rape threats” – though she points out her black and minority ethnic colleagues get even more, which is “horrific and relentless”. She has campaigned for several years to get misogyny recognised as a hate crime; earlier this year, the government confirmed this would not happen, but change has forged ahead in other ways.
Last week, legislation was passed making sex-based harassment in public a crime, explicitly recognising misogyny. “If you’re not bothered about who gets the credit, you can do all sorts of things,” says Creasy. She would still like to see misogyny recognised as a hate crime, but “I think what we need to do now is learn from how the police implement it. Then I suspect we’re going to have to be clear that it’s not just when it happens on the street. But now we’ll have a model to use, and every police force will have to record [sex-based harassment]. The Met was refusing to record it. The Met, at one point, said ‘if we record it, we have to do something about it’.” She laughs. “Yes, that’s the point.”
Does the abuse make her fear for her safety? She pauses. “We’re supposed to have parliamentary security, it’s all a work in progress.” Late last year, a complaint was made to social services about Creasy’s political views and suggested her two young children should be taken away from her; although the complaint was quickly dismissed, it still had to be looked into. “The people who’ve come for my kids, that’s the point where it really hits home,” she says. “It would be very strange for anyone to not think, ‘let’s just make sure we’re not missing anything’ [in terms of making sure security is tight]. One of the things I have done persistently is to challenge being told ‘because you’re not on the frontbench, your family don’t get any support’. They’re targeting my family to get to me, so that doesn’t make any sense.”
She worries for her team, she says, “because we’ve had people physically attack my office.” And it frustrates her that the “emphasis from the police and the parliamentary authorities is about us avoiding risk rather than dealing with [perpetrators].” When Creasy was supporting the campaign in Northern Ireland to legalise abortion, “people targeted my town centre, and the response from the police at times was very much about their right to protest. I was, like, they’re not protesting, they’ve got a picture of my head next to a dead baby, they may as well put a target on it, and [they have a campaign] called ‘Stop Stella’. That’s a pretty clear incitement to attack somebody. I was 28 or 29 weeks pregnant at the time, so I was particularly vulnerable.”
Does the culture of anger and abuse make life harder for her? “It doesn’t matter, if it’s my life,” says Creasy. She seems so wary of complaining about it – she loves her job, she says, and it’s a privilege – but it does matter, because if this is what life is like for some MPs, who would want to do it? She talks for a while about the challenge of the left to improve people’s lives and opportunities. As it currently stands, she does worry that, potentially, our elected representatives will be “only people who enjoy conflict. That’s probably not a great way to make progress.”
In 2022, Creasy set up MotherRED, which supports women with children – a group lacking in parliament, especially those with young children – to stand for Labour selection. Often potential candidates want to talk to her about the practicalities of political life while bringing up young children and issues such as maternity cover (still nonexistent for MPs; Creasy was the first and only MP to use a locum for her first maternity leave, but she was scathing of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority which didn’t allow her one for her second). “But they also want to know about the risk, and that breaks my heart because nobody should be going into a job worried that they might be at risk,” she says. “Look, Jo [Cox] was my friend. I got on really well with David [Amess], he was a lovely guy. It’s a very real thing for this generation of politicians.”
She deals with it, she says, by having “a tribe” of friends. “You have to have a healthy hinterland. I have two toddlers, I don’t get to go to as many gigs as I used to, but being in the mosh pit at a Wedding Present gig was a good release, especially because we’re all of a certain age now, so the mosh pit doesn’t move that fast.” And she always remembers the words of her mother, who was the headteacher of a special school and now runs a night shelter: it’s not about you. “When you stop being narcissistic – which in politics is a very easy thing to be, and we’re all guilty of it – you can focus on what could be done. I guess the thing I find motivating is thinking, ‘actually, what if we did change it?’” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/feb/11/biography.edithwharton | Books | 2007-02-11T00:22:07.000Z | Hilary Spurling | Review: Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee | Edith Wharton
by Hermione Lee
Chatto & Windus £25, pp864
When Ivy Compton-Burnett complained that people in real life were too flat, too blurry and nothing like definite enough to go straight into a book, she had never met Edith Wharton. If a categorical imperative ever took human shape, it would be Mrs Wharton in her prime. Her edicts were absolute, her summons was always mandatory, her taste consummate and her put-downs correspondingly scathing. 'There are only eight people in New York I care to have dine with me,' she told a celebrity designer rash enough to point out that her dining table was unfashionably small. When an artless American millionairess showed off her prize possession - 'And this I call my Louis Quatorze room' - Wharton peered through her lorgnette and asked blandly: 'Why, my dear?'
Her friends' accounts of her exacting standards, exorbitant demands and illimitable energy ranged 'from awestruck to horror-struck', depending on whether they were writing to or about her. Her visits reduced Henry James, by his own account, to a cowering wreck, burrowing under the bedclothes or lying flat and blubbering into the carpet. When Bernard Berenson gave her a guided tour of continental museums, she told his wife it was high time he learned to go 'through galleries with a quick, firm step instead of gaping and dawdling' in front of the pictures. Nobody could resist or withstand her. Even Wharton's publishers gave way to her like butter before a hot knife. 'As for the hero, he's going to be very strong,' she warned Scribner's, demanding a 20 per cent royalty on her prospective third novel in 1905: 'If you were to refuse, he is so violent that I don't know whether I can answer for the consequences.'
She told Berenson she planned to 'eat the world leaf by leaf', and her stamina, appetite and attack barely diminished with age. She lived alone in France until well into her seventies, maintained by a staff of 22. When an old friend invited her to stay in 1937, the last year of her life, she brought her personal maid, secretary, chauffeur, nurse and housemaid. 'Everyone was on the jump all the time,' wrote her host, reporting that only a heart attack after four days slowed his guest down. 'Her almost last words as she left in the ambulance were, "This will teach you to ask decrepit old ladies to stay."'
'Wharton's life story often feels like a cover story,' writes her biographer and clearly the appalling, enthralling, semi-mythical character ably depicted in these pages started out in some sense as a fictional construct. When Wharton looked back on her life, it fell into two halves on a folkloric, almost fairy-tale pattern. She saw herself as a dim, shy, plain, gawky girl, unloved and painfully insecure, slowly assuming as a protective mask the self-confidence knocked out of her by years of rejection and failure. She was born in 1862 into the narrow, censorious, conformist and fiercely exclusive society of old New York, a world she would miraculously transpose as a novelist in the reflective mirror of a richly inventive, humane and humorous imagination. But it took almost four decades for her to distance herself sufficiently to write about the forces that had caged and stunted her youth.
She escaped as a small child by clutching an open book (as often as not upside down), turning the pages and spewing out stories aloud as she rushed round the room at top speed. As soon as she could write, she covered sheets of brown wrapping paper with more stories, sermons, poetry and plays. Novels were disreputable, dangerous and so irredeemably vulgar that Edith's mother forbade her to read one as long as she remained unmarried. Wharton published a slim volume of verse at 16, following it up with a handful of poems before becoming engaged at 20 to a boy who broke off their engagement on the grounds, promptly reported in New York's smartest gossip column, that he couldn't be expected to put up with her writing.
She made what turned out to be a disastrous marriage to a family friend shortly afterwards and wrote nothing more, succumbing, instead, to the combination of lassitude, ill health and depression that commonly served as an oubliette for female misfits of her generation. She was 37 before she published her first work of fiction, a collection of short stories written 'at the top of my voice', as she said in retrospect ('"The Fullness of Life" was one long shriek'). The House of Mirth, her second novel, first in a long line of bestsellers, depicts the stifling, repressive and coercive world she grew up in with devastating accuracy, and a glittering, airy brilliance that still feels to the reader like sucking in great gulps of fresh air.
She produced a book or two a year from then on almost without fail for the rest of her life. Her fiction is full of brave, touching, sensitive characters whose aspirations are slowly crushed out of them, like their creator's when young, but she put her boldest self-portrait into The Custom of the Country in 1913. It is as if Wharton reimagined herself in reverse as the implacable, unstoppable, extortionate Undine Spragg of Apex City. At first sight, the two look like opposites. Undine embodies the exuberant commercialism of consumerist America, what Wharton in her role of stern European sophisticate called 'the wild, dishevelled backwoods look of everything when one first comes home'. Undine combines the innate coarseness of innocence and ignorance with irresistible, swan-like beauty and grace. But she also displays a swan's ferocious rapacity as she claws, grabs and slithers her way inexorably up through the ranks of American and French high society. There is something of the same angry fastidiousness in both author and heroine, as well as the same raw power.
By 1913, Wharton had long since completed her own transformation from ugly duckling to swan, triumphantly overturning Ivy Compton-Burnett's rule in the process. The fabulous, in some ways monstrous creation she had become in real life made everyone else, especially those closest to her, seem tame and lacklustre by comparison. Wharton's phenomenal success - critical, commercial and personal - was parallelled by her husband's decline from jovial ineffectuality into helpless, ignominious dependence and eventual disintegration. Not even Hermione Lee can make much of Teddy Wharton, or the supercilious Walter Berry, whom Edith insisted meant more to her than any other human being all her life, or even the dapper Morton Fullerton, her famously masterful lover, who turns out to have been simultaneously involved with various other women, including his ex-wife, live-in mistress and adoring, quasi-incestuous adopted sister.
It was at the height of their horrific break-up that Wharton's manic side - 'her great globe-rushes and gyrations' - fed into Henry James's fantasy with unfortunate results. The reign of terror described so feelingly in his letters at the time skewed her posthumous image ever after, as Lee argues persuasively in her moving account of a fond, admiring, competitive and mutually supportive friendship that ran deep on both sides. Lee is at her best on Wharton's large, disparate, carefully tended and constantly growing circle of friends, who understood the courage, sweetness and generosity behind her relentless compulsions and exactions.
This is a majestically weighty biography as meticulous, exhaustive and exhausting in scope and scale as its subject. In the end, the reader can only say of Lee's book what an admirer said of Wharton herself: 'One must give her rope because she is a full-rigged vessel and can't manoeuvre in a toilet basin.' | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/07/boko-haram-captives-escape-women-children-abducted-borno | World news | 2014-07-07T15:31:45.000Z | Monica Mark | Scores of Boko Haram captives escape | Sixty-three women and children snatched by Boko Haram militants last month have escaped after walking dozens of miles to safety.
The group of women, teenaged-girls and toddlers were abducted on 22 June when the Islamists swept across three remote villages in Borno state, Boko Haram's north-eastern base. Thirty-one boys abducted alongside them were forced to become fighters as Boko Haram stepped up its bloody four-year campaign to re-establish a caliphate in religiously mixed Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation.
The women escaped on Friday and walked for almost 24 hours before authorities were alerted on Sunday. At least 50 militants were killed over the weekend after attempting to storm military and police bases while troops were patrolled surrounding villages, the army said.
Nigeria's government initially denied the mass abduction – the latest in a series that only came under the spotlight when more than 300 schoolgirls were abducted from Chibok in April. Almost 220 of those seized at the school in Borno are among several hundred people still missing after being abducted by Islamist militants.
"The women were locked in a compound when the Boko Haram went to do another operation," said Alhaji Sule, a member of one of the semi-official vigilante groups that have formed in the state capital, Maiduguri, and elsewhere because of attacks by the Islamist militants.
Around dusk, the militants warned the women not to escape or they would be hunted down, Sule said. But when their captors failed to return after several hours, the women broke open the door and escaped.
"They walked about 50km [31 miles]. When a person is running for their lives they can do this journey in one day," he said.
A government official said about half of those who escaped were able to reach their homes. The others were found wandering in the bush "weak and dazed". Many were now receiving medical treatment, the official added.
The escapes suggest a renewed military offensive may have put Boko Haram under pressure. The captives were being held near Gwoza, a remote mountain range that sprawls into neighbouring Cameroon and which the group has made their base since many of their camps within Nigeria have been attacked by air force jets. But the militants have continued to launch weekly strikes on remote villages with little troop presence.
"Some of the villages around here are ghost towns. In Chukon Gudo they set alight all the houses – there are only three houses remaining there," said Kabiru Garba, who fled his birthplace to the relative safety of Maiduguri. Villagers with nowhere to go had taken to sleeping in the bush at night for fear of attacks.
The outrage following the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls has dwindled, with parents and residents saying they feel abandoned by the government.
"As I'm talking to you now, we haven't had any more news from anybody. Our elders are dying of grief but we are still being attacked by the Boko Haram," Mungo Park, a Chibok resident, said.
Insiders said Boko Haram is demanding the release of its detained members in a hostage swap for the girls, but the government has ruled out the move. The group has increasingly turned to lucrative kidnapping to fund its activities.
In the runup to elections less than a year away, internal politics have bedevilled attempts to flush out Boko Haram. Strained relations between federal and state officials – who are from an opposition party – have also undermined a 14-month state of emergency intended to crush the militants in three north-eastern states.
At the same time, Cameroon has been criticised for not cracking down on the militants – who have deep ties with communities on both sides of the border. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/dec/03/macbeth-cush-jumbo-david-tennant-donmar-warehouse-interview | Stage | 2023-12-03T08:00:09.000Z | Kate Kellaway | ‘I studied the play in school – I hated it’: Cush Jumbo and David Tennant on playing the Macbeths | David Tennant and Cush Jumbo walk into the Donmar Warehouse’s offices, above the theatre’s rehearsal rooms in Covent Garden, and sit down on a sofa, side by side. Tennant has that look his many fans will instantly be able to call to mind of being at once stressed – with a desperado gleam in his eye – yet mischievously engaged, which has to do with the intelligence he applies to everything, the niceness he directs at everyone. He is wearing a mustard-coloured jersey and could be mistaken for someone who has been swotting in a library (actually, he has been rehearsing a fight scene). If I am right in supposing him to be tense at this mid-rehearsals moment, I know – from having interviewed him before – that it is not his way to put himself first, that he will crack on and probably, while he’s at it, crack a joke or two to keep us all in good spirits. But some degree of tension is understandable for he and Jumbo are about to perform in a play that explores stress like no other – Macbeth – and must unriddle one of the most dramatic marriages in all of Shakespeare’s plays.
This is star billing of the starriest kind. Tennant, at 52, has more triumphs under his belt than you’d think possible in a single career (including Doctor Who, Broadchurch’s detective, the serial killer Dennis Nilsen in Des, and the father in There She Goes). Jumbo has been seen on US prime time in The Good Wife and The Good Fight and in ITV’s Vera. But what counts is that each is a Shakespeare virtuoso. Jumbo, who is now 38, won an Ian Charleson award in 2012 for her Rosalind in As You Like It and, in 2013, was nominated for an Olivier for her Mark Antony in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Julius Caesar. More recently, she starred as a yearningly embattled Hamlet at the Young Vic. A dynamo of an actor, she is described by the former New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley as radiating “that unquantifiable force of hunger, drive, talent usually called star power”. Tennant, meanwhile, who has played Romeo, Lysander and Benedick for the RSC, went on to embody Hamlet and Richard II in performances that have become the stuff of legend.
I hope I’m creating a rounded human being with moments of lightness, even in the bleakest times
David Tennant
Jumbo settles herself cross-legged on the sofa, relaxed in her own body, wearing a white T-shirt, dusky pink tracksuit bottoms, and modestly-sized gold hoop earrings. She looks as if she has come from an exercise class – and she has in one sense – no need to ask whether rehearsals, at this stage, are full-on. As we shake hello, she apologises for a hot hand and I for a cold one, having just come in from a sharp November morning. She is chirpy, friendly, waiting expectantly for questions – but what strikes me as I look at her is how her face in repose, at once dramatic and pensive, gives almost nothing away, like a page waiting to be written on.
Max Webster, the director, is setting the play in the modern day and Macbeth, a taut and ageless thriller, is especially friendly to this approach. I want to plunge straight in to cross-question the Macbeths. Supposing I were a marriage counsellor, what might they tell me – in confidence – about their alliance? Tennant is a step ahead: “There are two versions of the marriage, aren’t there? The one at the beginning and the fractured marriage later.” And he then makes me laugh by asking intently: “Are they sharing the murder with their therapist?”
He suggests Macbeth’s “reliance” on his wife is unusual and “not necessarily to be expected in medieval Scotland” (another excuse for the contemporary production): “I look to my wife for guidance: I don’t make a decision without her,” he explains. “We’ve been through some trauma which has induced an even stronger bond.” Jumbo agrees about the bond and spells out the trauma, reminding us the Macbeths have lost a child, but hesitates to play the game (I have suggested she talk about Lady Macbeth in the first person): “I want to get it right. I don’t want to get it wrong. I don’t know what to say… If I improv Lady Macbeth, it will feel disrespectful because you don’t know if what you’re saying on her behalf is true. And then you’re going to write what I say down and she [Lady Macbeth] is going to be: ‘Thanks, Cush, for f-ing talking about me that way.’” She emphasises that, as an actor, you must never judge your character, whatever crime they might have committed. And perhaps her resistance to straying from the text is partly as a writer herself (it was her play, Josephine and I, about the entertainer and activist Josephine Baker, that put her career into fast forward, opening off Broadway in 2015).
She stresses that the great problem with Lady Macbeth is that she has become a known quantity: “She is deeply ingrained in our culture. Everyone thinks they know who she is. Most people studied the play at school. I did – I hated it. It was so boring but that’s because Shakespeare’s plays aren’t meant to be read, they’re meant to be acted. People think they know Lady Macbeth as a type – the strong, controlling woman who pushed him to do it. She does things women shouldn’t do. The greatest misconception is that we have stopped seeing Lady Macbeth as a human being.”
For Tennant, too, keeping an open mind is essential: “What I’m finding most difficult is the variety of options. I thought I knew this play very well and that it was, unlike any other Shakespeare I can remember rehearsing, straightforward. But each time I come to a scene, it goes in a direction I wasn’t expecting.” He suggests that momentum is the play’s great asset: “It has such muscle to it, it powers along. Plot-wise, it’s more front-footed than any Shakespeare play I’ve done.” And is it ever difficult for him as Macbeth to subdue his instinctive comic talent? “Well, yes, that’s right, there are no gags! But actually, there are a couple of funny bits though I’d never intentionally inflict comedy on something that can’t take it. I hope I’m creating a rounded human being with moments of lightness, even in the bleakest times.” Jumbo adds: “Bleakness is funny at times”, and Tennant, quick as a flash, tops this: “Look at our government!” (He is an outspoken Labour supporter.) Later, when I ask what makes them angriest, he says: “Well, she [Suella Braverman]’s just been sacked so… I’m now slightly less angry than I was.” Jumbo nods agreement, adding that what makes her angriest is “unkindness”.
It is Tennant who then produces, with a flourish, the key question about the Macbeths: “Why do they decide to commit a crime? What is the fatal flaw that allows them to think that’s OK? I don’t know that they, as characters, would even know. Has the loss of a child destabilised their morality?” In preparation, Tennant and Jumbo have been researching post-traumatic stress disorder. “PTSD is a modern way of understanding something that’s always been there,” suggests Tennant – and the Macbeths are traumatised three times over by battle, bereavement and murder. “We’ve looked at postpartum psychosis as well,” Jumbo adds. They have been amazed at how the findings of modern experts “track within the play”. Tennant marvels aloud: “What can Shakespeare’s own research process have been?” Jumbo reminds him that Shakespeare, like the Macbeths, lost a child. She relishes the play’s “contemporary vibe which means it’s something my 14-year-old niece will want to see. Even though you know the ending, you don’t want it to go there. It’s exciting to play that as well as to watch it.”
A further exciting challenge is the show’s use of binaural technology (Gareth Fry, who worked on Complicité’s The Encounter, is sound designer). Each audience member will be given a set of headphones and be able to eavesdrop on the Macbeths. “The technology will mess with your neurons in a did-somebody-just-breathe-on-me way,” Jumbo explains. “You’ll feel as if you’re in a conversation with us, like listening to a podcast you love where you feel you’re sat with them having coffee.” Tennant adds: “What’s thrilling is that it makes things more naturalistic – we’re able to speak conversationally.”
Fast forward to opening night: how do they manage their time just before going on stage? Tennant says: “I dearly wish I had a set of failsafe strategies. I don’t find it straightforward. I’ve never been able to banish anxiety. It can be very problematic and part of the job is dealing with it. I squirrel myself away and tend to get quite quiet.” But at the Donmar, this will be tricky as backstage space is shared. Jumbo encourages him: “When I’ve played here before, I found the group dynamic helpful,” she says, but explains that her pre-show routine has changed since her career took off and she became a mother: “These days, I no longer have the luxury of saying: I’m going to do five hours of yoga before I go on. When I leave home at four in the afternoon, I might be thinking about whether I’ll hit traffic or, whether my kid’s stuff is ready for the next day. You get better at this, the more you do it. The main thing – which doesn’t sound that sexy – is to make sure to eat at the right time, something light, like soup, because when I’m nervous I get loads of acid and that does not make me feel good on stage. I have a cut-off point for eating and that timing has become a superstition in its own way.”
I
n 2020, Tennant and Jumbo co-starred in the compulsively watchable and disturbing Scottish mini-series Deadwater Fell for C4. How helpful is it to have worked together before? Tennant says it is “hugely” valuable when tackling something “intense and difficult” to be with someone you are “comfortable taking chances with”. Although actors cannot depend on this luxury: “Sometimes, you have to turn up the first day and go: ‘Ah, hello, nice to meet you, we’re going to be playing psychopathic Mr and Mrs Macbeth.’” And Jumbo adds: “I’ve been asked to do this play before and said no. You have to do it with the right person. I knew this would be fun because David is a laugh as well as being very hard-working.” He responds brightly with a non sequitur: “Wait till you see my knees in a kilt…” Are you seriously going to wear a kilt, I ask. “You’ll have to wait and see,” he laughs.
It is perhaps the kilt that triggers his next observation: “We’re an entirely Scottish company, apart from Cush,” he volunteers, suggesting that Macbeth’s choice of a non-Scottish wife brings new energy to the drama. He grew up in Paisley, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and remembers how, in his childhood, “whenever an English person arrived, you’d go “Oooh… from another worrrrld!”, and he reflects: “Someone from somewhere else gives you different energy.” And while on the Scottish theme, it is worth adding that Macbeth is the part that seems patiently to have been waiting for Tennant: “People keep saying: you must have done this play before? I don’t know if Italian Shakespeareans keep being asked if they have played Romeo…”
I tell them I remember puzzling, as a schoolgirl, over Macbeth’s line about “vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself and falls on th’other” – the gymnastic detail beyond me. Tennant suggests that what Macbeth has, more even than ambition, is hubris. But on ambition, he and Jumbo reveal themselves to be two of a kind. Tennant says: “Ambition is not a word I’d have understood as a child but I had an ambition to become an actor from tiny – from pre-school. I did not veer off from it, I was very focused. When I look at it now, that was wildly ambitious because there were no precedents or reasons for me to believe I could.”
Tennant, with Nigel Lindsay as Bolingbroke, in the title role of Shakespeare’s Richard II, at the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 2013. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
“For me, same,” says Jumbo, “I don’t remember ever wanting to be anything else.” She grew up in south London, second of six children. Her father is Nigerian and was a stay-at-home dad, her mother is British and worked as a psychiatric nurse. “At four, I was an avid reader and mimicker. I got into lots of trouble at school for mimicking. My ambition was similar to David’s although, as a girl, the word ‘ambition’ has always been a bit dirty…” Tennant: “It certainly is to a Scottish Presbyterian.” “Yes,” she laughs, “perhaps I should have said Celts and Blacks… Girls grow up thinking they should be modest, right? But I had so much ambition. I knew there was more for me to do and that I could be good at doing it.”
And what were they like as teenagers – as, say, 14-year-olds? Tennant says: “Uncomfortable, plooky…” What’s plooky, Jumbo and I exclaim in unison. “A Scottish word for covered in spots.” “That’s great!” laughs Jumbo. “Unstylish,” Tennant concludes. Her turn: “At 14, I was sassy, a bit mouthy, trying to get into a lot of clubs and not succeeding because I looked way too young for my age. And desperate for a snog.”
You have to get together with people who give you good vibes… This tends to bring more creative things to you
Cush Jumbo
And now, as grownups, Tennant and Jumbo are, above all, keenly aware of what it means to be a parent. Jumbo has a son, Maximilian (born 2018); Tennant five children between the ages of four and 21. Parenthood, they believe, helps shape the work they do. “Being a parent magnifies the job of being an actor,” says Jumbo, “because what we’re being asked to do [as actors] is to stay playful and in the present – be big children. As a parent, you get to relive your childhood and see the world through your child’s eyes as if for the first time and more intensely. We don’t do that much as adults.”
Tennant reckons being a parent has given him “empathy, patience – or the requirement for patience – and tiredness. It gives you a big open wound you carry around, a vulnerability that is not a bad thing for this job because it means you have an emotional accessibility that can be very trying but which we need.” But the work-life balance remains, for Tennant, an ongoing struggle: “Just when you think you’ve figured it out, something happens,” he says, “and you have to recalibrate it because your children need different things at different times.” Jumbo sometimes looks to other actors/parents for advice: “To try to see what they are doing – but you never quite get it right.”
And would they agree there is a work-life balance involved in acting itself? Is acting an escape from self or a way of going deeper into themselves? Tennant says: “I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive though they sound as though they should be – I think it is both.” Jumbo agrees: “On the surface, you’re consciously stepping away from yourself but, actually, subconsciously, you have to do things instinctually so you find out more about yourself without meaning to.”
David Tennant and Cush Jumbo in rehearsals for Macbeth at the Donmar Warehouse. Photograph: Marc Brenner
And when they go deeper, what is it that they find? Fear is another of the motors in Macbeth – what is fear for them? “Something being wrong with one of my kids,” Tennant says and Jumbo concurs. And what about fear for our planet? Tennant says: “There is so much to feel fearful and pessimistic about it can be…” Jumbo finishes his sentence: “Overwhelming.” He picks it up again: “So overwhelming that you don’t do anything.” Jumbo worries about this, tries to remind herself that doing something is better than doing nothing: “If everybody did something small in their corner of the world, the knock-on effect would be bigger.” Tennant admits to feeling “anxiety” and distinguishes it from fear. Jumbo volunteers: “I recognise fear in myself but don’t see it as a helpful emotion. It’s underactive, a place to stand still.”
As actors who have hit the jackpot, what would they say, aside from talent, has been essential to their success? Tennant says: “Luck – to be in the right place at the right time, having one job that leads to another.” Jumbo remembers: “Early in my career, I had a slow start. You have to fill your soul with creative things, which is not always easy if you can’t afford to go out. You have to find things that are free, get together with people who are creative and give you good vibes and not people who are bitter and jealous or have lots of bad things to say about the world. This tends to bring more creative things to you.” Tennant observes: “As the creative arts go, acting is a difficult one to do on your own – if you’re a painter, you can paint – even if no one is buying your paintings.” Jumbo chips in: “Because of that, it can be quite lonely when it’s not happening.” “Tennant concludes: “It’s bloody unfair – there are far too many good actors, too many of us.”
And are they in any way like the Macbeths in being partly governed by magical thinking – or do they see themselves as rationalists? (I neglect to ask whether they call Macbeth “the Scottish play”, as many actors superstitiously do.) “I am a rationalist. I’m almost aggressively anti-nonsense,” Tennant says. Jumbo, unfazed by this manifestation of reason, speaks up brightly: “I’m a magical thinker, I’m half Nigerian and that’s all about magical realism and belief in energy. If something goes my way, I think: God, I felt that energy. And the thing that drew me to theatre as a kid was its magic.” And now Tennant, alerted by the word “magic”, starts to clamber on board to agree with her – and Jumbo laughs as they acknowledge the power of what she has just said.
Macbeth is at the Donmar Warehouse, London, 8 December-10 February. £15 standing tickets are available on the day, online only; and a limited number of Donmar Daily tickets are released throughout run. Further information is here | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/sep/26/uefa-ends-blanket-ban-on-russian-teams-by-allowing-under-17-teams-football-compete | Football | 2023-09-26T15:46:56.000Z | Nick Ames | Uefa ends blanket ban on Russian teams by allowing under-17 sides to compete | Uefa has decided to end its blanket ban on Russian teams by allowing the country’s under-17 sides into its competitions from this season.
All Russian teams, at club and international levels, have been barred from Uefa events since Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But plans are being drawn up to partially relax those rules and allow minors to compete, using the justification that children should not be punished for the actions of adults.
Uefa accused of presenting ‘untrue’ evidence to inquiry on Champions League final chaos
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“It is particularly aggrieving that, due to the enduring conflict, a generation of minors is deprived of its right to compete in international football,” a Uefa statement read.
“For these reasons, the Uefa executive committee has decided that Russian teams of minor players will be readmitted to its competitions in the course of this season.”
The executive committee – which still lists the Russian Football Union president, Alexander Dyukov, among its number – announced plans to seek a solution that would allow Russian under-17 teams, in the men’s and women’s games, to play even when draws have already been held. In one high-profile example it could leave the door open for Russia to belatedly enter the Uefa Under-17 Championship qualifiers, which begin on Wednesday and conclude in late November.
Any matches contested by Russian sides will be played without their national flag, anthem or kit. The ban on continental games being played on Russian territory also remains in force.
The Uefa president, Aleksander Ceferin, appeared to assuage fears of a wider return by ruling out any further softening of the ban. “Uefa’s continuing suspension against Russian adult teams reflects its commitment to take a stand against violence and aggression,” he said.
“Uefa is determined that this position will continue until the war is over and peace restored. But by banning children from our competitions, we not only fail to recognise and uphold a fundamental right for their holistic development but we directly discriminate against them.”
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It remains to be seen whether Fifa, the global governing body, will take a similar stance and permit Russia’s under-17 sides to play in global events. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/marketforceslive/2014/apr/24/ftse-seven-week-high-tech-healthcare-ukraine | Business | 2014-04-24T15:58:45.000Z | Nick Fletcher | FTSE hits seven week high as tech and healthcare gains outweigh Ukraine fears | In a volatile day's trading, the FTSE 100 was supported by rising technology and pharmaceutical shares, but buffeted by growing worries about an escalation of the crisis in Ukraine.
The leading index finished 28.26 points ahead at 6703.00, a near seven week high, but came off its best levels amid reports of new tensions between Russia and Ukraine. Traders were spooked by talk of a press conference in Russia but this failed to materialise before the UK market closed.
Better than expected results from Apple and Facebook pushed UK technology shares higher, with Arm - which fell on Wednesday following its own update - climbing 4p to 960p - and Imagination Technologies rising 13.6p to 197.4p. Laird, which supplies components to Apple and Samsung, ended 7.7p higher at 295.2p.
Elsewhere the excitement in the pharma world continued, with AstraZeneca adding 132.5p to £41.75 as it reported results in line with expectations, down 17%, and highlighted new cancer treatments. But its shares have been puffed up recently by talk of a possible £60bn bid from Pfizer, and on this it did not comment.
The week has already seen a major deal between GlaxoSmithkline, 8.5p higher at £16.51, and Novartis, as well as bid talk around Shire, up 59p to £32.48. Citigroup issued a buy note on Shire with a £40 price target:
News of Pfizer's recent offer for AstraZeneca, and Valeant's pursuit of Allergan, has led the market to renew its interest in Shire as a potential consolidation target. While plausible, we argue one can justify the shares still offering an attractive risk-reward profile even on a stand-alone basis. Our recent report lays out an attractive scenario valuation range of £35-£55 a share. This is based on conservative revenue/cost trend assumptions, as well as full utilisation of the balance sheet. We currently assume R&D spend is maintained at $0.9bn per annum for the next five years, despite many late-stage trials ending in 2014, and the current paucity of mid-stage assets moving into Phase 3.
Still with healthcare, news that medical device maker Zimmer had announced a $13.35bn deal to buy US orthopaedic products group Biomet pushed Smith and Nephew to the top of the FTSE 100. It closed 29.5p higher at 909p. S&N rejected a £15bn merger with Biomet in 2011 shortly after another US group Johnson & Johnson offered £7bn for the business.
Among a raft of companies reporting results, mining group Anglo American added 19.5p to 1566.5p after it reported a 10% rise in iron ore production in the first quarter while copper output increased by 18% year on year. But platinum output fell by 39%, hit by strikes in South Africa where it is cutting jobs and mothballing mines.
Building materials group Travis Perkins, owner of the Wickes do-it-yourself chain, dropped 69p to £17.63 on profit taking after its latest update. The company reported a 12.7% rise in like for like sales in the first quarter, helped by the upturn in the construction and housing markets. But analysts at N+1 Singer said its future growth could be constrained:
Travis Perkins remains a quality act in the sector. It continues to generate a best in class merchanting margin despite having expanded its network aggressively in recent years. Its offering now spans serious DIY'ers through its consumer outlets up to national contractors and housebuilders in its contracts business. It is almost entirely UK focused and has a high correlation with the housing sector. It does not, however, have the same margin recovery potential that its peers offer or the potential excitement being exposed to European recovery. As such we have a neutral stance with stock preference elsewhere in the sector.
Unilever lost 44p to £25.90 despite better then expected first quarter sales despite a later Easter holiday, with a continuing slowdown in emerging markets.
Among the other risers easyJet rose 13p to £16.99 as Morgan Stanley issued an overweight rating and raised its price target from £18.30 to £18.55. The bank was also positive on British Airways and Iberia owner International Airlines Group, up 6p at 413.3p.
Centamin climbed to the top of the mid-cap risers on hopes the tide could have turned in its favour in a long running dispute in Egypt.
The gold miner jumped 6.55p or 11% to 62.5p on hopes a new law could lead to the dismissal of a claim against its licence for the Sukari mine in Egypt. In 2012 a court ruled the company's right to operate the mine was invalid, and it is currently in the middle of an appeal process. But a law introduced on Wednesday could help the company, since it restricts the capacity for third parties to challenge any contractual agreement between the Egyptian government and an investor. The Sukari licence was brought by a third party. Davy Research said:
The new investment law in Egypt will certainly go a long way to calm investor jitters. We do not yet know, however, if legal challenges to the law will materialise in the country and/or if Centamin's legal challenges could now be immediately dismissed. We suspect a prolonged process may still lie ahead before Centamin's legal standing is cleared. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/15/for-sama-review-documentary-aleppo-syria | Film | 2019-09-15T07:00:19.000Z | Mark Kermode | For Sama review – affecting chronicle of life in war-torn Aleppo | There is a scene in the middle of this powerful, harrowing and deeply human documentary about life under siege in Aleppo, Syria, that perfectly encapsulates its mixture of horror and hope. In the terrible aftermath of yet another airstrike, a pregnant woman with broken limbs and shrapnel in her belly is brought into a makeshift theatre in al-Quds hospital. An emergency caesarean brings her critically unresponsive child into this world of carnage – a terrible, pitiable sight, made all the more unwatchable by the certainty that nothing so vulnerable could possibly survive such violence. Syrian citizen-journalist and mother Waad al-Kateab, whose frontline footage was seen in Channel 4 News’s Inside Aleppo reports, keeps filming, determined to bring such daily atrocities to the attention of the world. And then, as the spectacle seems too cruel to endure, a miracle occurs, offering a gasping glimpse of redemption amid this unfolding hell.
There are many moments in For Sama when audiences will want to look away, not least because so many of the victims being dragged out of ravaged buildings or laid out on blood-soaked floors are children. These are kids who have grown up amid a cacophony of deafening explosions to which they no longer react; whose earliest words include “air raid” and “cluster bomb”; who play among the wreckage of burnt-out buses; and whose young friends have either moved away or died. The documentary itself is addressed and dedicated to a child – Waad’s daughter, Sama – whom we first meet as smoke fills the corridors of the hospital in which she lives, while her mother cries: “Who’s got my girl? Where’s my girl?”
This is Syria in 2016, with the Assad regime, supported by the Russian air force, indiscriminately pummelling Aleppo, hitting houses and hospitals alike. Waad moved here as a student several years earlier, full of hope for change. “For such a long time we were sure we would win,” she declares, a belief shared by the fellow activists caught on Waad’s mobile-phone footage, endangered yet optimistic.
Hamza al-Kateab (centre) holding baby Sama in For Sama.
A handsome medic, Hamza, shares her passion and declares his love for Waad, even as the violence around them escalates. The couple marry against the incessant backdrop of the conflict, celebrating with songs “louder than bombs”. While Hamza and his colleagues tend to the increasing casualties (they have to move buildings after their hospital is destroyed), Waad films their lives and struggles, a process that “gives me a reason to be here”, even after the birth of Sama, for whom this documentary is intended as both a “love letter” and an explanation.
“Will you blame me for staying here or blame me for leaving?” Waad asks in her quietly poetic narration. It’s a question that lies at the very heart of For Sama, wherein we see Waad and Hamza returning to the besieged city after visiting relatives in Turkey, with their daughter in their arms, dodging barrel bombs and sniper fire, certain that “everyone has a role to play” in this struggle – even Sama. “I need you to understand why your father and I made the choices we did,” says Waad, before admitting candidly that “the truth is, I can’t believe we did it now”.
‘My daughter was raised during the siege of Aleppo. I had to make a film for her’
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Like Sean McAllister’s heart-breaking documentary A Syrian Love Story, For Sama interweaves its very personal narrative with a broader political story, finding the bigger picture in the tiniest of details. Co-directed by seasoned film-maker Edward Watts, it presents a collage of images gathered over a period of five years, elegantly edited to allow the narrative to slip back and forth in time with deceptive ease. While much of the material may be shocking (the BBFC’s 18 rating warns of “disturbing scenes” and “images of real dead bodies” that “may cause distress to some viewers”), it’s the simple human interactions that really hit home – the day-to-day comradeship of women stoically preparing food while fire falls from the sky; the resilience of children who still smile and play even as their lives are threatened. In one scene, the appearance of a persimmon fruit produces an outpouring of joy that is as unexpected as it is uplifting, albeit only fleetingly.
With footage as raw and dramatic as this, it’s a credit to composer Nainita Desai that her score remains restrained and understated throughout, emphasising subtler themes of endurance and empathy, while gesturing gently toward the possibility of hope – of love – even in the midst of tragedy.
Watch a trailer for For Sama. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/24/us-china-north-korea-attack | World news | 2010-11-24T21:15:52.000Z | Tania Branigan | US to press China to rein in North Korea after attack | The United States is to press China to rein in North Korea to prevent further provocative incidents such as yesterday's deadly artillery attack on a South Korean island close to the border.
Although the US is dispatching the carrier George Washington for a show of solidarity with the South this weekend, Washington has few options left to use as leverage on North Korea. Instead, it is hoping that China, Pyongyang's closest ally, will play a pivotal part in restoring calm.
The US state department spokesman, PJ Crowley, said today: "China does have influence with North Korea and we would hope and expect China would use that influence."
Barack Obama, in a telephone call to his South Korean counterpart, Lee Myung-bak, late last night said the US would stand shoulder to shoulder with its ally.
The White House said the George Washington and other warships would join South Korean naval forces on Sunday. The US had been due to take part in military training but had postponed involvement, citing scheduling conflicts.
The resumption of the joint exercise is one of the mildest responses available to the US and South Korea, and Washington was seeking to cool passions as quickly as possible.
Crowley played down the attack, characterising it as an isolated incident. In support of this, the US reported that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, had been on a factory visit at the time, whereas if the crisis had been premeditated, it is more likely he would have been at the military command centre.
Obama sees China as the key to resolving tensions. In an interview with Barbara Walters of ABC News, he said Beijing should "make clear to North Korea that there are a set of international rules that they need to abide by".
Although the response of the US and South Korea has been modest, there is still a danger that North Korea could interpret a joint exercise as provocation.
"The North Koreans see it as an offensive move, however many times it happens," warned Professor Hazel Smith of Cranfield University in the UK, who argued that the artillery attack illustrated the military's dominance in North Korea, in contrast with the rule of Kim Il-sung, who led the country from 1948 to 1994.
"We are in uncharted waters … Under Kim Il-sung, the military were controlled by civil power. That is not the case in Kim Jong-il's North Korea."
Smith added: "This is a highly dangerous situation unless people start getting involved in negotiations."
The eventual objective of the US is to see North Korea resume diplomatic talks about abandoning its nuclear weapons ambitions in return for economic aid.
On Yeonpyeong island, which was subjected to the artillery barrage, the burnt bodies of two civilians in their 60s were found, thought to have been killed in the bombardment, bringing the death toll to four. The South Korean coastguard said the two men were construction workers.
Two soldiers died in the attack and several people were injured, including civilians.
Around 500 people were moved by the coastguard to nearby Incheon and housed in a bathhouse, sleeping on mats provided by the Red Cross.
One of the evacuees, Kim Eung-seok, said: "We don't understand why people of the same blood are attacking each other."
Another 400 people remained on the island, mostly young men who are helping repair the damage.
Park Jae-bok, a fisherman who was among those moved, said: "I want to know about my business. What will happen while I'm gone? I want to be able to work again. I just want the government to make it safe for us to live like we did before." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/08/game-of-thrones-stars-personal-details-leaked-hbo-hackers-demand-ransom | Technology | 2017-08-08T10:51:02.000Z | Samuel Gibbs | Game of Thrones stars' personal details leaked as HBO hackers demand ransom | Hackers of US television network HBO have released personal phone numbers of Game of Thrones actors, emails and scripts in the latest dump of data stolen from the company, and are demanding a multimillion-dollar ransom to prevent the release of whole TV shows and further emails.
In a five-minute video letter from somebody calling themselves “Mr Smith” to HBO chief executive Richard Plepler, the hackers told the company to pay within three days or they would put online the HBO shows and confidential corporate data they claim to have stolen.
The hackers claim to have taken 1.5TB of data – the equivalent to several TV series box sets or millions of documents – but HBO said that it doesn’t believe its email system as a whole has been compromised, although it did acknowledge the theft of “proprietary information”.
HBO said it is continuing to investigate and is working with police and cybersecurity experts.
The hackers demanded “our six-month salary in bitcoin”, claiming they earn $12m to $15m a year from blackmailing organisations whose networks they have breached. They said they would only deal directly with “Richard” and only send one “letter” detailing how to pay.
Along with the video, the hackers released 3.4GB of files. The dump contained technical data detailing HBO’s internal network and administrator passwords, draft scripts from five Game of Thrones episodes, including this week’s instalment, and a month’s worth of emails from HBO’s vice president for film programming, Leslie Cohen.
The hackers claim it took six months to break into HBO’s network, and that they spend $500,000 a year purchasing so called zero-day exploits that let them break into networks through holes not yet known to Microsoft and other software companies.
Many of the more than 50 internal documents released were labelled “confidential”, including a spreadsheet of legal claims against the TV network, job offer letters to several top executives, slides discussing future technology plans, and a list of 37,977 emails called “Richard’s Contact list”, an apparent reference to Plepler.
One document appears to contain the confidential cast list for Game of Thrones, listing personal telephone numbers and email addresses for actors such as Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey and Emilia Clarke.
The HBO leaks have been limited so far, falling well short of the chaos inflicted on Sony in 2014 when North Korea-linked hackers broke in and stole troves of data, including embarrassing emails and the personal details of employees. The hackers’ biggest threat appears to be dumping videos of future shows online with their logo “HBO Is Falling” superimposed. They claim that HBO is their 17th target and that only three of their past targets have refused to pay.
Stolen nude photos and hacked defibrillators: is this the future of ransomware? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/28/man-up-review-simon-pegg-lake-bell | Film | 2015-05-28T20:45:02.000Z | Steve Rose | Man Up review – Simon Pegg and Lake Bell map out anxiety-ridden modern dating landscape | Simon Pegg: ‘I find it very hard to write for women’
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Romcoms and blind dates have much in common: there’s no real telling what’s going to work, and what looks good on paper often turns out to be a disaster. There is nothing particularly promising about this set-up – middle-class 30- to 40-year-old Brits, one of whom is actually American – but where a dozen other Bridget Jones imitators have failed, Simon Pegg and Lake Bell really hit it off. They’re fine partners in quick-witted repartee and goofy dance steps, yet both sympathetically fallible underneath. A blind date is involved: his rebounding divorcee mistakes her frustrated singleton for his rendezvous; she decides to play along, despite not being a high-flying, 24-year-old triathlete. They have a lot in common, or at least pretend to. But rather than stringing out Bell’s masquerade to a big end-of-second-act reveal, the story blows her cover early, which shifts their awkward, tentative romance on to a footing that’s more combative, genuine and less predictable. Ben Palmer directed The Inbetweeners Movie, though this is more All Bar One than Ibiza Uncovered: an amusing succession of screwball escapades, surprise turns and recurring characters, washed down with a lot of alcohol but nothing stronger. We know where the story is headed, and it gets progressively soapier and clumsier as it nears its destination, but along the way Tess Morris’s script maps out a modern dating landscape strewn with anxiety, deceit, emotional baggage and drunken meltdowns – all of which make true romance even harder to find. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/sep/18/natalie-imbruglia-returns-to-music-lucky-me-that-the-90s-is-trending | Music | 2021-09-17T20:00:08.000Z | Katie Cunningham | Natalie Imbruglia returns to music: ‘Lucky me that the 90s is trending’ | Natalie Imbruglia is not afraid to talk about the lowest point of her career. “Oh yeah, I quit. Effectively, in my head, I wasn’t going back to music,” she says. She’s speaking to Guardian Australia over Zoom from her home in Oxfordshire in England. It’s early morning and her camera is switched off because, by her own description, she “looks like death”.
Imbruglia was just 16 in 1992 when she was cast as Beth Brennan on Neighbours. But if her name is familiar to you, it’s more likely because of Torn: a cover of a 1995 song by US band Ednaswap that turned Imbruglia into a global pop sensation two years later.
Her version became one of the most-played songs ever on UK and Australian radio and sold more than 4m copies worldwide. Left of the Middle, the debut album that followed, sold 7m, swept Australia’s Aria awards and was nominated for a Grammy.
It was a path Imbruglia mapped out almost to the letter as a teenager at home in Berkeley Vale on the New South Wales Central Coast. “I remember writing this wishlist in my bedroom that said, I want to be on Neighbours, E Street, or Home & Away,” she recalls. “Then I’m gonna make music, then I’m gonna be a movie star.”
Natalie Imbruglia at the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards, where she won best new artist. Photograph: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc
But fame wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Being a global celebrity, she has previously said, left her “successful, rich and terribly unhappy”.
“It was daunting,” she remembers now. “I was going around and winning awards and I didn’t have a lot of confidence. It was this weird combination of trying to step up and own it, and also not really thinking you’re that great. So there were mixed emotions. I see pictures of myself at that time and I just want to give me a hug, because I think it was a lot.”
Torn’s success also invited some criticism. Ednaswap, the band who wrote the original, weren’t thrilled by her take.
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“I met them and they were quite bitter about it, at the beginning,” she says. “After it came out they were like, ‘That’s not really what we had in mind for the song.’ And it’s like, well, you would have had to sign off on me singing it for one, so there’s that. And [then there’s] the money you made.” (In a previous interview, Ednaswap’s Anne Preven and Scott Cutler described Torn as a “massive financial windfall” that yielded multiple six-figure royalty cheques; Cutler admitted that while he wasn’t a fan at first, “I love [Imbruglia’s version] now.”)
Imbruglia invited the band to work with her on her second album – but that ended badly too. She “walked out” of the sessions, she says, and hasn’t talked to the band since.
After relocating to London, Imbruglia released two more albums and acted in a few films, including the James Bond spoof Johnny English. But by 2008, not everything was going to plan. After five years of marriage, she divorced from Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns; while the pair remain friends, being newly single in her mid-30s rattled her. “I spent a lot of time after that trying to settle down, find a guy, start a family,” she says. “I [thought] another relationship might be the answer.”
And then, in 2009 – after years spent working on her fourth album Come to Life – Imbruglia was dropped by her label Island Records before it got a global release.
“I’d made this super-cool album ... and they kept trying to change it and make it more poppy,” she says. “Just that typical music industry bullshit … to have it not get a proper release really broke my heart. That was difficult for me.”
Natalie Imbruglia: ‘The ups and downs that I’ve been through have landed me where I am now.’ Photograph: BMG
It was at this point she considered quitting altogether. “I really thought the universe was telling me not to make music,” Imbruglia says. She returned to Australia for a period of soul-searching – and a hosting gig on X Factor – and spent time in nature around Queensland’s Currumbin Creek. Eventually she went to Los Angeles to study acting, landing roles in a trio of independent films, and in 2015 she released an album of cover songs, before finding her way back to writing her own.
Now, Imbruglia is gearing up to release Firebird: her first album of originals in more than a decade. She describes the record as a celebration of independence, strength and overcoming; as the start of a new chapter.
“I realised [music] is my first love. I might not be the best songwriter, but what I am is a communicator of emotion and I think it’s valid,” Imbruglia says. “The fact that it’s taken this long is just typical me, unfortunately.”
In 2019, Imbruglia welcomed her first child as a solo parent, after revealing to Instagram that she had become pregnant after undergoing IVF with donor sperm. The album finds Imbruglia optimistic and at peace with the universe, whether it’s reflecting on the joy of having something to lose on Maybe it’s Great or cheering for being “older and wiser” in the chorus of On My Way. On the KT Tunstall collaboration Nothing Missing, Imbruglia sings about realising she is already whole without a partner, an “epiphany” that landed before the birth of her son.
Her comeback has another dimension too: it aligns with the zeitgeist. A wave of new pop acts are embracing the sort of breezy guitar pop music Imbruglia helped popularise around the turn of the century, including Rina Sawayama and Slayyyter; and Lorde covered Torn during a TV appearance this year, name-checking Imbruglia as an inspiration for her new album, Solar Power.
Imbruglia hasn’t yet listened, but is happy to be a reference point. “I think [Lorde] is a genius and it’s very flattering,” she laughs. “Lucky me that the 90s is trending.” But she wasn’t interested in returning to that sound herself. Instead, Firebird is a sonic mixed bag – pop music fused with country, electronic and rock influences – that was guided by Imbruglia’s own tastes as well as the input of collaborators including the Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jnr.
Ngaiire: 3 review – radiant and rich third album meets the artist on her own terms
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Signed to a new label this time around, Imbruglia didn’t have to contend with external opinions about what she should sound like, or “write for algorithms”.
“I think that the ups and downs that I’ve been through have landed me where I am now, and I’m super-proud of Firebird. Making it has been the most joyful, creative experience. So I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Plus, she says, “I try to remember the highs more than the lows. And I’m having a high at the moment.”
Firebird by Natalie Imbruglia is out 24 September through BMG | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/13/same-sex-couple-become-first-in-taiwan-to-legally-adopt-child | World news | 2022-01-13T13:17:47.000Z | Helen Davidson | Same-sex couple become first in Taiwan to legally adopt child | A married same-sex couple have become the first in Taiwan to legally adopt a child neither of them are related to, after they challenged local laws in court.
Wang Chen-wei, Chen Chun-ju, and their daughter, nicknamed Joujou, were surrounded by press at the Taipei household registration office, as the couple formally signed adoption paperwork after a long battle. Clutching Joujou, her face hidden behind a hoodie, face mask and sunglasses, Wang and Chen told of their bittersweet victory.
“I have everything now. I am married and just like heterosexual couples, we can have our own children,” Wang said. “But we were born to have and enjoy all of this, we are not a charity case. We shouldn’t have had to fight for it.”
Taiwan legalised same-sex marriage in 2019, becoming the first jurisdiction in Asia to do so, but did not remove all inequalities for LGBTQI people. Full legislation rather than an amendment was passed. It includes a provision that allows someone to adopt a spouse’s biological child, but says nothing about adoption rights if neither partner is the biological parent. The provision does not exist in other marriage laws.
The result is that in Taiwan any single person can apply to adopt a child, and any married heterosexual couple can apply together. But for married same-sex couple, the only option is to divorce and one of the couple adopts as a single person. They can then remarry, but current law does not allow the partner to adopt and be registered as a parent, leaving them without equal rights.
“Gay adoptive families are forced to choose between children and spouses, and between adoption and marriage,” Chen and Wang wrote on Facebook shortly after signing the adoption papers.
Chen Chun-ju, left, and Wang Chen-wei display the identity card of their daughter. Photograph: Daniel Ceng/The Guardian
Wang and Chen have been together for more than 16 years, and embarked on the adoption journey together. They delayed their marriage in order to complete Wang’s adoption of Joujou, and then took the case to court to have Chen recognised as a parent.
On 25 December, the Kaohsiung juvenile and family court ruled that a child should not be discriminated against because of their parents status, and that the law did not expressly prohibit the adoption of adopted children. The ruling allowed Chen to adopt Joujou and be registered as a parent alongside Wang.
Chu Chiajong, the director of advocacy organisation Taiwan LGBT Family Rights Advocacy, said the ruling was “brave”, in that the judge found his legal obligation was governed by the child’s best interest, and upon assessing Wang and Chen’s case, it meant the two parents were seen as equal under the law.
“At the end of the day, someone finally acknowledged it’s all about a child’s best interests, not just about the rights of an LGBTI couple,” Chu said. “Now their daughter’s ID shows both parents name on it. It means she finally is legally under the protection of both parents, of both dads.”
While the case has brought hope to LGBTQI couples hoping to start a family, it did not set a precedent and legal change is still needed, said Chu.
But the solution is simple, Chu added: “We just need to fix one word in the same-sex marriage law, just the word ‘genetic’. If we get rid of that word it would allow LGBTQI couples to adopt.”
The Taiwanese legislator Fan-Yun has fought for for equality and basic rights for LGBTQ+ people in Taiwan. Photograph: Daniel Ceng/The Guardian
A bill proposed by the legislator Fan Yun has been stalled in Taiwan’s parliament for more than a year. “We are waiting for the submission … from the Ministry of Justice,” Fan told media on Thursday.
Wang and Chen have always wanted two children but that is off limits until the law changes. Now they are married they cannot adopt, and if they divorced they would still have to go to court again to fight for dual adoption.
“I hope that our first story of victory as a gay couple will serve as a foundation for the full practice of fair, equal treatment for other LGBT families,” said Chen.
Additional reporting by Xiaoqian Zhu and Daniel Shou Yi Ceng | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2012/mar/24/apprentice-grace-dent-tv-od | Television & radio | 2012-03-24T00:06:00.000Z | Grace Dent | The Apprentice: Grace Dent's TV OD | "I
'm like a shark, right at the top of the food chain. I take what I want, when I want it," Ricky, 26, informs us in his introduction film. "I truly am the reflection of perfection." Eight series of The Apprentice (Wed, 9pm, BBC1) have passed, and the candidates still haven't sussed how to not resemble delusional, chest-puffing buffoons. "I would call myself The Blonde Assassin," says Katie. Tellingly, only Apprentice contestants and brand-conscious serial killers give themselves nicknames. "They call me The Master Puppeteer!" claims Azhar. No one calls Azhar this, I'll wager. Not one solitary soul. "That knob at head office with the shonky Bluetooth headpiece who reckons he's Gordon Gecko"? Perhaps. In 2012, The Apprentice has changed just ever so slightly. Of course, it's the same old challenges as ever: selling door to door, almost poisoning the public with a vile food product, doing something that requires dancing or funny voices, and then that task where humankind dismays Nick Hewer so much that his eyeballs turn 180 degrees and resemble hard-boiled eggs, his sphincter ingests his lower colon, and he has to be put in a cage with a tea-towel over it and told that it's beddy-bobos. That's usually about week seven. Like last year, the prize is no longer "a job", but a £250,000 business investment. Clearly nobody, neither the contestants nor the crew, could keep a straight face while claiming their prize (being sat in a broom cupboard at Amstrad HQ playing Angry Birds, wearing a name tag saying ALAN'S SECOND IN COMMAND INTERNATIONAL HEAD OF EVERYTHING) was actually much cop.
"I'm looking for a Marks to my Spencer," says Alan, growl ever-present on his delightfully furry chops. "A Lennon to my McCartney." Alan's search for a Spotty to his SuperTed will clearly be chockful of jollity, intrigue and derring-do. I just feel like I've been here too many times before. The biggest difference this time is that every single contestant is television-level attractive. Not a bingo-wing, jowl, lady-lump, wrinkle, liver-spot or extra set of back boobs in sight. It's TV world, where even the uglies would be the prettiest person in a real-world office. And then there's Ricky Martin: "By day I'm a business superstar," he reveals, "By night, I'm a professional wrestler. So when I'm in a group with men, I am the alpha male of that group!" I don't see Ricky as an alpha male. I see him as a nork in man-made fibre cape who spends his free time with his face squashed to another man's steaming sequinned cod-piece. Whether Ricky began finding organised violence a therapeutic outlet at the same time as his Puerto-Rican snake-hipped namesake released Livin' La Vida Loca is not clear.
In episode one Lord Sugar instructed his brood to design and sell some merchandise. "Could be T-shirts, mugs, mouse mats," he advised. Woah Alan, wind back a moment, not mouse mats. No one has bought a mouse mat since 2005. What next Alan, the Tamagotchi task? The girls (Sterling) romped off, printed up T-shirts emblazoned with fluffy penguins, and set about selling them dynamically and semi-aggressively until a big man appeared and told them off, at which point they all looked at the floor like flimsy schoolgirls and mumbled "sorry". The boys (Phoenix) made a massive arse of the entire task and somehow won. The search for an Orm to Alan's Cheep continues. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2014/mar/02/alain-resnais-60-years-of-sensational-cerebral-film-making | Film | 2014-03-02T13:21:40.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | Alain Resnais: 60 years of sensational cerebral film-making | The French director Alain Resnais, who had presented his most recent film The Life of Riley only last month at the Berlin film festival, was part of that remarkable New Wave generation and their associates which set the movie world on fire after the war: not merely film-makers but experimentalists, dazzling theoreticians, maîtres à penser, artists whose work proffered a critique ahead of any of the reviewers and writers who crowded excitably into the cinema to see their latest movies.
His films Night and Fog (1955), Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and the sensational Last Year in Marienbad (1961) made him one of the key figures in European cinema. Like many of this group, Resnais made an explosive start and carried on working into extreme old age, though perhaps his later work could not match the scintillation of that golden period of the late 50s and 60s.
He was fascinated not merely in the possibilities of cinema but in theatre and theatricality — and the theatrical dimension of reality. In fact, he was notable as a French cultural star who took an interest in something British: he frequently adapted the plays of Alan Ayckbourn, in whom he savoured a surreality of bourgeois form; he brought out the delicious Magrittean absurdity.
Like Godard, Resnais began by being fascinated — as well as agonised, and thrilled — by the modernist question of whether cinema, as the pre-eminent artistic medium, could really tackle and confront the urgent issues of the day: the evil of the Holocaust, the nightmare of nuclear destruction, and the toxic burden of empire, especially as the French were beginning to perceive it in Algeria.
Certainties were being exploded, and perhaps there was a new integrity in experimentalism and confusion, in a cinema which challenged not merely the authorities who had allowed the horrors to happen, but which challenged those classical forms of storytelling and representation culturally licensed by the powers-that-be.
Resnais’s Night and Fog, with its ironically Wagnerian title, was a documentary about the death camps, their liberation and their aftermath, and was one of the very first films to disclose to a very wide audience the horrible images themselves. There was diplomatic pressure from Germany to have the film withdrawn from the Cannes film festival that year.
His Hiroshima Mon Amour, a long and intensely realised “conversation” between two lovers, French and Japanese, played by Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada, which debate the meaning of memory, perception and existence — after a section of the film which recounted in documentary style, the effects of the Hiroshima bomb. The provocative cymbal-clash of history and personal narrative, the refusal to offer a clear narrative meaning, the infusion of geo-political dismay and intense eroticism — it was all sensationally provocative.
Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961) perplexed some, exasperated others, entranced most. It is, I think, probably his best film, para-surrealist masterpiece whose nightmarish scenario appears to have been absorbed from Buñuel and transmitted onward to Antonioni. In a colossal, eerie mansion, where a languid, dream-like weekend party is in progress, there is an encounter between a man and a woman. He knowingly alludes to his clandestine romantic encounter last year with the woman — but she claims never to have met this man before. Who is telling the truth? Violence and despair seem to linger below the surface. It is brilliant and commanding.
In his later work, such as Providence (1977) with Dirk Bogarde and John Gielgud and My American Uncle (1980) Resnais’s style evolved into something more conventionally elegant and stylish: witty comedies with shrewd commentary on social mores, but with persistent elements of the surreal and the macabre.Resnais was a director who helped give a new freshness and intellectual sinew to postwar cinema.
Gilbert Adair interviews Resnais in 2010
David Thomson on Resnais | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/13/whos-afraid-of-gender-by-judith-butler-review-the-gender-theorist-goes-mainstream | Books | 2024-03-13T12:00:04.000Z | Finn Mackay | Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler review – the gender theorist goes mainstream | For the purposes of this review, I read a work by Judith Butler. That might seem like a banal statement, but it already sets me apart from almost everyone who has an opinion on the US philosopher.
It’s not quite a joke to say their latest book could have been called Who’s Afraid of Judith Butler, because many people are; all the fears and fantasies poured into the idea of “gender”, which this new work explores, are also poured into its author. Butler’s work has been defined as diabolical, and the professor as some sort of she-devil – or rather they-devil – a convenient vessel for current anxieties about the stability of sex.
When I was in my 20s doing women’s studies as an undergraduate, Butler’s 1990 book, Gender Trouble, was relatively new and already hugely successful. In it, they brought classic radical feminism, psychology and poststructuralist philosophy to bear in the analysis of gender and sexuality. But though they were a rock star in academic circles, Butler was hardly mainstream. Known for expounding the theory of gender performativity, they were also infamous for deploying exceedingly long sentences, dense prose, and the postmodern style that people either really love, or really hate. Their ideas are now much more widely discussed, at least partly because of a backlash against the increased rights and visibility of trans and gender-diverse people.
This seems like the kind of impact and level of public engagement that most academics can only dream about, but when theory travels into popular discourse it is often damaged on the journey. It arrives late, very much changed, sapped of nuance, simplified, misapplied and misunderstood. This is particularly the case with gender performativity, continually misrepresented as “performance” in order to accuse Butler of declaring that sex doesn’t matter, and that gender is just some drag costume we choose to take on and off. Rather, they argue that it is performative insofar as it comprises the stylised repetition of acts, the doing of which brings gender into being. And it isn’t exactly voluntary, but required – and policed by society. More than 30 years after Gender Trouble, Butler is still having to explain that they never said sex doesn’t matter, as they do again here: “What if, in fact, no one has said that sex is not real, even as some people have asked what its reality consists of?” Butler is frustrated and angry; or as frustrated and angry as famous philosophy professors get. I know because this is the most accessible of their books so far, an intervention meant for a wide audience.
Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni has warned that gender ideology will strip everyone of their sexed identity
Unless you have been avoiding coverage of social issues for the last decade or so, you may have a working knowledge of the so-called “gender wars”, which are particularly vicious here in the UK (and seen globally as an embarrassing exemplar of sex and gender conservativism). Butler explains that “gender” has become a phantasm, representing multiple human fears and anxieties about sexuality, bodily attributes, sex and relationships. These anxieties have been stoked and manipulated by rightwingers in positions of religious and secular power to more effectively project the harms they are complicit in on to women and minorities.
Butler offers various examples. In 2015, Pope Francis compared gender theory to nuclear weapons, claiming it was an annihilating force that refused to recognise the order of creation. Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni has warned that gender ideology will strip everyone of their sexed identity. Vladimir Putin refers to Europe as “Gayropa”, saying that gender is a western construct that will destroy the concepts of mother and father.
This should rightly sound bizarre; affirming trans rights is not comparable to nuclear annihilation. LGBTQ+ history month is not about erasing mothers and fathers. Anti-gender movements are, however, erasing my rights; and they are erasing lesbian, gay and trans parents, quite literally in some cases. In Italy right now, lesbian mothers are being removed from their children’s birth certificates and denied legal responsibility for their children. Who is going to stand up for these women? Butler points out that what is happening is an inversion. Rightwing forces take rights from, and harm, some women, children and families, justifying their actions by saying they are preventing harm to others. And there is a horrific irony, of course, in the Catholic church contributing to the rights-stripping of LGBTQ+ people and their families under the guise of protecting children, while the Catholic church itself has been responsible for decades of child sexual abuse.
This is a “moralising sadism”, and the only answer, Butler says, is to form an axis of resistance; to “gather the targeted movements more effectively than we are targeted”. People who may not be friends, who disagree, need to work together, because they’re all in line for the same persecution, sooner or later – all women, all minorities, all those minoritised. Solidarity is not home, Butler reminds us, using a well-known phrase coined by feminist Bernice Johnson Reagon. It doesn’t have to be cosy.
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Because Butler is a human rights activist, as well as a theorist, the urgent point conveyed by this book is the same as it is in all their work: why are so many people seemingly happy to give away their power to increasingly authoritarian forces? And why are they so confident that this power will never be used against them?
Finn McKay is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England. Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/feb/09/supreme-court-ruth-bader-ginsburg | Opinion | 2009-02-09T20:00:01.000Z | Sanford Levinson | Sanford Levinson: Ruth Bader Ginsburg's surgery highlights why supreme court justices shouldn't serve life terms | Associate justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the US supreme court was operated on last week in New York for pancreatic cancer, an especially virulent form of the disease. Fortunately, she was diagnosed early, so her prognosis may be significantly better than the statistical averages. She apparently has expressed a hope to be at the supreme court when it resumes hearing oral arguments on February 23.
Rightly or wrongly, the illness of the 75-year-old justice, who joined the court in 1993 as President Bill Clinton's first appointee, has provoked much discussion among those interested in the US judiciary as to her possible retirement and potential successor. As to the latter, there is almost unanimous agreement that President Barack Obama would pick a woman to succeed Ginsburg, and the most-often-named candidates invariably include two distinguished sitting federal judges, Sonia Sotomayer from New York and Diane Wood from Chicago.
A third oft-named candidate, Elena Kagan, who was appointed to serve as the solicitor general from her spectacularly successful deanship of the Harvard Law School, is probably a far more likely appointee two or three years from now. Sotomayer would become the first Hispanic member of the court (her family is from Puerto Rico). Wood would bring the particular advantage of being a specialist in anti-trust law, which might well be beneficial given recent developments in the US and world economy.
Obama will almost certainly have several opportunities to place new faces on the court. Justice David Souter, who is nearing the end of two decades of service on the court, is widely thought to dislike living in Washington and to relish the prospect of being able to return to his native New Hampshire on the full salary available to him as a 15-year veteran on the court. And, of course, justice John Paul Stevens, appointed to the court in 1975, will turn 90 in 14 months.
Still, even the retirements of Ginsburg, Souter and Stevens would not give Obama a genuine opportunity to remake the court inasmuch as all are identified with the wing of the court – there is a debate whether they are best labelled "moderates" or "liberals" – that is often found vigorously dissenting from the opinions of the conservative majority.
As interesting as speculation about resignation and replacement might be, at least to court-watchers, it is more important to discern what lessons might be learned about America's peculiar, and close to unique, form of judicial tenure. In the modern world, almost all judicial systems operate under systems either of limited term-appointments (often 10-12 years) or ostensible "life tenure" with an age limit (usually some time between 65-75 years).
What is unusual – some might even think bizarre – about the American system is that "life tenure" means just that: Once a federal judge is appointed and confirmed, he or she can remain in office until death terminates the appointment. Thus the phenomenon of Stevens being in his 34th year of service, the same number of years attained by the late chief justice William Rehnquist, who died in office at 80 from a thyroid cancer for which he had been receiving chemotherapy.
Emery law professor David Garrow published an article several years ago demonstrating the relative frequency with which supreme court justices have remained on the court even after they had clearly entered into various stages of debilitation. The most serious example was surely William Douglas, who would not immediately resign even after suffering a serious stroke. His colleagues refused to count his vote in any 5-4 case where it would have made a difference.
It is fair to say that no country drafting a constitution today would be tempted to follow the American model. Endless life tenure has almost literally nothing to be said for it. Any reasonable desire to maintain judicial independence could easily be achieved by, for example, appointing justices for non-renewable 18-year terms, with full-salary pensions at the end of service. (This would have the advantage both of generating a new appointment every two years and preventing even a two-term president from being able to pack the court with a majority reflecting his or her own ideological preferences.) An 18-year term would eliminate justices Scalia, Kennedy and, very shortly, Thomas from the present court, with justices Ginsburg and Breyer to follow them in two and three years, respectively.
That would not, however, speak to the problem of an ill or debilitated justice within the 18-years. Yet any constitutional drafter should be aware of the possibility. The US constitution presents one possible model in its 25th amendment, which applies to the potential debility of a president. The cabinet, by recognising such debility, can arrange for the succession by the vice-president. And it has now become customary for presidents facing short operations to sign over their powers to the vice-president for the hours during which they will be under sedation.
One might imagine, for example, that judges facing operations and recovery, might be temporarily replaced during their periods of necessary absence, though they would be welcome back upon recovery. Sitting in for them might be retired justices. Thus, should justice Ginsburg need more time to recover, why shouldn't retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor return to the court and thus provide a full complement of nine justices?
This would, among other things, prevent the awkwardness of the court's inability to reach a decision because of being split 4-4. Given my own politics, I would not in fact be delighted by the substitution of justice O'Connor for justice Ginsburg, but that should be irrelevant if one is talking about how best to design a system for the future that recognises the inevitability of illness and absence as an alternative to retirement and full replacement.
Ginsburg's illness should provide a learning opportunity for anyone interested in constitutional design. Unfortunately, it is probably unlikely to do so in the US itself, which believes, altogether falsely, that the constitution is above criticism. But other countries around the world – or the EU itself – might exhibit greater imagination. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/jul/17/nt-live-a-streetcar-named-desire-gillian-anderson-young-vic | Stage | 2014-07-17T13:39:10.000Z | Ben Beaumont-Thomas | NT Live to screen A Streetcar Named Desire with Gillian Anderson | The Young Vic's forthcoming production of A Streetcar Named Desire has become the fastest-selling in its history – presumably driven by the presence of Gillian Anderson, an actor who is doing some of the best work of her career but is rarely seen on stage.
But if you've been too sluggish with your redialling of their box office, fret not, as the production will now be screened as part of the NT Live programme from the National Theatre. The performance on 16th September will be shown in cinemas globally at 7pm UK time.
Anderson appears alongside US actor Ben Foster in the production of Tennessee Williams' high-tensile character study, known as an American classic full of violent sexuality, thwarted dreams, and the potential for spellbindingly intense performances. In an interview with the Telegraph, Foster described the production as "a thrill. It's very scary in the best way. There's nowhere to hide.
"We've turned film into such an industry that we pursue naturalism just by shaking the camera, and cutting the film to ribbons to provoke a bogus sense of documentary. But we haven't done the homework. To push the depth that the Actor's Studio did or the Russian theatres did with their actors, is to rehearse, to spend time, to dig, to excavate. And that is what we are doing."
Anderson added: "I've never seen a production where I felt I was a fly on the wall in New Orleans and I felt that that version of it would not only be exciting to perform, but the version that I'd want to see. I'd want to sit in that room and be hot and sweaty with the actors. And after I'd had that idea there was no changing my mind... I have completely fallen in love with Blanche and I was unprepared for that."
Tonight meanwhile is the NT Live screening of Skylight from the West End, with Carey Mulligan and Bill Nighy starring in David Hare's production. The Guardian's Michael Billington gave it a five-star review, saying it "hits you straight between the eyes with its mixture of private pain and public rage at our profoundly polarised society." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2013/oct/08/a-league-central-melbourne-victory-preview | Football | 2013-10-08T21:28:05.000Z | Kate Cohen | A-League preview No5: Melbourne Victory | Guardian writers' predicted position: 1st
Last season's position: 3rd
If last season was a season of transition for Melbourne Victory, then this one will be fun to watch. Super coach Ange Postecoglou is already the most successful Australian club manager with four grand final wins, and a third premiership/championship double for Postecoglou is by no means an unrealistic objective this season.
Postecoglou's two and a bit season spell at Brisbane Roar was not only enormously successful, with the club winning the double in season six, the title in season seven and going 36 games undefeated in-between, it was also revolutionary in the A-League. Brisbane, by playing attractive, possession-based football, showed the way forward for other clubs and were the benchmark for the continued progression of the league.
Last season, Postecoglou's first at Victory, was considered a transitional year – one for the coach to implement his philosophy – but from day one the signs of a deadly style of play were evident. By the 25th minute of their round one game against Heart, Marco Rojas and Archie Thompson had combined for the first time. It was a combination that everyone knew would come, but no-one knew how to stop it. A narrow semi-final loss to eventual champions Central Coast ended their season, but Postecoglou's disappointment showed how determined he is for his sides to succeed.
If people expected Postecoglou to copy Brisbane's successful style of play at Victory, they were wrong. The basic principles of play were the same – to press and an emphasis on keeping the ball, but Postecoglou adapted and implemented a different style of game – one based on vertical passes, False 9's and lightning quick transitions.
This time around, with 12 months to employ his style, and 12 months to cut the players not up to the required standard, everyone is expecting a better, more refined version of Melbourne Victory. The team's pre-season showing against Liverpool showcased the club and the A-League to the rest of the world, and they did everyone proud, causing frequent problems for Liverpool's defence.
But causing problems for the opposition's defence was always going to happen. Victory had the best attack in the league last season (along with Central Coast) and possessed the league's best attacker in Marco Rojas … aka the Kiwi Messi. They've lost Rojas, who moved to VfB Stuttgart, but their list of attackers is scarily good.
Thompson and youngsters Connor Pain and Andrew Nabbout have been joined by Kosta Barbarouses (23, from Alania Vladikavkaz) and Mitch Nichols (24, from Brisbane Roar), both of whom have played under Postecoglou at Brisbane. Socceroo James Troisi (25, on loan from Atalanta) has also joined, and Gui Finkler's return from a long term knee injury can be considered a new signing.
Victory may have lost Rojas and Marcos Flores (who never really suited the False 9 role anyway) but their attack looks to have only improved. But, as with last season, their attack wasn't the issue. Melbourne scored 48 goals during the regular season, but conceded 45. The defensive issues were the real signs of transition. If a style of play is new to the whole team, mistakes are inevitable. If an attacker misses a one-on-one or doesn't make the correct run, the damage isn't as detrimental as if a defender chooses the wrong option when playing out or doesn't track his runner. Last season, Melbourne Victory had too many defensive lapses, too many players unsuited to Postecoglou's style of play and too many key injuries.
Postecoglou has been ruthless in his handling of unsuitable players and will hope to have found the right defensive balance for the new season. Petar Franjic, Matthew Foschini, Diogo Ferreira, Sam Gallagher and Tando Velaphi were all released, and Melbourne will instead hope that Nick Ansell and Adama Traore have an injury-free season, that Adrian Leijer returns to his pre-Fulham form and that new signing Pablo Contreras lives up to his marquee status. Fans will still hope to see plenty of the clubs talented young defenders, such as Scott Galloway, Jason Geria and Dylan Murnane, but not under the same circumstances as last season.
One of the major off-season coups for Melbourne, apart from the signing of Contreras, was retaining Mark Milligan. Milligan, who was heavily pursued by Crystal Palace, has been appointed captain, taking over from Leijer. His midfield role was essential to Melbourne's performances last season and saw him return to the Socceroos to play a major role in Australia qualifying for Brazil 2014. Milligan is up there with Alessandro Del Piero and Thomas Broich as the best player in the league, and his ability to play accurate vertical passes and break up opposition attacks is vital for Melbourne.
Victory's need to retain Milligan became more vital after Billy Celeski, another who flourished under Postecoglou's system, moved to the UAE. While they'll be without Milligan and new signing Barbarouses for their opener against Melbourne Heart, both away on international duty, Victory will be many people's favourites for the A-League title. It will be a scary proposition for opponents that last year's 'transitional season' was still a success: Postecoglou has assembled a fantastic squad and there's no reason why they won't improve. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2015/may/13/physiotherapists-relieve-pressure-a-and-e-departments | Healthcare Professionals Network | 2015-05-13T14:15:06.000Z | Linda Jackson | Physiotherapists can relieve pressure on overstretched A&E departments | When physiotherapist Annalisa Newson started working in Salford Royal hospital’s A&E department, little did she know she would leave a lasting legacy.
Physiotherapists call for bigger role in delivering healthcare changes
Read more
Working as a physiotherapist specialising in musculoskeletal (MSK) injuries, Newson realised that additional training would allow her to see more patients. It led her to became the first physiotherapist in Salford to become an advanced practitioner.
Eight years on, her pioneering work has brought physiotherapy into the frontline of emergency care and led to recognition of the role physiotherapists can play in Britain’s overstretched A&E departments. Newson is now training doctors, nurses and students how to work in A&E, and developing the role of advanced practitioner.
The hospital now has five advanced practitioner physiotherapists, operating seven days a week from the minor injuries unit. Part of multidisciplinary teams, they offer holistic care for patients with MSK injuries bringing their expertise in assessment, discharge and arranging care after leaving hospital.
The move has seen a 60% reduction in staff costs of treating patients with MSK injuries from £46 a patient to £14. It has led to immediate access to physiotherapy advice and treatment for patients and faster recovery times. Physiotherapists have also taken on new roles, such as managing wounds and interpreting x-rays.
We free up doctors by allowing patients to see the right person at the right time
Michelle Angus
Michelle Angus, consultant physiotherapist at Salford Royal, said: “We free up doctors by allowing patients to see the right person at the right time. And being experts we can tailor appropriate exercises to patients’ needs.”
At Liverpool’s Aintree University hospital, four physiotherapists trained as advanced practitioners are also offering rapid access therapy to patients attending A&E.
As well as seeing patients with MSK injuries, the physiotherapists treat elderly people who have had falls and work with occupational therapists to ensure they receive the right support at home. Tracey Keane, lead physiotherapist, says: “It’s good to know you’re helping people get better faster and to avoid hospital admissions.”
Are you a member of our online community? Sign up to the Healthcare Professionals Network – for free – to receive weekly email updates on policy and best practice in the sector, as well as exclusive offers. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/06/iran-uranium-deal-us-sanctions | World news | 2010-02-06T14:49:00.000Z | David Batty | US dismisses Iranian claims of nuclear agreement | Western officials have disputed claims by Iran's foreign minister that his country is "approaching a final agreement" in its nuclear programme.
Manouchehr Mottaki told a security conference in Munich yesterday that Iran was "serious" about making progress on a deal agreed in principle last October to swap most of its enriched uranium stockpile for fuel rods to use in nuclear power stations. Governments in Europe and the US fear the stockpile could be refined to make nuclear weapons.
But despite Mottaki's assurances, the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, today dismissed the idea that a deal was close and said it might be time to push forward with sanctions.
"The reality is they've done nothing to assure the international community" or "to stop their progress toward (building) a nuclear weapon," Gates said.
"And therefore various nations need to think about whether it is time for a different tack."
Gates, who is in Ankara for talks with the Turkish government, said that in his discussions with Turkey and other allies he had sought to underscore the threat Iran poses to them.
"Iran is the only country in the region that has publicly declared its intent to destroy another country in the region," he said.
If Iran proceeded with its nuclear programme "unrestrained", there was a "real danger of proliferation" that would destabilise region, he said.
The German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, whose country has joined the five permanent UN security council members in negotiations with Tehran, dismissed Mottaki's comments as nothing new.
"If it's not more than we heard yesterday, then we have to say unfortunately this is not a new transparency," Westerwelle said. "It does not mean there is a change. That is the situation and we have to face it."
Mottaki said Iran should set the amount of uranium that would be exchanged, suggesting that less than the 1,200kg of low enriched uranium provisionally agreed last year would be exported.
Such a change could render any deal worthless in the eyes of western governments, for whom the whole point of the bargain was to deplete Iran's stockpile.
Mottaki said today that he had a "very good meeting" about Iran's proposals with the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano, who is attending the Munich conference.
The meeting came a few days after Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, raised the possibility of low enriched uranium being exported and returned within five months in the form of fuel rods.
The president did not mention how much might be exported, and his offer was met with scepticism from western capitals, where it was seen as a gambit to buy time and forestall sanctions.
Preliminary discussions have begun at the UN in New York on a further round of punitive measures aimed at Iranian individuals and institutions linked to the nuclear and missile programmes, and the Revolutionary Guards who control both.
However, a security council resolution is seen as highly unlikely in the near future because of Chinese opposition. Speaking at the Munich conference, China's foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, made clear the country was prepared to stand alone among the permanent members of the security council in opposing sanctions.
He insisted Iran had not closed the door on negotiations over the export of its uranium, and called for patience and "a more flexible, pragmatic and proactive policy" towards talks with Tehran.
The EU foreign affairs chief, Catherine Ashton, said she agreed with the Chinese foreign minister that the possibilities of dialogue with Tehran were not exhausted, but added that "dialogue takes two". | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/careers/careers-in-it | Guardian Careers | 2011-10-02T16:00:00.000Z | Alison White | Ask the experts: How to find a job in IT | I'm sure you've all heard the expression digital native; someone who was born during or after the widespread adoption and introduction of technology. These days, it seems like tech-savvy kids are pretty much born clutching an ipod, a Blackberry and a Nintendo DS.
So, the government is looking at shaking up the way they are taught ICT in schools, with less of an emphasis on the basic skills pupils already know - the sort of stuff I was taught in IT lessons at school. A trial scheme will see teenagers taught how to design and write their own computer software.
OK, so your school days are well behind you. But, bear with me. Science minister David Willetts, who announced the pilot scheme, pointed out that the business community is "desperately short" of people with the ability to create software programmes, saying: "I'm told that it is like gold dust for the business sector." News that, I'm sure, will be music to the ears of anybody who has these sort of skills and is looking for work in this area.
And these aren't the only abilities in demand. Judy Baker, director of the Cyber Security Challenge, told V3.co.uk that employers in areas such as cyber security are currently not finding the talent they need.
So, what does all this mean if you're considering an IT industry career? Where else are your skills in demand and where should you be looking for work? We've asked the experts to share their industry knowledge in a live Q&A on Friday October 7 - join us from 1pm.
This content was brought to you by Guardian Professional. To keep up-to-date with our regular Q&A sessions, you can now sign-up for our newsletter here.
Our panel:
Jenny Taylor is IBM UK's graduate, apprenticeship and student manager. She is responsible for all aspects of these schemes, including recruitment into IBM, career management, development of education programmes and financial management.
Jason Hill is partner of Reply, multinational specialising in new digital media, telecommunications and IT. Jason covers strategy and development for the business, within the group responsible for architecture, technology and consulting in the UK.
Terry Parsons is chief technical officer at 192.com Limited, the people-finding website. Terry's oversees the technology personnel, system resources and strategies at 192.com.
Stuart Allsopp is chief technology officer at Access, a provider of business and accounting software to organisations across the UK and Ireland.
Tristan Rogers is CEO of Concrete, a provider of retail software designed to facilitate the expansion of retail companies.
Gareth Everson is an independent IT business owner. He is launching a new business focused on providing IT and digital marketing help for small businesses. He has worked as a consulting programme manager with Accenture in the UK and in Europe.
Alex Woods is head of communication at e-skills UK. Alex's background is in occupational standards and qualification development, producing employer-led solutions to meet the skills needs of the IT industry.
We'll also be joined by three representatives of FDM Group, an international IT services provider.
1-2pm: Alex Blevins - development service head
2-3pn: Henry Duddy - development service head
3-4pm Jon Taplin - head of group, project management office | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/28/nursing-homes-america-new-jersey-coronavirus | US news | 2020-10-28T05:00:34.000Z | Ann Neumann | It has the highest death rate of any nursing home in the US. Families want to know why | Update, 7 January 2022: Last week New Jersey awarded $53m to more than 100 families of veterans who died in two nursing homes in the state, Menlo Park and Paramus. The settlement, likely the first in the country for Covid deaths at a medical facility, answers a question that families of nursing home residents across the country have been asking since the early months of the pandemic when a rash of immunity laws were passed at the state level to protect nursing home operators: can immunity laws prevent facilities from being held to account for Covid deaths? One lawyer, Paul da Costa, who represented the families of 74 residents of Menlo Park, told us in late 2020 that he believed the laws would not impede justice. He was right. The families he represented will receive more than $440,000 each. Understaffing, rampant fraud, supply shortages and other chronic issues continue to plague the long-term care industry; how the settlement will influence reform that protects residents from present and future waves of the virus is still unclear.
By noon on 16 September, more than 100 people had gathered at the end of the long drive that leads to the Menlo Park Veterans’ Memorial Home in New Jersey. Eighteen-inch letters – red, white, and blue – spelling “THANK YOU HEROES” were pushed into the sod beneath a semi-permanent sign that reads “Now accepting job applications” and “SERVING THOSE WHO SERVED”.
Staff members – mostly Black, mostly female – stood to the right of a podium. To the left stood family members holding framed photos of their loved ones, former residents of Menlo Park who had died over the past several hellish months, either in the facility or in a nearby hospital.
Gary White, the no-nonsense, cigar-chewing commandant of the local Marine Corps League – an 80-year-old federal organization and advocacy group for marine veterans – organized the event. White told the crowd that Menlo Park’s residents had, as service members, “given America a blank check payable up to and including their lives”, but that during the pandemic, “veterans died who never should have”. A week before the protest, White had received calls and emails from family members who were shocked by their loved one’s deaths, who had never even been told their father or grandfather was sick. “They asked me to do something,” he said.
Left to right: Nancy Pike holds a photograph of her father Alois Franko; Susan Vella holds a photograph of her father Frank Vella; and Keith Prendergrast holds a photograph of his father William Prendergrast. Photograph: Victor J Blue/The Guardian
By late May, there were only 177 residents at Menlo Park, down from 300 in early March. A recent Wall Street Journal investigation shows that many of the dead were never tested for Covid-19, their official cause of death recorded as pneumonia or sepsis. Though the facility’s management maintains that the official death count from Covid-19 is 62, the investigation concluded that 101 residents had died of Covid-19 at Menlo Park since March, the highest single death rate of any nursing home in the country.
At the protest, families and staff cited a gross lack of communication about what was happening inside the facility, a senseless ban of mask-wearing in the early weeks of the pandemic, and a continued effort to cover up the total number of deaths at Menlo Park, as the cause of their attendance. “Negligence is Murder,” read one sign, held by a grieving family member, “Where was their PPE?” Outraged by the mass deaths, at least 35 families and 22 employees have retained lawyers.
The protest was brief, but one family member, White told me, said it was the only memorial they’d had for their grandfather. As people in the crowd wiped their eyes and began to wander back to their cars, staff members gathered around Shirley Suddoth-Lewis, the president of their local union who has worked at Menlo Park since 1984, as she handed out white balloons. When they released them into the air they said in unison the name of their colleague, Monemise Romelus. She had contracted Covid-19 before she was given access to PPE and died in May.
They want accountability. They want transparency. They want justice. But in April, New Jersey passed an immunity law intended to protect nursing home owners from responsibility for Covid-19 deaths, a law that nursing home operators hope will stand in the way of what the bereaved most desire. Despite the fact that nationally more than 50,000 nursing home residents and 750 staff members have died so far from Covid-19, at least 26 states have passed some form of immunity law that shields long-term care facilities and healthcare providers from Covid-19-related civil negligence lawsuits. A recent article in ABA Journal, a publication of the American Bar Association, states: “Those measures generally bar claims for standard negligence, only allowing claims for harder-to-prove gross negligence, willful misconduct or fraud.”
Immunity laws are often passed by state and federal governments in the event of a crisis. But the decision to protect the nursing home industry, betrays legislators’ – and perhaps society’s – erroneous assumption that elders’ deaths were inevitable, that their lives were worth little or too frail to be saved. Clinicians and advocates alike have countered that proper infection control, long a systemic problem in nursing home care, could have largely mitigated the number of deaths.
Tanya Montuore cries as her husband Robert Montuore comforts her. Photograph: Victor J Blue/The Guardian
“This is simple,” Robert Montuore told me, “if they had just followed standard protocol.” His wife, Tanya stood next to him, holding a photo of her father, former marine Howard H Cognac Sr, who died at Menlo Park in April.
“Pop” lived with the Montuores and their daughter, Samantha, for 12 years after the death of his wife, Celeste. But when he began to use a mobility chair, the Montuores moved him into room 511 on Eagle wing at Menlo Park in February. The Montuores spoke with him daily, with Tanya joining her father for lunch at Buddy’s, the restaurant in Menlo Park’s “town hall”, almost every day. The last lunch she had with him was on 11 March; the following day the facility notified the Montuores that Menlo Park was closed to visitors. As staff and family gathered for the protest, the Montuores told me about the horror of the next four weeks, as they struggled to get Pop on the phone or to receive reliable updates from Menlo Park staff.
According to a letter the Montuores wrote to their local senator, assemblywoman and Gary White (who shared it with me, with permission) Pop called them a last time a little after 8pm on 5 April, “hysterical” because management had taken away his mobility chair and put him in a bed without a call button. “His final words were, ‘I’m not going to make it out alive,’” the Montuores wrote. “That was the last conversation we had with him.” Two days later they were told that Cognac was having trouble breathing and had an elevated heart rate, two signs of Covid-19 infection. They begged for a test. “No fever, no test,” they were told repeatedly by staff over the next few days. At one point, a staff member used her personal phone to help Pop speak to his family. Then on 11 April the facility’s nurse practitioner called to tell them that Pop was failing; when they asked if he had Covid, she said no, heart failure.
On the 16th, they called again for an update on Pop’s status. An hour later the nurse practitioner called back to tell them that he was dead.
Several attorneys I spoke with believe that Menlo Park’s lawsuits are the first in a wave that will sweep the country
A few days before the protest, the Montuores found out that Pop’s roommate, Daniel Bartus, had died of Covid-19 on 5 April. At the protest, Gary White called Tanya Montuore up to the microphone to speak. “They were devalued as human beings,” she said of the Menlo Park residents, “and there were countless unnecessary deaths, of my dad and so many others. Why?” She paused to wipe tears from her face. The next day the Montuores sent me two last telephone messages they received from Cognac, found after his death as they put together information for a case against Menlo Park for their lawyer. “Hi T,” Cognac says, explaining that he can’t use the phone very much because his wing is on lockdown. And then his voice breaks. “I’m worried, Honey” he says, and in a whisper, “I think I have one of the [symptoms]. I love you, Honey. If anything happens … ” A sob. “I miss you so much.”
The Montuores are only one of dozens of Menlo Park families who are seeking legal accountability for the loss of their loved ones. They fear that state and non-profit defendants will successfully leverage immunity laws to escape legal repercussions; but knowing the pain and suffering of their loss, they can’t imagine the courts won’t also want to know why helpless elders were left to die. Several attorneys I spoke with believe that Menlo Park’s lawsuits are the first in a wave that will sweep the country.
Daria Lisco, left, and Liz Vigren, right, hold photographs of their father Charles VanderPyle. Photograph: Victor J Blue/The Guardian
State and federal long-term care advocates loudly opposed immunity laws and claim that the firestorm of Covid-19 that has ravaged long-term care facilities was only made possible by decades of poor management, gross understaffing, debilitating cost cutting, systemic Medicare and Medicaid fraud, poor infection control and the lack of meaningful federal or state oversight of residents’ care. “Legal liability has always functioned as a safeguard for nursing home residents by incentivizing nursing homes to provide quality care and comply with laws and regulations,” advocates wrote in a letter to the Senate judiciary committee on 11 May.
Nonetheless, in New York, a provision was included in the annual budget, passed in April, that provided broad immunity to long-term care facilities. Governor Andrew Cuomo has drawn criticism for organizing the transfer of elderly Covid-positive patients from overwhelmed hospitals to nursing facilities. In August, the law was amended and significantly narrowed, removing protections for non-Covid patients.
On 6 May, the Pennsylvania governor, Tom Wolf, passed an executive order granting immunity. Still, several lawsuits have already been filed in Pennsylvania, including one by the family of Elizabeth Wiley, a housekeeper who had worked at Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness in Pittsburgh for three decades and died of Covid-19 on 10 May.
Robert Sachs Jr, an attorney in Pennsylvania, where the nursing home deaths have made up between 60 and 70% of Covid-19 deaths so far, has learned from case inquiries, that many facilities “had the ability and the knowledge of what was coming to protect their populations and didn’t take any steps”. He added that the department of health “did an absolutely abysmal job” of helping facilities to prepare for the pandemic.
On 1 April, the New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, enacted an executive order that granted broad immunity to nursing homes and healthcare providers and little more than a week later, he also signed a law. But there’s also a federal law, the Prep Act, a pandemic readiness plan passed in 2005 by the George W Bush administration in the wake of the avian influenza, that some facilities hope will provide them with immunity protections.
Yet, some attorneys, like Paul da Costa in New Jersey, who is representing dozens of Menlo Park staff and family members, believe that some claims may not be confined to the Prep Act laws (which address use of medical countermeasures) because they address absence of measures, namely the lack of proper infection control, and the now common accounts of management preventing mask and other PPE use.
In perhaps the first post-Covid decision of its kind, Estate of Maglioli v Andover Subacute Rehab, the courts have shown a willingness to see such cases go ahead. Plaintiffs asked the federal court to remand the case back to the state, against the defendants’ argument that the Prep Act prevented the case’s continuation. The court agreed with the plaintiffs, leaving the decision up to the state court.
Glenn Osborne watched the protest from inside Menlo Park. “What a privilege that was to witness,” he told me by email. I’d met him in person the week before by taking advantage of Menlo Park’s new visitation program, “Operation Rocking Chair”, which allows residents and visitors to spend 15 minutes together, masked, outside, six feet apart. I saw a steady stream of grateful sons and daughters file through the registration pavilion (reservations must be made in advance) the day I visited Osborne. I was his first visitor in six months.
Osborne is a former marine with service-induced ALS. He speaks in a breathy, halting voice because the disease has restricted his breathing. Osborne, who is kind-faced, laser-focused and tireless, is the president of the resident’s association. If anything is on the minds of residents at the facility, they call on him. For that reason, staff members told me they worried about Osborne; he’d been writing letters to the facility’s administration and related agencies with various concerns for years. They feared management retaliation against him.
Shirley Suddoth-Lewis, who worked at Menlo Park for more than 30 years, knew from experience; she also feared retaliation from the CEO, Elizabeth Schiff-Heedles, who called an all-staff meeting on 16 March to announce there was no Covid in the building. “She told us, ‘We don’t want anyone to wear masks, the masks will scare the residents,’” Suddoth-Lewis said. “Everybody was in the lunchroom and you could tell people wanted to ask questions, but they were afraid because they might go after you.”
Let’s be candid, we know this is what we call our final mission
Glenn Osborne
But Osborne felt a strong sense of responsibility to his fellow residents and refused to be quiet. In a single-spaced, three-page letter to the department of health in August, Osborne addressed the toll that isolation has taken on the residents, leaving them to feel forgotten, disregarded, alone. He asked when outside time will resume, when residents, whose personal belongings were boxed up by the national guard during the height of the pandemic and stored in the basement, will be returned. And he asked questions regarding management’s actions in April and May. “Why did our CEO purposely prevent employees from wearing PPE?” he wrote.
Osborne told me residents try not to talk about the losses. “Many of the residents were longtime friends before they ever entered the facility. The people who lived at Menlo Park were vibrant, leading rich lives as artists, writers and storytellers,” Osborne said. “You know, this is our home, this was our life. And we knew what we’re here for. Let’s be candid, we know this is what we call our final mission.”
Shirley Suddoth-Lewis, head of the local AFSCME union, worked at Menlo Park for more than 30 years. Photograph: Victor J Blue/The Guardian
Like several others I spoke with, including Suddoth-Lewis, Osborne witnessed PPE being removed from staff members’ access. Osborne, Suddoth-Lewis, and others also questioned management’s decision to move patients around the facility. Covid-19 positive and Covid-suspicious residents were often moved downstairs, to the dementia ward. One resident of a shared room would be taken downstairs to quarantine while his or her roommate remained. Or patients would be returned to shared rooms when they came back from the hospital. These accounts – and the methodology behind them – bewildered Osborne and many staff members who were unable to ask questions but only follow orders. And if there was a plan to management’s mitigation efforts, the veterans and staff were never informed of it. “Transparency in communication in all areas of operations, especially those that pertain directly to us Veterans, is exceedingly rare,” Osborne wrote.
Perhaps the most chilling part of Osborne’s account is his suspicion that he will be retaliated against. “I know he’s going to be a target. I know it,” Suddoth-Lewis told me on the phone, “Because this administration is so brutal. I mean they have no remorse.” Management has remained opaque and unwilling to consider the input of residents in their care—or even the professional staff employed to provide it. “We continue to feel our lives are at risk and our patient’s rights and dignities are ignored,” Osborne wrote in the letter to the department of health.
During my “Operation Rocking Chair” visit a week before the protest, I left some snacks and toiletries for Osborne on the patio for him. For this, management punished Osborne with a citation. Should he receive a second citation, he will altogether lose the ability to see visitors.
For his dogged outspokenness and commitment to bringing residents’ concerns forward, attorney Da Costa has called Osborne a hero. To the staff of Menlo Park, Shirley Suddoth-Lewis is a hero too. She had planned to retire in December, but when she started thinking about a second wave of the pandemic, she retired early, a few weeks before the protest. She told me, “It was my anxiety from working there because certain things to me weren’t done as they should have been.”
In August, state senator Joseph Vitale, chairman of the senate health committee, hosted an online hearing. Gary White, Paul da Costa, and Glenn Osborne all testified about their experiences with Menlo Park. Vitale called for the resignation of the Menlo Park CEO, Elizabeth Schiff-Heedles (who did not return multiple requests for comment). But the spokesman for the New Jersey department of military and veterans affairs, Kryn Westhoven, publicly expressed support for Schiff-Heedles – and the CEOs of the other two veterans’ nursing homes in New Jersey, Paramus, where the official death count is at 81, and Vineland, where the count is three. A total of at least five thousand nursing home residents (veterans’ and civilian combined) have died in New Jersey.
Veterans and family members release balloons in honor of those they lost. For some, this was the only memorial they’d have for their loved ones. Photograph: Victor J Blue/The Guardian
For now it seems little has been done to address the actions of the Menlo Park administration during the height of the pandemic’s first wave – nor to prepare for the potential second wave. Suddoth-Lewis may have retired, but her responsibilities to her fellow union members are not over. As we spoke on the phone one afternoon, three of her great-grandchildren playing in the background, texts continued to come in, texts from staff members at Menlo Park. We said goodbye so she could check each one.
This story was supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/feb/09/alwyn-lishman-obituary | Science | 2021-02-09T13:28:31.000Z | Georgina Ferry | Alwyn Lishman obituary | Alwyn Lishman liked to tell people that he wrote his classic textbook Organic Psychiatry (1978) only because the £500 advance would enable him to buy the Bechstein grand piano that he coveted. Yet he put his heart and soul into it, setting the subject of neuropsychiatry on a new footing, and trained generations of successors to approach mental illness with insights from both brain and mind.
Trained in neurology and psychiatry, Lishman, who has died aged 89, was not the first to bridge the two subjects. There was a strong tradition among German neurologists of the late-19th century to look for underlying physical causes for conditions such as dementia and schizophrenia. But when he qualified in medicine in postwar Britain, Lishman found that neurology had little to say about the mind, while psychiatry was strongly influenced by psychoanalysis. He made it his mission to build a new discipline that combined the two. While using newly available techniques to explore abnormalities in the brain, he rooted his practice in psychiatry, listening to his patients and taking their circumstances into account.
“There was no reason in neuropsychiatry to forget about interpersonal relationships when treating someone with dementia, … [or] the impact of culture when dealing with alcoholism,” he told the Australian psychiatrist Michael Salzberg in an interview in 2002. “Everything we had learned [in psychiatry] applied to people with neuropsychiatric conditions.”
As part of his training in the early 1960s Lishman had completed a thesis on psychiatric symptoms in 670 soldiers with penetrating wounds to the head, who had been followed over five years by his former mentor Ritchie Russell at Oxford University. Lishman’s research career took off again in the late 70s when the Institute of Psychiatry in London, where he became professor of neuropsychiatry in 1979, took delivery of one of the first research CT scanners.
For the first time he could examine changes in the brains of living patients. He encouraged his PhD student Maria Ron (now emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at UCL Institute of Neurology) to study the brains of chronic alcoholics, showing that if they gave up drinking their atrophied brains recovered, though only partially. He later used more advanced scanning techniques such as MRI to study other conditions such as the psychosis that affects some patients with epilepsy.
The first edition of Organic Psychiatry, subtitled The Psychological Consequences of Cerebral Disorder, took seven years to write while he continued full-time work as a clinical psychiatrist, helped his wife to bring up two small children and cared for elderly relatives. Among many other administrative roles, in 1987 he was founding president of the British Neuropsychiatry Association, which awards an annual prize for early career researchers in his name.
Lishman was born in Houghton-le-Spring, Co Durham (now Tyne and Wear), the younger child (he had an older sister, Valerie) of Madge (nee Young), a teacher, and George Lishman. The family was influential in the town thanks to the successful tallow chandlery founded by Alwyn’s great-grandfather, a former mineworker, that supplied candles for mining and shipbuilding all over the north-east. Alwyn’s father had started training as a dentist and hoped to move on to medicine, but after being taken prisoner during the first world war he was unable to complete his studies and managed the family business.
Alwyn attended Houghton-le-Spring grammar school and, having played the piano since the age of five, intended to be a musician. But he succumbed to “relentless pressure” from his parents to become a doctor and in 1950 went to Birmingham University to study physiology and anatomy. There he was lucky enough to work in the laboratory of Solly Zuckerman, later government chief scientist, who inspired him to continue with research and complete his medical qualification.
During his national service in the late 50s, he worked at a military hospital near Oxford, researching head injury, epilepsy and other topics under a succession of distinguished neurologists. Russell, a head injury specialist, took him on as registrar after his military service ended. A career in neurology beckoned, but Lishman had doubts. There seemed little he could do for his patients once he had diagnosed their condition. He had begun to read up on psychology and psychiatry, and decided he was more interested in the mind. He later said it “took a certain amount of unworldliness to make the move”, but he went to the Maudsley hospital in Denmark Hill, London, for psychiatric training.
After qualifying in 1966 he spent a year as a consultant in psychological medicine at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Queen Square, London, examining neurological patients who had psychological symptoms. In 1967 he returned to the Maudsley as a consultant, and remained there until his retirement. He was a kind and generous mentor to his junior colleagues, many of whom went on to hold chairs in neuropsychiatry. Maria Ron recalls that as well as offering her the chronic alcoholism problem for her thesis, “he spent a lot of time discussing things with me, teaching me how to write properly. I was Lishmanised!”
He continued to be an accomplished keyboard player. In addition to his Bechstein, he built himself a harpsichord and regularly played his local church organ. His idea of a holiday was to tour Europe visiting the organs in baroque churches.
In 1966 he married Marjorie Loud, a psychiatric social worker, and they had two children, Victoria and William. Marjorie later developed a slow-growing brain tumour and Lishman took early retirement in 1993 in order to care for her, though he continued to work on the third (1997) edition of his textbook.
Marjorie died in 2000. Lishman is survived by his children and two grandchildren.
William Alwyn Lishman, neuropsychiatrist, born 16 May 1931; died 24 January 2021
This article was amended on 5 March 2021. Houghton-le-Spring was historically in Co Durham rather than Northumberland. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/06/best-fiction-2015-marlon-james-jonathan-franzen-ishiguro | Books | 2015-12-06T08:00:14.000Z | Alex Preston | The best novels of 2015 | This has been quite a year for the novel, one of those exquisite vintages that come along every decade or so and scotch any critical doom-mongering about the death of the form. It was such a good year that one doesn’t know whether to envy the Man Booker judges the delights of a summer spent devouring novel after magnificent novel, or pity them for having to narrow the books down to a (baker’s) dozen, then six, then to Marlon James’s deserved winner, the violent, polyphonic, masterful A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld). The best winning novel since Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty in 2004, or so it seemed to me as I read it over one white-knuckle weekend.
Joining James on the Man Booker shortlist were three other novels of extraordinary power, any of which would have made a fine winner (I’ll pass over Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread and Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, both of which felt like the minor novels of major novelists). A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (Picador) was the bookmakers’ favourite in the run-up to the prize, and although it divided critics, I thought the wretched protagonist, Jude St Francis, and his self-inflicted agonies beautifully rendered, the novel’s uncanny allegorical atmosphere unlike anything I’ve read before. The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota (Picador) was a quietly devastating examination of immigrant lives, moving between brutal subcontinental poverty and drab subsistence in Sheffield. The Fishermen (One/Pushkin Press), Chigozie Obioma’s first novel, laced Greek tragedy and African folklore into a withering allegory of contemporary Nigeria. The best debut of the year by some distance.
Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways was ‘a quietly devastating examination of immigrant lives’ Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
The judges discarded several very fine books in the cull from long- to shortlist: Anne Enright’s The Green Road (Jonathan Cape) was a fierce, funny, loosely woven family saga told by dissipated envoys of the Irish diaspora; Andrew O’Hagan’s The Illuminations (Faber) took on big subjects – war, old age – with a fine, sympathetic eye. His best novel yet, I think. I didn’t find Marilynne Robinson’s Lila (Virago) quite as stimulating as the earlier novels in the coterminous Gilead series, but it was admired by many, while Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family (Jonathan Cape) told its heartbreaking tale with tenderness and verve.
Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone (Canongate), released towards the end of the year, deservedly picked up the Goldsmiths prize. It’s a bizarre, fragmented and linguistically inventive imagining of John Lennon’s trip to the island he owned off County Mayo for three days of “scream therapy”. It was also good to see Richard Beard’s brilliantly original and absurdly compelling Acts of the Assassins (Harvill Secker) make the shortlist – a generic mash-up of detective story and dystopian nightmare, it’s a book you’ll read in one, frantic gasp.
While Milan Kundera’s The Festival of Insignificance was a terrible yawn and Jim Shepard’s The Book of Aron a tawdry piece of Holocaust kitsch, other literary heavyweights delivered their best novels in years. Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights (Jonathan Cape) is a joyous, fractured fairytale with a cast of thousands and a darkly glittering heart. Sebastian Faulks’s Where My Heart Used to Beat (Hutchinson) takes a rangy, Any Human Heart-ish sweep across the 20th century. It’s a melancholy tale of war, love and loss that will leave you gulping back sobs. Jonathan Franzen’s Purity is perhaps not quite as clever as he’d like you to think, but it’s a good deal warmer and funnier than Freedom – a technophobic rant yoked to the baggiest of plots that, somehow, works.
Scarlett Thomas’s The Seed Collectors was ‘stunningly original’. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
In translation, you’ll have to wait until 2016 to read Laurent Binet’s dazzling follow-up to HHhH, La septième fonction du langage, but I can tell you that it’s stupendously good. This year, though (like last year), was all about the bewitching enigma of Elena Ferrante. The Story of the Lost Child (Europa Editions), the final installation of her Neapolitan quartet, was every bit as sinister and compelling as its predecessors, a vivid and haunting portrait of female friendship that confirms Ferrante as one of the masters of her craft. Do also look out for Finnish author Sofi Oksanen’s When the Doves Disappeared (Atlantic Books), a heartbreaking tale of love and betrayal in postwar Estonia.
Four more novels that earned their place at the top table of this literary annus mirabilis (and should find their way on to your Christmas lists): High Dive (William Heinemann)by Jonathan Lee, a meticulous and gripping reimagination of the Brighton bomb; Paradise City (Bloomsbury) by Elizabeth Day, which follows John Lanchester’s Capital and Amanda Craig’s Hearts and Minds in its moving and multilayered portrayal of the state of London; Tokyo by Nicholas Hogg, an intelligent, gripping and stylish love story set against a beautifully drawn contemporary Japan; The Seed Collectors (Canongate) by Scarlett Thomas – her best since The End of Mr Y – is a stunningly original novel that builds to a scintillating finale.
Finally, I come to two novels I thought should have appeared on every prize shortlist, and which, if not exactly overlooked, haven’t been sufficiently feted given their quality. The first is Benjamin Markovits’s You Don’t Have to Live Like This (Faber), a mordant, intense and very funny novel about a hedge fund manager’s attempts to reanimate the economy of Detroit. It is about money, race and urban acedia and features a cameo from Barack Obama every bit as brilliant as Hollinghurst’s Thatcher in The Line of Beauty. Kazuo Ishiguro’s fantastical The Buried Giant (Faber) baffled me as much as it impressed me when I first approached it in February. Subsequent readings have convinced me that it is a profound and important novel. It says meaningful things about memory and trauma, about the way we attempt to accommodate the unthinkable horrors of history. It’s a book that people will read in the decades and centuries to come and will, eventually, be recognised for the masterpiece it is.
Save at least 30% Browse all the critics’ choices at bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. From now until Christmas, 20p from each title you order will go to the Guardian and Observer charity appeal 2015.
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Vote now: what was your favourite book of the year? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/24/cheap-thrills-the-best-free-uk-festivals-of-2023 | Life and style | 2023-06-24T12:00:07.000Z | Graeme Virtue | Cheap thrills: the best free UK festivals of 2023 | BirminghamFestival 23
Centenary Square, 28 July-6 August
After successfully hosting the 2022 Commonwealth Games last summer, Birmingham is striving to keep that sporting and cultural legacy alive with a free jamboree in the city’s Centenary Square. As well as a gigantic screen and live music stage, the 10-day festival will feature promenade performances, participatory workshops and special takeover days by local cultural organisations including south Asian arts boosters Sampad and carnival specialists ACE Dance and Music. The organisers’ aim? To “conjure the shared moments, magic and memories of 22”. The full programme will be announced on 28 June.
Manchester
International festival
Various venues, 29 June-16 July
Alongside its attention-grabbing big-ticket shows, this biennial event has always featured a packed programme of free entertainment in Festival Square. That cultural hub has relocated for 2023 – it is now sited outside the landmark new Factory International venue – and its riverside open-air stage will host more than 190 artists, bands and DJs over the festival run, including funk-punk veterans A Certain Ratio, South African sensation Nakhane and avant-poppers the Orielles. Yayoi Kusama is bringing a big immersive environment, You, Me and the Balloons, and beyond the square, Ryan Gander’s ambitious art installation, The Find, will scatter collectible coins inscribed with cryptic instructions across Manchester, inviting everyone to be part of a city-wide treasure hunt.
London
River Stage
National Theatre, to 2 July
The 2023 edition of the National Theatre’s free outdoor arts blowout has been in full swing this month but still has two more curated weekends to go. The multidisciplinary Shubbak festival proudly celebrates modern Arab culture, from the politically pro-active Hawiyya Dance Company to the underground soul sounds of Beirut Groove Collective (AKA DJ Ernesto Chahoud). The final weekend sees Hackney Empire’s Young Producers – a shrewd crew of tastemakers aged 14-21 – serve up beatboxing, steel drums, grime and much more.
Greenwich+Docklands international festival
Various locations, 25 August-10 September
The long-running Greenwich+Docklands festival has taken “acts of hope” as its 2023 theme, presenting a bustling schedule of free outdoor theatre, art, dance and circus performances in public spaces to encourage creativity and reflection. Early highlights include Ancient Futures, a DayGlo Thamesmead dance party that takes a sci-fi look at west African folklore, and Cygnus, a quirky nocturnal ballet performed by serene robotic swans at Royal Victoria Dock. Check the website later this month for the full programme.
Animatronic swans in London. Photograph: Florian Ullbrich
Plymouth
British Firework Championships
Plymouth Sound, 16-17 August
Things are about to get lit: the natural amphitheatre of Plymouth Sound provides a dramatic backdrop for the long-running British Firework Championships, which see six professional companies launch their glittering displays from the Mountbatten breakwater while thousands of pyrotechnics fans look on from the shore. Things do not get fired up until after dark but the event lays on family-friendly entertainment from the early evening of both nights, including a funfair, live music and food stalls at favoured viewing location the Hoe, dominated by distinctive local landmark Smeaton’s Tower.
Liverpool
Biennial
Various venues, to 17 September
The UK’s largest festival of contemporary art offers a city-wide programme of free exhibitions, performances, screenings and community events under the banner of “uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things”, celebrating ancestral and indigenous forms of knowledge, wisdom and healing. With more than 30 artists exhibiting in historic buildings, art galleries, museums and public spaces, highlights include a new large-scale multilingual neon work on Stanley Dock and a carnivalesque installation injecting revolutionary spirit into the Liverpool One open-air mall.
Stockton
International riverside festival
Various locations, 3-6 August
This long-running free outdoor shindig sees the market town taken over by local and international artists for a packed family-friendly programme. Highlights include French innovators Bivouac, UK dance troupe Akademi, circus specialists Upswing and Portuguese theatre company Teatro Só.
Dance troupe Akademi in Stockton. Photograph: Justin Jones
Glasgow
Cults & Classics open air cinema
Queens Park Arena, 3-21 July
The community-led Queen’s Park Arena in Glasgow’s Southside has expanded its summer season of free screenings, kicking off with a Back to the Future double bill. After that, the programme alternates between family matinees (including Toy Story, Mary Poppins and Frozen) and more mature evening fare (Scarface, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Braveheart). The amphitheatre is also staging a host of other free activities all summer, including participatory fitness workshops, an open stage for local musicians, the second annual community choir festival, Laugh in the Park comedy festival and storytelling events for kids.
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Cardiff
Tafwyl
Parc Bute, 15-16 July
Taking place in the shadow of Cardiff Castle, this free two-day festival celebrates Welsh-language culture in all its forms. That means more than 40 bands – including melancholy indie rockers Bwncath and heavy brass ensemble Llareggub – playing across three stages, plus the usual food stalls and beer tents, and a wide range of activities for everyone from teens to toddlers. The vibe extends to the rest of Cardiff, with bars, cafes and venues across the city hosting free events in the week leading up to the festival.
Bristol
International balloon fiesta
Ashton Court Estate, 10-13 August
Up, up and away … and it helps to get up early if you want to make the most of Europe’s largest free annual hot-air balloon festival. The first morning mass ascent begins at 6am on the Friday, with up to 100 balloons gracefully lifting off (below). If the family sleep in, there are other mass ascents at 6pm on all four days of the festival (weather permitting). The rest of the time, get up close to tethered historical balloons, chat to aerialists during their pre-flight prep and investigate the nearby market crammed with local stalls and family activities.
Balloons in Bristol. Photograph: Paul Box © framedogs
Belfast
Music in the Parks
Various locations, to 30 September
What better way to celebrate a city’s grassroots music scene than with free performances in some of its greenest spaces? Every Friday and Sunday this summer (and beyond) will see local Belfast talent – including folk groups, jazz trios, contemporary choirs, hip-hop collectives, African drumming ensembles and brass bands – perform afternoon shows, culminating in a grand finale concert at City Hall. The rolling series of gigs encompasses a dozen leafy locations, including urban sanctuary CS Lewis Square.
Leicester
re/action festival
Various locations, 26-27 August
This new-for-2023 festival sets out to examine issues of climate change through the lens of creativity, injecting Leicester town centre with family-friendly pop-up shows, installations and exhibitions. They will include oversized wandering creations piloted by Puppets With Guts, interactive theatre from award-winning Plunge Boom and a recital by the Vegetable Orchestra, who toot on root veg. There will also be a dedicated “re/purpose” area exploring the ways old household items can be given a new lease of life. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/jun/07/pride-month-playlist-best-lgbt-songs | Music | 2018-06-07T10:00:40.000Z | Jim Farber | From Noël Coward to Frank Ocean: the greatest LGBT songs for Pride month | Next June will mark 50 years since the modern gay rights movement ignited, kindled by the Stonewall riots. Much has changed since then. In the original coverage of the riots, the New York Daily News’ headline mocked “Queen Bees Stinging Mad”. The New York Times wouldn’t use the word “gay” for another two decades. Today, newspapers commonly police their pages for the slightest whiff of homophobia. Yet, even in far more benighted times, music conveyed the codes and emotions of gender nonconformists everywhere.
For Pride month, here’s a selective playlist featuring those recordings that best express both gay yearnings and society’s changes, over the last century.
1. Ma Rainey – Prove It On Me (1928)
More than 40 years before Stonewall, the forthright blues belter Ma Rainey delivered a no-nonsense come-on to women, complete with a kiss-off to men, in case you missed her sapphic point.
2. Noël Coward – Mad About the Boy (1932)
For years, this classic Noël Coward song passed as straight in cover versions by female artists from Dinah Washington to Marianne Faithfull. But when the author’s own version finally came out, it made plain the same-sex lusts that inspired a classic.
3. Billy Strayhorn – Lush Life (1938)
Billy Strayhorn. Photograph: David Redfern/Redferns
Though lyricist Billy Strayhorn wrote Lush Life in the 1930s, for a long time he would only perform it in private. Later, it became a jazz standard, with lyrics that pivoted on an antique meaning of the word “gay”. Strayhorn’s clever lyrical dodge gave him both plausible deniability and a pathway towards an eventual truth.
4. Gene Howard – The Man I Love (1962)
In the early 60s, a straight singer who sang with Stan Kenton’s band generously agreed to voice an album intended for a gay audience on which he sincerely serenaded another man with some of the most passionate love songs ever written. It became a cult item, beloved by stars like Frank Sinatra and Liberace, as well as gay audiences on the east and west coasts. In the years since, the album has been unearthed as an early gay treasure.
5. The Kinks – Lola (1970)
Ray Davies’s empathetic, and accepting, story of a cross-dresser proved so compelling, it became a top 10 smash, even in an infinitely more homophobic time.
6. David Bowie – All The Young Dudes, as popularized by Mott the Hoople (1972)
David Bowie. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Glam rock specialized in sending mixed messages about sexual identity. Dudes made the lust of its narrator blatant when he announced his intent to “chase some cat to bed”. The simultaneously proud – and pained – music Bowie wrote to match his words turned Dudes into an anthem for all gay rock fans.
7. Lou Reed – Walk on the Wild Side (1972)
With savvy assistance from Bowie and Mick Ronson, Reed managed to smuggle Andy Warhol’s entire underground – peopled with drag queens, hustlers and drug addicts – right into the heart of the charts.
8. Jobriath – Take Me I’m Yours (1974)
The first “openly gay” rocker who was actually gay, Jobriath embraced BDSM in this cheeky cult fave.
9. Rod Stewart – The Killing of Georgie Parts I and II (1976)
Yes, Stewart’s classic indulged a hoary gay cliche by ending in tragedy. But the deep love he displayed for his doomed friend Georgie – drawn from a true-life story – expressed sentiments otherwise unstated by rock stars of its day.
10. Sylvester – You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) (1978)
With his ecstatic vocal and driving disco beat, Sylvester captured the sound of liberation in a song.
11. The Village People – Go West (1979)
The Village People. Photograph: PA
Just as Scott McKenzie’s San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair) lured hippies west in 1967, this Village People classic functioned as a welcome mat for gay people at the community’s adopted homeland by the bay.
12. Sister Sledge – We Are Family (1979)
This classic redefined the entire LGBT community as its own family, decades before same-sex marriage became, in some places, the law.
13. Elton John – Elton’s Song (1979)
At the commercial nadir of his career – five years after he came out as bisexual and more than a decade before he come out as a gay man – Elton released the most poignant queer song of his career. Co-written with Tom Robinson (of Glad to be Gay fame), Elton’s Song told the sad tale of a young boy’s hopeless crush on another boy. In the recording, the genders in question were blurred, but the accompanying video made them stirringly clear.
14. Pete Townshend – Rough Boys (1980)
Townshend’s randy song, which caught him longing to “bite and kiss” a rough trade punk, exposed the homoeroticism that underlies so much rock’n’roll. It’s found in everything from the phallic guitars to the boys’ club bonding of its classic bands.
15. Diana Ross – I’m Coming Out (1980)
For decades, Miss Ross’s declarative disco smash has served as the ultimate invitation to not only state your identity, but to revel in it.
16. Bronski Beat – Smalltown Boy (1984)
Bronski Beat. Photograph: David Redfern/Redferns
Both the song and video for Boy confronted audiences with the pain and shame of gay bashing.
17. The Smiths – There is a Light That Never Goes Out (1986)
The most poignant depiction of gay miserabilism ever, fired by a once impossible desire.
18. Pet Shop Boys –- It’s a Sin (1987)
Shame, the sad cousin of pride, found cathartic expression in the Pet Shop Boys’ thrilling redefinition of “sin”.
19. Madonna – Vogue (1990)
Madonna. Photograph: Eugene Adebari/Rex/Shutterstock
Yes, Malcolm McLaren appropriated the black gay world of “vogueing” before Madonna did. And RuPaul alluded to it with a far greater authority in Supermodel. But Madonna’s hit reached the largest audience and treated that demimonde with the chic it deserves.
20. REM – Losing My Religion (1991)
At the peak of REM’s fame, a still closeted Michael Stipe wrote a song, matched to a hit video, that contained “the hint of the century” about his true identity. It stands as a classic example of coding in the Bill Clinton-era of “don’t-ask-don’t-tell”.
21. Nirvana – All Apologies (1993)
As the top rock star of his day, it took real balls for Kurt Cobain to assert that “everyone is gay” in this seminal Nirvana song. The singer had a deep identification with the outsider, which made him a hero to gay people. More, Cobain’s song offered a bracing corrective to the macho aspect of rock he abhorred.
22. kd lang – What’s New Pussycat? (1994)
kd lang. Photograph: Paul Natkin/Getty Images
Not only did kd lang become one of the first major pop stars to come out, amid a mini-wave in the early 90s, she did so, in part, by performing one of the randiest odes to a female body part ever. Her take on the campy track turned Pussycat from the ultimate straight man’s leer into a lustful lesbian rallying cry.
23. Vampire Weekend – Diplomat’s Son (2010)
The New York band brought same-sex desire to modern indie rock with a song whose lyrics have the lilt of poetry.
24. Frank Ocean – Forrest Gump (2012)
While Ocean hinted at his bisexuality in his work with Odd Future (in a song like Oldie), he took full ownership on this woozily romantic song found on his official debut solo album, Channel Orange.
25. Mary Lambert – She Keeps Me Warm (2013)
Lambert’s same-sex love song became an urgent rallying cry in the battle for marriage equality when she lent its chorus to the Macklemore and Ryan Lewis smash Same Love.
26. Against Me! – True Trans Soul Rebel (2014)
Against Me! singer Laura Jane Grace. Photograph: Casey Curry
No one captured the anxiety, and bravery, of the transgender experience with more authority than Laura Jane Grace, leader of the punk band Against Me!. Though Laura wasn’t open about her identity at the time the song appeared, the music expressed the feelings she would later write about with unflinching candor in her raw autobiography, Tranny.
27. Perfume Genius – Queen (2014)
With consummate subversion, Perfume Genius turned inside out the antique image of gay people as vampires lurking in the shadows ready to strike the innocent. Queen repurposed that threat as an expression of gay power.
28. Miley Cyrus – Bang Me Box (2015)
The same artist who appropriated twerking for middle America created one of the most raw odes to lesbian sex on record.
29. Kim Petras – I Don’t Want It At All (2017)
When her satirical send-up of young girl greed became a viral hit, Kim Petras set herself up as the first transgender teen idol.
30. Troye Sivan – Bloom (2018)
Though gay pop stars started publicly announcing their sexual identity in significant numbers in the 90s, it would take another two decades before some would make the gender they desire explicit in their lyrics. Troye Sivan epitomized the evolution with Bloom by lionizing the boy he hoped would end his virginity.
This article has been amended on 7 June 2018. Gene Howard was originally called George Howard in error. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jan/03/france.jonhenley | World news | 2006-01-03T00:03:20.000Z | Jon Henley | Mitterrand tops presidential poll | François Mitterrand emerged in an opinion poll yesterday as the Fifth Republic's best president, pipping Charles de Gaulle by a head and the incumbent Jacques Chirac by several lengths.
In a result that said as much about the shortcomings of the man who succeeded him as it did about his own achievements, Mitterrand, whose death 10 years ago this Sunday will be commemorated with a nostalgia fest, won the support of 35% of respondents in a poll for the left-leaning daily Libération.
Despite the scandals that have surfaced since his death, Mitterrand, who led France for 14 years from 1981, finished five points ahead of de Gaulle on 30% and 23 points clear of Mr Chirac on 12%.
Georges Pompidou, president from 1969 to 1974, and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, from 1974 to 1981, managed 7% and 5% respectively in the survey, a representative sample of 952 people carried out by the pollster CSA. Analysts said the result was probably influenced by the current deluge of Mitterrand anniversary books and films and by the dismal fin de régne of Mr Chirac, who is expected to step down next year.
Critics claim Mr Chirac has achieved little in 10 years in power and looked out of touch during a year in which France voted no to the EU constitution and suffered its worst urban violence since 1968. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/07/her-smell-elisabeth-moss-alex-ross-perry-terrible-title-great-film | Film | 2019-09-07T07:00:10.000Z | Guy Lodge | Streaming: Elisabeth Moss in Her Smell – not to be sniffed at | Abad title can be a debilitating handicap to even the best of films: if it makes you wince even to say the thing, it’s that much harder to get invested in watching it. This is a truth that has been learned the hard way by the new film from American independent writer-director Alex Ross Perry: a daring, grungily immersive and quite brilliantly acted character study that has been saddled, for reasons best known to Perry himself, with the buzz-killing moniker Her Smell.
Try telling people, as I have for several months now, that they should be looking out for a terrific film called Her Smell – only to be greeted with grimacing, nose-wrinkling, “her what?” questions and often a swift change of subject. It hasn’t courted much of a crowd: after premiering to strong reviews at the Toronto film festival a year ago, the film eventually secured a tiny release in the States, grossing just over $250,000. UK distributors were particularly slow to bite: finally, Her Smell (Signature, 15) is being released directly to video on demand on Monday, skipping a traditional cinema release. I’m not saying that low profile is all down to the title – the film’s abrasive and challenging in more substantial ways – but it can’t have helped.
In any case, I implore you to overlook the title, not the film, which is so hell-for-leather in its close-up study of a fictitious female rock star – played with thrilling, strung-out bravado by Elisabeth Moss – that you feel a little punch-drunk watching it. It shows up so many musical biopics in the Bohemian Rhapsody vein as the gutless cosplay exercises they are. In case you’re wondering, the olfactory system plays no obvious role in the film, though you can pretty much imagine how Becky Something (Moss) smells as the film introduces her in a mood-swinging backstage frenzy of post-concert adrenaline: sweat, sex and substances, and not in a particularly inviting way.
Becky is the frontwoman of a popular all-girl punk band coming apart at the seams, mostly because she’s coming apart herself. The way Moss plays her, as a whirligig of ego, anger, untended talent and self-loathing, makes Courtney Love look like Taylor Swift. Perry’s film charts Becky’s self-destruction, self-reckoning and tentative self-renewal in five kinetic, unstinting acts, with a kind of updated, pressed-to-the-glass John Cassavetes energy. At over two hours, its deep emotional payoff feels hard-won. Moss should be up for every award going at the year’s end; she almost certainly won’t be.
Watch a trailer for Her Smell.
Perry, for his part, is growing into one of American cinema’s most adventurous, exciting young film-makers, even as UK distributors have largely gone off him. His excellent last film, the wistful but strychnine-laced New York ensemble piece Golden Exits – another less than enticing title – also went straight to streaming here.
Finally, while we’re considering the fates of festival films, this week’s column comes to you from the Venice film festival, where critics are swooning and/or arguing over such big autumn attractions as Todd Phillips’s Joker and Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. If you want a taste of the programme’s less starry side, however, Venice has again teamed up with Festival Scope to launch the Sala Web, where a handful of this year’s sidebar entries are available to stream at home, for the equivalent of €4 each, until 19 September. Take a chance on Tunisian film The Scarecrows, an emotionally raw study of women escaping sex slavery on the Syrian front, or the intriguing, experimental Spanish memory piece Zumiriki. There’s every chance they won’t turn up farther down the road.
Also new to DVD and streaming
Watch a trailer for High Life.
High Life
(Thunderbird, 18)
Claire Denis may be our greatest working auteur, and her first English-language film shores up that claim: an exquisitely apocalyptic sci-fi nightmare, spiked with visceral sexuality and body horror.
Long Shot
(Lionsgate, 15)
An odd-couple romcom that bombed cinemas but deserves a second life. Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen have surprisingly sparky chemistry as a swannish presidential candidate and her schlubby speechwriter.
Only You
(Curzon, 15)
Harry Wootliff’s polished, autumnal debut is an essentially traditional relationship drama about a Glasgow couple struggling to conceive, but actors Laia Costa and Josh O’Connor lend it special emotional ballast.
Beats
(Altitude, 15)
Centred on two Scottish lads united by small-town ennui and a love of techno, Brian Welsh’s 90s-set coming-of-age tale is a euphoric treat for rave-era nostalgists and a scrappy charmer for everyone else. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/01/the-guardian-view-on-digital-only-archives-material-items-still-matter-to-historians | Opinion | 2024-01-01T18:00:37.000Z | Editorial | The Guardian view on digital-only archives: material items still matter to historians | Editorial | In the 1980s, as sales of video recorders boomed, a trade sprang up in converting grainy old 8mm home movies of festive celebrations and first steps to VHS tapes. Later, camcorder footage of family holidays was transferred on to DVDs. Those, too, have had their day. But even those who now hold their childhood memories in digital files on their laptops know they face the risk of obsolescence. Conversion to more modern formats can prove more complicated than it looks.
Digitising archives brings huge benefits – even more so when they are public rather than private. Files can be duplicated and distributed, reducing the risk that they will be lost entirely through physical damage such as fire or flooding. Studying digital versions reduces wear and tear on the originals. Scholars from around the world can easily access records and collaborate with others elsewhere. The International Dunhuang Project, for example, has catalogued and digitised items such as manuscripts and textiles from the Mogao caves in China. Founded by the British Library almost 30 years ago, it now includes 22 institutions across 12 countries.
But the news that the Ministry of Justice is proposing to scan the 110 million wills it holds and destroy all but a handful of the originals after 25 years has appalled historians. The consultation presents this as a way of providing easier access for genealogists and other researchers. But that explains the digitisation, not the destruction of the paper copies. The ministry notes that the change would save around £4.5m a year while, it argues, retaining all the essential information.
Scholars disagree. Physical records can themselves carry important information – the kind of ink or paper used may be part of the story that historians are uncovering. Errors are often made in scanning. And digital copies are arguably more vulnerable to damage than material items, just in different ways. The cyber-attack on the British Library in October has prevented scholars from accessing digitised materials it holds: imagine if researchers could not return to the originals. Even without bad actors, digitised information can easily be lost within a few decades. Much will depend on what formats the Ministry of Justice chooses and what safeguards are put in place.
The government says that it will save the original wills of “famous people for historic record”, such as those of Charles Darwin or Diana, Princess of Wales. It is extraordinarily arrogant to assume that we know who will matter to posterity. Mary Seacole, the pioneering nurse who now appears on the national curriculum, was largely forgotten in the UK for almost a century.
Some of the most compelling historical research of recent years has focused on individuals who in their own time were footnotes at best, or overlooked entirely, and has required a painstaking search for even scraps of information. As one historian, Melanie Backe-Hansen, notes, the wills of ordinary people are arguably more valuable than those of the famous because there are so few other sources regarding them: “Wills can provide enormous amounts of information not only for family history, but for public and social history,” she adds.
The digitisation of old documents is a valuable, even essential measure. But to destroy the paper copies, once they have been scanned, is – as the historian Sir Richard Evans has warned – not a matter of efficiency, but of vandalism. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/apr/01/anthony-joshua-taken-the-distance-but-beats-jermaine-franklin-on-points | Sport | 2023-04-01T22:59:06.000Z | Donald McRae | Anthony Joshua taken the distance but beats Jermaine Franklin on points | Anthony Joshua won his first fight in more than two years with a comprehensive points victory over a brave and resilient Jermaine Franklin. The gritty American disappointed Joshua’s supporters, who had been hoping for a sensational win by knockout, by lasting the full 12 rounds late on Saturday night.
All three judges scored the fight in Joshua’s favour by accurately decisive margins of 117-111, twice, and 118-111. Despite Franklin’s innate toughness, Joshua had expected to win the fight in far more thrilling style. Instead he landed the overwhelming majority of telling blows but could not force a stoppage.
It was a decent but mildly underwhelming performance from the former world champion who lacks some of his old fire and conviction. Joshua is no longer a brutal finisher. Perhaps three defeats in his previous five bouts, before he faced Franklin, have left their mark and made him more apprehensive.
Joshua was cautious at the start, taking control behind his jab, but Franklin looked untroubled amid the intense atmosphere. He had won the round but Joshua’s nose began to bleed and needed a little attention from his corner. In the second, a long right hand from Joshua had Franklin shaking his head and sticking out his tongue in goading contempt. Joshua landed a more meaningful combination which made Franklin fire back. But the American looked less comfortable when Joshua nailed him with a heavy right hand and then, later in the round, went to the body with thudding blows.
Anthony Joshua beats Jermaine Franklin by unanimous decision – as it happened
Read more
Joshua was winning the rounds clearly, with his jab dominating. But Franklin was not cowed and at the end of the fourth he backed Joshua up against the ropes and let his hands fly with limited success.
The difference in height, weight, power and sheer pedigree was meant to be conclusive. At Friday’s weigh-in, Joshua had scaled 255lb, the heaviest he has ever been in a professional career which began almost 10 years ago. Franklin weighed 234lb – 23lb lighter than he had been when he suffered his first defeat against Dillian Whyte last November. The intent of both men seemed obvious then. Joshua planned to bludgeon his opponent into submission while Franklin hoped to stay out of too much danger.
But Franklin proved he had the appetite for combat. As they reached the halfway point, Joshua’s shimmering white trunks were stained a pinkish hue from the blood which still trickled from his nose while there was a slight swelling across Franklin’s right cheekbone. Early in the eighth a series of fast and shuddering punches from Joshua, with sharp left jabs followed by heavy right hands, jolted Franklin’s head back. They forced the American to try to smother the bigger man with grappling clinches. It was messy but it helped Franklin avoid more punishment.
Anthony Joshua celebrates victory over a dejected Jermaine Franklin. Photograph: James Chance/Getty Images
The referee, Marcus McDonnell, eventually had to step in to instruct both fighters to stop their excessive grappling in the ninth. They took heed of the warning and the following round was perhaps the best of the fight. Three big right hands from Joshua hurt Franklin in blurring succession and it looked as if he was readying himself for a concussive finish. Another right uppercut rocked Franklin but, admirably, he fired back as both men threw flurries of punches. A hard right and left hook from Joshua again won him the round – only for Franklin to finally shade the 11th while connecting with a meaty blow to Joshua’s head.
Joshua came out for the last round looking for the knockout but Franklin withstood the attack. Fighting broke out again briefly after the final bell, before they were separated, in a sign that Joshua harboured some frustration at his failure to close the show in clinical style.
Joshua, who at 6ft 6in is also four inches taller, with a five-inch reach advantage, had used his physical attributes to secure victory. The former world champion has shared the ring with fighters of the calibre of Wladimir Klitschko and Oleksandr Usyk, while Franklin’s best opponents, apart from Whyte, have been more humble figures such as Rydell Booker, Jerry Forest and Pavel Sour – and the American lost some rounds against that mediocre opposition.
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If it was clear that the two men operate at contrasting levels, the disparity in class was not sufficiently wide to earn Joshua the spectacular win he craved.
Any muted clamour for Joshua to fight Tyson Fury or Deontay Wilder now seems premature. Joshua has just begun working with Derrick James, his blunt and highly respected trainer in Dallas, Texas, and it would make more sense for their work to continue steadily before they are thrust into a heavily hyped showdown with Fury or Wilder. A more likely path for Joshua would be to next face Whyte, whom he has beaten before, and to build towards a far more difficult defining test much later in the year.
This winning performance against Franklin told us nothing new about Joshua. He is a cut above routine opposition but a very long road still stretches before him if he is to become a world heavyweight champion again. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/mar/06/grayson-perry--depict-brexit-tribes-rival-leave-remain-vases | Art and design | 2017-03-06T17:46:44.000Z | Matthew Weaver | Grayson Perry to depict 'Brexit tribes' on rival leave and remain vases | Leave voters, including a soldier, a mother expecting a “Brexit baby” due nine months after the vote, a rare chicken breeder, a witch, and a hammer-wielding Nigel Farage fan, have all been chosen to represent the various faces of Brexit on a new vase by the artist Grayson Perry.
The 108cm-tall leave pot, and a symbolically smaller remain version, illustrate what Perry calls the “two great tribes of our time”. They are to be exhibited side by side to mark the first anniversary of Britain’s divisive vote to leave the EU.
“These are pots to stand on the mantle shelf of Britain,” Perry announced as he began seeking volunteers to appear on the pots at the start of his crowdsourcing project.
Stencils applied for my frieze of leavers #leavepot pic.twitter.com/KsKir5Je3v
— Grayson Perry (@Alan_Measles) February 4, 2017
Perry’s progress updates reveal he has selected 17 leavers and 11 remainers for the rival vases. The chosen voters have not been officially unveiled while Perry continues to work on the pots as part of a forthcoming Channel 4 programme called What Britain Wants. But their identities can be gleaned by cross-checking photos submitted online against silhouette stencils applied by Perry to the pots shown in clips he has released.
Dave Mines: “It was a cry of freedom.” Photograph: Elaine Preece
The selected leavers are a defiant group, typified by Dave Mines, a 73-year-old retired ambulance commander, who features prominently on the pot brandishing a hammer in his back garden in Chesterfield. “It felt like wielding a hammer when we voted to leave. It was a cry of freedom, for God’s sake,” he said.
Mines is a devoted fan of the former Ukip leader. “I’ve been watching Nigel Farage speeches on YouTube. That one man has done more for the country than any government since the second world war and he’s not even in parliament.”
Mines, whom Perry nicknamed Thor as he selected his picture, said he was delighted to feature on the pot. “That’s my immortality right there,” Mines said.
Alongside Mines is Daryl Robinson, a lance bombardier who has served in Iraq and the Falkland Islands. “That’s me,” he said of the stencilled outline shown in one of the clips. “It’ll be nice to see my face on something I feel strongly about. I voted leave because I can’t stand how the country is at the moment. It’s time for a change and this seemed like a way to kickstart it.
Grayson's back and this week he needs the help of the remainers. #RemainPot T&Cs here: https://t.co/iYXxTunHzq cc: @Alan_Measles pic.twitter.com/Udx5wOKwEP
— Channel 4 (@Channel4) January 31, 2017
“If people want to dress up in women’s clothes, support Donald Trump, or vote leave or remain, just let them be.”
A picture of Ann Flowers crouching in a wood also appears to have made the leave pot. “I voted to leave, but I am not a racist, I’m a witch,” she wrote in her submission. “It’s good to know what side witches are on,” Perry said in a clip posted by Channel 4.
Christina Laben: “I’m proud for people to know I voted leave.” Photograph: Christina Laben
Next to Flowers is a stencil of Christina Laben in a floppy hat and wearing a “crazy chicken lady” T-shirt. Laben, 60, breeds rare hens in Carmarthen in south-west Wales. “I breed them my way,” she said. “I’m proud for people to know I voted to leave. I’d like to go there and smack the arse of the man who thinks he can just appoint himself and tell me what to do. I think the outcome will be super.”
Also selected is Lois Merrick, a horserider “riding into a beautiful sunset of independence”.
Perhaps the most eye-catching voter on the leave pot is art teacher Liz Jackson, who submitted a picture of herself with “Brexit baby” scrawled across her womb as she holds aloft a union jack. The baby is due exactly nine months after the EU referendum. “I hope Brexit baby grows up in a less polarised and divided society,” said Jackson, who lives in Colchester, Essex.
Liz Jackson: “I hope Brexit baby grows up in a less polarised society.” Photograph: Victor Dabrowa
“Submitting my photo was a bit scary – I had seen lots of Brexiteers being verbally attacked and harassed. But I decided early on that I would rather speak up for those who were too afraid to.”
She said she was “ecstatic” that she and her unborn child would feature on the leave pot. “The photo is symbolic of new beginnings. I am very optimistic about the future of an independent UK.”
In front of Jackson’s stencil is David Burns, a wheelchair user from Dorset, who describes himself as “a self-unemployed artist”. In his submission he wrote: “Struggling to make a living is an everyday occurrence, that’s why I voted leave – how much harder can it be.”
Those on the remain pot are much more pessimistic. Jo Barber, 30, a wheelchair user who looks set to feature on the remain pot, is “terrified that by separating we are heading towards another world war”.
@Alan_Measles #remainpot Still furious. Forced to make a choice we were not equipped for. Ashamed by the legacy left to our young people. pic.twitter.com/NnSPfnzTKM
— Gordon White (@singlecoiluk) February 3, 2017
Gordon White, 53, who repairs guitars in Leeds, said: “I’m still furious. I shout at the television and the radio much more than I ever did before. We were forced to make a decision that nobody was qualified to make.”
He is excited that he appears to be on the remain pot holding a guitar, but anxious about how it will turn out. “I’m worried that the leave pot is going to look a lot more fun. The remain one is going to have a lot of miserable-faced people like myself whingeing and complaining.”
Day 22 started sticking on frieze of remainers pic.twitter.com/rQnjAvVGcC
— Grayson Perry (@Alan_Measles) February 7, 2017
The bottom of the remain vase looks set to feature an image of Barbara Hulse struggling to get out of bed. “Brexit has left me feeling vulnerable, isolated and ashamed,” she tweeted.
Nathan Barnard: “Grayson is one of my biggest inspirations, socially and artistically.” Photograph: Nathan Barnard
Nathan Barnard, 19, from Shropshire, who describes himself as a transgender man, was in tears after the result. But he is thrilled that a photo of him with a pot of his own was selected by his hero. “It is amazing. Grayson is one of my biggest inspirations both socially and artistically as I’m an aspiring ceramicist.”
Rachel Green: “There’s such a huge divide.” Photograph: Rachel Green
Kate Maravan, a dancer and actor, also confessed to weeping after the result. But in her submission, she says: “I’ve become extremely frustrated at being labelled a remoaner, snowflake, metropolitan elite.”
Rachel Green, who features holding an eagle, hopes there will be a second referendum. The 45-year-old support worker from Sheffield is excited by Perry’s project but doubts it can help unite the country. “There is such a huge divide. I’m not sure it can be reconciled,” she says.
Perry himself said that “anxiety seems to be a theme” of the submissions from remainers. But there are things both remainers and leavers can agree on. Given a choice of six colours, both sides chose blue for their respective vases. And they all chose the symbol of a teapot to decorate the pot.
The finished pots will appear in an exhibition of Perry’s work at London’s Serpentine Gallery (pdf) from 8 June to 10 September. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/jun/04/bon-appetit-how-i-rediscoved-the-joys-of-french-cuisine | Food | 2019-06-04T12:44:45.000Z | Felicity Cloake | Bon appétit! How I rediscovered the joys of French cuisine | Ican measure out my childhood in creme brulee. Every special occasion in the early 90s was celebrated with a trip to the same Soho brasserie in London for onion soup and steak frites, always culminating in the same pièce de résistance, a little pot of custard with an eminently smashable sugar top. In the summer, we would go over on the ferry and eat the same thing at the source, to a Johnny Hallyday soundtrack.
In this, we were part of a fine British tradition. Long before Elizabeth David shook up domestic cuisine with French Country Cooking in 1951, 19th-century cookbooks were peppered with recipes “in the French fashion”, while the continental restaurants of Soho and Fitzrovia in London were a magnet for Victorian artists and bohemians.
Yet although French food has maintained its traditional status at the top of the tree – think of a fancy restaurant and I bet your mind conjures an image straight out of Ratatouille – our passion has been cooling since the turn of the millennium.
It was the pesto I noticed first, a sludgy green interloper in the door of the fridge at home, the vanguard of an Italian invasion that would eventually see the Naked Chef cosy up to Keith Floyd on the kitchen bookshelf, and the butter dish on the dinner table replaced by extra virgin olive oil (which, my dad’s anxious face suggested, was expensive stuff, not to be wasted on teenagers).
It wasn’t only Italian food elbowing the French stuff out of the picture. Suddenly, every pub did Thai or Tex-Mex; next to fiery green curries and technicolour chimichangas, all that solid, bourgeois cooking started to look very vieux chapeau. Who wanted to sit demurely spreading chilly pate on toast when you could eat chilli-spiked nachos with your hands, or tear into a gourmet pizza topped with rocket and parma ham?
The food writer Diana Henry remembers the moment well: “I was cooking out of Raymond Blanc and loving French bistro food and then it all changed.” She attributes this partially to the influence of places such as the River Café, but also to a collective move away from the cream- and butter-heavy school of French cooking historically popular in this country in favour of lighter, sunnier flavours.
At university, free at last to choose for myself, I too rebelled, scorning the creme brulee on offer at the local branch of Pierre Victoire in favour of a Japanese restaurant called Edamame, where I saved up for weeks to nibble bright-green soya beans straight from the pod. Needless to say, this – and the raw fish that followed – blew my tiny mind, just as the accompanying wasabi blew my sinuses. French food felt beige and bland in comparison. Familiarity breeds contempt, however unfair that may be.
Nostalgia eventually saw me crawl back into its buttery embrace, however. Last year, I decided to write a book – One More Croissant for the Road – just so I could spend the summer cycling around France in the name of “research”, the latest in a long line of Britons hopelessly smitten by French culinary savoir-faire.
But those six weeks pedalling around l’Hexagone made it clear that I wasn’t that familiar with French cuisine after all. For one thing, it took a while to re-adjust my palate – so thoroughly acclimatised to hot sauce and kimchi, anchovies and miso – to the quieter, subtler pleasures of the provincial restaurant menu, characterised from Brittany to Burgundy by fish in white sauce with stewed green beans (I don’t think I even tasted garlic on my trip – I mean really tasted it – until I reached Marseille).
Then there were the myriad hyperlocal specialities I had never even heard of, such as spicy tomato macaroni with braised beef and sausage in Sète on the south coast, or the creamy deep-fried tripe eaten with relish in Lyon. These are now as much a part of my mental image of French food as old friends such as the moules marinières or cherry clafoutis below. New discoveries were as thrilling as the classics were comforting – I thought I was au fait with French food, when I had barely scratched the surface.
I am home again now and happily reunited with my collection of chilli oils. Fortunately for my further education, though, I am not the only one with a renewed appetite for French flavours: Olive magazine tipped new-wave French as a trend to watch in 2019, a prediction borne out by restaurant openings including Flamboree!, an Alsatian tarte flambée joint on Old Street in east London; Bob Bob Cité, which serves up steak tartare and snails in parsley butter a mile away in Leadenhall; and La Guingette, a little piece of Paris in Bristol. Bistrotheque, in Bethnal Green, east London, is due to open a Manchester outpost later this summer.
With French food firmly back on the British menu, this feels like the right time to get back in the kitchen and remind ourselves why we fell in love with it in the first place.
Five French classics from One More Croissant for the Road
Omelette soufflée à la Mère Poulard
Photograph: Bonchan/Getty Images/iStockphoto
For all its carefully cultivated mystique, the world’s most famous omelette is surprisingly easy to reproduce – it just takes a bit of elbow grease (or an electric whisk). I haven’t suggested any fillings, as adding extra ingredients to the pan will knock the air out of the eggs, but a few chopped herbs on top are very welcome. You can serve fried potatoes, cured ham, sautéed mushrooms or foie gras, if you must, on the side.
Per omelette
3 eggs
A pinch of salt
Oil, to grease
Generous 1 tbsp cold butter, cut into small dice
Crack the eggs into a large bowl with the salt and begin whisking vigorously. Once they are fairly foamy, oil a heavy-based frying pan, about 20cm (8in) wide, and put it on a medium heat.
Keep whisking the eggs until they are very thick and bubbly, almost like a mousse. This will probably take just under four minutes with a hand whisk.
Pour the mixture into the pan and leave to set until it begins to come away from the side of the pan, then gently loosen the edges with a spatula and slide the butter underneath, shaking to distribute it evenly beneath the omelette.
Once it is deep golden underneath, but still foamy and wet above, carefully shake the omelette on to a plate, fold it over and serve immediately.
Moules marinières
Photograph: Shaiith/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Such a simple dish, but such a delicious one, with the added theatre of the shelling operation, of which I never tire. I like to use Norman cider and drink the rest with it, but you can use a dry white wine if you prefer. Chunks of baguette or (or preferably and) hot, salty fries to mop up the liquid are, however, mandatory.
Serves 2
1kg mussels
4 long shallots, finely chopped
300ml dry cider or white wine, eg Muscadet
50g creme fraiche
A small bunch of flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
Baguette or chips, to serve (or both)
Rinse the mussels in cold running water, then give them a good scrub and scrape to remove any barnacles or dirt. Discard any with broken shells and give any open ones a sharp tap; if they don’t close, throw them away, too. Pull out the beards – the fibrous appendages with which the mussels attach themselves to ropes or rocks – by pulling them sharply towards the hinge end of the mussel. If you want to prep them ahead, leave them in a sink of cold water until ready to cook.
Put the chopped shallots and the cider or wine into a large pan and cook gently for 10 minutes, then turn up the heat to medium-high.
Drain the mussels and tip into the pan. Cover and cook until most of them have opened – about three minutes.
Add the creme fraiche and put the lid back on for 30 seconds to allow it to melt. Add the parsley and shake the pan well to distribute, then season gently and serve immediately, discarding any mussels that remain closed.
Salade Lyonnaise
Photograph: Alleko/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Most of the ingredients for this bistro classic are readily available, although you may have to go to a greengrocer’s for a frisée lettuce. (Other bitter leaves, such as chicory, or the traditional dandelion greens, would also work well. At a pinch, you could use a crunchy mixed salad.) Leave out the lardons if you would prefer to keep it vegetarian– fry a finely chopped shallot at that stage instead, to flavour the vinaigrette.
Serves 4
½ a slim baguette (ficelle, if you can get it)
Olive oil, to drizzle
1 garlic clove, cut in half
150g smoked bacon lardons
1 tbsp dijon mustard
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
4 eggs
2 heads of frisée lettuce/curly endive, washed and dried well (see above)
Preheat the oven to 200C/180C fan/gas mark 6 and cut the bread into thin slices. Drizzle with oil and arrange on a baking sheet. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes until crisp, then rub with the garlic and set aside.
Fry the lardons in a dash of oil over a medium-high heat until bronzed and crisp. Stir in the mustard and then the vinegar, scraping the pan, and set aside.
Bring a large pan of water to the boil. Crack the eggs into ramekins, then slide them into the water and reduce to a simmer. Cook for three minutes, then scoop out and drain on kitchen paper.
Rub a salad bowl with garlic and tear in the salad leaves. Add the contents of the pan and toss together. Divide between four bowls and top each with a poached egg.
Cassoulet
Photograph: Felicity Cloake
This dish is the star turn of Gascon cuisine, an apologetically rich gratin of beans and animal fat, studded with various meats and served hotter than the southern sun. The great food writer Richard Olney called it “a voluptuous monument to rustic tradition”.
Serves 8
1kg haricot beans, soaked in cold water overnight
1 onion, peeled and halved
1 large carrot, cut into chunks
1 head of garlic, unpeeled, plus 4 cloves
2 sprigs of thyme
2 sprigs of parsley
1 bay leaf
1kg slab of pork belly, bone in
4 confit duck legs and their fat (reserve any jelly you find in the tin)
6 Toulouse sausages
300ml white wine
Salt, to season
Drain the beans well and put them into a very large, ovenproof casserole dish. Pour in water until it comes about 3cm above the top of the beans, then add the onion, carrot, whole head of garlic, herbs and pork belly (if you need to spoon out some water at this point, that is OK – you can top the dish up during cooking). Bring to the boil, then cover and simmer for about two hours until the beans are just tender, but not falling apart.
Meanwhile, fry the duck and sausages separately in plenty of the duck fat until crisp and golden.
Once the beans are ready, remove the onion and herbs and discard. Scoop out the pork belly and, once cool enough to handle, cut into chunks, discarding the bones.
Squeeze the garlic cloves from their skins and mash to a paste with 4 tablespoons of duck fat and the fresh garlic cloves. Preheat the oven to 160C/140C fan/gas mark 3.
Drain the beans, reserving the liquid and seasoning it well – this will be your sauce. Grease the bottom of the casserole with a little of the duck fat mix, then tip in the beans, the rest of the duck fat and all the meat, plus any jelly from the duck confit. Mix well, then top with the wine and the bean cooking liquid to cover.
Bake for about 2 hours, keeping an eye on it – once a crust has formed, stir this back into the cassoulet, repeating as necessary. By the end of the cooking time, you should have a thick, golden crust.
Allow to cool slightly before serving with a simply dressed green salad.
Cherry clafoutis
Photograph: Martiapunts/Getty Images/iStockphoto
This is the creamy, chunky version that you will find in Limousin bakeries, rather than the crisp clafoutis served hot for dessert in restaurants and after dinner. Sturdy and surprisingly portable, it is a good choice for a picnic at the height of cherry season, although make sure you warn people to watch out for stones. Leaving them in may seem like the height of laziness, but in fact it adds to the fruit’s flavour, as well as making life considerably easier for the cook. (The use of demerara sugar is a tip from the food writer Sarah Beattie, who lives in the south-west of France.)
Serves 6-8
Butter, to grease
3 tbsp demerara sugar
600g cherries
4 eggs
100g caster sugar
A pinch of salt
100g plain flour
500ml whipping cream
150ml milk
A dash of vanilla extract
50ml rum or brandy
Grease a deep roasting dish about 25 x 20cm (10in x 8in) wide with butter and sprinkle with the demerara sugar. Preheat the oven to 180C/160C fan/gas mark 4.
Remove the stalks from the cherries, but don’t bother to stone them unless you are feeling very energetic. Put them in the base of the dish – they should cover it in a single layer. Eat any extra cherries.
Whisk together the eggs, caster sugar and salt, then whisk in the flour until smooth, followed by the cream and milk. Finally, stir in the vanilla and rum or brandy.
Pour on top of the cherries, carefully put into the hot oven and bake for 50 to 65 minutes until firm on top with a slight wobble in the middle.
Allow to cool to warm before serving – although it is also very good cold.
One More Croissant for the Road by Felicity Cloake is published by Mudlark. To order a copy for £11.49 (RRP £14.99), go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK P&P over £15; online orders only. Phone orders minimum P&P of £1.99. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/nov/18/i-dont-watch-television-how-two-brian-coxes-stumped-one-hotel-receptionist | Culture | 2022-11-18T16:35:19.000Z | Tobi Thomas | ‘I don’t watch television’: how two Brian Coxes stumped one hotel receptionist | It adds a whole new meaning to double booking. Or perhaps it’s more of a mathematical problem: solve Brian Cox squared? But when the question was raised by a hotel receptionist, it was left to an actor and a physicist to find an answer.
Brian Cox, the former musician turned physics professor, was the first to encounter the problem when attempting to get a key to his room in the hotel in which Brian Cox, the Scottish actor best known for starring in Succession, was also staying before a joint TV appearance.
Speaking to BBC Breakfast on Friday, the two men explained what had happened the previous day when attempting to check in.
“Well, last night was very confusing,” the actor Brian Cox said. “Because Brian arrived at the hotel and [they] said there are two Brian Coxes, so you’ve got two rooms.
“And he said: ‘No, no, there’s only one, but I think there might be another Brian Cox,’ to which the hotel worker replied: ‘We can’t have two Brian Coxes.’”
The physicist Brian Cox, 54, then chimed in, saying: “They wouldn’t check me in!”
The actor added: “They wouldn’t check him in, so he had to use his assistant’s name.”
The physicist said: “I had to change my name. They couldn’t do it on their computer system. They didn’t believe me. And I got a picture up on my phone and said: ‘Look, this is Brian Cox, he’ll be coming later, and then this one …’ and he said: ‘I know neither of you, I don’t watch television.’”
The actor Brian Cox, who first gained recognition for his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre, has previously revealed he was initially extremely annoyed at the prospect of having to share his name with another celebrity.
In a Guardian interview with both Brian Coxes earlier this year, the actor said: “It annoyed me initially – but has been such a great lesson – to find someone who is extraordinarily successful with the same name as me. It irked me at first, then I thought: it’s not important.
“I mean, we have the same name, but then something comes into play where you go: ‘Well, it’s only a name.’ So it has been wonderful meeting you, Brian, because it’s proved that name doesn’t matter. I’m very pleased that we’ve got the same name, but ultimately it’s just one of those curiously strange accidents.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/nov/30/poorer-students-over-1000-worse-off-this-year-warns-ifs | Money | 2022-11-30T06:00:09.000Z | Sally Weale | Poorer students over £1,000 worse off this year, warns IFS | England’s poorest students will be more than £1,000 worse off this academic year than the last, according to a new analysis that warns of “significant hardship for many this winter”.
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), the reduction – which means students from the poorest families will be £125 out of pocket each month – is due to the falling value of maintenance loans, which students take out to cover their living costs.
Maintenance loans are adjusted in line with inflation forecasts rather than inflation itself. Because inflation has been significantly higher than forecast, students are being hit harder by the cost-of-living crisis than previously thought.
“While others are benefiting from extra government support, students have been left out in the cold,” said IFS senior research economist and author of the report, Kate Ogden. “Merely because of errors in inflation forecasts, the poorest students will be more than £1,000 worse off this academic year than in 2020-21. This could lead to significant hardship for many this winter.”
The report warns that the cuts in support will not only affect students this year, but potentially for years to come. “There is no mechanism in place for these cuts ever to be undone, as past forecast errors are not considered when the adjustment in entitlements for the following year is determined.
“This means that – unless and until policy changes – any cuts will stay in place. Indeed, if the government continues to use out-of-date inflation forecasts for uprating, we expect a small further cut in the real value of entitlements next academic year.”
The IFS’s warning comes after a survey by the Office for National Statistics last week found half of students in England were already struggling with financial difficulties. A quarter were taking on additional debts and three in 10 were skipping lectures and tutorials in order to cut costs.
More than nine in 10 students (91%) said they were worried about the cost of living, 45% said their mental health had deteriorated as a result during the autumn term, and nearly one in five said they had considered pausing their degree until next year.
According to the IFS analysis, the real value of maintenance entitlements is now at its lowest level in seven years. If forecasts had been accurate, students from the poorest families studying outside London and living away from home would be entitled to £11,190 in living cost support – about £1,500 more than they are actually receiving.
A co-author of the IFS report, Ben Waltmann, said: “Using forecast inflation to uprate maintenance loan entitlements makes sense, but having no mechanism to correct errors makes no sense at all.
“The government should ensure maintenance loans are uprated consistently rather than allowing a large and essentially random reduction in the value of loans to become baked in.”
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We recognise the financial challenges students face with the rise in global inflation. That is why we have continued to increase the amount students can access through loans and grants for living and other costs every year.”
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The cost-of-living crisis is also hitting the recruitment and retention of trainee teachers, according to a survey by the National Association of School-Based Teacher Trainers.
Nearly half (47%) of initial teacher training providers who took part in the survey said trainees had already quit this year because of the cost of living, especially rising travel costs, and nearly all (96%) providers were worried that more would follow.
Meanwhile, strike action by 70,000 members of the University and College Union will resume at 150 universities on Wednesday over pay, working conditions and pensions. It follows two days of strike action last week, and the UCU has already warned of further industrial action in the new year, failing an improved offer from employers.
The UCU called for a reversal of pension cuts for members of the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), after the latest monitoring report found the scheme was £5.6bn in surplus, up from the £14.1bn deficit cited in the 2020 valuation. The UCU’s general secretary, Jo Grady, said: “The USS pension scheme is going from strength to strength and there remains no credible reason why benefits should not be restored.”
In a separate dispute, sixth-form teachers who are members of the National Education Union are also due to go on strike at 77 colleges across England on Wednesday in pursuit of an above-inflation pay rise. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/18/jeremy-corbyn-antisemitism-claims-ludicrous-and-wrong | Politics | 2015-08-17T23:00:53.000Z | Rowena Mason | Jeremy Corbyn says antisemitism claims 'ludicrous and wrong' | Labour leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn has dismissed “ludicrous and wrong” suggestions he would knowingly have associated with Holocaust deniers, as he broke his silence about accusations he has past links to people with antisemitic views.
Asked about the allegations, Corbyn said he did attend a few meetings some years ago of a group called Deir Yassin Remembered, founded by Holocaust denier Paul Eisen. However, Corbyn said Eisen certainly did not hold those views publicly at the time and he would never have associated with the group if he had known.
Corbyn gave the explanation as he was grilled by Channel 4 News for the first time since the Jewish Chronicle published a front page editorial saying he had questions to answer about alleged links with people who have used antisemitic rhetoric.
The Labour leadership frontrunner said: “I have no contact now whatsoever with Paul Eisen and Deir Yassin Remembered. I did attend a number of events concerning Deir Yassin Remembered some years ago, I think two or three of them.” Deir Yassin was a Palestinian Arab village near Jerusalem where there was a historic massacre.
Speaking to Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News, Jeremy Corbyn strongly denies having links to the self-professed Holocaust denier Paul Eisen
The questions first arose after Eisen wrote a blog post, saying Corbyn had attended some of his annual commemorations and once got his chequebook out for the group. Corbyn said any donations would only have been throwing coins into a collection bucket at a meeting.
“Fifteen years ago [Eisen] was not a Holocaust denier,” said the Labour leadership frontrunner. “Had he been a Holocaust denier, I would have had absolutely nothing to do with him. I was moved by the plight of people who had lost their village in Deir Yassin.”
Corbyn said: “Holocaust denial is vile and wrong. The Holocaust was the most vile part of our history. The Jewish people killed by the Nazi Holocaust were the people who suffered the most in the 20th century.”
He said he regretted giving any money if Eisen was a Holocaust denier at the time.
Corbyn was also asked about having met Raed Salah, saying he had been unaware that the cleric had been convicted of racist incitement involving the medieval blood libel that Jewish people use the blood of children to make bread.
“We had quite a long conversation and I made my views very clear. He did not at any stage utter any antisemitic remarks to me. Had he been convicted at that time then I’m surprised the Israeli government allowed him to travel.”
Asked if he made “misjudgments”, Corbyn said: “You’re putting a lot of words into my mouth about misjudgments. Any form of racism is wrong, the need to talk to people to bring about a peace process is absolutely right.”
The interview was broadcast as Corbyn addressed a packed meeting at Ealing in west London.
Earlier, he spoke to Labour List about his view that the party’s elections should be annual and its autumn conference given “more authority” in policy making.
He said “economic policy, environmental policy, constitutional issues” should be approached with “open conventions”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/11/thinking-of-going-to-a-christmas-market-maybe-dont | Opinion | 2023-12-11T07:00:12.000Z | Emma Beddington | Thinking of going to a Christmas market? Maybe don’t | Emma Beddington | ‘I
f you’re thinking of going to York Christmas market on a Saturday,” says an exasperated local on TikTok, “can you just not?” I thought instantly of my friend E, a peaceable, gentle woman – a therapist! – who is driven to seething rage by the appearance of the first chalets. Everyone I know here is feeling the same Scroogery, muttering in stark horror: “carnage”, “crazy”, “never”.
Those of us who live in York are not easily spooked; we’re used to dodging the flailing swords and booming faux-Norse utterances of historical re-enactors, fighty racegoers and crying, shoeless hens, shedding whisps of pink boa. But the market, with its shuffling hordes stuck in a bottleneck outside Claire’s because someone decided to try on a Viking helmet, 40-deep queues for a plastic beaker of mulled wine and man asking for £2 for a selfie with his plastic dinosaur, has broken us.
Keep away, you may say, but what if we want to go to the bank? (Silly, yes, no one wants to go to the bank, it’s just a person in a lanyard consulting exactly the same website as you and coming to the same baffled, impotent conclusions.) Prepare to be assaulted by synthetic cinnamon, Wham! and wet anoraks. It was massively overcrowded last year, but so far 2023 seems even busier.
It’s not just York: the UK has gone Christmas market bananas. Lincoln, one of the “oldest” (1982), has been cancelled after crowd numbers reached 320,000 over four days last year – far over its ideal 250,000 limit. People commenting on the York TikTok video write that Manchester is “deadlock”, Edinburgh “a nightmare”, and other cheery festive words.
I know I shouldn’t begrudge anyone a living or a moment of joy, but we’re not Cologne or Strasbourg, with crisp, frosty weather, gingerbread delights and charming tree ornaments carved by fifth-generation artisans. We’ve just flung up some half-hearted chalets in the rain and hoped for the best. Can’t we revive our own time-honoured festive shopping tradition: panicking over scarves in a department store hotter than the core of the Earth, then giving up and going to the pub?
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/dec/16/matthew-bourne-swan-lake-review-sadlers-wells-little-prince-ballet-review | Stage | 2018-12-16T08:00:39.000Z | Luke Jennings | Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake; The Little Prince – a wild swan ride | In Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, we see the return of the show which, in 1995, changed the British dance landscape for ever. Bourne gives us a repressed and unhappy prince (Liam Mower), rejected by his icily unloving mother (Nicole Kabera), and growing up amid the stifling protocol of court. Encountering the Swan (Matthew Ball, guesting from the Royal Ballet), who may or may not be a figment of his imagination, he falls in love, only to be viciously rebuffed when the Swan’s human double materialises. The final act is shattering, a headlong plummet into tragedy.
The current production features dancers who were not born when the original was launched 23 years ago, and it’s easy to forget what a risk Bourne was taking in his homoerotic framing of the story. The 90s was a less tolerant era than our own (one newspaper captioned a picture of Bourne’s male swans with the words “Bum me up, Scotty”), and if the ballet’s dramatic momentum had faltered it would have sunk, probably taking Bourne’s career with it. But strong storytelling and a charged emotional core ensured that Swan Lake flew, and continues to fly.
Mower is an engaging and technically accomplished prince, Kabera is suitably chilling as his chic basilisk of a mother, and Katrina Lyndon is very funny as the prince’s gauche, puffball-skirted and repeatedly rejected girlfriend.
However, from the moment of his first entrance, it’s Ball’s show. As well as being an assured technician, he’s a dance actor of real charisma. As the Swan, he’s dangerous and commanding, all sinew and hissing aggression; and as the Stranger he’s as disdainful as he is sexually predatory, cutting a ruthless swath through the female courtiers before finally, to the prince’s excruciating distress, battening vampirically on to the Queen.
Matthew Ball (The Swan) and Liam Mower (The Prince) in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
To ballet regulars, Ball’s performance will come as no surprise. Fast-tracked by the Royal Ballet, he has made promising inroads into roles such as Albrecht (in Giselle), Crown Prince Rudolf (in Mayerling), and Romeo. But here he really cuts loose, revelling in the physical and dramatic nuances of the role, and in the extremes of the characters he portrays. It leads one to wonder whether classical ballet, and the Royal’s increasingly abstract repertoire, is a radical enough canvas for his talents.
It’s interesting to compare Bourne’s version with the Royal Ballet’s recent Swan Lake, mounted by Liam Scarlett, which had its premiere in May this year. The Royal’s is a lavishly handsome production, with designs by John Macfarlane, but somewhere along the line we lose our connection to the beating heart of the story. For all Scarlett’s earnest attempts to interest us in the Prince as a character, choreography takes over from narrative, and by the final act we’re lost in the steps.
Bourne, by contrast, asks hard questions of the ballet, whose first performance in a form that we would recognise today (with choreography by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov) took place in St Petersburg in 1895. Why might a man imagine himself to be in love with a swan? What form would this swan take, and in what imaginative realm might such a strange love story unfold? These were the same questions that Petipa and Ivanov must have asked themselves a century earlier, but which subsequent productions have tended to avoid. Swan Lake today is all too often a beautiful ritual, all too rarely a compelling drama. Bourne’s production is not perfect. The choreography can feel repetitive, and the characterisation of the vacuous, bitchy courtiers is so unvarying that it ultimately loses its edge. But the emotional truth of the piece prevails, as it always has.
Luca Silvestrini’s The Little Prince, for Protein Dance, had its opening performance on Wednesday. St-Exupéry’s enigmatic tale of a stranded pilot (Karl Fagerlund Brekke) and a small boy (Faith Prendergast) who leaves his tiny asteroid to travel to Earth is delivered with quirky charm. Yann Seabra’s designs affectionately reproduce the author’s illustrations, and Prendergast is touchingly excellent in the title role, dancing from planet to planet with fleet-footed ease, and delivering her often surreal lines with bell-like clarity. Andrew Gardiner and Donna Lennard perform a further eight roles between them. A packed house of Ipswich schoolchildren was enthralled from start to finish.
Faith Prendergast in The Little Prince. Photograph: Chris Nash
Star ratings (out of 5)
Swan Lake ★★★★★
The Little Prince ★★★★
Swan Lake is at Sadler’s Wells, London until 27 January | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/dec/14/a-league-women-emily-van-egmonds-brief-newcastle-jets-return-suits-both-player-and-club | Football | 2021-12-13T16:30:25.000Z | Emma Kemp | Emily van Egmond’s brief Newcastle Jets return suits both player and club | Emma Kemp | What a difference a week can make. Ten days ago Newcastle lost their season opener 3-1 to Sydney FC, a Cortnee Vine-led contest which served as both a reminder of the Sky Blues’ talent and the Jets’ inconsistencies.
Four days later the club signed Emily van Egmond, and two days after that did a 5-1 number on Wellington. “It would have been great to have had her last week,” coach Ash Wilson said after Friday’s rout. “You can’t deny the influence she had just with her calmness on the ball and her ability to find things.”
Van Egmond’s short-term contract with the Jets is one which suits both player and club. The 28-year-old’s return to her hometown side ensures regular game time before she joins the Matildas at the Asian Cup in India in January. For the team, it could yet mean, at the very least, an improved season at most a return to the finals for the first time since 2017-18 – incidentally the last time van Egmond represented the Hunter region.
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The lack of Australian internationals left in A-League Women naturally render the performances of those who do remain more striking. But it was clear on Friday just how influential a single player can be.
Van Egmond, returning from stints with West Ham in the Women’s Super League and Orlando Pride in the NWSL, was deployed more creatively by Wilson than she is for the national team. Her presence brought out Newcastle’s breadth of scorers as Kirsty Fenton, Norwegian Marie Dølvik Markussen and Sophie Harding all celebrated maiden league goals and club stalwart Tara Andrews added a brace.
“That’s one of the big reasons we signed her,” Wilson said. “She’s here and she’s wanting to play and she’s a local girl, but she gives so much in terms of her experience and her quality. She worked really hard in attack to try and make forward runs, and defensively she was solid, and I think that had a really big impact on what other players were doing around her too.
“Other players were stepping up, the midfield worked really hard, the wingers were looking to get in behind as much as possible knowing they had people on the ball who could find them. That’s definitely what she was able to bring, and what you could see in terms of our performance.”
Newcastle, perhaps out of necessity given their stretched financial position, have drawn heavily from their youth ranks and emphasised junior development. The fruits of that approach are apparent through Fenton, who has been in the club set-up since under-13s started playing for the Jets at an under-13 level.
The presence of an import for the first time since 2018-19, in Norwegian international Dølvik Markussen, has helped too. The long-term effect of this combination is yet to be seen but the signs are encouraging, and this Friday’s fixture against the ailing Western Sydney could provide a platform of further confidence ahead of tougher tests further down the road.
Wilson has been careful to manage expectations, to keep her players optimistic but also in the present. Past seasons have proved little can be gained from doing otherwise, and it has been some time since the Jets have put together a full season.
The 2020-21 campaign ended in eighth place from the nine-team competition with two wins from 12 rounds. This year’s introduction of the Phoenix and expansion to 14 regular-season rounds means teams have a little more room for early season error. However, with defending champions Melbourne Victory and runners-up Sydney already top with a perfect two from two, the fourth-placed Jets will slide quickly unless results keep coming.
“The performance shows the potential that we have,” Wilson said. “I think we need to be more consistent, we need to have more performances like that before we can start to jump the gun, but if we can put together performances like that.
“If we can be clinical, we’ll definitely be very competitive, and if we do make those finals we’ll hopefully be a handful. But it’s very early, there are a lot of good teams, and we need to make sure we’re putting those performances together week in, week out – that’s been a challenge for us in the past.” | Full |
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2002/dec/20/artsfeatures3 | From the Guardian | 2002-12-20T01:25:57.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | The Lion King - Imax | This 1994 Disney classic about the noble lion cub cheated of his kingdom is now gloriously spread out on the giant Imax canvas - and a cracking Christmas treat it is too. (Once again, I advise sitting well to the back of the auditorium if you don't want to be overwhelmed by the screen's sheer size.)
The Lion King is similar to The Jungle Book with its Kiplingesque view of a well-ordered animal kingdom. No humans in this jungle: the lions are the masters here, and the film has superb moments of family treachery and unrivalled poignancy as Simba the lion cub stands over his dead father's body. Not a dry eye in the house!
The animation is simple and bold, with fluency and muscular confidence, and Elton John and Tim Rice's songs drive the story onward with terrific fervour. There's also sumptuous voice-work from Jeremy Irons, Rowan Atkinson, Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane.
There's just one disturbing thing. When King Mufasa holds his tiny son over a high ledge for all the other lions to admire, it reminded me horribly of Michael Jackson holding his seven-month baby over a hotel balcony.
Where do you suppose the King of Pop got his inspiration? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/dec/28/australia-urged-to-fight-any-russian-bid-to-join-asian-football-confederation | Football | 2022-12-28T03:50:13.000Z | Henry Belot | Australia urged to fight any Russian bid to join Asian Football Confederation | Human rights campaigners have urged Australia to help block any Russian bid to return to international football by joining the Asian Football Confederation (AFC).
Russia was banned by the European governing body, Uefa, and Fifa earlier this year after the invasion of Ukraine and as a result disqualified from the play-off stage to make the Qatar World Cup.
The president of the Russian Football Union (RFU), Aleksander Dyukov, has raised the possibility of Russia leaving Uefa and applying to join the AFC, which would allow the national team and clubs such as Zenit St Petersburg and CSKA Moscow to compete internationally again.
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“Politics is in first place [in Europe], football has faded into the background, Dyukov told Russian media after a recent meeting of the RFU executive committee.
“We saw this at the World Cup in Qatar. Today they [Europe] are not satisfied with this situation. Tomorrow they will ask questions about human rights, the day after tomorrow it will turn out that we are not energetically supporting the LGBT movement, and this will also be the basis for a boycott.”
The prospect of Russia rejoining international football has concerned Amnesty International Australia, which said the ban should remain in place. Fifa governs entry to global competitions such as the men’s and women’s World Cup, but each confederation has jurisdiction over its own tournaments, such as the Asian Cup.
“Given Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, it would be hard for members of the Asian Football Confederation to reconcile its entry to the Confederation with Fifa’s human rights policy,” Amnesty International’s Nikita White said.
“We’ve seen strong statements from the PFA and Socceroos on the importance of human rights in the game and I can’t imagine an attempt by Russia to join the AFC to be welcomed by those who value human rights for all.
“Human rights and sports aren’t mutually exclusive – we saw at the recent World Cup that issues such as workers’ rights, women’s rights and the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community are important to football fans and players alike.”
Bonita Mersiades, a former Football Australia executive who was head of public affairs during Australia’s bid to host either the 2018 or 2022 men’s World Cup, said any request from Russia should be rejected.
“Whether Russia is in Uefa or the AFC makes no difference to the core issue, which is that Russia should be banned from international sporting competitions,” she said.
“They have shown themselves to be a serial aggressor with no regard for human rights and the rules-based order.
“As such, they disqualify themselves from being part of the world sporting community. The question should be asked of Fifa as to why they even countenance Russia as a member at this time.”
The FUR has set a deadline of Saturday to make a decision, arguing that is necessary to ensure the national team could compete in upcoming Asian tournaments.
“If we don’t do this now, and later decide on the transition, then the next tournament for the national teams will be a cycle from 2027,” Dyukov said.
“Delaying the decision by a few days means that the national teams could lose four years.”
Any application from Russia to join the AFC would need to be approved initially by the confederation’s executive committee before going to a vote of the full membership, according to the confederation’s statutes.
A similar process occurred in 2005 when Australia left the 11-member Oceania Football Confederation to join the AFC.
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Australia has a representative on the committee, Chris Nikou, who is the chairman of Football Australia.
While Australia, Japan and South Korea would likely be opposed to Russia’s application, other AFC members, including China, Iran and North Korea, might be inclined to support it.
Russia recently played friendly matches against Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Last week, Iran’s ambassador to Russia, Kazem Jalali, told Russian state media that preparations were being made for friendly matches in 2023.
Last season’s Uefa Champions League final was moved from St Petersburg to Paris in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Uefa also ended a sponsorship deal with the state-owned Russian energy giant Gazprom.
Football Australia has been contacted for comment. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/24/drugs-electroconvulsive-therapy-depression-brother-ect | Opinion | 2017-04-24T09:30:15.000Z | Andrew Mayers | Drugs didn’t work for my brother. Electroconvulsive therapy did | Andrew Mayers | The death certificate said heart attack. But anyone familiar with what my brother had been through over the last decade of his life knew the real cause of death: depression. A self-depleting torment that knew no rock bottom; a psychological tumour that consumed his personality.
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Now, looking back after several months on an end that Stephen had said was all he prayed for, I think there was something missing on the certificate: not a cause of death, but a “cause of hope”. That cause was a procedure once derided as the Frankenstein treatment: ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy. Last week it was reported that ECT is on the rise again, with more than 22,000 individual treatments carried out in England in 2015-16.
For some people, this new research will have reawoken old fears of the therapy, and it has certainly brought forth a welter of images of Randle McMurphy, Jack Nicholson’s character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, who was laid impossibly low by the treatment. It’s a context in which my brother’s story needs to be heard.
My brother’s case of depression may well have been “severe”, or “psychotic” or “neurochemical”, or any of the labels used in the struggle to understand his condition. But for me the definitive label was “treatment-resistant”.
Antidepressants, tranqs, sleepers, hypnotics, anxiety meds, CBT, visualisation strategies, talking therapies – my brother, bless him, tried every regime, and stuck to them doggedly even as his symptoms escalated. The efforts of the NHS doctors to find the magic formula, the right balance of millilitres and microgrammes, could not be faulted.
Stephen Mayers, front, a month before he died, with brother Andrew, niece Lola, daughter Sienna and wife Yasmin. Photograph: Andrew Mayers
With every regimen change there would be new flickerings of hope. Patience, the psychiatrists always cautioned – there is never a quick fix. If these drugs do work, it might be weeks, months, before the first inkling. But the lesson of the passing years was that the drugs didn’t work. The darkness engulfing Stephen became a tomb. And it engulfed us all – his wife, his daughters, his brothers, his parents.
So it seemed little short of a miracle when a “last resort” treatment penetrated that malign murk – indeed, blew it away. According to data collected by the Guardian, about 2,000 patients were given ECT in 2011. Thank God Stephen was one of them. A life that had been little more than an extended stupor, enlivened only by the gobbling of stodge, was transformed. The principled, generous, engaged soul re-emerged, as if from hibernation.
The addiction to discomfort eating, which brought only self-hatred, was ousted by a renewed passion for cycling. The old Stephen was reborn. As the writer and professor of clinical psychology Andrew Solomon has sagely noted, the opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality.
My brother ended up getting four amazing, unexpected years of vitality: not a bad result from a seizure lasting less than a minute, triggered by an electrical current applied for up to eight seconds. All under general anaesthetic. No thrashing, no writhing. Perhaps a little toe-curling.
So if there is anything “crude and controversial” about ECT it’s the reaction, from some corners, to the revelation that these treatments are on the rise again. The portrayals that put this procedure on a par with lobotomy belong to a wholly different mental health era. We all know what happened to McMurphy at the hands of Nurse Ratched, but that was a fictional depiction, decades ago. When the Ramones sang Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment they made it sound like something only the truly twisted would consider. The experiences of Sylvia Plath – who described ECT as “a great jolt [that] drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant” – or Janet Frame, the New Zealand poet incarcerated in asylums and subjected to 200 treatments by sadistic nurses, are brutal. But if anything they demonstrate how far mental healthcare has come.
‘At his funeral one of his fellow cyclists gave an oration. ‘Steve Mayers, what a guy. Steve Mayers, what a guy. Steve Mayers what a guy.’’ Photograph: Yasmin Mayers
Last week the mental health charity Mind warned that the side-effects of ECT could include memory loss, difficulty concentrating and dizziness. In my brother’s case, these were the side-effects of not having ECT. But I still suspect that the ultimate side-effect of not having the procedure was his death last October.
The procedure had given him four precious years of vitality. In the middle of a cycle ride from Land’s End to John O’Groats – to raise money for the Maudsley hospital, in south London, where his treatment was carried out – his illness returned. The doctors knew – we all knew – that his best chance, perhaps his only chance, was another ECT course. But good medical practice meant that first they had to go through the rigmarole of drug regimes they knew would probably fail.
ECT time came agonisingly closer. His depression raged out of control – worse he said, than ever. And on top of this, even grimmer news: a persistent tremor was incipient Parkinson’s. The catastrophic thinking that was the hallmark of his depression now played a terminal role: the ECT miracle, those four years of vitality? A fluke, a trick, a story. Go under general anaesthetic? What happens if it leaves me conscious but paralysed? And anyway, what’s the point in being liberated from depression into a life ravaged by Parkinson’s?
The years of vitality were not to be repeated. But without ECT they would not have happened. At his funeral one of his fellow cyclists gave an oration. “Steve Mayers, what a guy. Steve Mayers, what a guy. Steve Mayers what a guy,” he intoned in broad Wolverhampton.
At the same time pictures flashed up on a big screen of Stephen on a bike. Forget Jack Nicholson, I thought. My big brother’s the positive face of ECT. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/jan/26/artsfeatures.smashingpumpkins | Global | 2000-01-26T00:00:00.000Z | Adam Sweeting | Heavy on the 70s metal | "H
elp a sick man sing!" pleaded Billy Corgan, as the Smashing Pumpkins thrummed their way through a nifty unplugged-style version of 1979. "I'm sick! I can't even speak!" Down in the stalls, Pumpkins zealots shrieked sympathetically.
Engaged on a whistle-stop "if it's Tuesday this must be Belgium" European visit to plug their new album, Machina/The Machines of God, the last thing the Pumpkins needed was for their frontman to be sandbagged by the flu, but the suffering Corgan decided that the London show must go on. His nagging whine of a voice has never been the Pumpkins' strongest asset, but here it sounded like a handful of rusty razor blades clattering round inside a waste-disposal unit. So this wasn't the perfect opportunity to get a first live earful of the new songs, which aren't the most accessible the band have ever recorded. A boomy sound mix didn't help either. Nevertheless, it was still possible to detect Corgan's familiar preoccupations in the music. The Crying Tree of Mercury (lucky this tour was confined to western Europe, because his ludicrous prog-rock song titles could get him arrested by several of the world's less tolerant regimes) is steeped in The Cure's meandering gloom, while Heavy Metal Machine takes its cue from the ear-rupturing excesses of 70s heavy metal. Corgan even recruited Sharon Osbourne, wife of Ozzy, as his manager, but the arrangement disintegrated acrimoniously.
A 70s vibe was also apparent in a spooky, atmospheric arrangement of the David Essex hit Rock On, while the electro-shuffle of Ava Adore mutated into a thundering Zeppelin-style juggernaut. Part of the reason for this may be the return to the Pumpkin fold of drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, now forgiven for his transgressions with banned substances and back to lay down some mammoth grooves. New bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur slotted unobtrusively into the band's barrage of gigawatts.
Second guitarist James Iha promised that the new songs are "really nice", and I of the Mourning showed that there is some Top 40 potential. But the crowd were grateful for back-catalogue highlights like Tonight, Bullet with Butterfly Wings and Cherub Rock. The ghoulishly bald and black-clad Corgan may resemble a Transylvanian grave-robber, but at the end, he paid his respects by spending a few minutes bonding with the crowd and pinging plectrums into the front rows. He's canny enough to recognise the value of a display of humility. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/18/afd-ally-wins-mayoral-election-in-east-germany | World news | 2023-12-18T13:30:38.000Z | Kate Connolly | AfD ally wins mayoral election in east Germany | The far-right populist Alternative für Deutschland had another electoral success at the weekend when its candidate was elected as mayor of a town in east Germany, securing the party its second top municipal position in six months.
Tim Lochner, who is not a member of the AfD but ran with the party’s backing, in effect as its representative, secured 38.5% of the vote in the second round of a three-way runoff in the Saxon town of Pirna, near Dresden and close to the Czech border.
The 53-year-old independent candidate, a carpenter by trade, was trailed by candidates for the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Germany’s leading opposition force, who secured 31.4%, and the ultra-conservative Free Voters, who took 30.1%.
It is the first time the AfD, which is riding high in the polls across the country, has secured the post of Oberbürgermeister, similar to the post of lord mayor, designated to towns and cities of a significant size. Pirna has about 40,000 inhabitants.
The party’s first mayoral post was won in August in the municipality of Raguhn-Jessnitz, in Saxony-Anhalt. Its first head of a district administration, Robert Sesselmann, was elected in June in the Sonneberg district, in the state of Thuringia.
All three posts are in former communist east German states, where the AfD has been most successful, due largely to disgruntlement on issues related to the economy and integration widely perceived as the result of unfair treatment towards the region since unification in 1990.
Alice Weidel, a co-chair of the party, which was founded in 2013, called the win a historic result for the AfD.
Last week, the Saxon office for the protection of the constitution – the regional branch of the domestic intelligence agency – classified the AfD in Saxony as “firmly rightwing extremist”. The classification had already been given to the AfD in Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt by the respective agencies in those states.
Writing on X, the Saxon branch of the Green party said: “We find the election of a mayor from a party which was classified as rightwing extremist by the office of the protection of the constitution just last week devastating.”
Lochner, when asked if he would have a problem entering the town hall as an AfD mayor after this ruling, said he did not view it as an obstacle.
Lochner has come in for criticism for his use of the controversial term “Bewölkerungsaustausch”, or population exchange, also referred to as the “Great Exchange”, a conspiracy narrative shared in rightwing extremist circles involving a belief that a secret elite is planning to eliminate the white population in the west by gradually swapping it for a non-white population.
Asked after his election to comment on his use of the term, Lochner said he had only used it only in his capacity as a “private person”.
He is a member of the AfD faction in the city council but is not a party member. He stood in the mayoral election in 2017 but lost definitively against the incumbent, independent candidate.
The Pirna win sets the AfD up well for state elections in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg, also an eastern state, next September, political analysts said. Each successive win is seen as helping the party to break down barriers with voters who might previously have been cautious about voting for the nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim party. The party is in good stead to emerge as the strongest party in all three states.
The AfD has been riding at a high in national polls, on about 20% in recent weeks and more than 30% in some areas. Voters cite discontentment with the chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government’s dealings on the economy, migration and the cost of living crisis. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/nov/17/sturridge-city-slickers-and-a-race-for-the-spoon-complete-a-league-men-guide | Football | 2021-11-16T16:30:12.000Z | Joey Lynch | Sturridge, City slickers and a race for the spoon: your A-League Men guide | Joey Lynch | Adelaide United
Coach: Carl Veart
Major ins: Nick Ansell, George Blackwood, Isaias
Major outs: Tomi Juric, Jordan Elsey, Ryan Strain
Player to watch: Striker Kusini Yengi is the type of player the Reds want to develop, but is battling league-wide trends against deploying young attackers
Predicted finish: 5th
Fun fact: Adelaide United’s first competitive win was in round five of the 2003-04 NSL season – a 1-0 win over Brisbane Strikers
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Based on stockpiling young South Australian talent – as well as choice cuts under-valued elsewhere such as James Delianov and Josh Cavallo – that can contribute to the first team and eventually turn into potential transfer bait, Adelaide’s strong culture saw them over-achieve in 2020-21 as they reached the semi-finals. Ostensibly, simple linear progression would tell us the Reds should get better almost by default this campaign as their young cohort improves with experience.
However, the mid-season return of Craig Goodwin in 2020-21 and the signing of Isaias this off-season suggest Veart may be hesitant to go all in on his youngsters. Finding the right balance between the exuberance of youth and wisdom of experience – something A-League Men clubs have traditionally overshot in favour of the latter – could be key to their finals hopes.
Brisbane Roar
Coach: Warren Moon
Major ins: Nikola Mileusnić, Matti Steinmann, Luke Ivanovic
Major outs: Dylan Wenzel-Halls, Riku Danzaki, Jamie Young
Player to watch: A born-and-bred Queenslander, Alex Parsons received significant hype during a breakout 2020-21, but the encore is always harder
Predicted finish: 4th
Fun fact: Arriving in Australia as a five-year-old refugee, Roar utility Rahmat Akbari is eligible to represent Afghanistan at senior international level
Young striker Alex Parsons is on his way up. Photograph: Albert Perez/Getty Images
It hasn’t received as much attention as Adelaide’s efforts, but Roar coach Warren Moon is instigating his own, Sunshine State-flavoured reformation in Brisbane. Formerly the coach of Peninsula Power and Lions FC in the NPL Queensland, Moon has made a concerted effort to bring in players with local connections during his tenure and supplemented this with the shrewd recruitment of figures such as Matti Steinmann and Luke Ivanovic. Combined with his flexibility in approach and tactical aptitude, it is clear the Roar are building something sustainable and potentially special at Moreton Daily Stadium.
Unfortunately, a lack of top-end talent may limit what they can achieve in 2021-22; Macklin Freke facing a big task in replacing long-time custodian Jamie Young and the creativity and verve of Riku Danzaki leaving a massive void to fill up front. Keep an eye on a potential breakout season from Rahmat Akbari.
Central Coast Mariners
Coach: Nick Montgomery
Major ins: Nicolai Muller, Cy Goddard, Storm Roux
Major outs: Daniel De Silva, Alou Kuol, Gianni Stensness
Player to watch: Josh Nisbet is already a cult figure due to his tenacious play and diminutive stature but, with departures elsewhere in the Mariners midfield, his role will increase this season
Predicted finish: 12th
Fun fact: The Mariners use Tom Petty’s ‘I Won’t Back Down’ as a club anthem.
She dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips
The Mariners experienced a season for the ages under Alen Stajcic in 2020-21, shrugging off more than half a decade of abject misery to shock Australian football by storming – at least until Melbourne City woke up – to the top of the A-League Men table, eventually finishing third and playing finals football for the first time since 2013-14.
Alas for the Gosford faithful, all rhyme and reason suggests it was a (magical) one-off. His counter-attacking style had already began to lose its lustre by season’s end, when Stajcic departed. Also out the door went creative fulcrum Daniel De Silva, midfield rock Gianni Stensness, and the swag and game-breaking ability of Alou Kuol. Still up for sale by owner Mike Charlesworth, their battle appears less one for finals and more one to avoid the spoon.
Also, apologies to John Keats.
Macarthur FC
Coach: Ante Miličić
Major ins: Ulises Davila, Daniel De Silva, Craig Noone, Al Hassan Toure
Major outs: Denis Genreau, Mark Milligan, Matt Derbyshire
Player to watch: Young striker Al Hassan Toure moved to the Bulls from Adelaide this off-season in search of more game time and, with Tomi Juric rarely sighted in pre-season, may just get it
Predicted finish: 6th
Fun fact: The three stars on the Bulls’ logo don’t represent titles but “links with the grassroots football community, the National Premier League and the A-League”
Former Socceroos captain Mark Milligan abruptly left Macarthur months after taking up an assistant coaching role under Ante Miličić. Photograph: Jason McCawley/Getty Images
The Bulls are a tough side to predict. On the one hand, their off-season recruiting splurge has loaded up their squad with a bevy of tried-and-true attacking threats, including reigning Johnny Warren medallist Ulises Davila. How Miličić fits all these players into his high possession-based style, however, remains a significant question mark, as does whether they have enough stockpiled on the defensive front to keep sides at bay up the other end – the now-retired Adam Federici helped the club ship 10 goals less than their expected goals conceded last season.
Persistent rumours of the club being in a state of crisis throughout the offseason won’t go away either, highlighted by the shock departure of Mark Milligan just months after he retired as a player and took up an assistant coaching role. The Bulls have the potential to collapse, but just have so much talent that it’s difficult to completely write them off.
Melbourne City
Coach: Patrick Kisnorbo
Major ins: Mathew Leckie, Manuel Pucciarelli
Major outs: Craig Noone, Adrian Luna
Player to watch: The attacking triumvirate of Jamie Maclaren, Mathew Leckie, and Andrew Nabbout get the headlines, but central defender Curtis Good is primed to challenge for a World Cup pace and, perhaps, secure a European move
Predicted finish: 1st – champions
Fun fact: Maclaren, Leckie and Nabbout are all born-and-bred Melburnians; Maclaren a Green Gully junior, Leckie a Bulleen Lions youth and Nabbout a former Brunswick City Spartan
When examining a competition on the eve of its commencement, it’s always tempting to try to convince yourself this is the year of the underdog; the year when the plucky upstart shocks the world and defies the odds. And that would be great, because nobody wants to read the story of how the Empire crushed the Rebellion.
But alas for the romantics, that is what might very well happen. Darth Kisnorbo and his defending champions have retained almost every key contributor to last year’s premiership and championship double-winning side and have even added Socceroos captain Leckie to their frontline. Combine this with a fearsome aerobic capacity born of one of the most hellacious pre-seasons this league has seen and they can run you off the park as well.
In short, anything less than another double for City’s fully armed and operational battle station would be a disappointment.
Melbourne City signing Mat Leckie is among several Australian internationals playing domestically. Photograph: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images
Melbourne Victory
Coach: Tony Popovic
Major ins: Chris Ikonomidis, Jason Davidson, Josh Brillante
Major outs: Rudy Gestede, Callum McManaman, Elvis Kamsoba
Player to watch: Joining from Serie B side A.C. ChievoVerona, Francesco Margiotta will be relied upon to provide the lethal edge the club has lacked since Ola Toivonen
Predicted finish: 3rd
Fun Fact: WWE NXT wrestler Indi Hartwell grew up a Victory fan and even served as a ball kid for a game
The only way is up for Victory, literally. After finishing second-bottom in 2019-20, the fallen A-League giants went one better (worse) in 2020-21, crashing to a first wooden spoon in club history and suffering two abject humiliations against City. The second cost club legend Grant Brebner – who had arguably been handed a Sisyphean task – his job. In a way it is lucky there were Covid-enforced crowd limits; the simmering unrest within the club’s large fanbase could have exploded to a greater extent than the banner and pyro show that doubled as a training-ground protest.
Tony Popovic is embarking on his third A-League Men head coaching stint with Melbourne Victory. Photograph: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images
Now, Popovic and his history of success is in, as well as Joe Palatsides in the club’s academy to turn on the talent pipeline and supplement the strong off-season recruitment. Finals should be expected, but don’t be surprised if strong early season form leads to a blowout in aspirations.
Newcastle Jets
Coach: Arthur Papas
Major ins: Matthew Jurman, Daniel dos Santos Penha, Beka Mikeltadze
Major outs: Nigel Boogaard, Roy O’Donovan, Matt Millar
Player to watch: Christened the ‘Port Macquarie Pele’ by Jets fans, midfielder Angus Thurgate has more than 70 senior games under his belt at just 21 and looms as a key contributor
Predicted finish: 10th
Fun fact: The Jets took their moniker from the Royal Australian Air Force base located at Williamtown, 25km from their home ground McDonald Jones Stadium
It has been a time of significant change in the Hunter, with the club overhauling its roster as it seeks to turn around a depressing trudge of mediocrity, ownership chaos and player departures. And given the significant off-season upheaval, it wouldn’t be a shock to see the club once again head towards the bottom of the table. Yet simultaneously, based on some – admittedly nascent – pre-season signs, it would also be unsurprising for them to come good and challenge or even qualifying for finals.
It is apparent that Papas and his staff are undertaking a project in the Hunter that will require a few seasons to properly kick into gear, one which will only be boosted when the club, which is currently administered by a consortium of fellow A-Leagues clubs, finds stable ownership – perhaps even with a component for fans to share a stake.
Daniel Sturridge walked straight out of hotel quarantine and into training with new club Perth Glory. Photograph: Paul Kane/Getty Images
Perth Glory
Coach: Richard Garcia
Major ins: Daniel Sturridge, Brandon O’Neill, Brad Jones
Major outs: Diego Castro, Neil Kilkenny, Chris Ikonomidis
Player to watch: Sturridge is going to monopolise coverage but striker Bruno Fornaroli is no slouch and could thrive with the Englishman drawing defenders off him
Predicted finish: 7th
Fun fact: Glory faces the Phoenix every year in the ‘distance derby’ celebrating the 5,255km between the two clubs
The fate of Glory’s campaign likely rests on two factors – both of which are impossible to truly predict until the season commences.
The first is how the club will cope with the extended time on the road thanks to Western Australia’s stringent border controls: eight games in the east sandwiched by their season-opening game against Adelaide and round 10 fixture against Wellington Phoenix.
Having faced similar challenges last season, Garcia and his staff should have some idea of how to look after the physical and mental wellbeing of players but, as seen in Western United’s unceremonious collapse at the back end of 2020-21, living out of a suitcase always has the potential to tear down a season quickly.
The second factor is the health and form of Sturridge. The Englishman’s profile will deliver the A-Leagues a sugar hit, but his injury history and lack of recent football loom over his potential impact on the field.
Sydney FC
Coach: Steve Corica
Major ins: Max Burgess, James Donachie, Elvis Kamsoba
Major outs: Ryan McGowan, Alexander Baumjohann
Player to watch: Adam Le Fondre scored four goals in just seven games after a mid-season return from India in 2020-21, and will have Jamie Maclaren’s golden boot firmly in sight
Predicted finish: 2nd
Fun fact: Sydney are the only five-time champions in A-League Men history, eclipsing the four won by Hakoah Sydney City, South Melbourne, Marconi Stallions, and Melbourne Victory.
Last season’s grand final defeat to City had all the hallmarks of a changing of the guard as the Citizens supplanted the Sky Blues as the kings of the castle, and Corica’s side could yet be replaced by a new dynasty.
That is not to paint the Harboursiders as the sick men of the A-League. However, as their trademark continuity in culture, personnel and approach ensures they will once again be right in the thick of it come the pointy end of the season. And if Max Burgess can rediscover the form he showed at the end of 2019-20 and the unfairly maligned Elvis Kamsoba can fire off the bench, they potentially have made two of the best off-season signings.
Indeed, the rest of the league may appear to have closed the gap on Sydney but underestimate them at your peril, lest the keepers of the Arnieball make you live to regret it.
Alex Wilkinson and Miloš Ninković have been key to Sydney FC’s long rule but now face the challenge of prising the trophy back from Melbourne City. Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images
Wellington Phoenix
Coach: Ufuk Talay
Major ins: Gary Hooper, Callan Elliot, Luka Pršo
Major outs: Tomer Hemed, Ulises Davila, Cameron Devlin
Player to watch: Reno Piscopo
Predicted finish: 11th
Fun fact: Ross Aloisi was the Phoenix’s inaugural captain in 2007–08, just a few years after serving as Adelaide United’s skipper in their first A-League Men season
First with Mark Rudan and then under Talay, the Phoenix have made a habit of making the naysayers look like fools in recent years, overcoming numerous obstacles to consistently ask questions of rivals and challenge for finals. Nevertheless, the sheer weight of the challenges has to show up in results eventually.
Though the New Zealand-based side will return home at some point in the new year, they will be forced once again to play early home games out of Wollongong’s WIN Stadium. There is also a significant drain in talent, including the shock retirement of Steve Taylor just days after he was named captain.
Though Kiwi fans will be quick to produce screenshots should this prediction turn out wrong, this may be the year that the ‘Nix experience the unwanted nostalgia of a season mired near the foot of the table. At least the A-Leagues independence means they won’t have to suffer through another round of calls for their expulsion from the competition.
Western Sydney Wanderers
Coach: Carl Robinson
Major ins: Dimi Petratos, Terry Antonis, Rhys Williams
Major outs: Bruce Kamau, Dylan McGowan, Nicolai Muller
Player to watch: New captain Rhys Williams will be relied upon to provide leadership, a pillar of strength in the centre of defence and shore up a porous set-piece defence
Predicted finish: 8th
Fun fact: During the expansion process, Wanderers was one of five possible names put to a public vote, alongside Athletic, Strikers, Wolves and Rangers
It is fair to say Carl Robinson’s first season in charge at Wanderland did not quite go the way he – or club management – envisioned. Lured down from Newcastle only months before the season started, the Welshman was given significant backing and licence to recruit upon his arrival in Sydney’s west but, despite the influx of talent, could not prevent the late-season swoon and omission from finals for a fourth straight year.
Robinson has again recruited strongly, bringing in proven performers with a link to Sydney’s west such as Terry Antonis and Dimi Petratos. Perhaps on paper, he has assembled the second-strongest list in the league, and potentially its best midfield in Antonis and Steven Ugarkovic.
How those individuals are deployed and function as a collective will make or break their championship credentials.
John Aloisi is the new man with Western United’s clipboard but no home ground. Photograph: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images
Western United
Coach: John Aloisi
Major ins: Leo Lacroix, Aleksandar Prijovic, Neil Kilkenny
Major outs: Andrew Durante, Besart Berisha, Tomislav Uskok
Player to watch: He doesn’t get much credit but Tomoki Imai has quietly become one of the league’s best and most versatile defenders
Predicted finish: 9th
Fun fact: Very early on, club officials floated the prospect of pursuing Arsenal legend Arsène Wenger as their foundation coach
No side generates the same hostility that Western United does but, unfortunately for their attempts to build an identity and fanbase, it is not down to envy of the club’s on-field exploits.
The rancour, instead, is almost entirely linked to the ongoing saga surrounding the lack of action on the construction of a stadium those behind the club’s bid promised during the expansion process. This, in turn, has necessitated its use of multiple home grounds, a shrinking number of which are actually within their supposed turf in Melbourne’s west. This resulted in an unedifying situation in September, when they announced Lakeside Stadium as a home ground for 2021-22 – only to promptly be blocked by existing tenants and vanquished expansion rival South Melbourne.
Under new coach John Aloisi, the club has loaded up on veteran talent in an attempt to return to finals and also boasts some good youngsters, but it might all be for moot if there is no tangible progress on proposed construction site in Tarneit. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jul/26/james-bond-film-confirmed-for-2019-but-no-word-on-who-will-play-007 | Film | 2017-07-26T00:11:47.000Z | Dan Carrier | James Bond film confirmed for 2019 – but no word on who will play 007 | He is the original international man of mystery – so perhaps it is not surprising that there is still a cloak of secrecy over who will take on the mantle of James Bond in the secret agent’s next outing.
Film company Eon Productions, which produces Bond movies, and Metro Goldwyn Mayer, which owns the rights to the long-running franchise, said on Tuesday that the latest instalment would be released in November 2019.
But whether Daniel Craig will be saving the world in the title role has yet to be confirmed.
The New York Times quoted two anonymous sources as saying the actor, who has appeared as 007 in four films, would be returning in what will be the 25th outing featuring the secret agent.
Eon and MGM did not confirm the cast or who will oversee the action – it is rumoured that Christopher Nolan is in line for the director’s chair – but the New York Times quote two unidentified sources as saying Craig’s return is a ‘done deal’.
Speculation has swirled around whether he would continue in the role and who could take on the mantle if he was to step aside.
Now 49, Craig had said at a event to promote his last outing, Spectre, that starring in the film was a gruelling experience and he would not do so again. In later interviews, he backtracked and stated he would consider another stint in the role.
The announcement that the film would be out next year included the news that the screenplay will be written by Neil Purvis and Robert Wade. They penned Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall and Spectre – instalments that, along with Craig’s performances, critics say have breathed new life in to the franchise. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/07/russian-revolution-then-and-now | World news | 2017-11-07T10:11:22.000Z | Matt Fidler | The 1917 Russian Revolution: then and now – in pictures | The Russian Revolution consisted of two revolutions in 1917 that ended Tsarist rule and eventually replaced it with a communist state. The first revolution was mainly centred in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) and overthrew Tsar Nicholas II. The second revolution was led by Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik party. It overthrew the provisional government and established communism.
St Isaac’s Square, St Petersburg
Cossack troops sitting in St Issac’s Square.
These Cossack troops, loyal to the provisional government, likely soon melted away as the Bolshevised sailors and soldiers fanned out through the city, seizing key buildings and infrastructure. (1917 photo: Getty Images)
Palace Square, St Petersburg
Protesters march in favour of continuing the war effort.
The lead banner reads: “In the name of freedom, [continue] the war against Germanism until full victory.” But pro-war sentiment dwindled after the offensive launched against Germany in July ended disastrously for Russia. (1917 photo: Sputnik)
Field Of Mars, St Petersburg
A funeral for casualties of the revolution. (1917 photo: Shutterstock)
Red Square, Moscow
The revolution soon spread throughout Russia.
This political speech in Moscow was photographed in the early days of the February Revolution. (1917 photo: Alamy)
Alexander Palace, St Petersburg
Three of former tsar Nicholas II’s daughters along with his son, left to right: Olga, Alexis, Anastasia and Tatiana, seated on the ground at Tsarskoe Selo. Alexis was the former heir to the Russian throne, in captivity near St Petersburg. Just over a year after this photo was taken, the entire family was shot and bayonetted to death by Bolshevik revolutionaries. (1917 photo: Alamy)
Nevsky Prospekt, St Petersburg
A demonstration of Bolshevik supporters in central St Petersburg. (1917 photo: Shutterstock)
The Winter Palace, St Petersburg
Soldiers tasked with guarding the provisional government inside the Winter Palace days before it was stormed by soldiers and sailors fighting on behalf of Lenin’s Bolsheviks. (1917 Photo: Alamy)
Red Square, Moscow
Members of women’s death batallion swear an oath before being sent to the front. Battalions of women were intended to shame the men into continuing the fight against Germnay. (1917 Photo: Sputnik)
Gorky Park, Moscow
Bolshevik troops in Moscow. By early November 1917, Moscow was also under the control of Bolshevik fighters. (1917 Photo: Sputnik)
Theatre Square, Moscow
Lenin speaking in central Moscow. By 1918, the revolution had morphed into a civil war between Lenin’s “Red” Bolsheviks and a collection of forces known as the “Whites”. The violence in Russia was just beginning.
Amos Chapple/RFE/RL | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/16/country-diary-locating-the-true-names-for-the-landscape-of-wales | Environment | 2020-05-16T04:30:20.000Z | Jim Perrin | Country diary: locating the true names for the landscape of Wales | “Anial chwith ” – forlorn wilderness – is how the Welsh essayist D Tecwyn Lloyd termed the Berwyn mountains. Paddy Monkhouse, former northern editor of the Manchester Guardian and the best of the hillwalking writers from the 1930s, characterised these hills tersely as “bastard, slithering things … rough and sloppy underfoot”. Neither description is entirely fair. This great bulwark curves west from Chirk to Hirnant, seldom dropping below the 600m contour. The lockdown is giving its fine moorland crest and green-track approaches a chance to recover from the depredations of the recreational imperium, which in recent decades has rendered them a black morass.
Y Berwyn (“the white barrier”) has its mysteries. There’s the supposed UFO crash on Moel Sych, which informed analysis reduces to a conjunction of local lads out lamping for rabbits one January night in 1974 at the same time as a small earth tremor occurred.
Another puzzle concerns toponymy. The imperialist arrogance skewered in Brian Friel’s fine play Translations, about the work of the Ordnance Survey in 19th-century Donegal that resulted in wholesale loss of indigenous names, is the crucial text here. It was the life’s work of the late Tim Robinson to remedy that disaster. The same OS ignorance also resulted in the lovely name of Y Berwyn’s high point being misplaced. For decades either Moel Sych (827m) or Cadair Berwyn (827m) were accepted as that. They’re not. The summit is between the two, a rocky knoll at 830m called Moel yr Ewig (Hill of the Roe Hind). The name is on the map, but 400m from where it should be.
A virtual walk in Welsh mountains – with just an OS map and my imagination
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Last time I descended from here, I stopped to talk to a fisherman casting his diawl bach (“little devil” fly) for the small brown trout that teem in Llyn Lluncaws. “D’you know the name for the top?” he asked. I gave him Moel yr Ewig. “Good man!” he responded, and with a gesture of his hand described the ridge rising to it. “See the grace of her neck, the ears above? Beautiful ...” He shook my hand, and I jogged off down the green way, ring ouzels darting among the waterfalls to my right, a pair of hobbies shrieking from the rocks of Cerrig Poethion, and the hill’s deer-like presence behind me. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/oct/18/nessun-dorma-podcast-world-cups-oranje-souness-football-books-euro-88-italia-90-france-98 | Football | 2023-10-18T09:22:49.000Z | Gary Naylor | Nessun Dorma podcast: World Cups, Oranje, Souness and football books | After a couple of years out with booze-up-in-a-brewery issues, the Nessun Dorma podcast returns with some new voices and some new formats, but the same commitment to going long on an era when many English teams did just that.
Martyn Ramsay takes on hosting duties, joined by regulars Gary Naylor and Rob Smyth and a series of guests, including Mike Gibbons, Mac Millings, Jonathan O’Brien and the Guardian’s own Jacob Steinberg.
The Nessun Dorma Draft
“The beast in me,” sang Nick Lowe, “is caged by frail and fragile bars.” The same is true of our inner nerd, which escaped sometime during the summer and recorded a mini-series of retro drafts.
It’s a shameless, ahem, homage to the movie drafts on The Big Picture, and a chance to eulogise players and moments we love while also making snide comments about each other’s selections. The draft has three simple rules.
Each player can only be picked by one person. When Maradona has gone, he’s gone.
It’s a reality draft, not a fantasy draft: players should be judged solely on their form during the tournament/season/era in question. So, at Italia 90, Salvatore Schillaci is good, Marco van Basten is very, very bad.
The listeners vote on which team has won the draft.
These are the drafts we have done so far, with episodes on the first Premier League season, the 1999-2000 Champions League and more to follow.
England in the 1980s | Italia 90 | Euro 96 | France 98
One of the XIs from our Euro 96 draft. Photograph: Nessun Dorma
Euro 88 special
You never get a second chance to make a last impression. The Netherlands charmed the football world by winning Euro 88, a romantic triumph that touched the otherworldly with Van Basten’s astonishing goal in the final against USSR.
We decided to take a subterranean dive into the tournament on its (gulp) 35th anniversary. The preview contextualises European football in the summer of 1988, and then there’s an episode for each matchday. We discuss, among other things, whether the Netherlands were as good as we like to remember, whether England were as bad as we tend to remember – and whether many modern tactical trends, from pressing to defenders stepping into midfield, were there in plain sight in the late 1980s. Most importantly, we pay tribute to Van Basten at a time when he was very, very, very good.
Preview | Matchday one | Matchday two | Matchday three | Semi-finals | Final
The Nessun Dorma Book Club
The NDBC is a kind of sporting Late Review, but without Tony Parsons. The premise is simple: three people bring a football book that made an impact on their lives and explain why.
From the definitive and myth-shattering history of West German football and the instant window into the past provided by Panini to a delve into the world of sports psychology at a time when Sven-Göran Eriksson was still considered to be a Svengali and not a Scandi Benny Hill, there is something here for everyone. Listen here
Souness’s Rangers revolution
Gary and Rob talk to Martyn about his book Revolution: Rangers 1986-92, and how Graeme Souness changed Scottish football when he became player-manager at Ibrox. It was a perfect storm, and for a short time Rangers had a pulling power that not even England’s biggest clubs could match: ask Trevor Steven, who turned his nose up at Alex Ferguson and Old Trafford because his heart was already set on Glasgow. Souness was prepared to rip up traditions – and pick fights with just about everyone – in his attempt to continue lifting trophies after hanging up his boots. Listen here
Graeme Souness lifts the League Cup. Photograph: Colorsport/REX/Shutterstock
Nuit de Séville
And finally, before last year’s World Cup, we lost ourselves in a classic from the past: West Germany v France in the 1982 semi-finals. Listen here
Nessun Dorma is available on iTunes, Spotify and Substack. They tweet @nessundormapod and you can check out their previous pods here. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/18/robert-mccrum-100-best-nonfiction-books-common-sense-by-thomas-paine | Books | 2017-09-18T04:45:00.000Z | Robert McCrum | The 100 best nonfiction books: No 85 – Common Sense by Tom Paine (1776) | The American revolution was always a rhetorical as well as a political upheaval. The Founding Fathers transformed a mood of sullen opposition into a convulsion of revolutionary fury as much in print as on the field of battle. Thomas Jefferson’s catalyst for the conflict in the declaration of independence was a masterpiece of English prose.
If there was to be a storm, there first had to be a lightning strike. The necessary explosion was ignited by a little book, attributed to an anonymous “Englishman”, and published by Robert Bell from a print shop on Third Street, Philadelphia, on 9 January 1776. The book was Common Sense, the bestselling American pamphlet of the 18th century. In no time at all, there were more than 120,000 copies in circulation, some 25 editions in 1776 alone, and its ideas were the talk of the eastern seaboard. “Who is the author of Common Sense?” asked the Philadelphia Evening Post. “He deserves a statue in gold.”
Thomas Paine, unmasked as the author of this sensational broadside, is a key figure in the making of the Anglo-American tradition, a man of fierce libertarian language and mercenary political instincts. He made his name by out-Englishing the English: exaggerating the most distinctive traits and selling it as a basis for revolt. A down-on-his-luck emigrant, landing in Philadelphia with few prospects, he had written Common Sense (the title belonged to another revolutionary, Benjamin Rush) in a few hectic weeks.
Rarely has a single volume achieved such an instantaneous effect, possibly because it was published on the same day that George III pledged in parliament to put “a speedy end to these disorders” in the 13 colonies.
Common Sense is a model of popular journalistic brio, written to be understood by all readers, high and low. With breath-taking chutzpah, Paine singled out George as “the royal brute” responsible for all the ills of America. His attitude to monarchy in general is entertainingly severe:
“England, since the conquest, hath known some few good monarchs, but groaned beneath a much larger number of bad ones; yet no man in his senses can say that their claim under William the Conqueror is a very honourable one. A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original.”
Nailing his colours, Paine then took the logical step of calling for war, and for independence. “Why is it that we hesitate?” he asked. “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth… For God’s sake, let us come to a final separation… The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ’tis time to part’… The birthday of a new world is at hand.” In a few well-turned phrases, and with an eye for vivid expression, Paine transformed a previously leaden debate into pure gold:
“I have heard it asserted by some, that as America hath flourished under her former connection with Great Britain, the same connection is necessary towards her future happiness, and will always have the same effect. Nothing can be more fallacious than this kind of argument. We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk that it is never to have meat, or that the first 20 years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next 20... ”
Paine never let the facts get in the way of a passionate restatement of popular sentiment:
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the event of a few months.”
Having found his voice, Paine subsequently weighed in against slavery, in favour of the emancipation of women, and on behalf of many other progressive causes. In 1787, he returned to England, via revolutionary France, and proceeded to launch a fierce attack on Edmund Burke in The Rights of Man, for some his masterpiece.
Paine was part of a radical circle of free thinkers that included William Blake, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (No 76 in this series). Among conservative Britons, he was regarded with fear and hatred. His books and effigy were regularly burned in public, and he lived a precarious life one jump ahead of the authorities. In the American spirit, Paine was always a master of the provisional.
Paine’s influential writings became a textbook for English radicalism, and widely admired on the left. His connections with both the French and the American revolutions gave him a unique position as a champion of Enlightenment politics, and his prose – more demotic and colloquial than Burke, whose “high-toned exclamation” he despised – survives as a bracing and exemplary blast of libertarian polemic.
A signature sentence
“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseriea by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.”
Three to compare
Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Thomas Paine: Rights of Man (1791)
Thomas Paine: The Age of Reason (1793) | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/07/from-barbra-streisand-to-barbie-seven-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-new-look-golden-globes | Film | 2024-01-07T05:00:11.000Z | Guy Lodge | From Barbra Streisand to Barbie: seven things you need to know about the new-look Golden Globes | Two years ago, the Golden Globes and their organising body, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), were persona non grata in Hollywood. In disgrace following widespread reporting of corruption, racism and even sexual assault within their ranks, the ceremony was boycotted by the industry and dropped by its longtime broadcasting partner NBC.
The awards went ahead, unattended and untelevised, posing an equivalent showbiz question to the old “if a tree falls in a forest” conundrum. Turns out they did make something of a sound: cue the awkward social-media spectacle of winners such as Nicole Kidman and Rachel Zegler advertising their victories while sternly admonishing the voters. In the frenetic, dog-eat-dog rush of awards season, even a tarnished win is an opportunity.
After all, it’s not as if the globes fell from a very high pedestal. For years, the small-time, even obscure nature of the HFPA membership – and its often questionable decisions, including an infamous win for Pia Zadora in the 80s amid allegations of bribery, or a best picture nomination for the Johnny Depp calamity The Tourist – was a point of mockery from industry folk, who were still all too happy to attend their boozy January shindig.
In the current climate of social consciousness, however, it became harder to look the other way from less trivial allegations – including actor Brendan Fraser’s claim that former HFPA president Philip Berk groped him at an industry event. Pundits speculated that it was finally the end of the road for a tacky but once-treasured Hollywood institution.
Yet what a difference a painstaking PR makeover makes. After a tentative return to television last year – still boycotted by some nominees, including Fraser – the globes this year are splashily declaring themselves not just back but entirely different: new voters, a new attitude, even a couple of new award categories. Hollywood, meanwhile, will be returning in all its most glittery finery, proving that you can’t keep a good back-patting ceremony down. Or even a dubious one.
There’s a completely new voter base
Barbra Streisand won Best Director in 1984 for Yentl – the first woman to do so. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
One thing everyone used to know about the Golden Globes is that they were run by the HFPA. Quite what, or who, that meant was a murkier question. Essentially a nonprofit organisation of entertainment journalists for non-US outlets, it was a small club (about 100 members at its largest, and thus a far easier group to sway than the 10,500-member academy that votes on the Oscars) but not a lofty one.
Their seamy reputation was tolerated until 2021, when an LA Times investigation into the HFPA’s ethics and demographic makeup turned up, among other scandals, a complete lack of black members. Now disbanded, the association has been replaced with an invited group of 300 international journalists: 47% female and only 40% white, as boasted by the Globes’ new owners, private equity firm Eldridge Industries and Dick Clark Productions. This year’s mostly respectable nominations – topped by summer siblings Barbie and Oppenheimer, but heavy on critically adored art films such as Past Lives, Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest – suggest the new group would rather not be sneered at.
Barbie is the one to beat… maybe
Barbie leads all contenders at this year’s Golden Globe awards with a whopping nine nominations – tied with the 1972 musical Cabaret for the second-most of all time, with only another 70s classic, Nashville, ahead of them on 11.
Cynics might point out that three of Barbie’s nominations are in the relatively minor best original song category, while another comes in the newly created and oddly defined category of cinematic and box office achievement, alongside the less prestigious likes of The Super Mario Bros Movie and Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. (When the Oscars floated a similar-sounding best popular film award a few years ago, it was ultimately scrapped for being craven and confusing – two adjectives the globes have never feared.)
Don’t assume Barbie’s nomination haul guarantees a good night for Team Gerwig, however, particularly with fierce competition from Poor Things in the comedy/musical categories: from its record-breaking 11 bids, Nashville won a single award… for best original song.
Marilyn Monroe clutches her Golden Globe award with pride after winning Best Actress in a Motion Picture Comedy in the film Some Like It Hot. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
Don’t place your Oscar bets just yet
Then again, for those with an eye on the biggest prize – the Oscar – the globes aren’t the be-all and end-all. For years, it was assumed that the globes were a reliable Oscar predictor but recently they’ve diverged significantly, as pundits look more to industry guild awards and the Baftas for Oscar tea leaves. In the last 20 years, only eight best picture Oscar winners won the corresponding prize at the globes.
Last year, globe voters preferred Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin to eventual Oscar sweeper Everything Everywhere All at Once, just as they did Austin Butler and Angela Bassett to Oscar winners Brendan Fraser and Jamie Lee Curtis. The year before, Jane Campion’s queer western The Power of the Dog trumped cheesy Oscar champ Coda; in others, they opted for The Social Network over The King’s Speech, The Grand Budapest Hotel over Birdman, Brokeback Mountain over shock Oscar victor Crash, and so on.
They can be hipper than you think
If, like many critics and cinephiles, you think those choices reflect rather well on the beleaguered, less prestigious ceremony, here’s the thing nobody tends to admit about the globes: they sometimes have better, bolder taste than you might think.
This is the group, after all, that nominated David Lynch’s visionary Mulholland Drive for best picture in 2001 – something the Oscars cannot claim – and has recently handed out inspired acting wins to the likes of Isabelle Huppert, for her daringly perverse portrayal of a conflicted rape victim in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, and Sally Hawkins, who wasn’t even Oscar- or Bafta-nominated, for her highly original comic turn in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky.
Indeed, the globes’ comedy/musical category has enabled them to reward various classic films and performances for which the Academy was too po-faced: Marilyn Monroe may never have received an Oscar nomination, but she did pick up a well-deserved Globe for Some Like It Hot.
They have a serious thing for
Barbra Streisand
For all their past diversity-related controversies, the globes beat the Oscars to one particular milestone by 26 years. Whereas it took the latter until 2010 to reward a woman for best director – Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker – the globes did it all the way back in 1984. Admittedly, the HFPA didn’t have to move outside their celebrity-loving comfort zone to do this: the winner was Barbra Streisand for her directorial debut, the self-aggrandising musical Yentl, an achievement the academy’s directors’ branch chose not to nominate at all.
As it happens, between her achievements in acting, filmmaking and songwriting, La Streisand holds the record for the most Golden Globe trophies with 10. (Meryl Streep, with eight, holds the record for acting wins alone.) With globe voters having preferred James Cameron to Bigelow in the year of her Oscar coronation, only Chloé Zhao and Jane Campion have since joined Streisand on the list of women to win for directing: Greta Gerwig and Past Lives newcomer Celine Song are hoping to join them this year.
HBO drama The Last of Us is in the running for the Best Series award. Photograph: Sky
They didn’t have a host until 2010
Traditionally, the appeal of the globes has been that it’s the more fun, more raucous version of the Oscars. With seating around dinner tables rather than theatre-style, and alcohol flowing freely throughout, it has a reputation for entertainingly inebriated speeches and chaotic mishaps – the night where a hammered Elizabeth Taylor couldn’t open the envelope for the award she was presenting, and when Renée Zellweger was in the loo when her best actress win was announced.
A frill-free ceremony – just awards, no production numbers, no emcee – was a key part of their informality. Then, in 2010, they introduced a tradition of suitably fast-and-loose hosts, including Ricky Gervais and the popular duo of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. This year, the job falls to a lesser-known comic, Filipino-American standup Jo Koy. It’s a big gig, though still comes with nothing like the pressure of hosting the Oscars.
Oh, and they’re not just about film
Where the Oscars’ viewership figures have declined in parallel with diminishing cinemagoing numbers, the globes have their additional television awards to lure in small screen-inclined audiences. Though the Emmys retain their reputation as the most prestigious prize in TV, the Golden Globes – drawn to shiny new things, and thus less inclined than the Emmys to pick the same winners year on year – can be more exciting on this front.
It’s the group that handed best series prizes to the Emmy-less likes of Brideshead Revisited, Twin Peaks, Girls and the original British version of The Office. This year, viewers can see if that trend results in wins for hot new series like The Last of Us and Jury Duty, or if past victors Succession and Abbott Elementary prevail again.
Meanwhile, a brand new category for best performance in standup comedy on television – with the nominees including Ricky Gervais, Amy Schumer and Chris Rock – gives the Golden Globes a unique selling point in a crowded season of awards shows: no other major ceremony has an equivalent.
The critically adored Past Lives is up for a Globe. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/05/theresa-may-unlikely-change-terms-parliament-vote-final-brexit-deal | Politics | 2017-02-05T19:47:51.000Z | Anushka Asthana | PM 'unlikely to change terms' of parliament vote on final Brexit deal | Theresa May is unlikely to concede to any demand to change the terms of parliament’s vote on the final Brexit deal despite facing a possible Conservative revolt over the issue.
A government source told the Guardian that calls for British MPs to be given a vote on the deal before it goes to the European parliament, and to be handed a say if no agreement is hammered out, were not practical.
The prime minister was keen to accommodate Tory demands but suggested that this move would “hamstring” the government in negotiations with the EU27, the source said.
They also argued it could plunge the government into “perpetual Brexit purgatory” if deals were repeatedly rejected.
The comments came in response to the suggestion that up to a dozen Conservative MPs are considering lining up with opposition parties, including Labour, on the issue this week.
Ken Clarke on Brexit: ‘I’ve never seen anything as mad or chaotic as this’
Read more
Potential Conservative rebels, including Anna Soubry, Nicky Morgan and Ken Clarke, want to avoid a “cliff edge” scenario in which the UK crashes out of the EU on to World Trade Organisation rules.
They could back a frontbench Labour amendment, or one laid down by the Labour MP Chris Leslie, which insists parliamentarians should not simply get a vote on an agreed deal but on any future “relationship” with the EU. That would mean politicians would still have a say even if no agreement was reached.
Leslie’s amendment also says MPs and peers should vote on the proposed terms of any deal before they are agreed with the European commission or put to MEPs in the European parliament.
The Conservative MP Neil Carmichael, who wants the government to negotiate a close relationship with the EU, said: “It is very important that parliament is properly consulted in a meaningful way up to and including any deals or relationships with the European Union.”
His colleague, Ben Howlett, added that MPs in all parties had expressed a range of concerns relating to the final deal. “In the unlikely circumstance there is no deal at the end of the two years once article 50 is triggered, parliament should have the final say on any ‘new relationship’ with the European Union,” he said.
Another Tory MP said the government was able to stop the rebellion by making a concession, pointing out that Conservatives did not want to vote against their party.
The same position will be pushed by the shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer, who is also hoping to use this week to secure an agreement under which May has to provide regular reports on the negotiations.
The government source stressed that May was willing to compromise and had already agreed to publish a white paper, as the rebels demanded. The Guardian understands she could also offer a concession on the issue of quarterly reporting to parliament.
But the source said it was much more difficult to take action with regards to the final vote, particularly given May’s determination that politicians in Britain cannot block the Brexit process.
“I struggle to see how it works in practice. What does that actually look like and what is the purpose of the vote?” they said.
“What if parliament rejects the deal, what then? The chances of the leaders of the 27 member states conceding because MPs vote against is pretty slim. We would end up in a perpetual Brexit purgatory.”
They argued that if the rest of the EU knew that MPs and peers were able to hamper the process it would hamstring British negotiators during the two-year period.
Government whips will hold meetings in the coming days to try to persuade MPs not to vote against the government during three days of debate on the article 50 legislation, which will then pass to the House of Lords.
They are determined to maintain the straightforward nature of the two-clause bill, which is narrowly focused on giving the government permission to begin the Brexit process. May’s government only produced it after being forced by the supreme court to give parliament a vote on triggering article 50.
Conservatives want to avoid a rebellion, not least because of their slim majority, but even if a dozen MPs vote against their party, the support for Brexit from some Labour politicians and the Democratic Unionist party means officials are still confident of winning a vote. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2009/mar/10/cannabis-drug-abuse | Books | 2009-03-10T00:01:00.000Z | Jonathan Myerson | Jonathan Myerson on the furore over his wife Julie's decision to write about their estranged son's drug use | There have been so many Worst Moments. There was the morning we watched our son shamble down the street, spare T-shirt and shoes stuffed into his shoulder bag, his 17th birthday only days before. His mother and I have just told him to leave home, that we cannot accept his behaviour any more. His front-door keys are still lying where he threw them on the doormat. We gaze from the front window until he turns the corner and then we simply stand there, watching the empty street, wondering what to do next.
Or was it worse when, maybe an hour before that, his mother and I realised - without even a word exchanged - that we had both finally reached this tipping point? All the addiction experts and all the drug counselling literature told us that this was the only way - "exclude the addict until he understands and asks for help" - but we had fought against this final step, telling ourselves we could handle anything, he's our son, we would never expel him. But that morning we see afresh the lank, lost squalor in which he is choosing to live, the wilful self-destructiveness, and finally we understand the inevitable flow of cannabis from him to his younger siblings. We have to protect them, we have to protect what remains of home life.
Or was it several weeks before that, when I attended my first Families Anonymous meeting? Quaint church hall in Wandsworth, welcoming and gentle faces, all of them related to drug-users, recovering or otherwise. The secretary turns and asks me, as a new member, if I would like the chance to say anything. I've readied myself for this moment, I know what I have to say. I open my mouth to speak, to say out loud for the first time, "My son is addicted to cannabis." Instead my throat dries, lumps up, the words won't form. I don't want to cry but I can't speak. I am mumbling, staring at the floor, and they know enough to leave me be.
Or maybe it was a year and a half later. After twice returning to live at home and twice being asked to leave again, we have rescued him from sofa-surfing by underwriting the first month's rent on a flat. Just five weeks later - following persistent noise complaints from all the neighbours, following a written complaint from the primary school whose playground backs on to the flat, following a police visit to break up a fight between him and his flatmate - he has been evicted. He simply takes a trip out of town, leaving his mother and me to clear up and, most importantly, to rescue his cat. Kitty was his sixth birthday present and has been hugged nightly and cherished every day since. He missed her so much during his homeless days, we could not refuse his request to take her to this new flat. Now she is cowering bewildered in a corner, her legs crimped tight under her, her eyes gummy and masked. We ease her on to a cushion in the carry-box and take her back home.
Or maybe it was six months after that. He had come round to collect some possessions from our house. He is flippant, off-hand, but I am simply furious. Out of nowhere, I am ablaze. I can't hold it back. I will always forgive him everything but I am still finding it hard to forget the damage he has inflicted on his two younger siblings - the chaos, the anxiety and, ultimately, the drugs. He could do this to himself but not to them.
As he rummages through the scrappy boxes we brought back from the abandoned flat, I pick an argument and I pick it and I pick it and then I simply let go and am throwing a punch at him. Of course, I don't know how to punch someone. He easily knocks me away and we grapple meaninglessly for a few seconds. Inside I have three, four years of frustration wanting to blow.
His mother sees him out of the house while I slump on the sofa and weep, gasping, snotty, desperate, final: "I have lost my son." I have deliberately tried to strike my son, to punch him until he hurts. Who have I become? What happens to make anyone do that? And yet, later that day, we find him sitting in the park outside, strumming a guitar with his sister.
I apologise (as though I could ever say enough). He smiles and says it is OK (and that's why I love him).
And for the last four years, this is how it's been. Two steps forward, two steps back. We effectively remain where we have been since it started.
This is cannabis. It stops you, it rips out normal reactions, normal kindness, normal motivation. It draws a line and you stand patiently behind it. And this is why we have broken one of the most serious prohibitions facing any writer. You Do Not Write About Your Children. Yes, your kids might enter your work now and then in charming disguise but you do not ever lay out their genuine, raw problems on the page. You fictionalise them, you do not present it up-front and true. There is a glass-fronted box in the corner of every writer's room, protecting the real lives of their children: Smash Only In Case Of Emergency.
This is an emergency. True, the city is not aflame, plague is not afoot. But there are too many families whose home life has been shattered by a teenage son (it is nearly always boys) who is losing it as a result of cannabis. Maybe not as badly as ours has lost it, but nevertheless creating chaos and distress. We think our boy was one in a thousand, maybe one in five hundred. He drew the unlucky lottery ticket, his brain could not cope with this influx of chemicals.
The Department of Health figures (one in five will have tried cannabis by the age of 15) insist use is falling in Britain. That's not how it feels in south London - or, presumably, south Manchester or south Glasgow. Here, it feels like everyone has had a toke by the age of 15. Of these, only some will become regular users. For most of them, it is a Saturday-night high and nothing more. But for some, it becomes unshakeable.
And crucially, with this particular drug, this is happening to children - to 13, 14, 15 year-olds. So if anyone is going to write the inside story, to bring out the truth of this, it is going to be a parent. My wife found herself doing this - long after the worst of the grief - but when the book was finished the decision was mine. I told her it was only publishable if our boy agreed. Over lunches in our local Italian, she showed him the manuscript and, subject to a few factual corrections, he agreed. And later, when we happened to find some poems of his, he selected the ones he was happy to see included in the book.
I know there are those who will say that he had no real choice, that he understands what makes his mother write and knew this book was precious to her, important even. But I also know that if he had thrown it back at her, horrified, she would have instantly withdrawn the manuscript. It is madness to suggest that she would put a book ahead of her relationship with her son - or that I would let her.
In my optimistic moments, I even imagine that he knows and understands the mess he is in and knows the story is true and deserves to be told. Maybe not. I just can't stop myself hoping. Every day I wait for him to come back. Every day.
Imagine if you could wave a wand and instantly all the spliffs and baggies were transformed into bottles of gin. You leave for work on Wednesday morning and suddenly you see kids on the way to school with a quarter of Gordon's sticking out their rucksack; at Thursday lunchtime, you see them sharing a swig of Tanqueray at the bus stop. And if you saw that daily, all around you, you would say there's a genuine problem. Except it's worse than that. Because skunk gets you as high as gin but has psychotropic effects to boot. Cannabis remains in the bloodstream for up to 10 days and, let me tell you, the mood swings continue for every one of those days. And that's not all. In your early 20s, the legacy returns in the form of schizophrenia. Professor Robin Murray at the Maudsley Hospital estimates that at least 10% of all people with schizophrenia in the UK would not have developed the illness if they had not smoked cannabis. That's 25,000 individuals at current figures. With stronger varieties being smoked at a younger age, this figure can only rise. So tell me, Daily Mail, why are you treating this story like "a bit of pot"? Why focus on the blonde novelist when there's a much bigger issue here?
Looking back, our boy seems to have started losing his way in the months leading up to GCSEs. He had been the star pupil, the star boy, our eldest, our golden one. Even as a child he had easily mastered the knack of charming adults. He was easygoing and biddable, with a genuine smile and ceaseless energy. We asked him to work hard at school and so he did. In his first year at secondary school, he wangled himself on to the headmaster's table at the annual quiz night and they won - he loved it.
By the time he was 15, he was targeting 12 A-grades at GCSE. A year later, we were so exasperated with his behaviour I remember saying to Julie, angrily, desperately, "He needs to fail one of these GCSEs. He needs to realise what he's doing."
Of course, it was us who didn't realise. By then he was smoking cannabis, presumably the potent form of cannabis known as skunk. In a Home Office study, figures from 23 police forces suggested that 81% of cannabis seized last year was herbal cannabis and the majority of this would have been the stronger form known as skunk. Sometimes he'd admit to using skunk, sometimes he'd insist he wasn't. Sometimes he'd tell us he used it every day, sometimes he'd boast about not having touched it for three days. Drug users are rarely consistent. But it was certainly draining all motivation out of him.
Over the last few days, most of the British press has queued up to criticise Julie for writing about the devastation that skunk has worked on our family. Their arguments - some ill-informed, some plain vitriolic - have all rested on an implicit belief that "a bit of pot" simply does not cause this kind of aggression, this sort of abuse. Yes, they say, if this was a heroin addict, nicking your stereo, your jewellery and flogging it down the pub, that would be credible. And they're right, you don't need to flog a stereo for a spliff - it costs less than a pint. And anyway, cannabis makes you mellow - stoners are hippies, laid back, docile to a fault. We used to smoke it, they imply, and we just giggled.
That was then. Skunk is GM cannabis. Evidence from the Forensic Science Service suggests that skunk cannabis (otherwise known as sinsemilla) is remarkably stronger than ever before. It is unquestionably different, definitely stronger. In skunk, the active ingredient, THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), has been ramped up significantly. But perhaps more importantly, this has been achieved at the cost of another component of naturally occurring cannabis, CBD (cannabidiol). And some scientists are starting to think that CBD has antipsychotic properties - something to offset the THC in old-fashioned marijuana but absent in skunk. But hang on, says the commentariat, you don't see stoners getting violent, abusive. You just don't. And, I agree, anecdotally that feels true. But these are adults they're talking about (and most of them have dropped out, are not being told to get up and go to school at 8am every morning). What happens if you give this potent, psychoactive ingredient to young, still-forming brains? There probably isn't enough certain scientific evidence yet (how long did it take for Richard Doll to gain a following for his cranky smoking-causes-lung-cancer theories?) but the anecdotal evidence is colossal, alarming, unavoidable.
Over the last three years, we have started to mention to friends what has been happening to us, the days and weeks of abuse and chaos. Too many of them have said, "That's amazing, exactly the same happened to my cousin's boy," or, "Yes, I know, my neighbour lost two sons to cannabis."
It's all just teenage rebellion, the doubters presume. They tell us we have overreacted. (Our son tells us the same, though he also readily admits to persistent drug abuse.) And for a year or so, that's how we interpreted it. When he stayed up all night and slept all day, when he stole regularly from us, when he returned home at 3am and woke his brother or sister for a chat, when he kicked open locked doors, when he insisted on coming to Sunday lunch in just boxers and picked an abusive argument when we asked him not to. In fact, he picked an argument about almost anything, almost daily. If we tried to deny him money, he stood belligerently in front of his mother's desk, refusing to let her work. Day after day, boundaries were ignored, order reduced to disorder. And maybe the worst thing was that his siblings were starting to change, they were echoing his disregard, his abusiveness, presuming this was correct pre-adult behaviour - of course they did, he's charismatic, he's the older brother. The whole tenor of home life was sliding, we would retreat to a boundary to create peace and he would march straight up and smash through that.
Any single one of these instances would pass for teen spirit. Put them all together and there's something different happening. Even then we didn't assemble the picture until an old friend who now lives in New York came to stay one night. We told her what had been happening. She didn't think twice, she told us it was drugs. We said, sure, we know he probably smokes some dope, that's all part of the rebellion. No, she told us, the cannabis isn't a symptom, it's the cause. That's when we put it together. A week later I was sitting in a FamAnon meeting. Two weeks later I knew all about Tough Love. I watched other FamAnon members retell the pain of walking away from their children, knowing it was the only way, the only hope.
It was a horrible learning curve, at once both a simplifying relief - we could finally put a name to this persistent, chaotic barrage - and an appalling admission. By my second meeting, I was able to say, out loud, "My son is addicted to cannabis." His two grandmothers both still reel at our use of the word "addict" but what else do you call it when his life has come entirely derailed? When he tells us what he really wants to do, what he passionately cares about but never manages to do it?
He is an outstandingly talented writer and all he wants is to make it as a songwriter. I think he will. But right now his life has stopped. He started an evening course that might have got him into university to read English - he dropped out of school after two years spent scraping three AS levels. But then he failed to show up for the end-of-year exam. Things start and never get completed. He is 20 now and has never done a day's paid work in his life.
Again, name any of these instances and they are hardly proof of drug problems. Put them together, and put them in the context of the happy and fulfilled boy he used to be, and you start to see the insidious effect of cannabis addiction. Simply because he is not begging on a street corner (except when he's busking, which he does with glorious chutzpah) or drooling with a spent needle hanging from his arm, you presume he is doing fine. And if you met him now, you would meet a tall, healthy-looking, articulate, charming guy. Look deeper and you would see a life in stasis.
Should we have allowed him to remain living here? The sensational press and ill-informed columnists have painted us as a couple who found one little spliff and told him to pack his bags that afternoon. We fought for almost two years to avoid doing that. And even after the first eviction, we took him back, renegotiated, watched him bust through boundaries, heard our other two children beg for peace. I remember one evening, late autumn, between evictions, he returned home and within 15 minutes I found my wife, my daughter and my son each in separate rooms, all in tears or shock. Our hearts sank each time we heard him re-enter the house.
During all this, we visited a drugs counselling specialist - and there are not many in Britain who know enough about cannabis - who comforted us but laid it on the line: there would be no other way out in the end. We attended FamAnon and discovered that there is a frightening tendency for this habit to pass from elder to younger brothers. That was a chilling harbinger. We had a 14- and 13-year-old to protect.
And so, unable to change, he went. The family balance was destroyed. In truth, we have never recovered from this, our family home will never be the same again.
Ask any family that has been hit by drugs and the first word they will use is "lonely". When this happens to you, no one who has not experienced it can or will understand it. And when it happens to your pre-adult child, it is doubly incomprehensible.
So if Julie's book helps any other family identify their problem sooner, get help sooner, steer their son off this path, then I don't mind what anyone says about her or me. We don't mind what they think of us for publishing a book about our own son. Our relationship with him is precious, enduring but ultimately our problem. Your problem starts when your child smokes his first skunk. And maybe then you'll pick up her book and want to understand. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/apr/22/labor-considered-altering-stage-three-tax-cuts-just-after-coming-to-power-foi-battle-reveals | Australia news | 2024-04-21T15:00:02.000Z | Sarah Basford Canales | Labor considered altering stage-three tax cuts just after coming to power, FOI battle reveals | The Albanese government was considering tweaks to stage-three tax cuts as early as one month after being elected, despite repeatedly stating its position hadn’t changed, new documents reveal.
A two-page ministerial submission, released to former senator Rex Patrick after a 16-month freedom of information tussle, shows Treasury officials provided the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, with a breakdown of options to change the stage-three tax cuts and claw back more revenue in July 2022.
Stage-three tax cuts: how the Albanese government’s changes will affect you
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After a discussion between department officials and Chalmers’ office in mid-June 2022, the treasurer requested “rule of thumb” costings regarding options he could take to the expenditure review committee and to discuss with other ministers ahead of the October budget.
The Morrison government’s stage-three tax cuts passed parliament in 2019, and Labor committed to keep them at the last election. The legislated cuts removed the 37% tax bracket for those earning between $120,000 and $180,000, increased the top tax bracket from $180,000 to $200,000, and lowered the 32.5% marginal tax rate to 30%.
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Treasury’s submission to Chalmers in July 2022 outlined three options for changes to the legislated tax cuts that would result in revenue gains. One option was leaving the tax rate for those earning between $45,001 and $200,000 at 32.5%, instead of reducing it to 30% from 2024-25.
A second option would see the 37% tax rate retained for those earning between $120,001 to $200,000.
The third option, which generated the smallest revenue gain of the options, would keep the 30% rate for incomes between $45,001 to $180,000 but increase the rate to 45% for those between $180,001 to $200,000.
Labor had initially opposed the former Coalition government’s tax reforms while in opposition but agreed to keep the tax cuts, which predominantly benefited high-income earners, in 2021.
Chalmers, and other Labor ministers, had repeatedly denied there was any change to its position on keeping the stage-three tax cuts until earlier this year.
In question time in July 2022, Chalmers said he had no intentions to change the stage three tax cuts.
“As the member for Melbourne [Greens leader, Adam Bandt] knows, the legislated tax cuts are already in the budget; they don’t come in for a couple of years, and we’ve said that we don’t intend to change that. I think our position is well known on that, as is, respectfully, the member for Melbourne’s position on that,” he said.
In January, more than a year-and-a-half after Treasury’s options were first laid out, the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, announced the tweaks as “a tax cut for every taxpayer” and that modification of the stage-three tax cuts was “the right thing to do” in changed economic circumstances.
Under this version, the 37% tax bracket – set to be abolished – was retained, the bottom tax bracket was lowered to 16%, and the top tax rate’s threshold was lowered to $190,000.
A spokesperson for Chalmers defended the decision: “As the treasurer has said publicly multiple times in the past, when we came to government, we ran the ruler over the entire budget because that was the right and responsible thing to do,” the spokesperson said.
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“After inheriting a budget heaving with a trillion dollars of Liberal party debt, it was important for us to know how much key policies cost.”
Patrick said he had lodged the FOI request in December 2022 predicting the issue would emerge as a major issue as the 2024-25 financial year crept closer.
Australian FoI loophole to deny access to documents closed in ‘transformative’ ruling
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The former senator, who describes himself as a transparency warrior and has earned a reputation for his expertise in FOI requests, faced a protracted battle with the department that ended up in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
“I won the battle but I lost the war, because I ended up getting the documents but only after the tax cuts had emerged,” Patrick said.
Treasury officials had argued against the two-page document’s release because it could undermine the treasurer’s confidence in the department’s advice and lead to poorer public administration and decision making. They also argued the policy area was “highly contested” and had “enduring high political sensitivity”.
Patrick said his win against the public service officials was a win for democracy.
“If Treasury are not prepared to have their advice reviewed by outsiders, then the treasurer should not act on that advice,” he said.
“In a democracy, citizens are allowed to get access to information so that they can contribute in an informed way to debate.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/09/electric-planes-sound-like-a-fantasy-but-they-may-be-the-future-for-short-haul-in-australia | Environment | 2023-01-08T14:00:50.000Z | Royce Kurmelovs | Electric planes sound like a fantasy but they may be the future for short-haul in Australia | In late September the first fixed-wing passenger electric passenger aircraft took off from Grant County international airport in the US state of Washington. The nine-seater charter plane – known as Alice – soared to 1,000 metres (3,500 feet) for eight minutes.
Less than two months later Northern Territory Air Services, a scheduled airline and charter operator, put in an order to bring 20 of the aircraft to Australia with plans to fly passengers from Darwin to Uluru and Mount Isa.
The first flight of Alice, the first fixed-wing passenger electric aircraft. Photograph: Eviation
It’s a small sign that the winds may be changing for zero-emissions aviation in Australia, one of the most flight-dependent countries in the world.
Until recently there was no industry body making the case for change and even the Royal Flying Doctor Service, which operates the largest air fleet in the country and has traditionally been a hotbed of innovation, has no plans to acquire or develop electric aircraft.
Aircraft and hangars owned by the Royal Flying Doctor Service at Alice Springs airport. Photograph: Fotofritz/Alamy
Yet away from the spotlight, a small crop of startups and aviation companies have been working on electric flight.
Among them is the charter company Sydney Seaplanes, which is planning to become the first all-electric airline in the country, and Bader Aero, a company developing a two-seater electric aircraft for use in pilot training and whose co-founder Barrie Rodgers set a record for the longest journey by electric aircraft – a seven-day, 18-stop flight across South Australia in June 2021.
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In July the US company Wisk announced a memorandum of understanding with the Queensland Council of Mayors to help clear the way for its four-seater driverless eVTOLs (electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing aircraft) to operate as “safe, sustainable and scalable” air taxis in Brisbane by 2032, when the city hosts the Olympics.
Wisk’s sixth-generation aircraft looks like a scaled-up drone and will have a range of 144km, a cruising speed of up to 120 knots and can be charged in 15 minutes. Its wingspan stretches 15m and it has six propellors mounted on each wing. Once aloft it flies like a small plane.
The Brazilian company EmbraerX is also planning to bring air taxis to Australia, this time by 2026 in Melbourne, in a partnership with Airservices Australia.
Planes, trains and automobiles: comparing cost, speed and emissions of Sydney-Melbourne travel
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Whether these plans will come to fruition remains to be seen. Aside from questions about whether services such as air taxis are desirable, authorities need to hammer out the regulations, insurance and infrastructure needed to make them work.
But the proposals show that at least the conversation about electrifying aviation has begun.
Huge emissions challenge
According to the International Energy Agency the global aviation industry accounted for about 2% of energy-related CO2 emissions in 2021. In Australia domestic aviation represented 8% of transport emissions in 2019.
The nation’s largest airline, Qantas, has increasingly begun talking about its plans to reach net zero emissions, beyond the usual carbon offset it offers its passengers.
Passengers at the Qantas domestic terminal in Sydney. Photograph: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images
The Qantas fleet burned 4.9bn litres of jet fuel in 2019, the last year before the pandemic temporarily curtailed its operations, and generated 12.4m tonnes of CO2.
At the launch of the company’s climate action plan in April, its chief executive, Alan Joyce, stressed that “hydrogen- or electric-powered aircraft are several decades away” and the airline wanted to focus on “technology that is within reach today”.
Qantas has since announced it will begin to replace its domestic fleet from late 2023 to enable the introduction of sustainable aviation fuels. Qantas plans to fuel its planes with 10% SAF – made with biological waste products or renewable materials – by 2030 and about 60% by 2050.
Australia has no SAF refining capacity but a spokesperson said Qantas had helped create a $200m fund to develop the industry.
“Zero emission technology like electric aircraft or green hydrogen are still a very long way off for aviation, and even further away for long-haul flights like London to Australia,” they said. “SAF and high quality carbon offsetting are therefore critical on the path to net zero.”
The La France, the aircraft that took the world’s first round trip in 1885 – that is, it landed at the same airstrip from which it launched. Photograph: Wikimedia
The price of SAF fuels is expected to fall but it is expected to remain more expensive than those derived from fossil fuels. Despite claims by Qantas that SAF fuels are a “stepping stone” to net zero, there are concerns its investment will create a new refining industry that may hinder the adoption of technologies that eliminate the need to burn fuel at all.
Its biggest competitor, Virgin Australia, has a commitment to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 but a spokesperson said the company was held back by a lack of domestic refining for SAF and “electric aviation isn’t something we’re actively looking at for the time being”.
The main obstacle for long-haul operators is weight. Two decades before the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903, a two-man crew took the airship La France on the first round trip by an aerial vehicle.It carried a 435kg zinc-chlorine battery on its 8km journey – the equivalent of hauling around a grand piano.
A modern battery this massive would still provide only a fraction of the power required for a commercial passenger aircraft with 150 or more seats.
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In January Carnegie Mellon University’s Prof Venkat Viswanathan wrote an article for Nature on the future of batteries in aviation which has become a call-to-arms for engineers in the industry. Viswanathan and his coauthors concluded that it was possible to make significant gains in battery chemistry for use in aviation by 2030 – but only if everything went right along the way. And even then, they would still not be capable of powering the largest passenger aircraft.
This means the future of electric aviation in Australia largely rests with short-haul operators.
A render of the Beechcraft King Air, a twin-engine electric aircraft. Illustration: Dovetail Electric Aviation
David Doral, the chief executive and founder of Dovetail Electric Aviation, says the current generation of batteries are not a good solution and green hydrogen technology is not far enough along in its development to power flights even by light aircraft.
“[For planes] it has to be hydrogen,” he says. “Only with batteries? You’re not going to fly very far.”
Doral says Australia will be “flying at two speeds” on zero-carbon aviation.
“On the one hand, for long-distance flying, we don’t have any good solution. From that side of the industry, I think, the future is a little bleak,” Doral says. “On the other hand, we have short haul-aviation – that is a very different story. We think there’s going to be a renaissance of smaller operators flying short distances.”
Rethinking air networks
Australia’s first passenger services developed after the first world war along mail routes such as Sydney to Brisbane, Charleville to Cloncurry and Geraldton to Derby. Greg Bamber, a professor at Monash University, says modern Australia wouldn’t exist without cheap, commercial passenger air travel enabled by the jet engine.
“It radically changed many things,” Bamber says. “[Aviation] became very important to Australia. We’re a big country, sparsely populated. No decent railways or even intercity motorways for that matter. We’re also a long way from the rest of the world.
David Doral says Australia will be ‘flying at two speeds’ on zero-carbon aviation. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian
“The jet age facilitated the movement of large numbers of people, which was until then very expensive and difficult to do when people had to travel for six weeks on an ocean liner.”
Bamber says that as Australia confronts the reality of climate change, electric flight promises to change how people move and where they live, create new industries and force a rethink of how cities are designed.
“We’re not going to wake up tomorrow and have electric planes,” Bamber says. “But there is massive potential there. If we do have electric aircraft and if it’s coupled with vertical take off and landing, we may see airports much closer to city centres, making travel easier, and we’re going to see people work from more remote locations.”
After years of fanfare the future of drone delivery in Australia remains up in the air
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If there is anyone who believes in the potential for short-haul electric flight to break the hub-and-spoke model between the major cities and regional areas, it’s John Sharp, the deputy chairman of Rex Airlines.
In August the company announced it planned a 2024 test flight in partnership with Dovetail. The test will involved retrofitting one of its existing Saab 340 aircraft with electric MagniX engines and a battery pack.
Should it go ahead, the flight will prove commercial electric flight is possible and prepare the ground for the regulatory steps needed to establish the industry.
“There’s the future of the whole concept of electrically powered aircraft at stake,” Sharp says. “If we can’t make this work, it’ll be a setback for people who hope to convert reasonably large aircraft to electric power.”
Success would be a “game-changer”, according to Sharp. As electric motors have fewer parts, they need less maintenance, make less noise and are less likely to go wrong.
Sharp says an airline like Rex could open more routes if it didn’t have to pay for fuel. “It makes the unviable, viable,” he says. “We’ll be at the bleeding edge worldwide on this. There’s a lot of hope, and a lot of expectations at risk – and clearly quite a bit of money.
“At the end of the day it’s all worthwhile, because the world’s calling on airlines to reduce their carbon emissions and we have to try and do something to meet that call.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/27/vauxhall-astra-to-be-built-in-uk-if-ministers-avoid-no-deal-brexit | Business | 2019-06-27T15:23:47.000Z | Jasper Jolly | Vauxhall Astra to be built in UK if ministers avoid no-deal Brexit | French carmaker PSA Group has warned that it will only build its new Vauxhall Astra at its Ellesmere Port plant if the UK avoids a no-deal Brexit, in a stark indication of the importance of trade with the EU to the British car industry.
The Astra is the bestselling model under the Vauxhall and Opel brands and will be built in Germany as well as at Ellesmere Port, near Liverpool, if severe Brexit disruption is avoided, PSA said on Thursday.
However, PSA, the parent company of the Peugeot, Citroen and Vauxhall brands, gave a clear warning against a bad Brexit deal, which could disrupt the just-in-time deliveries on which high-volume carmakers depend.
In its announcement, PSA said: “The decision on the allocation to the Ellesmere Port plant will be conditional on the final terms of the UK’s exit from the European Union and the acceptance of the New Vehicle Agreement, which has been negotiated with the Unite trade union.”
The warning underlined the urgent calls from across the British car industry for a Brexit deal that avoids delays or tariffs at the UK border. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders this week warned that every extra minute of delay of goods at the border would cost the industry £50,000.
If Astra production goes ahead in the UK under a smooth Brexit, the decision to build the vehicle at Ellesmere Port would be a major boost for the embattled British car industry and the 1,000 employees at the plant. Securing the new contract is thought to be vital for the future of the factory.
Yet Boris Johnson, who won the largest vote from MPs in the first stage of the Conservative party leadership election, has said that the UK will leave the EU on 31 October, “do or die”. PSA executives have not met Johnson. PSA also owns a Vauxhall plant in Luton, where it employs 1,200 people making the Vivaro van.
Mick Chalmers, regional coordinating officer for the Unite trade union, said a no-deal Brexit would destroy Ellesmere Port’s “hope of securing the plant’s long-term future”.
Ellesmere Port, which currently manufactures the Astra, beat off competition from a plant in Gliwice, Poland. The new model will be built from 2021 onwards, and will secure electric car production in the UK, an important consideration as the industry moves away from the combustion engine.
PSA’s chief executive, Carlos Tavares, has previously made it clear the carmaker would not shy away from unpopular decisions, including shutting factories, in the event of a no-deal Brexit.
Fears over the Ellesmere Port plant’s future have swirled within the industry since the Brexit vote, although the fact that PSA held off making a decision – even as Honda and Ford announced closures of British factories – led some analysts to believe the company was keen to preserve it.
The plant’s survival was probably aided by the quick turnaround of the Opel-Vauxhall business, which was bought by PSA for £1.9bn from US carmaker General Motors in 2017.
Opel–Vauxhall reported its first annual profits in 20 years in 2018 after a major cost-cutting plan. During General Motors’ ownership, the company made $19bn (£15bn) in accumulated losses but Opel-Vauxhall made a profit of €859m in 2018. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/apr/18/communities-fight-back-developers-with-greener-plans-for-uk-housing | Society | 2022-04-18T11:35:17.000Z | Harriet Grant | Communities fight back developers with ‘greener’ plans for UK housing | “We don’t think it’s too late. We hope that our vision might reach the offices in Hong Kong where they are deciding the future of our neighbourhood.”
In Deptford, south-east London, activist Marion Briggs is part of a group of campaigners making a last-ditch effort to change the trajectory of gentrification in the area.
Head off the high street towards the river, turn past the Dog and Bell pub and long white hoardings bring the streets of low-rise council homes to an end. This is Convoys Wharf, a huge riverside building site, once a shipyard for Henry VIII and now being prepared for 3,500 homes – the majority for private ownership. Three huge towers of 38 and 48 storeys will dominate the skyline. In the block set aside for “affordable” homes, the majority are shared ownership, the rest “affordable rent”. There are no homes at social rent levels. The development will also contain 1,800 parking spaces.
The Hong Kong-based developer Hutchison Whampoa – led by one of the world’s richest men, Li Ka-shing – has pushed relentlessly over the past decade to get these plans through against local resistance. When Lewisham council said no, Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, overruled it.
Now, at the final hour, as diggers arrive to lay foundations, local group Voice 4 Deptford has produced what it says is a “greener” vision that recognises the climate emergency. With plans drawn up by Herta Gatter, a planning apprentice, as part of her master’s degree, the group has designed a greener, more locally rooted development. It proposes weaving local history and culture into the site and replacing the towers – which activists say use more water than lower density blocks – with homes that have more shared space for children to play.
“All along the consultation was poor,” says Briggs. “Hutchison Whampoa are thinking about a certain group of people when they build – and that is young professional high earners. Developments like this are for investment, they are not intended to satisfy the needs of the local community.”
The group is not alone in hoping that a detailed “greener vision” might help it take on the complex and unbalanced planning system.
The Mayday Saxonvale project in Frome, Somerset is, its designers claim, the first community-led masterplan in the UK.
“If we succeed here, it will be the first time anything on this scale has been achieved by a community-led development,” says the project’s director, Paul Oster. He is part of a collective of experts who have produced detailed alternative plans for the brownfield mixed-use town centre site.
A housing development in south London. Photograph: UrbanImages/Alamy
The proposal is to fund the building of the site through a joint venture with Stories, a socially responsible property development company.
“We think our ‘Mayday Model’ could pave the way for genuine community-led development across the UK,” says Oster.
“Our view is that the plan as it currently stands is solely designed to make large profitable returns back to the district council. We want a greener site and because we are building this on a not-for-profit plan, we can put higher levels of investment into environmental design.
“We have a huge amount of support from the community.”
The thousands of hours that go into preparing alternative plans are a huge commitment for local residents. In Totnes, Devon, local people spent 13 years trying to buy and build on land that was then sold to other buyers – they say unfairly – at the last minute.
In London many bitter battles are fought over small patches of doorstep green space. Pushing for alternative designs is not easy.
Earlier this month Sarah Correia was given two minutes to speak against proposals by Lambeth council to demolish a former care home and build two large towers that will provide more than 60 affordable homes, including 41 for social rent. Residents say it will reduce light for locals and leave the local park in shadow for most of the afternoon.
“Green spaces matter to mental health in deprived communities,” says Correia. “The towers will overshadow the park after school and on summer evenings. For our children, sitting on that green is their only holiday.”
Locals formed the group Save Lambeth Walk, producing architect-designed plans for a “greener” refurbishment of the current site, which they say would provide just as many homes without the towers.
Lambeth council says the alternative was considered and that it is constantly balancing difficult decisions when building desperately needed new homes. A spokesperson from Homes for Lambeth, the building arm of the council, said: “Consultation began back in 2020 during the pandemic and the recent proposals came just before the decision went to planning committee. We considered them and think the tower design is better than a low-rise site which would have a larger footprint.”
He added: “Homes are more important than losing an hour or two of daylight.”
Meanwhile the council looking at the Deptford project says the development will provide about three hectares of green space as well as £175,000 – under section 106 for community funding – for local parks and playgrounds.
Hutchison Whampoa did not respond to requests for comment.
In Frome, Oster believes communities could help shape genuinely sustainable development. “Up and down the country towns are facing high-density housing schemes that ignore local planning policies. Communities need a long-term vision for generations to come, not short-term profit grabs for councils and developers.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2010/jan/22/joy-of-six-counterattacking-goals | Sport | 2010-01-22T10:51:02.000Z | Rob Smyth | The Joy of Six: Counter-attacking goals | As always, the point of the Joy of Six is not to rank things, only to enjoy them. Some of the other counterattacking goals we like were included in The Joy of Six: Great team goals.
1) Gheorghe Hagi, ROMANIA 3-2 Argentina, World Cup second round, 03/07/1994
To most teams, counter-attacks are almost treated as a bonus. If they emerge organically, great; if they don't, myeah. Yet a few sides are so heavily indoctrinated in the ways of the breakaways that they search for them at every turn and concentrate furiously when they get the opportunity to execute them. While good teams make proper use of set-pieces, very good and great teams make proper use of their opponents' set-pieces. Romania's magnificent 1994 vintage certainly fall into that category.
It stands to reason that, if you base your game around counter-attacks, you should have lots of midfielders, thus facilitating an exhilarating uncoiling of the spring. And in their epic second-round victory over Argentina, with Florin Raducioiu suspended, Romania gave perhaps the first great demonstration of the 4-6-0 formation that has been talked about so much in the last few years. Their match-clinching third goal was an immaculate demonstration of a side instantly realising the full potential of a moment, and probably the most aggressive counter-attack this side of Dead Man's Shoes.
As soon as Jose Basualdo treads on the ball following an Argentina corner, Romania act like a team who have been given a 10-second time-limit in which to score. Illie Dumitrescu charges straight down the field, with Tibor Selymes deliberately curving his off-the-ball run to drag the defence to his left. Dumitrescu uses Selymes by not using him and instead pauses, winding his foot back and forth like a dial while he waits for Gheorghe Hagi to appear on the right – and, crucially, for the covering defender to run beyond the line of the pass he wants to play. When he does, Dumitrescu's ball is exquisitely timed and Hagi, on his weaker right foot, rams it into the net with delicious certainty.
As brilliant as the execution was – particularly Dumitrescu's pause, which is a more manly version of Pele's tender, loving foreplay ahead of Carlos Alberto's goal in the 1970 World Cup final – many fine teams could have achieved such a level of technical excellence. But very few would have realised the opportunity was there in the first place.
2) Terry McDermott, LIVERPOOL 7-0 Tottenham, Division One, 02/09/1978
How can you not love this goal? On the venn diagram of football purism and pragmatism, this is the little bit in the middle, a goal that would charm Charles Hughes and Johan Cruyff equally. Almost every season the champions-to-be do it: score a goal that makes you think, 'Bugger this, they're just too good'. The collective nature of the counter-attack means that it is the most likely genre to engender such defeatism. Other examples include Liverpool at Nottingham Forest in 1989-90, Arsenal at Spurs in 2003-04 and Manchester United against Bolton in 2006-07. But this one, the final goal in a 7-0 early-season demolition of Spurs that signalled Liverpool's intention to get their trophy back, might be the pick of the bunch. "[Their] mutual awareness," wrote Patrick Barclay in this paper, "is beginning to approach collective genius."
The two things that stand out are the devastating economy and the quality of all three key touches: David Johnson's slashing crossfield pass, Steve Heighway's first-time cross with scarcely any margin for error, and Terry McDermott's header, which would have been much harder than it looks even if he hadn't just run 80 yards. Bob Paisley, not a man given to hyperbole, said simply, "That must be the best goal Anfield has ever seen." Balls to the Anfield Rap: this was the Scouse sonata.
3) Nigel Jemson, Tottenham 2-3 NOTTINGHAM FOREST, League Cup quarter-final replay, 24/01/1990
The posthumous Cult Of Clough (let's not bother with the acronym, eh), fuelled by travesties like The Damned United film, has focused to a misleading degree on his maverick nature, as if he did little more than turn up laminated on pints of Range Finder, chin one of his team for no particular reason and, in so doing, make the entire squad want to run to the ends of the earth for him. Clearly there was a thrillingly indefinable side to Clough's genius – which is why the copycat management of the likes of Phil Brown and Roy Keane falls so far short – but in other areas it was very easily explained.
One of Clough's biggest strengths was his awareness, years ahead of his time in English football at least, of the potential of counter-attacking football. And football is the operative word. While rapid breakaways were not new in this country – Herbert Chapman's Arsenal had great success through the simple tactic of their stopper lumping it into the space for their wide men – counter-attacking football with the emphasis on ball-carrying and precision passing certainly was. Clough was whip-smart, not a romantic, and was more than happy for Forest to play as the away side even at the City Ground.
Counter-attacking goals dotted his reign – Archie Gemmill won Goal of the Season in 1977-78 – but the ante was upped by the introduction of another Clough, Nigel, whose geometric passing was invariably integral to such moves. Ironically, Clough played no part in our favourite Forest breakaway, the zenith of a startlingly accomplished display of counter-attacking in a barnstorming Littlewoods Cup quarter-final replay at Tottenham in 1990. It might look relatively commonplace by today's standards, but at the time – and particularly in downtrodden, unsophisticated old England – it was like something from another planet. Or, at the very least, another island: during the post-Heysel ban, Forest were one of the few glimpses we got of European football.
Some might say there is an element of fortune in the way John Polston's interception runs through to Garry Parker, although in truth Gary Crosby was going to play it there regardless. Either way, there is so much to admire, from the care of Steve Hodge's ball out of defence – Clough's Forest didn't do Row A, never mind Row Z – to Crosby's first touch and the timing of Parker's through ball. Then it's all about Nigel Jemson, who at that stage was an extremely exciting talent, Clough's latest young, lower-league discovery and somebody who seemed like a future England player rather than a man who would play for eventually 17 clubs. There is real quality about the way he twists the blood and dirties the shorts of Steve Sedgley without even touching the ball, eventually sitting Sedgley down before moving the ball to the side and finishing with emphatic precision.
4) Andrei Kanchelskis, Norwich 1-3 MANCHESTER UNITED, Premier League, 05/04/1993
Manchester-United-included-in-the-Joy-of-Six-shocker. Come, come, only a truly dismal loser would even consider disputing United's inclusion in a eulogy to counter-attacks, for Sir Alex Ferguson's three great sides each mastered the art. Arsenal have arguably taken the breakaway goal to new levels of purity, but no club in recent memory has compiled as consistent and varied a body of work. In Ferguson's 24 years at the club, United have, by our reckoning, scored over 100 goals on the counter-attack. (And, yes, we have been through the videos; and, yes, we did bloody love every minute of it.)
Selecting the best is as futile as trying to pick the best Sopranos episode or the phattest Vanilla Ice rasher, because there are so few duds here. Andrei Kanchelskis's effort at Norwich in the inaugural Premier League season, which set a formidable agenda for the next two decades. United had been sporadically effective on the break before under Ferguson, most notably when trouncing Arsenal 6-2 in 1990, but the rocket fuel of Kanchelskis and Ryan Giggs and the vision of Eric Cantona added a whole new dimension. Kanchelskis's goal also came at the most crucial time, in what was effectively a title eliminator for the right to take on Aston Villa in the run-in.
United had failed to win their previous four games, scoring only two goals, and were looking like bottling the title race for the second year in a row. With Mark Hughes suspended, Ferguson – as tactically courageous in those days as he is cautious now – eschewed the safe selection of Bryan Robson and instead put Giggs at centre-forward alongside Cantona, with Lee Sharpe and Kanchelskis wide. Pace, pace, pace. The consequence was a majestic 3-1 victory full of swaggering counter-attacks, the pick of which produced the second goal.
It began with Gary Pallister facing his own goal six yards out, and with Jeremy Goss homing in on his backside like a letch on a dancefloor. Just seven seconds later Kanchelskis ran through on goal, following four consecutive one-touch passes of extremely high class, and coolly rounded Bryan Gunn to score from a narrow angle. "Lovely silky stuff," purred Andy Gray in the Sky commentary box. Nearly two decades later, United would still be subjecting opponents to death by silk.
5) Darko Pancev, Bayern Munich 1-2 RED STAR BELGRADE, European Cup semi-final first leg, 10/04/1991
Generalising about countries or regions is a dangerous thing these days, given the tedious number of woolly liberals keen to wilfully abuse the gift of political correctness in the name of a witchhunt. The fact remains, however, that in the days before football started in 1992, teams from the old Eastern Bloc were habitually described as "crack Eastern European outfits", and their unpronounceable names, inscrutable faces and otherworldly technique gave them a unique mystery and a danger. It was almost sinister, like they had a computer chip inside them. That mystery had been reduced by a combination of globalisation and saturation, yet the technique of players from these countries has always been so accomplished, with a telepathy not apparent anywhere else, that they are prime candidates to produce counter-attacking goals of the highest class.
The best example came from the magnificent Red Star Belgrade side that won the European Cup in 1991. If their performance in the final against Marseille was hard to defend, then their performance in the semi-final was even harder to defend against. In a first leg that was dominated territorially by Bayern Munich, Red Star were merciless on the counter, a tactic that brought both their goals. The second by Dejan Savicevic was almost offensively straightforward, if still infused with class, while the first was a fantastic demonstration of their peerless technique.
There is the confidence to play from the back, no matter how tight the situation, and an impossibly good curving pass from Robert Prosinecki – the type that commentators are contractually obliged to describe as a "searching ball" – to release Dragisa Binic. Even Binic's low cross is weighted and angled immaculately for Darko Pancev to finish. The England cricketer David Gower once said that "it's hard work making batting look so effortless". By the same token, it can get pretty complicated trying to make football look so chillingly simple. Only crack outfits need apply.
6) Marco Tardelli, ITALY 3-1 West Germany, World Cup final, 11/07/1982
This is the film where everybody remembers the ending and the closing credits but very little of what went before. Marco Tardelli's touch, finish and celebration in the 1982 World Cup final went straight into folklore, but they were preceded by a fantastic breakaway. Counter-attacking defined Italian football in the 20th century just as much as thud and blunder defined English football, and was an integral part of their unexpected 1982 triumph, particularly in the crucial win over Argentina.
"The Italians welcome and lull you and seduce you into their soft embrace, " said the Dutch art critic Rudi Fuchs, "and score a goal like the thrust of a dagger." Damn straight, yet unusually for a counter-attack this was actually a slow kill: after a delightful, leggy surge from the late Gaetano Scirea, one of the all-time great liberos, they toy almost malevolently with the West Germans before Tardelli finally strikes. It takes 25 seconds from interception to goal, an age in Counter-Attack Years, but that's the beauty of this goal: for almost all of those 25 seconds you know that a goal – or at least a significant chance – is on the way. And, if we are to compare a goal to sex for only the 774th time in the Joy of Six, everyone knows that the longer you wait, the greater the reward. Just ask Marco Tardelli. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/24/boko-haram-abducts-women-girls-north-nigeria-kidnap | World news | 2014-06-24T11:58:58.000Z | Harriet Sherwood | Boko Haram abducts scores of women and girls in northern Nigeria, say locals | More than 60 women and girls have been abducted by Islamic militants from a cluster of villages in northern Nigeria, according to a local vigilante leader, two months after an international outcry over the kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls in the same area.
Aji Khalil, the leader of a local group set up to defend villagers, said Boko Haram militants also took about 30 boys and young men.
"Some suspected Boko Haram members invaded … and kidnapped 91 persons. More than 60 married women and young girls as well as children, young men were forcefully taken away by Boko Haram terrorists. Four villagers who tried to escape were shot dead on the spot," he told reporters.
A local government official in Borno state, who requested anonymity, reported similar figures. "More than 60 women were hijacked and forcefully taken away by the terrorists," he said. The village of Kummabza was destroyed, and survivors fled.
However, the abductions were not confirmed by Nigerian defence officials.
The kidnapping in April of more than 200 girls and young women from a boarding school in Chibok, also in Borno state, focused world attention on Boko Haram's activities, and prompted western governments to offer military assistance to Nigeria to tackle the insurgency.
American drones, counter-terrorism experts and advanced surveillance technology from the US and the UK have been deployed in Nigeria in recent weeks. France, Israel and Turkey also offered assistance.
America's first lady Michelle Obama was among millions of people who backed a global Twitter campaign, #BringBackOurGirls, amid fears that those abducted would be used as sex slaves or trafficked to other countries.
The government of Goodluck Jonathan has said it knows where the abducted Chibok students are being held, but it fears militants would kill them in the event of any rescue attempt.
Last week, a presidential committee investigating the abductions said there were 395 students at the school, 119 escaped during the attack, another 57 escaped in the first couple of days of their abduction, leaving 219 unaccounted for.
Boko Haram wants to create an Islamist state in northern Nigeria. It frequently carries out bombings, arson attacks and abductions. Amnesty International estimated that more than 1,500 people were killed in north-east Nigeria in the first three months of this year, but intensifying attacks since then may have doubled that number.
The UN agency for refugees, UNHCR, said last week that about 650,000 Nigerians had been displaced in the north of the country as a result of Boko Haram attacks. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/20/posthumous-pardons-law-may-see-oscar-wilde-exonerated | Culture | 2016-10-19T23:09:59.000Z | Owen Bowcott | Posthumous pardons law may see Oscar Wilde exonerated | Is Oscar Wilde about be posthumously pardoned? In a symbolic gesture announced by the government on Thursday, deceased gay and bisexual men convicted of sexual offences that are no longer illegal will have their criminal records wiped.
Family of Alan Turing to demand government pardon 49,000 other men
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Announcing the initiative, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said that no individuals would be named or singled out – leaving the status of past scandals unresolved.
If the historical homosexual crime is no longer illegal and involved a consensual act with someone over the age of 16, then those convicted will be deemed to have received a posthumous pardon.
The complexity of the evidence that led to Wilde’s conviction in 1895 for gross indecency – including evidence of procuring male prostitutes – would make it difficult to assess. The gay rights organisation Stonewall suggested that the playwright and author, who was sentenced to two years hard labour in Reading jail, should now be entitled to a pardon.
The justice minister, Sam Gyimah, said that a clause would be introduced into the policing and crime bill. “It is hugely important that we pardon people convicted of historical sexual offences who would be innocent of any crime today,” he said. “Through pardons and the existing disregard process we will meet our manifesto commitment to put right these wrongs.”
The disregard process is already open to those who are alive and wish to remove from their criminal record any past sexual offences that are no longer illegal. They will be entitled to a statutory pardon under the new legislation.
In 2013 Alan Turing, the gay mathematician who broke the German Enigma codes, was posthumously pardoned by the Queen. He killed himself by taking cyanide in 1954, at the age of 41, following his conviction for gross indecency.
The MoJ said it would partially follow Lord Sharkey’s amendment to the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 although it would grant a blanket pardon for those who have died and not investigate individual historical cases.
Sharkey said: “This is a momentous day for thousands of families up and down the UK who have been campaigning on this issue for decades. I am very grateful for the government’s support and the support of many of my colleagues in parliament.”
The government has declined to support a private members’ bill on the subject, brought forward by an SNP MP, John Nicolson, which is due to be debated in parliament later this week.
Ministers said they fear that bill would allow some people to claim they have been cleared of offences that are still crimes – including sex with a minor and non-consensual sexual activity.
Gyimah said: “I understand and support the intentions behind Mr Nicolson’s bill, however I worry that he has not fully thought through the consequences. A blanket pardon, without the detailed investigations carried out by the Home Office under the disregard process, could see people guilty of an offence which is still a crime today claiming to be pardoned.”
The MoJ said there would be no historical limit in relation to past offences. It declined to say whether Wilde would be among those deemed posthumously pardoned.
Nicolson, the former BBC newsreader and front bench SNP culture spokesman, told the Guardian that the former justice secretary Michael Gove had promised him government support for his private member’s bill. His would only backdate pardons to 1919. “I hope that the government will sit and read my bill carefully,” he said. “Mine would also be a blanket pardon. A lot of those people [who are alive] are very old and would not want their names listed.”
Paul Twocock, director of campaigns at Stonewall, said: “We welcome the government announcement to issue a posthumous pardon to all gay and bi men unjustly prosecuted for being who they are, but we don’t think it goes far enough. John Nicolson MP’s proposed bill closes a loophole that means some gay and bi men who are still alive and living with those convictions still can’t have them deleted, despite them being unjust and not illegal today. We urge the government to look at bringing this into their proposal.
“We also don’t agree with the government’s interpretation of John Nicolson MP’s bill – it explicitly excludes pardoning anyone convicted of offences that would still be illegal today, including non-consensual sex and sex with someone under 16.” | Full |
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