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https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2010/sep/03/sean-connery-comeback | Film | 2010-09-03T13:37:45.000Z | Stuart Heritage | Sean Connery should stage a comeback to retire on a high | Stuart Heritage | It's hard not to feel a bit conned when an actor retires. That might be because acting doesn't seem like a real job. Putting on fancy clothes and pretending to be wittier and more athletic than you really are, in exchange for piles of cash and widespread adulation, doesn't seem like the sort of thing a normal person could ever grow sick of.
I'm bringing this up because, to mark his 80th birthday last week, Sean Connery reiterated his desire to never act again. Fair enough, you might say – he's been acting since the mid 50s and doesn't need the money. If you lived in a house as palatial as his residence in the Bahamas then your desire to work probably wouldn't be particularly intense either. He was right to bow out while on top. It's better to burn out than to fade away, after all.
Except Connery didn't manage to bow out while on top. He burned out, but he had faded away long before that. Look at the last few films Connery made. There was Entrapment in 1999, characterised by an unsettling four-decade age chasm with love interest Catherine Zeta-Jones. There was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in 2003, where he essentially just ran around headbutting people. There was a Michael Bay film. There was even, God help us all, The Avengers.
And this is why his determination to never act again is such a shame. Sure, his retirement has ensured he's avoided even more stinkers – he wisely avoided any involvement in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, for example – but it also means that he'll never be able to crown his career with the sort of masterful performance that has already helped to define his peers.
Think Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt, Peter O'Toole in Venus, Paul Newman in Road to Perdition, or about 85% of the roles that Michael Caine has accepted in the past decade. These parts demanded the actors to play men of their own age, stripped of the bravado of their prime years and informed by the vulnerability and sense of loss a younger actor could never hope to replicate.
To be fair, this kind of role has never really been Connery's style. He's always been more of a movie star than an actor, preferring to bludgeon his way through performances than lose himself in a role. There's no doubt he's capable of poignancy when it's most needed – his spoken-word rendition of In My Life from George Martin's otherwise execrable album of Beatles cover versions is almost unbearably tender – but bullishness was always more his bag. Take 2000's Finding Forrester, for example. Most actors would have found something sympathetic in his reclusive author, but Connery chose to imbue the character with a steely aloofness that's much more him.
That said, I'm still convinced that Connery has one last great dramatic role in him and, however much fun retirement is, I'd love nothing more than to yank him out of it and get him back working. The comeback could be a triumph, or it could be a horrible failure, but at least he'll have tried. And, if nothing else, it would mean that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen wouldn't be his final film. That alone has to be worth something. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/13/theresa-may-coalition-of-the-sane-brexit-tories | Opinion | 2017-10-13T09:25:31.000Z | Simon Jenkins | Theresa May needs a ‘coalition of the sane’ to stave off Brexit calamity | Simon Jenkins | So high are the Brexit stakes that divorce talks were always likely to go to the line. After yesterday’s “deadlock”, this appears to be the case. There must surely be an urgent heads of government session, at least involving Britain, France and Germany, to cut a deal on cash and talks on trade. It is time to bring on the grownups.
Another month, further deadlock – this isn’t what the Brexiters promised
Hugo Dixon
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But all politics is local, especially Brexit politics. It is impossible for Theresa May to embark on this next stage with a divided cabinet, party and parliament. The kindest analysis of her tactics so far is that she has played cunning. She has kept her Brexit backwoodsmen inside the cabinet tent, and has resolutely refused to seem partisan herself. That has not worked – witness the latest fierce backwoods demand for the chancellor to be sacked. There is now a serious risk of Tory right/Labour left collusion. As Brexit legislation enters parliament, paralysis by amendment will see May fighting on two fronts at once, at home and abroad. This is unsustainable.
All involved in this mess should keep one fact in mind. Britain has agreed to leave the EU, but it has not agreed how. Every opinion poll, every interest group, every sensible bit of evidence is tilted towards “soft” Brexit, towards workable, feasible, sane Brexit. Even polls on immigration specifically among leavers – by YouGov, the Economist and King’s College London – indicate majority acceptance of free movement for EU workers, given restrictions on benefits similar to those operating in many other EU states.
There is no consensus for a “cliff edge” departure from the EU, for customs barriers, trade quotas, passport restrictions and no transition. There is no majority for hard Brexit in parliament, even among Conservative MPs. Enthusiasm for the World Trade Organisation option is limited to a few newspapers and the Tory right. To any bank, business, travel organisation or university, hard Brexit is flat-Earthism.
Some compromise with the EU will have to come. It has already been hinted at over the budget and the European court. But the next “compromise phase” will collapse if May has to be looking over her shoulder every hour of the day in the House of Commons. This will especially be the case should Labour and the Liberal Democrats cynically use Brexit as a manoeuvre to bring her down.
The Brexiteers’ trade fantasies are crashing down around their ears
Molly Scott Cato
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May’s primary task of leadership is to contrive a parliamentary “coalition of the sane” on Europe for the duration of the talks. It may run against her nature to get the party leaders and their whips to agree on how best to monitor and support the negotiations. But there is a clear public interest, indeed public demand, for this to happen. Britons clearly wish to retain their open market status within Europe. Parliament should reflect that wish, and not let a minority drive negotiations to a crash.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/07/theresa-may-use-last-days-as-pm-series-policy-moves-legacy | Politics | 2019-06-07T12:03:20.000Z | Heather Stewart | Theresa May to use last days as PM to make series of policy moves | Theresa May is expected to press ahead with a series of policy announcements potentially costing billions of pounds in her final days in Downing Street, in the face of reservations from the chancellor.
The prime minister is keen to salvage some semblance of a domestic legacy from her three-year stint in No 10, which has been overwhelmingly dominated by Brexit.
May’s spokesperson said on Friday: “You heard from the PM recently in setting out that for the remainder of her time in office she will be focused on delivering and building on the domestic agenda that she has put at the heart of her premiership, since she became prime minister.”
High court quashes bid to prosecute Boris Johnson over false referendum claim about cost of EU - as it happened
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May has already responded warmly to the Augur review of higher education funding, suggesting that maintenance grants should be restored. However, Whitehall sources suggest No 10 has clashed with the Treasury about making costly pledges.
Philip Hammond has repeatedly made clear that with a full-blown spending review coming up in the autumn, decisions should be made in the round. Giving evidence to the Treasury select committee in April, Hammond was asked about whether extra resources could be found for key priorities before the spending review kicked off.
“It would be possible, but I do not think it would be a good idea at all,” he said. “The point of a periodic spending review is an opportunity for government, parliament and society more widely to debate priorities, to look at how we allocate scarce resources across the vast range of potential avenues for spending those resources, and to decide what our priorities are for the next period and how we want to allocate resources.”
However, that approach did not apply to the £20bn of extra funding for the NHS May announced last year.
Hammond is also nervous about the idea that some of the £27bn of “fiscal headroom” he set aside for Brexit contingencies could be spent, despite the fact that none of the frontrunners for the Tory leadership have ruled out no deal.
Asked whether May had clashed with the chancellor, the prime minister’s spokesperson said: “They meet regularly to discuss spending priorities. I wouldn’t get into the nature of the discussions.”
A Downing Street source played down the idea that any announcements would amount to a spending splurge, saying: “We’ll want to keep delivering for people, but what we haven’t said is whether/how much that costs.”
No 10 slapped down the chancellor on Thursday, after the Financial Times revealed a leaked letter in which he had said May’s promise to hit net zero carbon emissions by 2050 would cost £1tn in lost economic output.
“Obviously, I’m not getting into the contents of the letter, but broadly there are a lot of figures out there on this issue that don’t factor in the benefits or consider the costs of not doing this,” said the prime minister’s spokesperson.
From hard to soft – Tory leadership hopefuls cover Brexit spectrum
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Hammond and May have had a rocky relationship. During the 2017 general election campaign, she pointedly declined to say whether he would continue as chancellor, while he was standing alongside her.
The chancellor once suggested “fiscal”, when asked to choose one word to describe himself. But he has repeatedly irritated colleagues by reining in their plans. One cabinet minister described his reticence about May’s final announcements as: “Eeyore strikes again. He just likes to shoot everything down.”
May will resign formally as Tory leader on Friday: a move that will be cemented by a private exchange of letters with the chairs of the backbench 1922 Committee. However, she will remain in place until her successor is chosen, a process due to be completed in the week beginning 22 July.
Q&A
How do the Tories elect a new leader?
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All the leading contenders for the premiership have made high-profile spending pledges. Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock have focused on education, while Jeremy Hunt has suggested the UK needs to spend more on defence. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/nov/15/francesca-simon-family-values | Life and style | 2008-11-15T00:01:00.000Z | Melissa Benn | My family values: Francesca Simon, children's author | A family is like the priests in Father Ted - often incompatible people trapped together. I'm the eldest of four. A lot of my humour comes from having to live in somewhat cramped surroundings, always sharing a bedroom with my younger sister. Ironically, I get on famously with all my siblings now that we all have our own homes (and bedrooms!).
My childhood was peripatetic. By the age of 12 I had been to seven schools. Before I was eight I had lived in Missouri, New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and back to LA. We always rented places and often had to move at short notice. That made me determined to own my own home. My son has lived in the same house since he was 15 months old.
My father is a screenwriter and playwright. We always had to be quiet while he was writing. He also thought writers needed to be detached from the world: I don't think he ever set foot in a supermarket, paid a bill or did any childcare. I believe the opposite, I made a conscious decision that my family could be as noisy as they liked, and that my writing would fit in around the family and not vice versa. All my Horrid Henry books revolve around the chaos, stress and humour inherent in all family life.
I got my political interest and left leanings from my mother. She has always been politically active and a passionate fighter for social justice: she was involved in desegregating St Louis restaurants in the 1950s. She often took us on anti-war demonstrations.
My mother told me when I was about seven that a girl could either get married or have a career: to do both was impossible. In that case, I replied, I would never get married. I'm glad her dire prediction proved wrong.
It's very important for families to eat together. We had Friday night Shabbat as a family night, frequently with lots of friends round. Mom was a great cook. My parents loved entertaining and they always encouraged us to invite friends to dinner. I'm the same.
I love being a mother. It's far more important to me than being a writer. I would never have written for children if I hadn't had my son Josh. He gave me my career.
Martin and I discussed how we would care for a child before we had Josh. I said, "I don't want to have a child if I'm in effect going to be a single parent." We both worked part time once Josh was born, although he paid a price for his decision as he was put on the "mommy track" at work; he learned what mothers go through. But our decision also meant that Josh became a shared joy rather than my obsession and it has made us very close. Josh now has a very close relationship with both of us. He shares my interest in writing and theatre and Martin's in computing and music.
Horrid Henry Live and Horrid! opens at the Trafalgar Studios, London SW1 on November 21, then touring. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/mar/19/apple-ipad | Technology | 2010-03-19T23:14:03.000Z | Bobbie Johnson | Apple puts out call for iPad apps - but developers can't say a word | It might be a while before Britain gets to see the iPad, but it's just weeks away from launch in the United States - and Apple is beginning to crank up the gears.
The latest move? The company is now accepting submissions for iPad applications to be released on April 3, the date when the gadget starts shipping. If developers submit their wares in the next week (the deadline is actually Saturday 27th of March), they'll get told whether they pass Apple's approval process - with an eye to being available through iTunes to iPad owners on day one.
There are a few interesting aspects here, not least the fact that the rather arbitrary approvals process used by the iTunes store has come in for plenty of criticism recently.
But there's more potential trouble on the horizon, too. With more than 100,000 iPhone apps, and many developers working on new iPad versions, the company could easily be inundated with programs to approve. Is Apple suggesting it will screen them all before launch?
Even then, that's not all that's going on in Cupertino at the moment.
We know Apple's an incredibly secretive company, but as BusinessWeek reports, those who actually have access to an iPad (not simply to the emulator software that many developers are using) are forced to sign a series of demanding agreements and implement extremely particular security arrangements before Apple will play ball.
Would-be testers of the tablet-style computer, due to be released Apr. 3, must promise to keep it isolated in a room with blacked-out windows, according to four people familiar with the more than 10-page pact that bars partners from disclosing information about the iPad.
To ensure that it can't be removed, the iPad must also remain tethered to a fixed object, said the people, who asked not to be named because their plans for the iPad have not been made public. Apple (AAPL) won't send out an iPad until potential partners send photographic evidence that they've complied.
Will this stop more information leaking out ahead of the launch? Will Apple manage to control iPad apps without incident? I have a feeling we'll be coming back to this in the next couple of weeks. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/10/alcohol-guidelines-drinking-orwell-perfect-pub | Opinion | 2016-01-10T00:02:04.000Z | Olivia Laing | What would Britain be without drink? | Olivia Laing | We all know about George Orwell’s favourite pub, which he celebrated in a 1946 essay for the Evening Standard. The Moon Under Water was near a bus stop but tucked away on a side street, so drunks and rowdies never seemed to wander in. There was a long, hidden garden at the back, the barmaids knew everyone by name and pints of stout were served in mugs, not nasty glasses (Orwell was particularly partial to strawberry-pink china). Best of all, it was quiet enough to talk, even with the singing on Christmas Eve. Indeed, most of the regulars, who occupied the same chairs night after night, came as much for the conversation as the booze.
But sometimes we forget that it was a fantasy. No pub as perfect as The Moon Under Water could possibly exist in reality, even in the 1940s, decades before the era of Wetherspoons and alcopops. Orwell is famous for his dystopic visions, his nightmarish versions of the future, but in conjuring up this small and cheerful utopia, he got right to the heart of the appeal of social drinking and its deep place in British culture.
You wouldn’t have got trashed in The Moon Under Water and you wouldn’t have been sick outside it. It wasn’t a place for shots or binges, for messy nights that spree into nauseous, head-pounding mornings. It was a harbour for enjoying drinking’s best and most substantial magic: its happy knack for stimulating conviviality.
A substance doesn’t become a nation’s preferred recreational drug unless it has at least some socially desirable effects and it’s not difficult to see why a tight-lipped and awkward people, stuck in a cold climate and not known for their sunny dispositions, might make alcohol their drug of choice. Drink, as the porter in Macbeth observed, is a great provoker of three things: nose-painting, sleep and urine. But it is also a great producer, in small doses at least, of social ease. Whether you are drinking draught stout, Orwell’s preferred tipple, or gin and tonics, or Manhattans, or any of the many other drinks we’ve invented and perfected and imbued with cultural status, the basic effect is the same.
Alcohol profoundly alters the chemistry of the brain, interfering with the activity of neurotransmitters and giving rise to intense feelings of pleasure, accompanied by potent disinhibition. It unlocks tongues; it sweeps shyness away. Hardly any wonder that the watering hole has remained such a reliable element of Britain’s motley, hybrid culture. From the Anglo-Saxon alehouse to the artisanal cocktail bar, a substance that dissolves social anxiety and produces swift, free-flowing streams of talk is literally on tap.
But drinking has always been regarded with anxiety too. Any substance that brings about intoxication is potentially dangerous and social ease can all too easily topple over into antisocial behaviour. This was the central concern of the Temperance movement, which began in the early part of the 19th century, and which was determined to wipe out the scourge of drunkenness, to put a stop to the evils of drinking both in public and at home.
A Temperance tract entitled On the Effects of Ardent Spirits provides an excited list of the grotesque behaviours that follow intoxication, among them unusual garrulity, profane swearing and fighting, as well as “singing, hallooing, roaring, imitating the noise of brute animals, dancing naked, breaking glasses and china and dashing other articles of household furniture upon the ground or floor”. It sounds funny, this sort of undignified loss of control, unless you’re on the receiving end, the partner or child of an enraged drunk, the stranger set upon at closing time.
Drinking and masculinity have often entwined, often with toxic consequences. Surprisingly, there’s none of that in Orwell’s fantasy, in which the pub is an emphatically democratic space, welcoming to women and children alike. He describes the kids trotting in from the garden to fetch drinks for their parents, adding: “This, I believe, is against the law, but it is a law that deserves to be broken, for it is the puritanical nonsense of excluding children – and therefore, to some extent, women – from pubs that has turned these places into mere boozing-shops instead of the family gathering-places that they ought to be.”
Here, the imperative of getting off your face is secondary to alcohol’s better gift, of facilitating social interaction between diverse people, diverse groups of friends and strangers.
These days, it’s the physical body we worry about, not the moral turpitude that comes with nightly quaffing. No doubt there are people who will describe the chief medical officer’s dramatically reduced new guidelines for safe drinking as puritanical nonsense too, though it seems clear that each consecutive drink downed raises the threat of cancer, as potentially carcinogenic as a cigarette. All the same, it’s hard to imagine a Britain not driven by alcohol. How would dinner parties work; how would anybody ever kiss a stranger? (A friend who recently moved to New York complained that she had no idea how to start a relationship without alcohol as an engine.)
Yet alcohol is undoubtedly a poison and not just to alcoholics. Buried deep in the report from the chief medical officer about carcinogenic effects is a stray sentence that hit me hard. Every year a thousand people die of intentional self-harm while intoxicated, over 800 of whom are men. Drink disinhibits and what it allows to bubble up is not always just friendliness or tipsy lust. Often, it facilitates violence, often it facilitates harm.
What would Britain be like without booze? Healthier and safer, certainly, though also more isolating and more staid. I’m sure we should drink less, but I can’t help feeling Orwell had it about right. The Moon Under Water: that’s where I want to do my boozing, in a place where alcohol is used purely to encourage social warmth and where nobody puts away enough to get a hangover, let alone more lasting damage.
Olivia Laing is the author of The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (Canongate) | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/oct/08/unions-and-teachers-call-rishi-sunaks-new-education-plan-a-misdirected-fantasy | Education | 2023-10-08T06:00:33.000Z | Anna Fazackerley | Unions and teachers call Rishi Sunak’s new education plan ‘a misdirected fantasy’ | Heads, teaching experts and unions have slammed Rishi Sunak’s plans to scrap A-levels and make Maths and English compulsory to 18 as a misdirected “fantasy” that won’t work because so many schools can’t recruit teachers in these subjects.
Sunak, who argued in his speech to the Conservative party conference last week that reforming education was “one of the biggest levers we have to change the direction of our country”, plans to replace both A-levels and the government’s new T-levels with a merged baccalaureate-style qualification called the Advanced British Standard.
Dr Rachel Roberts, who leads the postgraduate teacher training course in English at Reading University and is the former chair of the National Association for the Teaching of English, told the Observer: “Given the national crisis in teacher recruitment and retention, the idea of making English and Maths compulsory to 18 seems quite preposterous at the moment.”
Secondary heads across the country who say they have become used to adverts for Maths, computing and science teachers not attracting a single suitable applicant, have reported that for the first time they are now seriously struggling to find English teachers. Applications to train to teach English were down by a third at Roberts’ university this year, a trend she says was replicated across the country.
The Department for Education confirmed this weekend that early career bonuses for teachers in shortage areas in deprived schools and colleges would come into force next academic year. But the tax-free bonuses of up to £6,000 a year for teachers in the first five years of their career will focus only on maths, physics, computing and chemistry. There will be no extra support for English teachers.
Dr Roberts said that, as well as it being unfair to those who have stayed in teaching for longer, few experts think these bonuses will work. “The bursary system for initial teacher training hasn’t really done anything to increase numbers in shortage subjects, and certainly not for English.”
Flood of English and maths resits expected amid tougher GCSE grading
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Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at Exeter University, said: “Grand aims declaring that we will deliver Maths and English to 18 feel like a fantasy when set against the real challenges our education system is grappling with amid growing societal inequalities.”
He argued that enabling all teenagers to master basic maths and literacy skills by the age of 16 was a far greater priority than reforming A-levels. “It’s scandalous that a third of pupils in England fail to secure a basic grade 4 in English and maths in their GCSEs,” he said.
Will Teece, headteacher at Brookvale Groby Learning Campus, a secondary academy in Leicester, said heads were hoping Sunak’s announcements were “just noise” and wouldn’t ever happen.
“The idea of additional teaching hours and extra maths is a fantasy. A-level changes are not needed at all in my view.”
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said Sunak’s announcement showed “just how out of touch this government has become with the teaching profession.”
“There are so many immediate crises that schools are now dealing with, from recruitment and retention, to crumbling school buildings and the lack of support for pupils with SEND,” he said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2008/oct/14/difficult-albums-nico | Music | 2008-10-14T14:00:54.000Z | Dorian Lynskey | Nico's The Marble Index is hard listening but worth it | I've had a copy of Nico's 1969 album The Marble Index sitting on my shelf for two years now. I bought it on the strength of a Lester Bangs essay called Your Shadow Is Scared of You: An Attempt Not to Be Frightened With Nico, which, like Peter Bradshaw's recent review of Import/Export, simultaneously intrigued and repelled me. When a word like "harrowing" is used as a compliment I have to ask myself: when do I feel like being harrowed? So every now and then I would pick it up, look at the cover shot, in which Nico has the kind of face you might see pressed against your window in a bad dream, and put it down again, waiting for the right time to commit to it.
John Cale curated a tribute to Nico at the Royal Festival Hall last Saturday, drawing heavily on The Marble Index and the equally extreme Desertshore, so I finally took the plunge in the interests of research. Songs such as No One Is There and Frozen Warnings are gorgeous in their bleakness and austerity. When, on Ari's Song, Nico promises her son "light and joy", the words sound strange in her mouth, as if she stands as much chance of experiencing those states as she does of walking on the moon. But I stumbled with Facing the Wind: discordant gusts of harmonium, nagging strings, intermittent percussion like someone banging on a coffin lid and vocals raddled with despair. I could see exactly what Bang was getting at. The Marble Index is a remarkable record, one with the annihilating beauty of a late Rothko painting, but I can't see a time when I'll feel compelled to play it again. I suspect that if you're ever in the perfect mood to play The Marble Index, then it's probably the last thing you should be playing.
Just beneath Nico in the pile is Scott Walker's Tilt, another legendarily extreme transmission from the gates of hell, and one which squats there on the shelf, daring me to play it (I've only heard one track). Slate magazine recently asked its readers which films they had ordered from Netflix and failed to watch. Top of the list came Hotel Rwanda, a film as brilliant as it is distressing. Writer John Swansburg grouped it with Schindler's List: "Both appeal to the lofty sense of ourselves that comes to the fore when we're managing our queues. Neither feels especially appealing after a long day at the office." I feel much the same way about Tilt.
A lot of the time, art and entertainment overlap. But an album like Tilt or The Marble Index forces the distinction. It is not entertainment. It is not fun. It is not something to play over dinner, unless you have a pretty extreme idea of dinner. Forget popping it on the iPod for the shops or the gym. It does not fit into everyday life, but demands that you carve out a space for it.
It therefore asks: what do you want from music? In his book 31 Songs, Nick Hornby takes a disappointingly conservative stance while contrasting Suicide's lurid, despairing Frankie Teardrop with Teenage Fanclub's warmly reassuring Ain't That Enough. "I listened to it once upon a time, when I was in my 20s and my life was different," he writes of the Suicide song, "but I probably haven't played it for a good 15 years, and I doubt whether I'll ever play it again … I don't want to be terrified by art any more."
Hornby contends that dark, extreme music is for people too young or smug to know real pain and grief. This strikes me as false and reductive logic, as if music were there only to soothe your brow after a hard day and keep bad feelings at bay. Since when has "terrifying" art been a symptom of emotional immaturity? Scott Walker, Mark Rothko and Philip Roth are/were all staring into the abyss in their 60s. Rothko once explained his interest as "expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions."
Hornby is right in one sense. As you get older, and your life fills up with deadlines, childcare, bill-paying, food-shopping, and so on, it becomes harder to accommodate artistic expressions of tragedy and ecstasy and doom that might make you want to break down and cry. At the end of a long day, the temptation to pop on Fleet Foxes in the kitchen or slump on the sofa to Dodgeball (nothing wrong with either activity, by the way) becomes greater. But he's wrong to suggest that you shouldn't even try the alternative. Art's job is not simply to cheer you up. Tilt's baleful presence on my shelf is a reminder of that. I might even listen to it tonight. And I'd be intrigued to know which difficult albums are your equivalents of an unwatched Hotel Rwanda. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/mar/22/premiership-return-six-nations-rugby-union-saracens-harlequins | Sport | 2024-03-22T12:30:02.000Z | Robert Kitson | Premiership returns with plan to harness Six Nations’ feelgood factor | Robert Kitson | The men’s Six Nations might be over but another decisive period looms for the club game, on and off the field. After the self-imposed famine – never before has the top English professional league voluntarily gone into mid-season hibernation for eight weeks – the next aim is to deliver a springtime feast of Premiership rugby as appetising as the national team’s last two outings against Ireland and France.
With a run-in of six regular season rounds still to play and just a handful of points separating the seven clubs between second and eighth vying for a place in the top four, some tasty basic ingredients are already in place. But there is also a whole other dimension involved, neatly articulated this week by Harlequins’ progressive chief executive, Laurie Dalrymple. “We’re coming out of a really positive Six Nations,” said Dalrymple, before Quins’ big London “derby” against Saracens at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. “From an English perspective if we don’t harness that feelgood factor and take it into the club game then we’ve dropped the ball.”
Diamond admits Newcastle Falcons are eager to attract Saudi Arabia investment
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How many such fumbles have there been in the past 20-odd years, from financial meltdowns and Covid disruption to salary cap sagas and club v country score settling? How many other businesses, already faced with a shortfall in matchday income as a consequence of a slimmed down 10-club league, would respond by shutting up shop – the odd friendly apart – at the precise time of year its product is at its most nationally visible? “Rugby union is brilliant at killing itself,” was the pithy verdict delivered this week by Newcastle’s director of rugby, Steve Diamond.
Now would be a good time, then, for the sport to look up from its navel and commit to showing the very best of itself over the next 11 weeks. If the weather vaguely plays ball by firming the pitches up and encouraging teams to give it a major rip, some genuine treats should lie in store. About 60,000 fans are expected to attend Satur Sarries-Quins showdown, underlining once again that if club rugby is presented as fun and accessible then an audience will come to see it. Owen Farrell v Marcus Smith is only one of many delicious subplots.
Quick Guide
Premiership: Bristol end Saints' unbeaten run
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So let’s set to one side, for now, the continuing negotiations over the crucial new Professional Game Partnership deal – the latest deadline for finalising the Championship structure and the outlook for promotion and relegation etc is mid-April – and some clubs’ wince-inducing balance sheets. Instead, it is time to dig deep into the recesses of the memory to recall who was looking half decent when the music abruptly stopped in late January, not least Northampton, who were seven points ahead of the field after 12 rounds.
Three more wins from their last half-dozen fixtures, with a light dusting of bonus points, should be sufficient to keep the chasing pack at bay particularly once their international contingent are all back. The other three semi-final spots, though, will be decided by fleeting micro-moments and the freshness of certain important players. Will Bath, for example, welcome back a knackered Finn Russell or a revitalised matchwinner? Their next four opponents are Sale, Quins, Exeter and Saracens: they may well have to beat two of them – they have Sale and Sarries at home – to make the playoff cut.
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Owen Farrell plays his final few games for Saracens before departing for Racing 92 in France. Photograph: Matt Impey/Shutterstock
Saracens, with some imminent big-name departures to distract them, must travel to Northampton, Bath and Bristol. In theory they should be top-four certainties but securing a home semi will require a serious upturn. Exeter? Their rebuild is progressing nicely but it is entirely possible they will have to beat Leicester away on the final day to make the playoffs. Before that they must deal with a freshly motivated Newcastle at Sandy Park, with Diamond adamant the bottom-placed Falcons will collect at least one victory in their remaining games. Not only are new contracts on the line but, if they win this weekend, Diamond has promised to dip into his own pocket for the squad to stay overnight and celebrate in Devon.
Sale? Last year they made the final but even four wins from their final six games may not be enough to gatecrash the top six. Perhaps the vital determining factor in the whole equation, though, are the mighty Quins. They have been working hard out in the Algarve and retain a handy mix of youth and experience. Players such as Oscar Beard have been exposed to the England environment and have returned with soaring confidence; Louis Lynagh is now a capped Test player with Italy and has yet to taste defeat in a blue jersey.
Smith, Danny Care, André Esterhuizen, Tyrone Green, Nick David, Cadan Murley … outscoring Quins is not going to be easy. Unless, of course, somebody like Saracens can shut them down at source as they did so splendidly in their 38-10 demolition job at the Stoop in November. Whether it is the outstanding Puma Juan Martín González, Scotland’s Andy Christie, Samoa’s Theo McFarland or the France-bound Billy Vunipola, Sarries have the back-row beef to stop anybody in their tracks.
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So stand by for some Tottenham fireworks, with the winning side my tip to join Northampton as home semi-finalists and, in doing so, assist with Dalrymple’s wish for the club game to win over more neutrals and to “raise all boats” commercially. “There is so much about this sport at club level that’s really positive. It’s about focusing in on some of the things we do exceptionally well and getting a growing audience behind that. If we don’t really deliver on our growing level of popularity and increased interest we’ll have wasted an opportunity,” he said. No pressure, lads. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/nov/14/idles-crawler-review-joe-talbot-the-beachland-ballroom | Music | 2021-11-14T13:00:02.000Z | Damien Morris | Idles: Crawler review – thrilling, glass-gargling introspection | No one weaponises passion quite like Idles. While their arsenal may vary, the mode of attack is always guns blazing. Last year’s Ultra Mono was criticised for its simplicity and lack of development, as the West Country quintet reduced and perfected their breathtaking gut-punch, post-punk aesthetic. The same faults can’t be aimed at this expansive yet introspective sequel. Glass-gargling frontman Joe Talbot disinters his lifelong struggle with substance abuse over 14 songs, circling around a traumatic, drug-fuelled car crash. The band use everything they’ve got, from buzzsaw riffing to beatless orchestration, staccato rap to Sinatra croon, peaking with the stately, stirring grandeur of the remarkable The Beachland Ballroom – a stately grandeur that includes hollering the word “damage” until your vocal cords bleed.
Some may bridle against their say-what-you-see songwriting, but few bands since Nirvana have excoriated themselves with such palpable joy. Who else could scream texts from their dealer and call it a song? Has anyone ever depicted taking drugs and causing a road traffic accident as perfectly as Car Crash? Songs such as The Wheel and Stockholm Syndrome offer thrills that can’t be denied, a preposterously exciting scrapyard soul.
Watch the video for The Beachland Ballroom by Idles. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/08/biggest-clean-energy-disaster-in-years-uk-auction-secures-no-offshore-windfarms | Environment | 2023-09-08T15:20:47.000Z | Jillian Ambrose | ‘Biggest clean energy disaster in years’: UK auction secures no offshore windfarms | No new offshore windfarms will go ahead in the UK after the latest government auction, in what critics have called the biggest clean energy policy failure in almost a decade.
None of the companies hoping to build big offshore windfarms in UK waters took part in the government’s annual auction, which awards contracts to generate renewable electricity for 15 years at a set price.
The companies had warned ministers repeatedly that the auction price was set too low for offshore windfarms to take part after costs in the sector soared by about 40% because of inflation across their supply chains.
The government’s “energy security disaster” means the UK may miss out on billions in investment and may also push up bills for working households, the Labour party said.
Up to 5 gigawatts of offshore wind was eligible to compete, which could have powered nearly 8m homes a year. That would have saved consumers £2bn a year compared with the cost of using electricity generated in a gas power plant, according to the industry group Renewable UK.
The government confirmed on Friday that only 3.7GW of new clean energy projects secured a contract, in a significant blow to the UK’s clean energy targets.
The winning projects include solar farms, onshore windfarms, the first geothermal schemes and a record number of tidal power. Nevertheless, the absence of giant new offshore windfarms will make the UK’s climate targets far more difficult to achieve.
Industry insiders said the three offshore wind developers behind these plans – SSE, ScottishPower and the Swedish company Vattenfall – were forced to sit out the bidding after ministers refused to heed their warnings.
The industry warnings intensified after Vattenfall said in July that it would cease working on the multibillion-pound Norfolk Boreas windfarm because rising costs meant it was no longer profitable.
Keith Anderson, the chief executive of ScottishPower, said: “This is a multibillion-pound lost opportunity to deliver low-cost energy for consumers and a wake-up call for government.
“We all want the same thing – to get more secure, low-cost green offshore wind built in our waters,” Anderson said. “But the economics simply did not stand up this time around.”
Ed Miliband, the shadow energy security and net zero secretary, said: “The Conservatives have now trashed the industry that was meant to be the crown jewels of the British energy system – blocking the cheap, clean, homegrown power we need.
“Ministers were warned time and again that this would happen but they did not listen. They simply don’t understand how to deliver the green sprint, and Rishi Sunak’s government is too weak and divided to deliver the clean power Britain needs.”
Sam Richards, the founder and campaign director of Britain Remade, which campaigns for economic growth in Britain, said the “catastrophic outcome” of the auction was “the direct result of the government’s complacency and incompetence”.
He said: “This will condemn consumers to higher bills than necessary and means Britain loses out on vital jobs and billions in investment.”
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Graham Stuart, the energy and climate change minister, said the government was delighted that the auction had secured “a record number of successful projects across solar, onshore wind, tidal power and, for the first time, geo-thermal”.
Stuart said the government would work with the offshore wind industry to retain the sector’s global leadership.
The government has been heavily criticised for its record on green energy policy, which has included blocks on onshore wind, the solar industry, and low levels of home insulation.
Greenpeace described the outcome of the latest auction as “the biggest disaster for clean energy policy in the last eight years” because it risked jeopardising the UK’s plan to triple its offshore wind power capacity by 2030, and cast doubt on Britain’s climate targets.
Richard Sandford, the co-chair of the Offshore Wind Industry Council, said lessons must be learned so future auctions could bring forward new offshore windfarms. “It’s clear that this year’s auction represents a missed opportunity to strengthen Britain’s energy security and provide low-cost power for consumers,” he said.
“Our plans to accelerate the growth of this innovative sector in the years ahead remain ambitious and undimmed. We will continue to work with ministers to build up a world-class domestic offshore wind supply chain around the UK, creating tens of thousands of jobs and attracting billions in private investment, as well as providing further opportunities to export our products and expertise globally.”
Solar power made up half of the clean energy capacity to win at the auction. Almost 1.5GW of onshore wind capacity secured a contract in the auction, the tidal power sector secured a record capacity of more than 50MW. There were also three winning projects for geothermal power for the first time, totalling 12MW of capacity. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/may/09/100-richest-uk-billions-offshore-tax-havens | Politics | 2013-05-09T20:17:47.000Z | Rupert Neate | 100 of UK's richest people concealing billions in offshore tax havens | More than 100 of Britain's richest people have been caught hiding billions of pounds in secretive offshore havens, sparking an unprecedented global tax evasion investigation.
George Osborne, the chancellor, warned the alleged tax evaders, and a further 200 accountants and advisers accused of helping them cheat the taxman: "The message is simple: if you evade tax, we're coming after you."
HM Revenue & Customs warned those involved, who were named in offshore data first offered to the authorities by a whistleblower in 2009, that they will face "criminal prosecution or significant penalties" if they do not voluntarily disclose their tax irregularities, as the UK steps up its efforts to clamp down on avoidance ahead of the G8 summit in June.
The 400-gigabyte cache of data leaked to the authorities is understood to be the same information seen by the Guardian in its Offshore Secrets series in November 2012 and March this year. It reveals complicated financial structures using companies and trusts stretching from Singapore and the British Virgin Islands to the Cayman Islands and the Cook Islands.
The Treasury is working in collaboration with American and Australian tax authorities in the biggest ever cross-border tax evasion investigation, and warned that the alleged evaders may be publicly named and shamed if they fail to come clean and explain their tax affairs.
Osborne described the data as "another weapon in HMRC's arsenal" in the fight against global tax evasion. HMRC added it "reveals extensive use of complex offshore structures to conceal assets by wealthy individuals and companies".
The Revenue said it was continuing to analyse the material, the equivalent of more than 200 lorry-loads of printed A4 sheets, but it has already "identified over 100 people who benefit from these structures". A number of those "had already been identified and are under investigation for offshore tax evasion".
It urged those who use offshore tax structures to urgently review their taxation arrangements to ensure they comply with the law, and encouraged those that don't to ensure "early disclosure of tax irregularities. Failure to do so may result in a criminal prosecution or significant financial penalties and the possibility of their identities being published," HMRC warned.
It is also investigating more than 200 UK accountants, lawyers and other professional advisers named in the data as advising the wealthy on setting up the elaborate offshore tax arrangements. HMRC declined to name any of the individuals, advisers or companies it is investigating.
An HMRC source said it was first offered a "taster" of the cache in 2009, but received the bulk in late 2010. A spokesman declined to state if it paid a reward to the whistleblower.
The Guardian, BBC Panorama and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) have been releasing details of UK citizens and companies acting as offshore middlemen.
Gerard Ryle, director of the ICIJ, said he expected the collaboration between taxmen in the UK, US and Australia to lead to "the largest tax investigation in history".
He added: "We know from the data we obtained there are names of people from more than 170 countries. Some are prominent citizens – politicians, celebrities, businessmen, the elite of some societies.
"To have three major tax agencies collaborating – with the possibility of many more doing the same – is potentially a major blow to the secrecy of offshore jurisdictions."
Among those identified by ICIJ data in the joint investigation was James Turner of York-based company formation agents Turner Little, who told undercover reporters how to set up a foundation in Belize: "It doesn't link back to you, it doesn't link back to your family. So it gives you complete confidentiality."
A representative of Atlas Corporate Services, another company run by Britons but operating from Mauritius, explained to reporters how to avoid tax on a hypothetical £6m sitting in a Swiss bank account. He suggested, "off the record", that they use an offshore entity in Panama. "If there's a tax issue … they won't disclose any information on that foundation under Panamanian law," he said.
Another middleman, Russell Lebe of Readymade Companies Worldwide, advising a reporter posing as an Indian businessman, assured his client that "If we were approached by the Indian tax authority … and they're doing tax evasion, we wouldn't give a monkey's."
The Guardian, in its investigation, identified 28 individuals with ties to the UK acting as "sham" directors for more than 21,000 companies across the world, keeping the true owners of the companies off official paperwork and thus making them invisible to authorities.
However, there is no suggestion that any of the individuals identified in the Guardian/ICIJ investigation are among those being examined by HMRC.
Jenny Granger, HMRC's director general for enforcement and compliance, cautioned that not all the individuals using offshore accounts were seeking to evade tax. "There is nothing illegal about an international structure, especially in a globally integrated economy and these arrangements may be perfectly legitimate and may have already been declared to HMRC," she said. "However, they may involve tax evasion, avoidance or other serious offences by taxpayers. What has got to stop is using offshore structures to illegally hide assets and income."
David Cameron has pledged to make tackling the "staggering" levels of tax evasion a key priority of the UK's presidency of the G8 this year. The EU will hold a summit on tax evasion on 22 May. It will be followed by a G8 summit under British chairmanship in June. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2023/jan/10/why-do-traffic-reduction-schemes-attract-so-many-conspiracy-theories | Environment | 2023-01-10T07:00:39.000Z | Peter Walker | Why do traffic reduction schemes attract so many conspiracy theories? | Peter Walker | Jordan Peterson is rarely lacking in strong opinions, but even by the standards of the Canadian psychologist turned hard-right culture warrior, this was vehement stuff: a city is planning to lock people in their local districts as part of a “well-documented” global plot to, ultimately, deprive them of all personal possessions.
Where was this? Not Beijing, or even Pyongyang. It was Oxford. In the days since Peterson’s tweet – viewed 7.5m times – officials in the city have fielded endless queries from around the world asking why they are imposing a “climate lockdown”. Inevitably, there have also been some threats.
Repeated insistence that Peterson’s version of events is nonsense has done little to stem the tide. In the week or so since, large numbers of people, often from the far right or with links to other conspiracy theories, have leapt aboard.
Oxford’s traffic plan, they insist, is the first step in a global plot led by – depending on who you listen to – the World Economic Forum (WEF) or the UN, designed to strip people of their fundamental rights and personal possessions in the name of the environment.
What’s going on? The short answer is that even in the context of an era in which conspiracy theories are rife, policies connected to cars and traffic seem particularly susceptible for a variety of reasons.
The first thing to clear up is that the claims have no basis, beyond the fact that six traffic filters will be installed across Oxford, in locations yet to be confirmed, as part of a plan led by Oxfordshire county council and supported by the city council.
Officials acknowledge that it is a relatively ambitious scheme for a UK city, intended to nudge people into using buses, bikes or walking rather than private cars for short trips.
While there will be no physical barriers, the traffic filters will try to deter people from driving through central areas. Numberplate recognition cameras will fine people £70 for passing a filter if they are not exempt.
It is worth stressing that no trip will be impossible, though some could be longer than before, with drivers instead having to use a less central route such as the city’s ring road.
A modal filter in Oxford city centre, part of a low-traffic neighbourhood scheme. Photograph: Geoffrey Swaine/REX/Shutterstock
There are also large numbers of exemptions. It will only apply to private cars, but not to those driven by registered carers, health and care workers, people with a blue badge for disability, those who own local businesses and various others.
Locals who are not exempt will receive up to 100 passes a year for each vehicle they own that temporarily exempt them from the charge. It will also be implemented on an initially interim basis, with the impact and support measured.
There are plenty more details here, but you get the idea. The plan may prove popular and effective, or it may not. However, it is a fairly technical scheme to try to clear the roads in a chronically congested city where nearly a third of people do not own cars, while also improving public health and the environment. It is not a UN plot.
So why the fuss? One quick answer is that efforts to limit people’s right to drive, whether in previous years through residents’ parking zones, or more recently with low-traffic neighbourhoods, have often prompted a furious response, usually from a noisy minority.
This is all the more the case when you involve North Americans like Peterson, for whom ideas routine in much of continental Europe such as modal filtering and the “15-minute city” – the latter also popular among conspiracists – are almost unknown.
Another factor is that efforts to limit urban driving inevitably attract the attention of the large pool of climate conspirators who, in a significant Venn diagram crossover with vaccine conspirators, often believe in the idea of a “great reset” plot led by multinational organisations.
A march against the traffic filters plan took place on Sunday in Oxford under the banner of Not Our Future, a new group led by 80s pop duo turned anti-vaxxers Right Said Fred.
If you believe Not Our Future, we currently face a “centralisation of political and economic power which is eroding life expectancy, personal liberty, and freedom of expression worldwide”. The group’s list of supporters includes a roll call of leading UK conspiracy theorists, among them the actor and politician Laurence Fox and the former footballer Matt Le Tissier.
Significantly, two other Not Our Future backers, Neil Oliver and Calvin Robinson, are regular contributors to GB News, a sign of how conspiracy theories have begun to be openly courted by what would normally be considered mainstream news outlets.
GB News, whose founders insisted it would not become a UK version of Fox News, now combines traditional coverage with occasional forays into vaccine conspiracies. A recent item on the Oxford traffic plan falsely billed it as a “climate lockdown” and featured a guest speculating that it was being imposed at the bidding of China.
In a similar vein, an opinion piece in the Telegraph last week argued that the climate emergency was “being used as cover to wage war on the very concept of travel”, amid “a plot to reinvent feudalism, a time when people rarely left their own villages and were taxed if they dared do so”.
But does all this matter? Should we really worry if a few fringe figures make up absurd claims about traffic schemes or cycle lanes? One significant worry is that people objecting to traffic restrictions can easily become exposed to much murkier ideas.
While the “great reset” does originate in fact – it was proposed by the WEF as a way for global economies to rebound and reshape themselves after Covid – it has become a shorthand for all sorts of alarmist conspiracies, often overlapping with antisemitic ideas of the New World Order and all-powerful “globalists”.
David Lawrence, a senior researcher at Hope Not Hate, which monitors far-right groups and conspiracy theories, says the Oxford scheme has been portrayed as an attempt to install a Hunger Games-style world in which people are confined to “zones” while the elites are free to travel, with electric cars seen as part of the plot.
He said: “As with Covid-19, we should be wary about conspiratorial language filtering from the fringes into mainstream debate and being used to attack scientists, politicians and others.”
GB News has been contacted for comment. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/dec/06/turner-prize-susan-philipz | Art and design | 2010-12-06T19:45:24.000Z | Adrian Searle | Turner Prize winner Susan Philipsz: an expert view | Adrian Searle | Susan Philipsz winning the Turner prize is the right result, and I feel the same pleasure in her win as I did when painter Tomma Abts won in 2006. In both cases I was impressed by the artists' originality - not a word you hear much in contemporary art circles, their inventiveness, and the difficult yet accessible pleasures their art can give.
Dexter Dalwood's paintings seemed to me too brittle, too clever and contrived to win. He was let down by having too many works in the show, too few of which were in themselves compelling. Each painting was a compendium of styles and references, and it all felt a bit too dutiful and congested. I much prefer Angela de la Cruz's work, with its painful humour, honesty and knockabout abjection. But De la Cruz's work seems to me to be at a moment of transition. Having only recently returned to work following a debilitating stroke, her ensemble of recent and older paintings and sculptures was as much a statement of intent as a fully achieved exhibition. Last month, de la Cruz won a coveted £35,000 Paul Hamlyn award. This is as valuable and prestigious as winning the Turner Prize.
Like De la Cruz, the wider exposure of the art of the Otolith Group collective has been valuable. It is as though Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar wanted to make life as hard on the audience as possible. I took a perverse delight in the fact that they made us work at their art, which is as erudite as it is sensual, as sexy as it is filmic. But they have an almost academic streak that makes one think one is in a classroom or study centre.
Philipsz is the first artist working with sound to have won the prize. I can imagine people saying she is just a singer, with the sort of voice you might feel lucky to come across at a folk club. But there is much more to Philipsz than a good voice. All singers, of course, are aware of the space their voice occupies, of the difference between one hall and another. We know it ourselves, singing in the shower. But the way Philipsz sites recordings of her voice is as much to do with place as sound. She has haunted the Clyde and filled her box-like Turner installation with the ballad Lowlands; she has called across a lake in Germany and had her voice swept away by the wind on a Folkestone headland.
Her current Artangel project, Surround Me, insinuates itself down alleys and courtyards in the City of London, her voice like an Elizabethan ghost, singing melancholy works by John Dowland and other 16th and 17th century composers. I have stood in shadowy old courtyards and between gleaming office blocks, weeping as I listen. And how many artists can you say that about?
Her sense of place, and space, memory and presence reminds me, weirdly, of the sculptor Richard Serra at his best. Her art makes you think of your place in the world, and opens you up to your feelings. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/01/easyjet-announces-grans-go-free-deal-on-holidays-to-europe | Business | 2024-02-01T05:00:42.000Z | Sarah Marsh | EasyJet announces ‘grans go free’ deal on holidays to Europe | EasyJet’s holiday wing is offering “grans go free” places on trips to Europe, after research found half of families had never holidayed abroad with their grandparents.
Under the offer, one grandparent on the trip can travel free of charge to countries including Spain, Greece and Italy. The tour operator said it hoped the deal would encourage Britons to take a holiday with three generations of their family or more.
Matt Callaghan, the chief operating officer at easyJet Holidays, said it was proud to offer “thousands of free kids places” but also wanted “to recognise the grandparents”.
Travel trade publications are calling multigenerational holidays one of the industry’s biggest post-pandemic trends amid a renewed desire among younger generations to holiday with parents.
‘Why would we stop holidaying together?’ Three families on the joy of travelling with adult children
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A poll of 2,000 British adults, found more than half of those surveyed (56%) said they regretted not spending more time with grandparents and 54% said they were hoping to bring them on future holidays.
More than half (59%) of those surveyed said they wanted to spend more time with the older generations in their family, with 57% saying they wanted to make holiday memories with grandparents.
Callaghan said: “This research shows how important grandparent and grandchild relationships are and how much can be learned from making time for them. We’ve launched our ‘grans go free’ offer to tighten these important family relationships.”
The polling also found that 77% of people agreed that the bond between grandparents and grandchildren was one of the most special relationships within a family – yet 27% said they spoke to their grandparents less than once a week.
The offer starts on 1 February and will be available for a limited number of customers. EasyJet Holidays said some additional spaces would also open on Monday. To qualify, the grandparent must be travelling as part of a family booking with at least one child. Proof of age and relation will be taken upon arrival at the destination hotel.
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EasyJet Holidays says the most popular destinations for a multi
generational holiday abroad are Spain, Italy and France. More than half of those polled said they would probably let their grandparents pick the destination if they were planning a trip together.
For 45%, the grandparents in the family are the bigger earners, but despite this only 35% would expect a grandparent to contribute financially if they came on holiday with them, wanting to treat them instead. If they were to contribute, 39% of those surveyed would ask them to cover just their share of the holiday, while 21% would ask only that they pay for a meal or two on the trip. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/jun/25/luis-suarez-giorgio-chiellini-violence-deceit | Football | 2014-06-25T19:55:51.000Z | Daniel Taylor | Luis Suárez’s Giorgio Chiellini clash adds to story of violence and deceit | Daniel Taylor | Earlier this year, an American sportswriter by the name of Wright Thompson travelled to Uruguay to speak to some of the people who knew Luis Suárez to try to get a better picture of his background. Thompson had heard of one story going back to Suárez’s childhood, of him being sent off in a youth match and head-butting the referee and how one witness had described the victim’s nose bleeding “like a cow”. He wanted to know if it was true. He wanted to find the referee.
Thompson went to Montevideo and spent weeks on the case. Everywhere he went, there was a common theme. “Everyone defended Suárez,” he recalled. He trawled to the end of the internet and he tracked down Enrique Moller, the local attorney who reviewed all youth league disciplinary problems. Moller remembered an incident involving the 15-year-old Suárez, but said he had no details. At Nacional, where Suárez played his youth football, they told Thompson all the records were lost. At the national library, he searched the bound volumes of El País and El Observador but found nothing.
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Someone told him the Uruguayan football federation would have records, but they did not. Thompson, writing for ESPN, had the impression people did not really appreciate him, a foreign journalist, asking questions about a guy they felt was persecuted outside their country. They are protective in Uruguay about Suárez, as a couple of English journalists found out last week when they travelled to one of the team’s press conferences in Sete Lagoas, in the countryside near Belo Horizonte. Suárez was due to talk and three security guys, in bouncer pose, made it clear they were required to leave.
Thompson was persistent. Eventually he got the name for the referee, Luis Larranaga, and arranged to meet Martinez Chenlo, one of the sports editors of the Montevideo papers. Chenlo rolled his eyes and told him the same as everyone else: it was garbage. To prove his point, he rang a guy named Ricardo Perdomo, who had coached Suárez in the youth leagues. Thompson recalled Chenlo grinning at him throughout the phone conversation “as if he were getting all the details he needed to prove that the story was made up”. Then he hung up and explained what had happened. Suárez was 16, not 15. Nacional were playing Danubio, another local team, and it was absolutely not a head-butt. He was simply protesting about a referee’s mistake, and who doesn’t do that? Sure, his head hit the referee’s face, but not on purpose. “He fell,” Chenlo said, “accidentally into the referee.”
He fell. One thing you learn about Suárez: he does a lot of falling. “Note how Suárez stumbles after jumping for the ball and how his face hits the shoulder of the Italian player,” one report from Uruguay explained of the assault on Giorgio Chiellini on Tuesday. Óscar Tabárez, the Uruguay coach, told a BBC reporter he had an “agenda” for asking about it. “This is a football World Cup, not about cheap morality,” he said.
Another report, on the Tenfield website, said the only people who cared about the biting were English.
“Their intention was for Fifa to expel Luisito. It would be good if these Englishmen remember how they won the World Cup in 1966 with a ball which was not a goal.”
And on it goes: the brainwashing, the buck-passing, the deception. “There was no single picture to prove there was a bite,” according to El Observador, questioning whether the photographs from foreign news agencies had been altered. El País reminded its readers that the English press “harassed the Uruguayan after the bite on Branislav Ivanovic”. Últimas Noticias noted: “Nobody talks about how Suárez was injured in the jaw and the eye”.
Uruguay captain, Diego Lugano, describes Luis Suárez's alleged bite during their final World Cup group match against Italy as inconsequential Guardian
All of which can make writing about Suárez slightly awkward when we already know the response, the denial, the finger-pointing and the automatic counter-allegation that this is some kind of payback time from a vengeful English press, who would never dream of treating one of their own this way. Someone, perhaps, should tell John Terry that after the avalanche of criticism for his abuse of Anton Ferdinand, coming directly after Suárez’s own racial-abuse case.
Or just imagine if Wayne Rooney had sunk his teeth into opponents on three different occasions. But the default setting will not budge. Suárez’s apologists follow like ants. They have their lines prepared and it is clever, in a warped kind of way. Every article from an English newspaper or website feeds the delusion.
So here is a prediction from Cathal Kelly, a sports columnist for the Toronto Star, in a piece he wrote about Suárez from 15 December 2013. “He will do something insane at this summer’s World Cup – mark it down. Afterwards, he will prompt an ugly transfer saga for a world-record fee.”
Halfway right, and there is plenty of time for Suárez to attempt the second part. His misbehaviour is shocking, but no longer surprising. It is a recurring theme and there will, almost certainly, be a next time.
In Argentina, when Carlos Tevez was on strike from Manchester City, a journalist from Buenos Aires told me how many of his colleagues never reported a single word about it because that would have meant criticising, or at least questioning, a player they revered too much. They pretended instead that he was simply on holiday, which, I suppose, he was.
Suárez is treated in a similar way and maybe that is a part of the problem. At Liverpool, they have redrawn the line just about every time he has crossed it. His story last season was put forward as one of redemption, the narrative being that he had learned from his mistakes and decided it was time to show the world it was untrue to think he was a lunatic or, as Thompson put it, “bat-shit crazy”. What actually happened was that he put it on hold. More fool the people who lapped up all that public relations fluff. “North of his feet,” Kelly also wrote, “there is nothing good about Suárez.”
Not everyone thinks the same. But it is certainly true that a less talented player would have been kicked out of the sport, or removed to its edges, a long time ago. The bite is one thing, but it is actually the pretence that it never occurred afterwards that tells us more. He did the same after the Ivanovic assault: limping, indignant, wearing a faux look of outrage, wanting punishment for the Chelsea player.
Some believe this shows his attacks must be pre-meditated. But what kind of fool would set out in a World Cup match, watched by a global audience, to do this, knowing the consequences?
More likely, it is deeper than that. Toddlers bite. Dogs bite. Normal, fully functioning adults don’t. When it is part of a long, unending pattern, that is when it looks pathological and the perpetrator needs professional help. We can all play at amateur psychology but the evidence here points to someone who is incapable sometimes of processing the things that threaten his ability to win, or score goals, as a normal act of his sport. Suárez takes it as a personal affront, maybe even an act of aggression.
The problem – or one of the problems – is that he is so heavily indulged it actually feels like he has started to believe what he says about it all being the imagination of others. If there is one person around him telling him he needs time with Dr Steve Peters, the psychiatrist at Anfield, we can be sure there are another 100 or so saying he is absolutely fine, and that it is the rest of the world with the problem.
Now, at the Uruguayan camp, they are trying to make a case that Chiellini made it up, that the photographs were doctored and that the controversy is the work of the embittered English. Perhaps they should look at the front page of O Globo and its “El Loco!”headline. Or how Suárez Bite III is being treated elsewhere.
Instead, Uruguay have adopted a siege mentality that ultimately does their player – violent, deceitful, unapologetic – no long-term good.
Then there was that piece by Thompson of his time in Montevideo and where his investigation finally led him. The story is well known of how Suárez dedicated his life to football so he could be reunited with his girlfriend, Sofia, after her family moved to Spain. But in November 2003 he was working as a street cleaner and in one of his darker moments.
A championship was on the line and in the final match of the season, with 15 minutes to go, Suárez flew into a Danubio player. The referee showed him a yellow card and Suárez appeared in his face. Larranaga went back to his pocket for a red. Suárez snapped.
Often with rage, there are hidden layers about what brings it to the surface. Before leaving Montevideo, Thompson sent a message to Suárez’s mother, to clarify when Sofia had moved away. The reply came back: October 2003. It was the month before her lovesick boyfriend had one of those unfortunate falls. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/14/ghost-farms-the-mink-sheds-abandoned-to-the-pandemic | Environment | 2022-11-14T07:00:33.000Z | Tom Levitt | Ghost farms: the mink sheds abandoned to the pandemic | The farm is quiet. Martin Merrild is sweeping leaves. Behind him is a row of 20 large sheds – all empty. Two years ago, his farm near Hjerm in West Jutland had been home to 15,000 mink, a small carnivorous mammal bred by farmers in individual cages before being skinned for its fur.
Since he started mink farming almost 40 years ago, Merrild’s life had revolved around a yearly cycle. It would start with a smaller population of female and male mink. In early March, the females would be ready for breeding and Merrild and his staff would have just a few weeks to ensure they got a mate. From late April, mink the size of a thumb would be born.
Martin Merrild has been farming mink since the 1980s, until an outbreak of Covid in 2020 saw his entire herd culled. He hasn’t reared a mink since
These would grow quickly over the summer months to about 3-4kg. They would be killed and skinned for their fur in November, with the cycle repeated the following year.
Across Denmark, more than 15 million mink were bred every year on farms like Merrild’s. Denmark was the world’s biggest producer of mink fur, at one point producing 40% of the world’s supply, mostly exported to Asia.
But on the morning of 4 November 2020, the industry came to a standstill as the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, announced the culling of the country’s entire farmed mink herd: 15 million animals.
Merrild’s mink sheds and cages lie empty
Twelve people had become infected with a Covid-19 mutation that originated in mink and Frederiksen feared the mutation, if left unchecked, could jeopardise future vaccines.
Soon after the announcement, veterinary officials came to kill Merrild’s animals. His sheds have remained largely untouched ever since.
Merrild plans to sell his farm once he receives compensation to dismantle and remove his mink sheds
“We’re lucky as we’ve had other things to do on the farm,” says Merrild, who also grows food crops and has a flock of poultry. “But there are men who’ve only ever worked with mink their whole lives. They were on a mink farm every day. And now nothing for two years.”
Half an hour south of Merrild’s farm is a collection of large warehouses emblazoned with the illustration of a mink. They belong to a company that had been feeding 3 million mink across the region, trucking out hundreds of tonnes of feed to farms every day during the peak summer months.
Much of the supporting industry, including companies who produced feed for the mink, have been mothballed since the Danish government shutdown the industry
Today, it feels like a half-empty museum without any visitors. Staff at the site have found other jobs, but the buildings and machinery remain mothballed as the owners await the outcome of a compensation claim.
“I just wish it would end. The business is over so we just want to be able to move on now,” says the company’s former chairman.
More than 1,000 former mink farmers are still waiting on the outcome of their compensation claims
There are more than 1,000 former mink farmers, like Merrild, who are still waiting on the outcome of their compensation claims. Unable to dismantle their barns, they are farming ghosts.
Aase Rask had worried for the health of her husband, Ejner, then 68, as his mink were taken away and killed. He had known nothing else since the early 1980s, with their son lined up to take over the farm near Holstebro, West Jutland.
They see few viable alternatives for making the farm profitable and their son is now trying to forge an alternative career in machinery.
Aase and Ejner Rask had been solely farming mink on their farm near Holstebro, Denmark since the early 1980s
But Ejner has at least found a new and unlikely passion: growing strawberries. Over the past two years, four of his sheds have been filled with berries, along with a small amount of peppers, potatoes and other vegetables. The couple sell them during the summer months on a stall by the roadside.
Even now, with the onset of winter, the mink cages are partly hidden by the green leaves of the plants.
“It’s more of a hobby and just about keeps my brain active, so I’m not just sitting down,” says Ejner. “It has been cheaper than going to a psychologist. At least strawberries don’t bite and everyone likes them.”
The Rasks have taken to growing tomatoes and peppers since mink farming was halted
Danish general election called after PM faces mink cull ultimatum
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The Danish government recently agreed to allow mink farming to restart after an official inquiry found its shutdown lacked legal justification. Although there were outbreaks of Covid in farmed mink across the world, Denmark was the only country to order a wholesale cull and shutdown its industry.
But after two years, many of the 5,000-plus vets, feed manufacturers, auctioneers and advisers involved have moved on, with just a handful of farmers expected to pick up where they left off. Everyone else is just waiting to see their cages removed.
The Rasks had about 27,000 mink on their farm before the animals were culled
“We knew quickly that the mink would not be coming back. The infrastructure supporting the industry has gone now. It’s over,” says Merrild.
At 67, the delays to compensation have left him feeling too old to consider replacing the mink with something else. “The best thing for the value of the farm [if we sell it] is to get the mink stuff away now,” he says.
Ejner Rask says growing strawberries keeps his brain active and that “everybody likes strawberries”
You can send us your stories and thoughts at [email protected] | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2000/feb/13/life1.lifemagazine4 | From the Observer | 2000-02-13T01:44:00.000Z | Andrew Smith | Burning question | What were we supposed to call this? Was it art? Some kind of bizarre political statement? A bit of a larf spun horribly out of control? If it was any of these things, it was the most extraordinary example anyone committed in the last two decades of the 20th century. It went almost unnoticed at the time, because few people were prepared to countenance the possibility that it was more than a stunt, couldn't believe anyone would do such a thing, be that stupid/irresponsible/free. But it wasn't a stunt. They really did it. If you want to rile Bill Drummond, you call him a hoaxer.
'I knew it was real,' a long-time friend and associate of his group the KLF tells me, 'because afterwards, Jimmy and Bill looked so harrowed and haunted. And to be honest, they've never really been the same since'
On 23 August 1994, Drummond and his partner Jimmy Cauty travelled to the Isle of Jura and, before a sceptical invited audience, ritually burned £1 million - in notes - of their own cash. Both in their late thirties, they'd earned the money as the men behind one of the UK's most unlikely pop groups. In 1991, the KLF, an acronym for Kopyright Liberation Front, was the bestselling British act in the world. Riding the post-acid house boom in club music, they could do no wrong: every tune they touched turned to gold. But the next year, they opened the Brit Awards with a scathing performance, backed by a co-opted heavy metal band. At the end of it, a stunned audience heard them announce that 'the KLF have left the music business'. A freshly slaughtered sheep was laid at the entrance to the post-awards party, with a tag reading: 'I died for ewe. Bon appetit.' They had been presented with the coveted gong for best group, then immediately dissolved themselves. Then, in 1994, they burned most of the money they'd made up to that point. Why?
Drummond sits before me, a stubbly
but youthful-looking 47, eating a cheese omelette and chips in a north London greasy spoon, the first thing he's eaten today, at 2.30pm, in the first interview he's done in six years. He and Cauty have made a deal not to talk about the million pounds, he tries to tell me. We're fencing. I ask him how much they earned during their peak.
'Are you trying to ascertain whether a million pounds was that much to us?' he replies, fixing me with a steady gaze.
Yes, I say.
He nods slowly. 'But it wasn't about burning all the money. And it wasn't about cleansing anyone's soul. In this context, a million is a lot more than 2 million. A million is the icon. It's what we talk about, dream about. It has the power.'
Have you regretted it since?
'...No...'
Are you financially stable now?
'No, I'm not. No.'
So why did they do it, I ask, and how did
it feel to watch it wither and snake, finally, irretrievably, into the sky? The answer takes two hours to emerge, and even then I'm not sure I quite understand.
For the past few years, Drummond has been relatively quiet, living with his wife Sallie Fellowes and two (soon to be three) small children on a farm in Aylesbury. The tangled logic of his career appears to be reflected in his private life, which takes in three other children, with two other women. He is close to the eldest two, but hasn't seen the third since the child was 18 months, a situation he acknowledges as 'weird' and is understandably reluctant to talk about. At one point in his new book, 45, after having 'trashed' another relationship, he wonders whether he 'will ever get to live with any of my children'. The longer you look at his life and read his work, the more clearly do you see what looks like a pronounced and compulsive cycle of creation and destruction, stretching right back to his schooldays.
His music career fits perfectly into this pattern, and it's what makes 45 such a good book about pop: few people in Britain can be in a better position to explore the dumb, chaotic tensions that make it tick - tensions between creation and destruction, ephemera and unwitting consequence, between mythology and visceral, irreducible truth. Many of his activities look like japes, but he will admit that 'we are serious about them, ridiculously serious'. He wants them to mean something, but knows that pop usually works best when it doesn't know what it means. And he knows. He can't help it. No wonder he wants to escape, but can't.
45 purports to be a series of snapshots and memoirs taken from the year he turned 45, seemingly at random, but actually compiled with deceptive - he would say accidental - logic. An early passage finds him driving to Helsinki with his children Kate, 12, and James, 10, to deliver some records and take in a Michael Jackson concert. James has just announced his decision to give up learning to play the guitar he badgered his father into buying him and switch to bass. A row ensues.
"That's it, James. I'm not paying for your lessons any more. The only reason why you want to start playing the bass is because you think it is easier." My voice is raised, I'm losing it, something I hardly ever do with my children. A year ago he would be crying by this point; now he just sinks into sullen silence. Kate says nothing. I switch on the radio. Abba's 'Winner Takes It All'. I slip from reality into pop nirvana, where the pain of heartbreak feels like the ecstasy of submission... I hope Kate and James can't spot the tears now rolling down my cheeks.
"Don't you understand, Dad? I have to work hard at school all day, and if I come home and just spend all my time practising guitar it makes me a boring person."
"What, and lying around watching television doesn't?"
"You're just getting like all the other dads, wanting me to do what you did."
"No, I'm not. I would far rather you didn't want to be in a band. Most people who dream or struggle their youth away wanting to be in a band end up unhappy, depressed, unfulfilled, 'cause it never happens."
"It happened for you."
"That was just luck. Look, even if it does
happen, it always goes wrong. Do you think Keith from Prodigy goes home at night happy?"
"You talk rubbish, Dad. I want to be in a band because that's what I want to do; it's got nothing to do with you. And anyway, I don't want to be a bass player, I want to be a singer."
"James, all singers are thick. Think of the boy you like least in your class - he'll be the singer. Everybody hates singers."
"Crap. Everybody loves the singer most."
"I mean the other lads in the band. They always hate the singer. He's always the lazy, loudmouthed, show-off one. You don't want to be like Liam Gallagher, just standing around doing nothing but being thick."
"Oasis are one of the best bands in the world; better than the Beatles ever were - it would be great to be the singer of Oasis."
I do not rise to the bait. Silence descends.
I can't believe I've just had this conversation with my 10-year-old son. If he's like this now, what's he going to be like when he's 15 and growing dope plants in his bedroom?
When Drummond was 15, he lived in a council house in Corby, in the East Midlands. He was born in South Africa, where his father, a Church of Scotland missionary, was working, and proudly recounts that his first words were in Xhosa, the language of the Bantu people. The incoming apartheid government forced the family home to Scotland before William was 18 months old, and thence to a council house in Corby. He was impatient with school and ultimately deemed unsuitable for the sixth form, he claims, after being caught reading the NME during a study period. Noting interests that included music and 'making things', a careers adviser suggested a future as an instrument maker, which required a qualification in art. Drummond enrolled in art school, but left before long, although his passion for art remains strong. 'It didn't work out,' is all he says now.
Music provided the solution, first through membership of Liverpudlian one-hit wonders Big in Japan (with Lightning Seed Ian Broudie and future Frankie Goes to Hollywood singer Holly Johnson on - don't tell James - bass). When that collapsed, Drummond found more lasting influence as manager of fêted local post-punk outfits The Teardrop Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen. Establishing what would later become a pattern, he severed links with the latter at the peak of their popularity and went to work in the A&R department of WEA Records, where he was responsible for signing acts to the label. The only significant thing he did at that time was to sign a group called Brilliant, which had been formed by the former Killing Joke bassist, Youth, and featured the guitarist Jimmy Cauty. After three years, Drummond left his job in ignominy, but not before he and Cauty had struck up a relationship. Their subsequent commercial success, he explains, was partly inspired by a desire to 'prove [WEA MD] Rob Dickens wrong'. So they did, spectacularly.
KLF stands for Kopyright Liberation Front. Their first album, 1987 - What the Fuck is Going On?, made use of the newly accessible 'sampling' technology to borrow parts of other records and assemble them into something new. This is routine now - just ask Fatboy Slim - but was controversial at the time and led to a lawsuit with Abba over the unauthorised use of a passage from 'Dancing Queen', after which all unsold copies of the record had to be destroyed. Presaging things to come, Drummond and Cauty travelled to Stockholm in order to present a commemorative gold disc to Abba singer Agnetha Faltskog. Also presaging things to come, they couldn't find her, so gave the disc to a prostitute they happened across in the street, and came home.
In 1988, the pair decided to have a number-one record. They changed their name to The Timelords and released a cheesy dance take on the theme from Doctor Who, 'Doctorin' the Tardis'. It duly topped the UK singles chart and inspired its authors to follow up with a book entitled The Manual (How
To Have A Number One The Easy Way).
An Austrian duo, Edelweiss, followed their instructions and shifted 2 million units of a single called Give Me Edelweiss. A year later, again operating as the KLF, Drummond and Cauty began an extraordinary run of success with a pair of juddering rave anthems called 'What Time is Love?' and '3am Eternal'. In 1990, there came the first 'ambient house' LP, Chill Out, and in 1991, a further series of hit singles and the bestselling album
The White Room. Most bizarre of all, perhaps, was a version of their song 'Justified and Ancient', which featured country star Tammy Wynette on vocals and was only kept from the Christmas number-one slot by the death of Freddie Mercury and the re-release of 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. It was hardly surprising if the duo began to imagine themselves immune to failure. They were having fun, could do anything. At the 1992 Brit Awards, they proved as much.
Drummond is wearing jeans and work boots and fluorescent-orange donkey jacket with 'K2 Plant Hire' emblazoned on the back. He is soft spoken and intense, more comfortable discussing ideas and abstracts than emotion or inner life. His second wife used to worry that he would find God and join the church without warning. It hasn't happened yet, but you can see how it might.
I'd heard that the original plan for the 1992 Brit Awards was to chop up a sheep on stage and throw the gore into the audience. Unfortunately, Extreme Noise Terror, the heavy metal backing band they used for the performance, were vegetarians and refused to be part of such a performance. Oh dear. At the same time, Drummond tells me with absolute conviction that his first wish for the 1992 Brit Awards was to cut off his hand and throw it into the audience.
'I thought that would be the ultimate thing, a way of taking it even further. I was inspired by the story of the red hand of Ulster, which you see on the Ulster flag. That comes from the story that, when the first people came to the region, there was a young man in the boat who wanted to be the first to claim it for his king or laird, so he chopped off his hand and threw it on to the beach. So in my head, I was chopping off my own hand and throwing it into the massed ranks of the music business, claiming it for myself.'
You're telling me that you seriously considered this?
'Yes, but it's hard... you end up going down an avenue where you are almost daring yourself. I bought the implement... and then... Jimmy talked me down, persuaded me that I didn't have to. The sheep became symbolic. They took the place of the hand.'
Extraordinary. I am looking at Bill Drummond, yet hearing the voices
of Hannibal Lecter and David
St Hubbins of Spinal Tap. Perhaps it's me that needs help. At the same time, subsequent events suggest that Drummond should be taken seriously. After the dissolving the KLF, he and Cauty took the additional step of deleting their back catalogue, thus cutting off future sales and royalties. Reconstituted as the K Foundation, their first overt act was to establish a prize for the worst art of the year in 1993. Remarkably, you might think, the shortlist was the same as for that year's Turner Prize. Sculptor Rachel Whiteread won both, and was allegedly warned that, if she refused
the K Foundation's £40,000, it would be
set alight. The Turner Prize was worth £20,000. Whiteread did all right that year. Soon, however, the ante would be upped.
I want to know two obvious things, the first being what possessed Drummond and his partner to burn £1 million, the second being what he felt at the moment he knew the money couldn't be retrieved, that it was gone forever. He tries to tell me that his actions that day were just like the others.
'I think I've always done the same thing, and it's just what it looks like on the outside that's different,' he contends, unconvincingly. 'I don't know what it is, but it's dealing with that same feeling on the inside and working with that.'
What kind of feeling?
'A sort of big thing that you've got to get out, and it's just the wrapping that makes it look different. I'm trying to make sense of something.'
What?
'I don't know what it is.'
To me, as with the way you ended the KLF, it looked like an aggressive expression of loathing, not dissimilar to Richie Edwards of Manic Street Preachers carving '4 Real' in his arm with a penknife, or Kurt Cobain blowing his brains out. Reading 45, I wondered if you were exacting revenge on pop music for the damage it inflicted on your personal life? As we know, the myth and iconography come at a price. I also thought the act said something quite profound about our relationship to money, as the anger felt in some quarters about your not having given yours to charity showed, but we'll have to save that for another time.
'No, I don't think that's right, though it touches on
certain things. Jimmy and I made an agreement not to talk about this for a certain time, because the more we did, the more its impact became dissipated. What I will say is that I've never seen it as a destructive thing. It wasn't to destroy the money. It was to watch it burn.'
Can you imagine ever regretting what you've done?
'Well, obviously, if one of your kids is dying of cancer and there's an expensive clinic in California which can cure them... but other than that, no.'
The great thing about UK pop is that trash and substance can exist side by side, often in the same artefact. In 45, Drummond betrays a rare trace of pride as he tells the story of how a forgotten KLF tune came to be used as an anti-Milosevic rallying cry in Serbia.
You spend your pop life longing for one of your three-and-a-half minute slices of radio
fodder to rise above being mere pop music, to enter the social fabric of the nation and times
we live through, like 'Give Peace a Chance' or 'Anarchy in the UK' or 'Three Lions'. And this morning, I learn that a track that we recorded in a day, never released as a single, thought was crap and had forgotten about has taken on a meaning, an importance in a struggle I hardly understood. Strange.
The most poignant passages of 45 come at the end, though, in a pair of chapters called 'Now That's What I Call Disillusionment' 1 and 2. In the first, Drummond tells the story of how he and Echo and the Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant flew home from the US specially to catch a rare performance by San Franciscan avant-garde legends the Residents, in Birmingham Town Hall, of all places. As so often in these instances, what they found was not what they had conjured in their fantasies. The next chapter concerns the KLF's self-mocking final performance, disguised as old men in motorised wheelchairs, at the Barbican in 1997. This provoked righteous scorn in the press, mostly in relation to the irony of the KLF making a comeback, however pranksterish and absurd. Drummond begins by quoting some of the reviews of that show, despairingly to begin with, then with a growing sense of peace and acceptance. Finally, he suggests, he was relieved of all obligation to live the myth, to be credible, bankable, in touch with the zeitgeist. He could pick up his pencil and get on with the rest of his life. That wasn't the best thing that happened that night, though. That involved a journalist from Time Out who had been one of the KLF's most ardent fans.
In 1988, at the age of 12, he had bought our 'Doctorin' the Tardis'. He got on board. Then through his teenage years he had faithfully followed our every move. We were the idealised big brothers he never had. On our retirement from the music business in 1992, he even wrote a book recounting our exploits. Then that night in 1997, after we daubed our message on the grey concrete and were about to speed off looking for some after-hours action, I shook our former teenage Number One Fan's hand and wished him well. In that moment, as our hands shook, I detected something in the glint of his eye: disillusionment, as real and pure as disillusionment can get. Almost as powerful and strong as when I saw that bit of dark curly hair sticking out the back of that Resident's eyeball mask. In our (Jimmy's and my) short journey through pop, that moment of disillusionment was maybe our greatest creation. Without that final state of disillusion, the power and glory of pop is nothing. And when it happens (and if it has not already happened for you, it surely will), savour it, because it very quickly slithers into disinterest and gets forgotten as life marches on.
Bill Drummond's 45 is published by Little, Brown at
£12.99, on 3 March. To order a copy for the special price
of £9.99, including UK p&p, freephone 0800 316 8171 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/12/who-has-come-out-on-top-after-the-first-junior-doctors-strike-in-40-years | Society | 2016-01-12T21:50:00.000Z | Denis Campbell | Who has come out on top after the first junior doctors' strike in 40 years? | So who won? Who has gained from junior doctors deciding to join picket lines rather than care for patients for the first time in 40 years? And where does the first of what might be three walkouts leave the prospects for settlement of a dispute that is as complex and protracted as it is important both politically and for the future of an already pressurised NHS?
Occasional toots of support from passing motorists for junior doctors in their scrubswith stethoscopes round their necks are not a reliable gauge of where public sympathies lie in the dispute. Nor are the predictably negative stories in newspapers, keen to portray the same medics as money-driven and arrogant or duped into industrial action by a Corbynite cabal running the British Medical Association.
A poll on Monday found that 66% of people back the junior doctors so long as they strike as they did for 24 hours from 8am on Tuesday: by hitting only non-urgent care, such as elective operations and outpatient clinics. Juniors plan to do the same again for 48 hours between 26 and 28 January. But that public backing would drop to 44% if they withdrew cover from emergency care such as A&E, childbirth and intensive care, as they plan to do from 8am to 5pm on 10 February if things are not resolved to their satisfaction beforehand.
Junior doctors' strike: increasing optimism over deal to end dispute
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As the union representing the professionals the public trusts the most, the BMA has to choose its tactics wisely. But it has had some success in persuading people that the new terms and conditions for junior doctors in England are unfair and potentially unsafe and that it is fighting to safeguard the health service.
Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, has consistently portrayed the juniors as resisting modern working realities and the dispute as vital to ensure that the NHS becomes much more of a seven-day service by 2020 in order to end indefensible inequalities in the quality of care that hospital patients receive depending on which day of the week they are admitted.
NHS Employers, the body that supports employers in the health service, hopes that yesterday’s show of strength has left juniors feeling that they have at last shown Hunt how they feel, and that the four month-long dispute can now begin to move towards resolution.
Despite the junior doctors’ strikes, patients are with us
Anamika Basu
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Everyone involved wants to reach an agreement. But after six weeks of stop-start talks – some with Acas’s help, some without – several key areas of disagreement remain.
Compromise on both sides is needed if a settlement is to be finally agreed. But that will not be easy. The BMA’s junior doctors’ committee contains various shades of opinion, which may make finding a common position difficult. After 98% backed a strike, they have to be convinced that they have seen off Hunt’s punitive proposals.
Equally, Hunt – whose hardline tactics have left him potentially exposed, and who has turned up the heat when cooling things was perhaps more advisable – needs to be seen to have “won” for reasons of his own credibility and political prospects. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2000/nov/28/newsstory.sport1 | Football | 2000-11-28T22:38:56.000Z | Paul Rees | Worthington Cup final on way to Wales | The Millennium Stadium is expected to be named as the venue for the Worthington Cup final next week.
Representatives of the Football League were at the rugby international between Wales and South Africa on Sunday when the state of the pitch generated almost as much debate as who the Wales outside-half should have been. A league spokesman said: "We have no problems with the pitch which we have been assured will be conducive to quality football come February."
The Wales Rugby Union has asked for help from turf experts in New York and Amsterdam. Glanmor Griffiths, chairman of the WRU and Millennium Stadium plc, said: "We are addressing the problem and I'm confident that it will be sorted out in time for the soccer finals."
You've read the piece, now have your say. Send your comments, as sharp or as stupid as you like, to [email protected] | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/07/hindenburg-disaster-80th-anniversary | US news | 2017-05-07T08:00:28.000Z | Joanna Walters | The Hindenburg disaster, 80 years on: a 'perfect storm of circumstances' | The huge airship had circled three times around the Empire State Building. It was on its way to land in New Jersey. From her home in southern Pennsylvania, Libby Magness Weisberg watched the Hindenburg glide by.
“It was amazing how beautiful it was,” she told the Guardian on Saturday. “The silver airship against a clear blue sky. How enormous. It was the most exquisite thing I had ever seen.”
Then the zeppelin turned. Its tail swung into view. On it, stark and black, were swastikas.
From the archive, 8 May 1937: Hindenburg airship disaster leaves 33 dead
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“We had no inkling of what Hitler was really doing to the Jews already, but I knew Germany was the enemy,” said Weisberg, 89. “I was startled, and that beauty up there turned into fear.”
Her neighbors, she said, gesticulated angrily at the sky.
Not long after, on 6 May 1937, as it was coming in to moor at the naval base at Lakehurst, New Jersey, the Hindenburg caught fire and crashed. Of the 97 people on board, 62 miraculously escaped the burning wreckage. But 22 crew members, 13 passengers and one worker on the ground were killed.
After the disaster, President Franklin Roosevelt and King George sent telegrams of condolence to Hitler.
E
ighty years on, as the spectacular crash is remembered with ceremonies and in retellings, its precise cause remains unknown. What is certain is that it could have been avoided, or at least minimized, if not for a “perfect storm” of unfortunate events and errors.
“The landing was rushed and they took shortcuts on some of the safety procedures,” Rick Zitarosa, a historian with the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society, said.
The Hindenburg crash was the first major transport disaster captured on film, in dramatic footage ever since paired with recorded commentary by a radio reporter who reacted in horror to the shocking scene before him.
Few people directly connected to the disaster are still alive. The lone remaining survivor from the airship itself, Werner Doehner, is now an 88-year-old resident of Colorado.
Photographers take pictures of an unidentified survivor of the disaster the previous day. Photograph: AP
“Suddenly the air was on fire,” he said this week, speaking to the Associated Press.
The Hindenburg was about 200ft off the ground when it combusted – not “exploded”, as some have since described it. It burned from tail to nose in just 34 seconds but as it collapsed to Earth, Doehner’s mother threw him and his 10-year-old brother from the craft. All three survived.
Just before the fire broke out, however, Werner’s father had gone to the family cabin.
“We didn’t see him again,” Doehner said.
His 14-year-old sister escaped the wreck but rushed back into it to look for their missing father. After emerging without him, she did not survive her burns.
Footage of the disaster.
Speculation about sabotage was rife, as this archive news report from the Guardian shows. There had been reports of bomb threats to the transatlantic passenger airship program, the pride of Nazi Germany.
Investigations, however, concluded that a spark of static electricity had most likely ignited leaking hydrogen as, in Zitarosa’s words, “they brought the ship in for landing under thunderstorm conditions”.
It is most widely believed that the leak came from one of the ship’s rear gas containers. What caused the leak is not known. Zitarosa surmised that a broken length of wiring or other piece of hardware somehow ripped the container, which was made of a tough cotton fabric with a film of early latex-type material.
Other factors may have contributed. The Hindenburg was 12 hours late to Lakehurst, having been delayed by strong headwinds across the north Atlantic before spending several hours flying around the area, waiting for storms to clear.
Zeppelins normally took two and a half days to reach the US from Germany, moving twice as fast as an ocean liner. Although the Hindenburg had taken three days, it had plenty of diesel fuel left. It could have flown further.
But passengers, among them dignitaries heading for England and the coronation of King George VI, were waiting. The airship was due to turn around in record time.
Its pilots attempted a so-called high landing, in which ropes were tossed to the ground from around 200ft, for ground crew to pull the giant craft down and secure it to a mooring mast.
This would be quicker than a more usual low landing, by which the airship approached long and low until it touched the ground and could be dragged to the mooring mast. A low approach carried less risk, but took more men on the ground and more time.
Either way, it was known to be extremely dangerous to land in thundery weather. Ground crew members were soaked and there was electricity in the air.
A London news vendor, carries posters promoting coverage of the Hindenburg disaster in local newspapers in London. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
“When the ship dropped its landing ropes, they got wet and acted as conductors,” said Zitarosa. “The ship became grounded and that’s why we think the static electricity made a spark and caught the leaking hydrogen.”
In a flash, the craft was shooting flames for hundreds of feet, its burning skeleton collapsing.
A Chicago radio reporter, Herbert Morrison, bore witness to the raging inferno.
“It burst into flames, it burst into flames!” he cried. “And it’s falling, it’s crashing …it’s crashing terrible … Oh, the humanity … oh, ladies and gentlemen …”
If the Hindenburg had caught fire after a low landing, many more would probably have escaped with their lives. The fire may also have been avoided completely, because the forward motion of the airship, as opposed to hovering, would have given the leaking hydrogen more chance of being flushed away through louvered vents.
“It was a perfect storm of circumstances,” said Zitarosa. “The late schedule, the weather, the leak, the decision to make the landing at that time and in that way and the use of hydrogen in general. The disaster could have been avoided on several counts, but caution was thrown to the wind.”
Despite the US maintaining a monopoly on commercial supplies of helium, an inert gas that would make airship travel much safer, news reports after the crash suggested that a bullish Germany was going to keep the zeppelin program going. In reality, thanks to the advent of the passenger plane, the airship business was already sliding towards obsolescence.
Zeppelins never landed at Lakehurst again. Before long, American dirigibles were taking off from there instead, searching for German submarines. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/feb/24/jamie-foxx-tells-african-american-stars-to-act-better-oscars-so-white-diversity-row | Film | 2016-02-24T10:10:18.000Z | Ben Child | Jamie Foxx: black stars – including Will Smith – need to #actbetter to win Oscars | Jamie Foxx knocks and Little Mermaids surface – the Dailies podcast
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Jamie Foxx has reportedly told fellow actors of colour threatening a boycott of the Oscars over its all-white nominees to #actbetter if they want to win the top prize.
Appearing at the American black film festival awards on Sunday, the Oscar-winner joked that he and Denzel Washington were unimpressed with complaints over the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ failure to nominate a single actor of colour for the second year in a row.
“All these Oscar talks, I don’t even trip about that,” said Foxx, according to US Weekly. “I mean, what’s the big deal? I was sitting at home with my Oscar, like ‘What’s all the hubbub?’”
According to Page Six, Fox added: “Me and Denzel were like, ‘Hashtag what’s the big deal? Hashtag act better.’”
Foxx cited the attitude of Sidney Poitier, who became the first black winner of the best actor Oscar in 1964 for his turn in Lilies of the Field. “I was with Sidney Poitier just a couple weeks ago, and in 1963 all he asked for was an opportunity to act,” Foxx said. “That’s all we have to do: opportunity. If you turn the camera on and say, ‘OK … win an award … and action,’ we’ll all have taken 10 steps back. It’s all about the art. Who cares about anything else?”
According to Page Six, Foxx also poked fun at Will Smith’s cod-Nigerian accent in Concussion. Smith has denied that the joint decision with his wife Jada Pinkett Smith to boycott the Oscars over diversity has anything to do with his failure to pick up a best actor nomination for his turn as forensic pathologist Dr Bennet Omalu in Peter Landesman’s film.
Oscars accused of bypassing own rules in push to plug diversity gap
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The 2016 Oscars ceremony will take place at the Dolby theatre in Los Angeles this Sunday, 28 February. Spike Lee, Tyrese Gibson and Michael Moore are among other notable figures who have called for a boycott or signalled that they will not be attending over diversity. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/17/steve-wright-death-power-radio | Opinion | 2024-02-17T08:00:09.000Z | Gillian Reynolds | It’s personal: the reaction to Steve Wright’s death is proof of the power of radio | Gillian Reynolds | The great illusion of radio, the magic trick, is making each of us think that the voice coming out of the air is talking just to us. Not everyone will like a particular voice. That’s their loss. But those of us who do will tune the radio to the same place at the same time on the same day to catch it. When the programme’s time slot changes, or even if the voice leaves and goes to another radio station on another day at a different time, we will follow. When this voice dies, our loss is personal. We may never have met them but, somehow, we’re connected. Think Alistair Cooke, Kenny Everett. And now Steve Wright.
After Wright’s unexpected death this week, some have said that he never got over losing his Radio 2 afternoon show in 2022 (though Wright himself said at the time, “I’ve been doing this programme for 24 years at Radio 2, so how can I possibly complain?”). It is true that many radio bosses these days, whether at the BBC or on the commercial side, don’t grasp the art and craft of sculpting sound, especially for a huge audience. There’s a common assumption that someone just has to play the music and burble in between. Audience figures and listener loyalty will show such assumptions are a dangerous illusion. You have to love radio to be very good at it.
Steve Wright obituary
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Steve Wright grew up with radio, being born in 1954 before the first pirate stations – Radio Caroline, Radio London and the rest – signalled the arrival of a new generation of broadcasting and the end of the BBC’s monopoly on sound. In 1954, Britain still had compulsory national service. Food rationing was a recent memory. Portable radios ran on huge, weighty batteries and, as far as popular music went, the BBC Light Programme – the precursor to Radio 1 and 2 – and Radio Luxembourg were pretty much the only options. Or, if you lived in the north-west, you could catch Radio Éireann from Ireland. (I can still sing all the words of the jingle for Donnelly’s sausages.)
Twelve years later, Wright was running his own rudimentary radio station at school – which he left with only three O-levels. But he was doing hospital radio, too, and when he left school he got a job as a researcher at the BBC. Alas, this seemed to consist mainly of dusting the discs in the record library, so after a couple of years he found more fruitful ground at Radio Luxembourg. By that time, local commercial radio was arriving. All the high roads, however, still led to the BBC and in 1980 he eventually got himself on to Radio 1. Steve Wright in the Afternoon ran from 1981 to 1993. Then he moved to the biggest job on any radio station, the breakfast show.
Steve Wright, left, with George Michael at the BBC in 1990. Photograph: PA
I wonder if any of his former teachers ever listened to him on Radio 1? They will have heard application, invention, team leadership and immersion in the craft in ways they could probably not have imagined of their erstwhile reluctant pupil. Even broadcasting to a huge audience, he kept developing his craft. He went over to New York and sat in his hotel room just listening to the radio. He came back with a trunkful of ideas, all of which he put to work on air. Parody people, mad situations, character voices that were like aural cartoons. He maintained an astute grasp of how popular music was changing and, with it, audiences. What didn’t change was Wright’s conviction that he often knew better than management.
After a blazing row with Radio 1’s then new controller, Matthew Bannister, he moved on and, eventually, arrived on Radio 2 in 1996. There, the controller, James Moir offered Wright the afternoon show. Wright took it on and transformed it. Over the next year or so, Radio 2 as a whole soared with massive new popularity. By then Steve Wright in the Afternoon and his other long-running hit show, Sunday Love Songs, were national favourites.
Today, of course, the BBC ushers both listeners and viewers to its website and it might not be long before old-fashioned transmission is phased out. You can practically hear the sighs of relief at New Broadcasting House. All that money saved on masts and machinery and people to run them. At the same time, commercial radio, which began as independent local radio, is now mainly the fiefdom of two competing international companies, Global and Bauer. Local commercial radio is largely dead.
The astonishingly wide and heartfelt reaction to Wright’s death is proof, again, of radio’s power to talk to us as individuals yet unite us as a secret tribe. Meanwhile, I contemplate the dozen or so radios that have accumulated around my flat over the past half-century of listening. Goodbye, my dears. You’ve seen me through bad times and good, always with the right song. We’ll probably conk out at the same time. Such dark thoughts may well have bothered Steve Wright. He’d have thought his way round them. He usually did.
Gillian Reynolds has been a radio critic for the Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/may/01/uk-students-begin-new-wave-of-protests-against-gaza-war-after-us-arrests | Education | 2024-05-01T13:01:23.000Z | Sally Weale | UK students begin new wave of protests against Gaza war after US arrests | A fresh wave of student demonstrations and encampments are under way at UK universities in protest over the war in Gaza after violent scenes on campuses in the US, where hundreds have been arrested in a crackdown by police.
Protests were due to take place in at least six universities on Wednesday, including Sheffield, Bristol, Leeds and Newcastle, with others expected to follow suit, in a show of solidarity with Palestinians.
Students are also calling for their individual universities to divest from firms that supply arms to Israel and in some cases sever links with universities in Israel.
While the focus of the protest movement in the UK in recent months has been on mass marches in London and other cities, students occupied university buildings and held demonstrations, which have been on a smaller scale and have attracted less attention.
‘Like a war zone’: Emory University grapples with fallout from police response to protest
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However, violent scenes from Columbia University and other US campuses over the past few days, broadcast across the world’s media, have triggered renewed anger among UK students and a sense of shared solidarity.
David Maguire, the vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia (UEA), said protests at UK universities had been generally peaceful but agreed that events like those in the US “could happen here”.
In Sheffield, a group called the Sheffield Campus Coalition for Palestine, a coalition of “staff, students, and alumni” from the universities of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam, began an encampment in solidarity with Palestinians.
The SCCP said there had been a mass walkout from lectures, followed by a demonstration, and that many students were prepared to camp “indefinitely” in tents outside the student union. This followed an encampment at the University of Warwick, which began last week.
“We’ve come prepared for the South Yorkshire weather,” said one research student taking part in the protest. “We’ve got gazebos and picnic tables and a generator for power. We’ll stay indefinitely until the university meets our demands.”
In Newcastle, an organisation called Newcastle Apartheid off Campus said more than 40 students were taking part in an encampment and that a day of events and a rally was planned for 5pm on Wednesday.
Organisers said students were outraged after the university apparently signed a partnership with Leonardo SpA, a defence and security company that they claim is responsible for producing the laser targeting system for the Israel Defense Forces’ F-35 fighter jets being used in the war in Gaza.
“Although the student union has passed motions with 95% of people in favour of calling for the university to end its ties with Leonardo, and multiple ‘Leonardo off Campus’ protests on its campus, it is clear that the university has not listened to students’ concerns,” a statement said. The university was contacted for comment.
The University of York, meanwhile, announced in a statement that it “no longer holds investments in companies that primarily make or sell weapons and defence-related products or services”. This followed prolonged pressure and protests from students and staff since the beginning of the war in Gaza.
In Leeds, there was a May Day student walkout for Palestine, and in Bristol, university students established an encampment in Royal Fort Gardens opposite Senate House.
This latest wave of action builds on earlier protests, which included student occupations of university buildings at the University of Manchester, Goldsmiths and at UCL.
In Manchester, protesters said 50 students had set up camp, demanding that the university end its partnership with BAE Systems and other arms companies, cut its ties with Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and stop all “unethical research”.
One first-year student said the US protests had highlighted “now is the time to act”. He said: “The courage that those students have shown faced with extreme violence from the police – it’s like a call that needs to be answered and picked up across the world.”
Patrick Hackett, Manchester University’s registrar, secretary and chief operating officer, said it recognised the right of students and staff to protest within the law, but added that setting up camp in a city campus posed potential health and safety concerns “and ultimately is an unauthorised and unlawful use of the university’s campus”.
He added: “You can be assured that we will do everything possible to maintain business as usual and we urge protesters to act accordingly. We are very conscious of the need to ensure that everyone on our campus remains safe and secure and this will be of utmost importance.”
University vice-chancellors in the UK have been keeping a close eye on events on their own campuses and overseas, meeting regularly to discuss developments. Asked on BBC Radio 4 whether the scenes on campuses in North America could be replicated in the UK, the UEA’s Maguire said: “Of course it could happen here.
“But this is a price that we pay for academic freedom and freedom of speech. Students have the opportunity, if they so wish, to protest about any issue. And I think we’ve got to remember that for a lot of students, these events have been completely cataclysmic. Any response from authorities must be commensurate and allowances need to be made.”
A spokesperson for Universities UK, which speaks for 142 institutions, said: “Universities are monitoring the latest news on campus protests in the US and Canada. As with any high-profile issue, universities work hard to strike the right balance between ensuring the safety of all students and staff, including preventing harassment, and supporting lawful free speech on campus. We continue to meet regularly to discuss the latest position with university leaders.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/10/fifty-shades-of-grey-screenwriter-says-film-is-too-painful-to-watch | Film | 2015-06-10T07:36:33.000Z | Ben Child | Fifty Shades of Grey screenwriter says film is 'too painful' to watch | Kelly Marcel, the screenwriter behind Fifty Shades of Grey, has revealed she has felt unable to watch the salacious blockbuster because the final cut was so different to her “crazy and artistic” original vision.
Fifty Shades stars not bound to potential spin-off film
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Production of Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film was plagued by reports that author EL James clashed heavily with the British director on set, with the novelist keen to ensure a more literal take on her bestselling book. Now Marcel has revealed she was left so disheartened by the experience of working on Fifty Shades of Grey that she has not been able to bring herself to see it.
“My heart really was broken by that process, I really mean it,” she told Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast. “I don’t say it out of any kind of bitterness or anger or anything like that. I just don’t feel like I can watch it without feeling some pain about how different it is to what I initially wrote.”
Marcel said her plans for a non-linear reading of James’ novel were initially received with enthusiasm by studio Universal. But she eventually came to realise that the British writer would only sanction a final cut that cleaved tightly to her own famously clunky dialogue.
“I didn’t want the story to be linear; I wanted it to begin at the end of the film, and for us to meet in the middle,” said Marcel. “So you start with the spanking, and you have these sort of flashes that go throughout the film … I wanted to take the inner goddess out, and all of Ana’s inner monologue … I wanted to remove a lot of the dialogue. I felt it could be a really sexy film if there wasn’t so much talking in it.
“When I delivered that script was when I realised that all of them saying, ‘Yeah, absolutely this is what we want!’, and, ‘You can write anything you like and get crazy and artistic with it’ – that was utter, utter bullshit. Rightly so. Erika was like, ‘This isn’t what I want it to be, and I don’t think this is the film the fans are looking for …’ Ultimately, Erika did have all of the control.”
Reports prior to Fifty Shades of Grey’s February release alleged that James threatened to withdraw her support for the film unless her original dialogue was retained. Studio Universal hired the award-winning playwright of Closer and Dealer’s Choice, Patrick Marber, to hone Marcel’s James-sanctioned screenplay. But the novelist reportedly went through the final script and removed all Marber’s tinkerings, threatening to alert her fans on social media if she were challenged.
Fifty Shades of grating teeth: EL James 'threatened boycott' of film if dialogue rewritten
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The author also reportedly refused to allow a subtle change to the film’s denouement in which Dakota Johnson’s Anastasia Steele was due to mutter the safe word “red” to Jamie Dornan’s kinky billionaire Christian Grey. In the final version, Taylor-Johnson and fellow film-makers were overruled, and Steele speaks the word used in the novel: “Stop.”
Taylor-Johnson admitted to fighting with James over the movie earlier this year, telling Porter magazine: “It was difficult, I’m not going to lie.” She has not signed on to direct follow-up Fifty Shades Darker.
Said Marcel: “There was a moment where we were weeks away from shooting … and it was clear that that was gonna be a struggle. It’s very difficult to come on as a director and to be handcuffed that way and not be able to fulfil your creative vision because there are certain restrictions on you. But at the same time, I would argue that it was very clear that that was the way it was going to be.”
EL James's husband to write screenplay for Fifty Shades of Grey sequel
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James is to take even tighter control over Fifty Shades Darker, which is expected to hit cinemas in 2017. The novelist has hired her husband Niall Leonard, who has previously written for TV shows including Ballykissangel, Wire in the Blood and Monarch of the Glen, to oversee the new screenplay.
Universal can reasonably argue that its approach has proven a highly profitable one. Despite scathing reviews, Fifty Shades of Grey scored $569.6m at the global box office and is likely to be one of the top 10 movies of 2015. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/30/white-holes-inside-the-horizon-carlo-rovelli-review-black-hole-quantum-physics | Books | 2023-10-30T11:00:11.000Z | Kevin Fong | White Holes: Inside the Horizon review – Carlo Rovelli turns time on its head | Iread Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time more than 30 years ago. It woke me up to the wonders of the universe in a way that nothing before ever had. And while I’m not sure I fully understood it then, or now, it certainly felt like an adventure. Carlo Rovelli’s new book is a kind of non-linear sequel in which he introduces his theory of “white holes”, how they might form and why we have such trouble seeing them in the universe today.
Black holes form from stars so massive that when they reach the end of their lives and all their fuel is spent, they collapse to form bizarre objects from which nothing can escape, not even light itself. Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted their existence: entities within which space and time had to come to an end.
But the same equations of physics that predicted the existence of black holes also predict the existence of their inverse: white holes, objects that you cannot fall into, from which matter can only pour. Astronomers can see black holes, or at least evidence of them as they hoover up matter in distant galaxies. But, curiously, we don’t see any evidence of white holes, which is a little strange and has led some to suggest that they might not exist.
‘A lyrical science communicator’: Carlo Rovelli. Photograph: Roberto Serra/Iguana Press/Getty Images
But Rovelli is a firm believer. His new book outlines his theory of white hole formation. In it he takes you on a guided tour, first leading you into a black hole, beyond its event horizon and into its throat. And there, with you expecting to reach a cosmic cul-de-sac, he departs from the expected narrative and shows you something new. This is a black hole. Things should finish here; space and time themselves should end here. But in Rovelli’s version of the universe, they don’t.
Rovelli is an accomplished theoretical physicist, prolific author and lyrical science communicator. White Holes is a small book – Rovelli’s briefest yet – and smashes through a lot of material at breakneck speed, pretty much the entire content of A Brief History of Time in a couple of short chapters by way of overview and introduction. Reading it is more akin to the final psychedelic sequence in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey: you’re not sure where you’re heading but it feels bloody exciting.
In fewer pages than it would take some authors to describe how they would prepare an omelette, Rovelli drags you into the heart of a black hole and then – somehow – out the other side. What he suggests is that, as the star forming a black hole continues to collapse, it eventually becomes so compact and tiny that the laws of general relativity have to give way to the laws of quantum mechanics.
Quantum theory is the physics of uncertainty on a tiny scale. Here, particles and patches of space become clouds of probability and the previously impossible becomes possible. All of which Rovelli exploits to suggest that the star at the centre of a black hole, trying to collapse away to nothing, might reach a point at which quantum uncertainty allows it to “bounce” backward through time and become a white hole.
Rovelli gives you a glimpse into the mind of a physicist working at the edges of the known universe
Books about extreme cosmic objects are hard to write well – and harder still to precis – partly because these theories are best expressed in mathematical terms. Indeed, they can only be fully explained by using mathematics. So no matter how dense or vast the text of a popular science book, without the requisite arcane symbols and algebraic notation you’re never going to be able to get the whole picture.
But this is a book for the layperson and Rovelli understands this limitation, glossing over finer detail in pursuit of an impression of the wonder that lies at the heart of the cosmos and his theorising. And in his hands it’s an effective technique.
Rovelli leaves you upside down. Having started with a black hole, an object into which you could only fall, from which there was never any escape, he conjures a white hole, from which things can only pour. He turns time on its head, runs it backwards and finally helps you understand how white holes might plausibly form and at the same time why – despite their existence – astronomers don’t see them spewing their matter into the universe like Regan in The Exorcist.
Despite the book’s brevity, Rovelli doesn’t flinch from discussing the tougher concepts. He warns you that you might find some of them a little confusing. I must confess that I’m still a little hazy on whether or not my inability to remember the future is just a perceptual illusion, or if it’s a fundamental consequence of the underlying physics. But Rovelli reassures you that none of that really matters and that what’s important here is the experience of being transported. If that’s true then the book more than does its job.
One of the things I most loved about White Holes was the glimpse Rovelli gives you into the mind of a physicist working at the edges of the known universe, and the fundamental insecurity of creating groundbreaking theories and then putting them out there like clay pigeons launched from a trap. It’s a strange duality. On the one hand, you have to be rock solid sure of the ideas you propose. But on the way to assembling them – and afterwards – you have to have the discipline to doubt them and continue to test them as fiercely as your staunchest rivals might.
Rovelli also openly worries about the book and its structure, telling us that his harshest critics are physics students, who tend to get cross about the lack of detailed exposition. And if you’re a final year undergraduate looking for revision notes to accompany your module in high energy astrophysics, this volume may disappoint. But if you want to remember why you once fell in love with the idea of the cosmos, or want to fall in love with that idea for the first time, then this book is for you. For my part, I found myself following Rovelli into a weird and wonderful new universe and I was very content to be there.
Kevin Fong is a doctor, broadcaster and author
White Holes: Inside the Horizon by Carlo Rovelli is published by Allen Lane (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/07/rishi-sunak-white-house-summit-brexit-britain-washington-europe-joe-biden | Opinion | 2023-06-07T05:00:28.000Z | Rafael Behr | Rishi Sunak’s White House jolly can’t mask the fact that Brexit Britain is a fading power | Rafael Behr | The Americans know how to make a prime minister feel special. It isn’t hard. Saying “you are special” or words to that effect, usually does the trick. It helps to say it in the White House, within earshot of the British press corps.
Westminster hacks and Downing Street aides, most of whom are unhealthily obsessed with US politics, love a Washington summit for the same reason that Harry Potter fans queue to visit the Warner Bros studio in Watford. Standing on the stage where the magic happens is its own reward.
That makes Rishi Sunak a cheap date for Joe Biden at this week’s summit. The US president can bestow the normal diplomatic courtesies, while conceding nothing of strategic substance. Downing Street then tells friendly journalists that the two men bonded over baseball, or some other shared cultural enthusiasm, or that their wives did. The prime minister flies home with burnished credentials as the leader of a very important country indeed.
The bar for summit success has been set low. It helps that the prime minister isn’t Boris Johnson or Liz Truss, whose bellicose Brexit methods sabotaged transatlantic relations. By negotiating the Windsor framework, easing frictions around Northern Ireland, Sunak atoned for the offence that Biden summarised crudely, but fairly, as “screwing around” with the Good Friday agreement.
Sunak’s mission to Washington is also mercifully free of unrealistic speculation about a US-UK free-trade deal. This was an obsession for Brexit enthusiasts. Opening new vistas of transatlantic commerce was meant to outweigh any downside to withdrawal from the European single market.
The economics of that proposition never added up, but it was a comfort to Eurosceptics, whose paranoia about London’s submission to Brussels fed a delusion of parity with Washington.
Sunak Washington visit faces being overshadowed by Ukraine crisis
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Donald Trump nurtured that fantasy. His successor has kiboshed it. Biden’s economic strategy is based around lavish government support for domestic industries, tax breaks for investment and supply chains rerouted to assert US strategic primacy. That buries the model of globalisation that Brexit ideologues had in mind when mapping their buccaneering adventures on the high seas of international trade.
Sunak is a disciple of the small-state, anti-intervention school of conservatism. He finds Bidenomics perplexing for that reason alone. But it also highlights the terrible error of quitting the continental bloc in which Britain, by pooling resources with European partners, had a chance of keeping pace with the Americans.
If economic competition in the years ahead is going to be an arms race of industrial subsidy, the UK will be outgunned by Brussels and Washington.
The counterclaim by keepers of the Brexit faith is that Britain’s isolation is really an advantage, permitting agility and innovation where Europe is staid and sclerotic. A nimbly sovereign nation might lead the way in new sectors.
Hence Downing Street has hyped Sunak’s interest in AI ahead of the Washington trip. The prime minister has been consulting tech bosses about awesome new computing powers coming on stream. He has been pondering how best to manage the development of machines that might, within years, rival nuclear weapons in their capacity to cause harm in the wrong hands. He has concluded that Britain can lead the world in this field, and that London should be the capital of global AI governance. He will raise all of this with President Biden, we are told.
The idea of an international AI regulator – equivalent to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna – is perfectly sensible. London could make a respectable bid to host it. But so could other cities. Either way, it won’t be decided over coffee on Wednesday night.
Visiting leaders “raise” all sorts of things with their hosts. It is a diplomatic euphemism for questions brought to the table with no expectation of answers. Things are “raised” for the benefit of an audience back home, so the leader who doesn’t really set the agenda can claim to have put some item on it.
Under a friendly (or credulous) media lens, the prime minister is thus projected from the margins of international influence into the centre. Something similar happened last week, when Sunak attended a summit of the European Political Community (EPC) in Moldova.
The EPC was first convened last year by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is envisaged as a forum where EU and non-EU heads of government can discuss pan-continental issues. That is no substitute for the seat (and the veto) that Britain used to have at European Council summits, but it is better than nothing.
Ukraine was the focus of discussions in Moldova. Except, that is, when Sunak raised the topic of illegal migration. His unilateral digression was then spun by Downing Street as Britain “taking the lead” on a vital issue; putting it “at the top of the international agenda”.
This fiction was transmitted by various UK media outlets, as if all of Europe’s leaders huddled round their British counterpart while he laid down the law on small boats crossing the Channel. Preposterously, GB News even reported it as a “migration meeting”.
At least Sunak was invited to Moldova. There had been no British representation the previous week at a meeting in Sweden of the EU-US Trade and Technology Council. This, too, is a relatively new institution. It was launched in June 2021 by Biden and Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission president, to coordinate policy on “global trade and technology” between Washington and Brussels.
The most recent gathering discussed a code of conduct for AI development. That is exactly the conversation Sunak thinks should be happening in London. But if Americans and Europeans are already having it somewhere else, why should they move it? What does Britain offer for just a seat in the room?
To raise the question is not to deny that a UK prime minister has clout. There is heft in the office of the leader of a G7 economy, with a nuclear arsenal and a permanent seat on the UN security council. Biden makes time for Sunak because the relationship between the two countries is important. When it comes to defence and security cooperation, it is one of the sturdiest alliances in the world.
But friendship is not the same as influence. It is a bald strategic fact that Brexit makes a British prime minister less useful to Washington. Without leverage in Brussels, Sunak is not in a position to broker deals with Biden. Instead, he pays tribute. That can be spun into something special for the parochial Westminster audience that doesn’t want to admit that Britain is smaller outside the EU. The message will get through eventually. There are only so many angles for making the margins look like the centre. There is only so long Britain can fake being a global power if it isn’t a player in Europe.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/nov/02/uk-workers-are-you-having-to-delay-your-retirement-for-financial-reasons | Money | 2023-11-02T11:09:41.000Z | Guardian community team | UK workers: are you having to delay your retirement for financial reasons? | We’re interested in hearing from people in the UK who are having to delay their retirement for financial reasons.
We are particularly keen to hear from people who thought they were on track to have saved enough into their pension pots to allow them to retire soon, but are now finding this is not the case.
Whether your invested pension products have not been performing as expected, your pension savings cannot keep up with inflation and the higher cost of living, or whether you’re having to push back retirement for other financial reasons, we’d like to hear from you.
This Community callout closed on 15 January 2024.
You can contribute to open Community callouts here or Share a story here. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/feb/16/inventing-anna-netflix-review | Television & radio | 2022-02-16T20:04:38.000Z | Adrian Horton | Cheating the audience: what went wrong with Inventing Anna? | There’s a recurring impulse throughout Inventing Anna, the nine-part Netflix limited series on the so-called “Soho Grifter”, to apply the scam logic of Anna Delvey – a broke twentysomething Russian émigré who posed as a wealthy German heiress in mid-2010s New York – to society at large. Capitalism is a scam. So is meritocracy. Rich people can skate by on the assumption of their wealth; men fake it till they make it all the time. There’s a point to this, however blunt and flattening it’s made in connection to Anna Delvey. Part of our evergreen fascination with scams – an amorphous zeitgeist that includes everything from Fyre festival to the Tinder Swindler to upcoming series on Elizabeth Holmes and WeWork’s implosion – derives from recognition. They’re extreme versions of dynamics with which we’re all familiar: exploitation, manipulation of trust, seductive performance, inflation of the self.
Inventing Anna: does Netflix’s new true-crime drama glamorise scammers?
Read more
Based-on-a-true-story television, like a scam, requires sustained disbelief; if done well, it’s a potent cocktail of truth and dramatic embellishment. There’s an implicit contract with the audience that some details will be juiced up, some facts changed. Inventing Anna, the first Netflix series created by Shonda Rhimes under her blockbuster deal with Netflix (2020 hit Bridgerton, produced by her company Shondaland, was created by Rhimes protege Chris Van Dusen), invokes this connection at the beginning of each episode with a cheeky reminder: “This whole story is completely true, except for all the parts that are totally made up.”
This nod at Anna Delvey’s genuinely stupefying nerve – to fund her self-named arts club (the “new Soho House”), based entirely on lies and zero assets, she applied for a $40m loan (!!) – ends up being more revealing of the show itself. Its curious blurring of fact and fiction will lead many viewers to Google the real thing, and left me scratching my head. In a confounding choice, Inventing Anna buries its sharpest hook – the scammer and those who accommodated, even benefited from, her charades through New York – into the somewhat fictionalized story of how a journalist, Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), pieces together her grift in an effort to rescue her career from a devastating journalistic mistake. It’s an attempted meditation on fact and fiction whose blurring of the two obscures the heady, perpetually compelling mix in the art of the scam – why someone lies, why people believe them, the heaps of denial and cognitive dissonance needed to sustain both. Like Nine Perfect Strangers, last year’s buzzy Hulu show with similarly flashy parts (Nicole Kidman in a wig, sinister wellness culture), Inventing Anna is at once overlong and underwhelming – a disappointing, intriguing misfire.
You’d be hard pressed to find a show with more reliably interesting attention hooks than Inventing Anna. There’s the creator: Rhimes, the master of the modern soap opera, adapting a true story for the first time. There’s Julia Garner, the breakout star of Netflix’s Ozark, transforming into Anna – perpetual scowl, bracingly harsh accent from nowhere. And there’s the source material: the 2018 New York magazine article by Jessica Pressler, which quickly became one of the most-read of the year and a surefire bet in the by-then churning article-to-screen pipeline. (Pressler, whose work also inspired the film Hustlers, is a producer on the series.)
Inventing Anna acknowledges the popularity of this story from the jump: the first shot is of magazines rolling off the press, the now canonical (to media people) lead image recreated with Garner. Anna gets the first word: “This whole story, the one you are about to sit on your fat ass and watch like a big lump of nothing, is about me,” she says. But it’s Vivian Kent, loosely based on Pressler, who tells the story. Each of the nine episodes focuses on someone tricked by Anna – her ex-boyfriend, the lawyer she retains for her club, her trainer, ex-best friend Rachel Deloache Williams, whom she stuck with a $62,000 bill in Morocco – as refracted through Vivian’s understanding of Anna and her personal motivations to nail the story.
Julia Garner, left, and Anna Chlumsky in Inventing Anna. Photograph: Nicole Rivelli/AP
The framing of the Anna Delvey story, which in the show is peppered with identifying details, characterizations and real names, through a fictional-ish journalist is questionable, distracting. When most of the other characters have real counterparts, and the details of the story are well known, why invent a journalist character? And why make the journalist bad at her job and borderline unethical? (Vivian, who in the show appears to view Anna as somewhat of a feminist antihero, lies to her boss, ignores assignments, and most egregiously, offers to help the defense team.)
It feels problematic to adjust the journalist character with some elements of Pressler’s story – Pressler was also pregnant when reporting the piece, and was also the author of a retracted story, though the mistake didn’t hang over her career as it does Vivian’s – but then keep Williams’s characteristics consistent. Inventing Anna’s Williams, who wrote a first-person account (and later book) about getting stuck with the Morocco bill, has the same name, university, job, hair and words in Vanity Fair as the real Williams, whom the show paints as a self-victimizing, opportunistic hanger-on who profited off Anna’s story. (Maybe that’s true! But didn’t everyone?)
While depictions of those in her orbit invite questions of accuracy and motivation, Anna herself is kept at an icy remove throughout. Garner’s Anna is deliberately abrasive, a cipher brimming with delusional ambition and uncomfortably guileless hustle. The show, via Vivian’s frustrated bafflement, gestures often at the sheer boldness of Delvey’s schemes – she didn’t have to apply for a $40m loan! She didn’t have to make the new Soho House! But it fails to capture the labyrinth of emotions undergirding the scam – why people cling to disproven trust, or how deeply Anna believed her own lies, what writer Brandon Taylor calls the “heady, thrilling feeling of getting away with something or the glazed pleasure of believing your own hype”.
Instead, there’s a middling simulacrum of wealthy New York, heavy-handed writing, lots of wide-eyed gesticulation by Vivian, and the bait-and-switch of a journalism plot over Anna’s manipulations. Inventing Anna is simultaneously too interested in an inscrutable, wildly mercurial scammer – at the expense of her friends, associates, even her lawyer’s confounding, fascinating loyalty to her – and not interested enough in her appeal beyond money. The dramatization of facts and stories already in print makes for a good idea – it’s wild material – but this blend distracts more than informs, a skim of the familiar with little payoff. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/apr/01/the-inheritance-young-vic-frankenstein-battersea-arts-centre-review | Stage | 2018-04-01T07:00:12.000Z | Susannah Clapp | The week in theatre: The Inheritance; Frankenstein: Making a Monster – review | “Y
ou can’t ask an audience to sit through a play that long.” Not an obvious gag – unless you are at the Young Vic, where it gets bellows of laughter. Matthew Lopez’s whopping two-parter can be seen in one day, but you have to clock in at 1.15pm and won’t be out much before 11pm. The length of The Inheritance is not just a challenge to prostates and concentration: it’s a declaration. It announces an intention not simply to punch home a series of significant moments but to trace the links between them: to unravel a history, and ask what one generation has passed on to the next – and whether the legacy could have been different.
This high-voltage account of male gay life whirls through marriages, breakups, betrayals, high life and hard times in present-day New York, but it also looks back: to mid-20th-century closeted existences and to the threats – social, physical and psychological – visited by Aids. A fleeting winged being summons up that other epic of gay life, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, but this is a different social document: less luxuriantly written, more quizzical. It’s absorbing, exciting and uneven, with a dip in the second half that could do with a snip.
The amazing thing is how strong it is. At first glance it looks like too literary an idea to work in the theatre. Lopez’s play springs from a fascination with EM Forster, with the sensitivities of Howards End and with Forster’s gay novel, Maurice – unpublished until after the author’s death in 1970. Large chunks of the action are narrated and explained – usually a cue for inertness.
And yet the questions it asks are crucial. Could liberation have come earlier? How important is it to retrieve the memories of difficult times? Are the special codes and habits of any particular group to be cherished or are they imprisoning – is camp (exuberantly gestured and danced here) simply “gay minstrelsy”?
Vanessa Redgrave (Margaret) and Samuel H Levine in The Inheritance. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Observer
And Stephen Daldry’s production is masterly, spiced with mischief and teeming with incident, even before anyone has spoken a word. A young man lolls with a book on a plain white platform like a low table. Another youth joins him, with an iPad. Slowly the stage fills with quietly chatting young men, a tangle of lounging limbs. But also with a palpable sense of shared memories in the making. This opening scene, of men moving softly towards each other, has a desolating echo some three hours later when youths from an earlier generation, dead from Aids, gradually fill the stage. It is also full of small carrying details. Everyone walks around in bare feet – intimate and unprotected – throughout. Until one couple get really bourgeois and slip on carpet shoes.
The legacy – stolen – at the centre is the same as that in Forster’s novel: a treasured house, beautifully pictured in Bob Crowley’s limpid design, in which white walls slide back to reveal a doll-like mansion and a significant, vivid tree. Some of the main connections and clashes are identical: left versus right, sensitivity versus energy.
Lopez quite often overeggs his points, but the evening speaks strongly through its images. And performances. Samuel H Levine doubles up soulfully as two love objects, uncertain, clobbered and, in one wonderful sardonic snicker, knowing. Kyle Soller delicately charts the difficult, admirable progress of the man who melts into goodness. Andrew Burnap – sulkily chiselled and snapping – is alluring, tricky, pitiable; the gunpowder beneath the plot. There is an imposing appearance by Vanessa Redgrave, got up in green like an ancient goddess, the only woman in the play. It is one of the witticisms of the production that she is herself a legacy – from the 1992 movie of Howards End. Inheritance is embodied as well as explained.
Battersea Arts Centre’s Beatbox Academy, 10 years old this year, has made a tremendous show. Frankenstein is a rip-it-to-pieces-and-remake-it production that galvanises the heart of Mary Shelley’s exclamatory gothic with vocal percussion, rap and soaring song.
Frankenstein is a natural choice for the stage: what could be more theatrical than the quickening of something in the same space as the audience? Seven years ago at the National, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller projected Shelley’s forward-looking sympathies by alternating the parts of scientist and creature. April De Angelis’s current Manchester Royal Exchange adaptation, marking the novel’s 200th anniversary, manages to put on stage an extraordinary amount of Shelley’s prose, with appropriate feminist emphasis.
Tyler Worthington, Nadine Rose Johnson, Aminita Francis, Germane Marvel and Nathaniel Forder-Staple in Frankenstein at Battersea Arts Centre. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
BAC’s beatbox version is fiercer and more inward. Co-directed by Conrad Murray and David Cumming, it has been devised by under 30-year-olds – “generation anonymous” – who chose the story because they recognise what it is to be made into monsters. It shows the creature from within, and invites not compassion but identification.
In darkness punctured by a scatter of pendant bulbs, six performers set the stage ticking, thrumming, crooning, throbbing. Each of them has a solo moment: an exquisitely sung lament; a wordless explosion of clicks and hisses; an ingenious rap which brings together antihistamines and tight jeans. The creature’s different organs and limbs are animated separately: legs sprawl all over the stage, breath is born in a sea of sound, until clustering together, huddled and juddering, five men and women become a multilimbed monster, while the narrow-eyed doctor moves to the rhythm of “I’m a genius, genius…”
Audiences are encouraged to take pictures on their phones, though the show itself contains a warning about screens as weapons. It also finely conjures up what is usually overlooked in adaptations of Shelley’s novel: the vibrant scenic backdrop, in which the natural world is inspiration and reproof to the doc’s laboratory efforts. Here is whirring, whistling, rustling, piping, cooing; here are leaves and birds and the rush of wind.
In the autumn, the Beatbox Academy will perform the piece in BAC’s new Grand Hall, restored after the fire that swept through the building three years go. It’s an appropriate tribute. I have seen several giant stage leaps at Battersea – from Jerry Springer: the Opera to Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death. Frankenstein is the centre’s latest tremendous creature.
Frankenstein trailer.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Inheritance ★★★★
Frankenstein ★★★★★
The Inheritance is at the Young Vic, London, until 19 May
Frankenstein is at Battersea Arts Centre, London, until 7 April | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/may/01/brompton-electric-bike-repair-fault | Money | 2024-05-01T06:00:49.000Z | Miles Brignall | Brompton electric bike needs costly £500 repair | In October I bought an electric Brompton bicycle for just under £3,000. Initially all was well but about three months before the two-year warranty expired, it started suffering intermittent power problems.
It would work on the electric assist, and then wouldn’t. I stopped using it as a result.
I was very busy with work, so didn’t get around to dealing with it for several more months – by which point it was out of warranty.
I took it back to Evans, the store I bought it from, which, after doing a £40 inspection, has diagnosed that it needs significant repairs.
Despite its original cost, it has quoted a shade under £500 to fix it – with a 20% discount on parts being offered by Brompton, and a cheaper labour cost from Evans.
Given the problems started during the warranty period, I don’t feel this is a great offer.
JW, Herts
You may not be surprised to learn that you are not the only person who has had problems with their electric Brompton.
The company has admitted that its early models, of which yours is one, had problems with the motors and battery connections, and there are plenty of tales of woe on the internet. Brompton tells me the latest models have had these problems fixed.
Given that, I asked it to take a look at your case, and, after a considerable time gap that we will put down to some miscommunication, it has now agreed to collect your bike from Evans and fix it free of charge. It was set to be delivered back to you two days ago.
Next time, be sure to take it back in the warranty period.
Meanwhile, for other Brompton owners, who have one of its regular models but who fancy going electric, you can buy an aftermarket kit to electrify it.
At just over £1,000, Cytronex Brompton kits are not cheap, but they have been very well reviewed, and are reliable.
We welcome letters but cannot answer individually. Email us at [email protected] or write to Consumer Champions, Money, the Guardian, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include a daytime phone number. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/nov/10/007-road-to-a-million-review-brian-cox-is-so-bad-it-could-ruin-succession-for-you | Television & radio | 2023-11-10T05:00:13.000Z | Lucy Mangan | 007: Road to a Million review – Brian Cox is so bad it could ruin Succession for you | The actor Mrs Patrick Campbell once told the playwright (and her friend) George Bernard Shaw that, when he was a little boy, someone should have told him to hush, just once. I feel that a similar message, delivered with the same firm but loving kindness, should be delivered to the makers of 007: The Road to a Million. Not every reality show idea has to be brought to fruition. Not even if it comes with Barbara Broccoli’s blessing and some name-brand recognition. You could say no, just once.
The tenuously James-Bond-affiliated premise is this: nine couples – friends, married pairs, sisters, brothers, a father and son – have the chance to win £1m each by answering a series of questions. To find the questions, they have to travel round the globe undertaking a series of Bond-lite challenges and – for extra thrills – pull open the ring tab on a smoke canister to find out if their answer was right. Green smoke, advance to the next country and question; red smoke, off home you pop.
They all start in Scotland, yomping up hills and into lochs in unsuitable clothing – I imagine the Hebridean mountain rescue team sitting at home watching with their heads in their hands – because no one has realised that there is a difference between formulaic (a satisfying base upon which to build intrigue in a genre film) and repetitive.
Then they head into continental Europe to run around Italy and Spain in bad shorts while pestering locals for directions to places they cannot remember or pronounce (alas for Bond’s cosmopolitan suavity). After that, they travel to more far-flung locales such as Jamaica and Brazil to do the same – but in lagoons instead of lochs.
The challenges have about 17 stages each before you get to the (multiple choice) question. The answer is then drawn out for about half an episode, in case the momentum was in any danger of building. To be fair, sometimes it is – usually when the challenge involves a boxful of snakes, a poorly caged tarantula or a yardful of crocodiles standing between the couple and their latest heavily secured silver suitcase full of promise. There are a few effortful attempts at building backstory and empathy for the competitors (the father apologies to his son for working away on the oil rigs for so much of the boy’s childhood), but no one’s heart is really in it.
None of that, however, is the worst thing. Yes, it is shoddy, for sure. Sometimes the answers can be deduced or narrowed down, sometimes it is pot luck. It is boring, soulless and derivative, too, of everything from Race Across the World to I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It is devoid of style, tension or anything else we might associate positively with his majesty’s longest secretly serving agent – including chivalry. I mean, yes, Bond shades it into sexism on numerous occasions, but to the husband who instantly urges his wife up a crane, into a tarantula cage and inside a crocodile compound instead of doing a damn thing himself, I would say: you can take things too far the other way, you know?
But there is something more awful about the show than all of this.
The worst thing is Brian Cox. He punctuates the dreary action in the manner of, according to the press release, “a villainous and cultured” Blofeld-ish figure. He purports to be watching from a giant bank of screens and supposedly “revels in the increasingly difficult journeys and questions the contestants must overcome”.
In fact, it looks far more like the producers have tied a cravat around a ham and offered it a lot of money to sit in a broom cupboard for a couple of days to record a load of voiceovers (“About 60 questions in a low growl, darling, if that’s OK? Then a handful of ‘corrects’ and ‘incorrects’, a couple of baleful criticisms for when they really are as thick as two short planks, and maybe a couple of avuncular bits for coverage?”). There are a few pieces to camera, too, so that the viewers don’t assume they are being held in contempt. I didn’t think anything could sully my rewatching of Succession, but this feels as if it could easily succeed. If it does, I will sue Cox and his agent for not saying no, just once.
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For desperate eyes only. For everyone else, I would remind you that this is eight hours long and you are not going to live twice.
007: The Road to a Million is on Prime Video | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/30/julie-myerson-my-writing-day | Books | 2017-12-30T10:00:09.000Z | Julie Myerson | Julie Myerson: ‘I am a solipsistic maniac who can think of nothing but the book’ | Iwrote my first novel at evenings and weekends, with an office job, two babies and another one on the way. I also had debilitating back pain and often had to lie down on the floor between paragraphs. I now wonder how I did it (a husband untroubled by childcare is the honest answer). These days it’s all very different but it still feels like the biggest luxury, to be allowed to think, write and work exactly when and how I want to. The only non-negotiable is twice weekly Pilates: if I didn’t stretch my body seriously and regularly, I don’t think I’d be able to sit and write.
Otherwise, my requirements are straightforward: a desk, a good chair, a screen and a door that shuts. I do need quiet (right now the bell ringers are rehearsing at the church next door and it’s not ideal). I also need it to be daytime – I’ve never been able to write a coherent word after about 6.45pm.
What I don’t really need is for a tabby to sit on my desk and stare at me or pat the cursor with her fat furry paw, but I seem to have that anyway. But I do need calm, or the appearance of it. I have never found chaos creative. I need to be able to lose myself when I am writing, and I can’t do that if I’m even slightly anxious about what might happen next.
I wake up, have coffee, do my meditation and the Guardian quick crossword (often simultaneously, which is not good), put on a wash, wipe the kitchen counters, send my children some annoying texts and answer emails. Which sounds boring but it’s vital – I can’t sink into my writing until I feel there’s nothing else pending, no one and nothing else to worry about.
What I don’t need is for a tabby to sit on my desk and stare at me or pat the cursor with her fat furry paw
Once I start, my concentration is absolute. Nothing distracts me. All my working life I’ve had to set alarms to prise me from my writing trance and remind me that kids need picking up or appointments need to be kept. But if this makes it sound as if I work very hard, I don’t. In fact the first months of writing a novel always feel like a con. I’ll tell people I’m writing something – and I probably am, or trying to, or thinking about trying to – but the so-called writing is as likely to be happening in my head, on the bus, on the backs of shop receipts, in the bath, even while talking to someone who (wrongly) presumes they have my full attention.
Once I’ve started thinking about a novel, it’s as if I’m hyper-sensitised. I am curious, open, alert to anything and everything. I daren’t pass up a single random detail or idea, just in case it turns out to be relevant. But at this stage of writing, I’m still laughably unproductive. I’ll tread water for pages and pages, sometimes spending weeks on a couple of (very bad) pages or even paragraphs, only to delete, delete, delete.
I’d love to be one of those writers who can do a whole draft and then rewrite it better, but I can’t. The only way I can find the story is by writing. And unless the last page I wrote startles and excites me – unless it feels, actually, as if someone who’s not me has written it – then I can’t move on in any way at all.
The need to write comes from not knowing. It’s like solving a problem. I only write to discover what I have to say
And even when I do move on, it’s still unlikely I’ll have any idea of where the novel’s going. I follow my instincts, almost always in the dark. If I knew what the book was, I doubt I would write it. The need to write comes from not knowing. It’s like solving a problem. I only write in order to discover what I have to say.
The second stage, though, is ferocious. Now I am mad, distracted, terrible to live with, a solipsistic maniac who can think of nothing but the book. I used to be slightly appalled at how a novel would suck up all my energy – physical, emotional, everything – but I’m used to it now. During this period my family and friends are saint-like, as I duck out of meetings, forget to answer emails, ruthlessly cancel on people. I will write for hours at a time at this stage, staying at my computer sometimes until I am in physical pain. But still I can’t speak about what I’m doing or show it to anyone until I am satisfied, or at least no longer embarrassed by it.
I’m finishing a novel right now and am still at that final, brutal stage. It doesn’t help that it’s Christmas. My poor family. The tree is up and people will be getting presents, but only just.
In brief
Hours: seven or eight a day right now, then I fall apart
Words: I’m a deleter. A good day ends with less, rather than more
Cups of coffee: three; espressos with almond milk, but no more or I’m unmanageable
Instagram posts: I’m a Colourpop fiend. When I’m sick of words, I make pictures! | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/oct/31/english-councils-tell-jeremy-hunt-100m-needed-to-avoid-collapse-of-homeless-services | Society | 2023-10-31T18:11:59.000Z | Patrick Butler | English councils seek £100m to avert collapse of homelessness services | Council leaders have urged Jeremy Hunt to intervene to prevent the collapse of local homelessness services because of the soaring costs of providing emergency housing for evicted families.
A letter signed by a cross-party group of local authority leaders in England indicates that some town halls in effect face bankruptcy and describes mounting temporary housing bills for homeless households as a “critical risk to the financial sustainability of many local authorities”.
It calls for an immediate cash injection of £100m for councils to provide emergency rent support for families at risk of homelessness, together with an end to the four-year freeze on housing allowance rates and long-term investment in social housing.
“Without urgent intervention, the existence of our safety net is under threat,” says the letter to Hunt, the chancellor. “The danger is that we have no option but to start withdrawing services which currently help so many families to avoid hitting crisis point.”
Homeless families evicted as landlords quit London emergency housing sector
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It says that as well as forcing councils to reduce local homelessness prevention services, the crisis could hit the viability of other council services, which would face cuts or closure to enable councils to meet their statutory homelessness duties.
The letter, drawn up by the Conservative leader of Breckland district council in Norfolk, Sam Chapman-Allen, and Stephen Holt, the Liberal Democrat leader of Eastbourne borough council, follows an online summit on Tuesday to discuss the crisis attended by 158 local authorities.
A Guardian investigation published on Monday revealed that some councils were in effect at risk of bankruptcy after spending between a fifth and half of their total available annual financial resources to cope with a rapid explosion in homelessness and the cost of temporary accommodation.
Evictions in some council areas have doubled over the past year as private landlords hit by climbing interest rates dump tenants to sell up or raise rents. Sky-high rents, scarcity of social housing and housing benefit cuts have drastically shrunk the supply of affordable properties in many districts.
Over the past two years many smaller, lower-tier authorities – often in affluent home counties areas around London such as Essex and Sussex – have become increasingly vulnerable financially as a housing and homelessness crisis once focused on London and other major cities has spread rapidly.
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The Guardian view on rising homelessness: a crisis made in government
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Crawley borough council in West Sussex told the Guardian that the number of homeless households it supported in temporary accommodation had risen from 169 in 2020 to 474 currently, pushing annual net spending from £194,000 to a projected £4.8m this year. Anticipated demand from Afghan refugees will push demand even higher.
The leader of Labour-run Crawley council, Michael Jones, said the crisis was caused by “system failure” in housing policy over many years. “The government should be taking action,” he said. “Their response has so far been so inadequate as to be asleep on the job.”
A record 104,000 households are in temporary accommodation in England, according to the latest official figures, at an annual cost to the taxpayer of £1.7bn.
Hannah Dalton, the District Councils’ Network’s housing spokesperson, said: “Unless money is found our services will be decimated, suffering will increase as more people fall into homelessness and other parts of the public sector will be left to pick up the pieces at huge cost.”
Holt said: “The collapse of support for society’s most vulnerable people is now a reality for many, unless the government urgently intervenes.”
A government spokesperson said: “We are committed to reducing the need for temporary accommodation by preventing homelessness before it occurs in the first place, which is why we are providing councils with £1bn through the homelessness prevention grant over three years.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/nov/18/alan-bennett-the-habit-of-art | Stage | 2009-11-18T01:08:00.000Z | Michael Billington | The Habit of Art | Theatre review | Artists in their late work often feel free to digress and experiment. Alan Bennett takes full advantage of this licence in a multi-levelled work that deals with sex, death, creativity, biography and much else besides. And, while it may not possess the universal resonance of The History Boys, the play has the characteristic Bennett mix of wit and wistfulness.
The structure is certainly complex. We are watching a rehearsal, in the National Theatre itself, of a play called Caliban's Day: one that, inspired by Auden's The Sea and the Mirror, gives voice to the unregarded.
The setting, however, is the cluttered Christ Church lodging of Auden himself in his twilit 1972 days. In the first half we see the poet being interviewed by his future biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, who is initially mistaken for a rent boy. And in the second, far superior, part we watch an imagined encounter between Auden and Benjamin Britten.
If one adds that Carpenter steps out of the action to become a choric commentator and that the actors constantly question the on-stage author about his text, it will be seen that the play has enough layers to make Pirandello blanch. At times, there is so much scaffolding you can't always see the main property. And, although Bennett seems to endorse Auden's point that "a lot of what is passed off as biography is idle curiosity," he is not above indulging our appetite for gossip about Auden's insistence on sexual punctuality.
There is also a hint of sentimentality in Bennett's claim that figures such as the rent boy are marginalised when great men's lives are parcelled out for posterity: it seems especially untrue in the case of Britten when books have been devoted to his relationships.
But Bennett's play is at its strongest when it deals with the theme implicit in its title: the idea that, for the artist, creativity is a constant, if troubling imperative. We see this in the beautifully written encounter between Britten and Auden. Temperamentally, the two men could hardly be more different: the one a model of restraint, the other an apostle of sexual freedom and something of an intellectual bully. But Britten's anxieties about Death in Venice, and his fear that it may be an act of self-revelation, are movingly countered by Auden's desperate desire to be involved in the libretto. It never happened; but it acquires an imaginative plausibility and shows two great artists, towards the end of their lives, united in their belief in the power of the creative impulse. As Auden himself says, "what matters is the work".
A play that could easily seem tricksy is also given a superbly fluid production by Nicholas Hytner and is beautifully acted. Richard Griffiths bears no physical resemblance to Auden but he becomes a vivid metaphor for the poet. At the same time, Griffiths reminds us of the tetchy actor who is simply playing a role. Alex Jennings offers an equally potent echo of the angst-ridden Britten, spitting out the name of "Tippett" with calculated asperity. Adrian Scarborough as Carpenter and Frances de la Tour as the stage manager are no less magnetic.
The latter has a speech about the parade of plays that have given the National Theatre a weathered use that eloquently epitomises the basic theme of Bennett's deeply moving play: the ennobling power, in art, of sheer diurnal persistence. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/nov/29/george-osborne-autumn-statement | UK news | 2011-11-29T20:06:49.000Z | Larry Elliott | George Osborne's autumn statement echoed grim chancellors of past | George Osborne's mini-budget was a bit like a greatest hits album from past chancellors. The news that austerity would go on and on was a tune hummed by Sir Stafford Cripps from the late 1940s.
The sense of a package pieced together at a time of international upheaval had echoes of Denis Healey in the 1970s. Nigel Lawson could have tapped his feet along to the assault on the public sector trade unions and the argument that the supply side held the key to national economic renaissance. And, in a curiosity akin to a rap artist sampling a folk singer, the list of infrastructure projects and micro-tax breaks was pure Gordon Brown.
In truth, the speech was a dog's breakfast, and judging by his halting delivery Osborne was not entirely convinced about it himself.
There were four messages from the chancellor. The first was that the economy is in poor shape, in part because the credit bubble caused deeper scarring than was thought, in part owing to the squeeze on incomes caused by higher inflation, and in part because of the euro.
Osborne, predictably, accepted no responsibility himself for the flatlining of growth, even though he clearly overestimated the ability of the economy to cope with his aggressive tax increases and spending cuts. Growth forecasts for this year, next year and 2013 were all cut – continuing the trend of every budget, mini-budget and autumn statement since the 2010 general election.
The independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) believes the UK will come perilously close to a double dip recession this winter but narrowly avoid one. That, though, assumes that the eurozone can sort out its problems, and no sooner had Osborne finished his speech than he was on a train to Brussels for the latest talks with fellow European finance ministers to prevent the single currency from breaking up. As Osborne knows full well, anything other than a swift and complete eurozone repair will send the UK back into deep recession next year.
Even on current assumptions that growth picks up from 0.7% in 2012 to 2.1% in 2013 – which looks highly questionable – it may be 2014 before the economy is back to where it was when the recession started in 2008.
This has been a downturn of biblical proportions: the seven fat years followed by the seven years of famine.
Osborne's second message was that the pain would have to continue well into the next parliament, with an additional £15bn of spending cuts pencilled in for 2015-16 and 2016-17.
Slower growth means higher borrowing and, because more of the damage caused to the economy by the boom-bust is permanent, the hole in the public finances that has to be filled is bigger.
As things stand, the coalition will be going into the next election promising to cut spending if it is re-elected.
The third message from the chancellor was that he had no choice but to stick to his fiscal guns. The determination of the government to get on top of the deficit explained why market interest rates were only a little bit above 2% in the UK but more than 7% in Italy.
Were bond yields on UK gilts to rise by one percentage point in response to backsliding on austerity, the result would be a £21bn additional cost for businesses and home owners.
It is debatable whether the financial markets – increasingly concerned about the growth prospects for the world economy – would respond in this way to a modest easing of austerity, but to the extent that they would punish Britain it is because Osborne has made such a fetish of sticking to his plans. By the time of the 2012 budget next March, things may have got so bad that the chancellor has no choice but to pump money into the economy, but for now he is being scrupulous about giving with one hand and taking with the other.
Extra spending on infrastructure projects, youth unemployment, house building and schools will be found from savings elsewhere. This may make the short-term prospects for the economy worse, since the Treasury is taking money out of the pockets of those who would spend it now in order to fund programmes that will only deliver a growth dividend in the future.
The final message from the speech was, therefore, that creating winners means creating losers. And the big loser is the public sector – which is heading for recession even if the rest of the economy avoids one – plus the old industrial regions of the UK that rely heavily on the state, and the least well-off.
The OBR now expects more than 710,000 job losses from the public sector, and only if and when the economy starts growing at 3% a year again will the private sector be strong enough to make a significant dent in an unemployment total that will climb, even on official forecasts, close to three million.
Osborne appeared to relish antagonising public sector unions by further clamping down on pay, announcing a consultation on scrapping national wage bargaining and raising the state pension age. If this looked provocative, then the decision to make tax credits less generous was clearly regressive.
The coalition has been sensitive to analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies showing that the measures introduced since May 2010 – as opposed to those inherited from Labour – hit those on lower incomes hardest. It will have its work cut out to explain away the latest changes, which take money away from those on low and middle incomes to subsidise cuts in business tax and increases in infrastructure spending.
Osborne's gamble is that he can seize the middle ground of politics by driving a wedge between private and public sectors. That, though, presupposes three things: the financial markets stay on board, the economy performs as planned, and the strategy is considered fair. All three of these assumptions look highly questionable.
Recession fears
The UK economy faces a one in three chance of falling into recession over coming months, with risks rising sharply if eurozone policymakers do not resolve the debt crisis, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has forecast. The independent body slashed its forecast for growth next year from the 2.5% pencilled in at the March budget to just 0.7% . It said the bulk of the latest downgrade was the result of higher than expected inflation squeezing household incomes and consumer spending.
The UK economy is expected to flatline in the first half of next year – contracting 0.1% in the final three months of this year and growing just 0.1% in the first and second quarters of 2012.
"The OBR added that the outlook could be significantly worse if Europe's leaders fail to find a solution to the eurozone crisis. In 2013 growth is seen at 2.1%, down from 2.9%. In 2014 the OBR forecasts 2.7%, down from 2.9%, but it has raised its forecast for 2015 growth to 3.0% from 2.8% and sees growth of 3.0% in 2016 again. The OBR says unemployment will rise from 8.3% now to 8.7% in 2012 before easing back to 6.2% in 2016.
It also sees the squeeze on household budgets continuing, predicting wage growth of just 0.9% this year, 2.0% next year and 3.1% in 2013. That suggests wages will fall in real terms this year and next, given it forecasts inflation at 4.5% this year, 2.7% next year and 2.1% in 2013.
Katie Allen | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/jul/15/west-ham-25m-offer-armando-broja-chelsea | Football | 2022-07-15T20:21:19.000Z | Jacob Steinberg | West Ham make opening £25m bid for Chelsea striker Armando Broja | West Ham have stepped up their pursuit of Armando Broja by making a £25m offer for the Chelsea striker, with David Moyes looking to add more depth up front this summer.
The 20-year-old impressed on loan for Southampton last season and West Ham have decided to find out whether Chelsea want to keep him. Their offer includes £5m in potential add-ons.
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Broja is currently with Chelsea on their pre-season tour of the US and still has a chance to work his way into Thomas Tuchel’s plans. However, there is plenty of competition for places in Tuchel’s attack.
The Albania international, who impressed on loan at Southampton last season, is also a target for Everton, Newcastle and Napoli. He could ask to leave if he is told he is not going to be a regular next season.
West Ham, whose only senior forward is the 32-year-old Michail Antonio, have monitored the situation closely. They have also held talks with Sassuolo over the Italian forward Gianluca Scamacca, but Broja has remained in their sights.
Moyes believes that Broja, who joined Chelsea’s academy at the age of nine, would be capable of alternating with Antonio next season. Broja is quick and capable of leading the line. He scored nine goals in all competitions for Southampton last season. It will now be down to Chelsea to decide whether to sell the forward.
West Ham are also keen to sign another central midfielder and have made a €38m bid for Lille’s Amadou Onana. The French club have already turned down two offers for the player but but are understood to be considering the latest approach. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/dec/26/manchester-united-aston-villa-premier-league-match-report | Football | 2023-12-26T22:06:04.000Z | Jamie Jackson | Højlund seals Manchester United’s thrilling comeback win over Aston Villa | What a time for Rasmus Højlund to break a 14-match Premier League duck: on 82 minutes, his left-foot volley pinballed in off Emiliano Martínez’s right-hand post to bring sheer delight to the young striker. It brought relief for Erik ten Hag too and began the Sir Jim Ratcliffe era of partial ownership of Manchester United in precisely the same fashion that preceded it: breathless and chaotic.
Højlund’s intervention came after Alejandro Garnacho had equalised on 71 minutes, via, too, his left boot. Before this, boos had greeted Aston Villa’s second strike and these, plus the sight of a stony-faced Sir Dave Brailsford watching United’s opening 45-minute debacle, threatened to tell the very sorry tale of a fifth defeat of December.
Threat of downsizing has desired effect but Manchester United still have hope
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But Ten Hag and his men escaped, before the manager takes his shaky side to Nottingham Forest on Saturday. And with a place on the board, Brailsford’s report to Ratcliffe of this showing will surely inform the new 25% shareholder how Ten Hag’s players are still fighting for him, which may be key to his job security.
Zero goals in their previous four games (in all competitions) and one point from their previous three league games was the damning record Ten Hag’s men hoped to halt. To that end, the most notable of his four changes from Saturday’s 2-0 loss at West Ham was a return for Christian Eriksen: a dearth of creativity has been a prime factor in United’s poor run, so to have his artistry back for the first time since the 1-0 win at Luton on 11 November might have predicated an upturn in fortunes.
In the opening period it did not, as United veered into near-farce territory, lacking poise and basic football attributes. Diogo Dalot was an example when hoofing a crossfield pass straight to Villa as United fashioned a move from the back. This allowed Leon Bailey to ping a ball into the area and needed Bruno Fernandes to head clear. A lack of composure was evident, too, when Marcus Rashford intercepted near halfway and hammered the ball too hard for Højlund.
After Saturday’s defeat Ten Hag repeated his mantra of “sticking to the plan”. What this might be remains difficult to discern. Any blueprint seemed to rely on counterattacking, as when Garnacho broke and squared for Eriksen who turned the ball on for Rashford but the Dane’s radar was awry and the sequence fizzled out.
Alejandro Garnacho slots in Manchester United’s equaliser. Photograph: Matt West/Shutterstock
Unai Emery is a coach whose touchline act is to mime how every move should play out. When Dalot – again – ceded possession, Bailey – again – could have punished the left-back but a poor pass allowed Jonny Evans to thwart the winger and Emery became a picture of hopping disgust.
Now, though, he turned into one happy man as John McGinn scored, André Onana yet again the culprit. From the right Villa’s captain swung in a free-kick as Bailey ran back from near United’s keeper to get onside: the ball cleared everybody, bounced past a hapless Onana, and in. The VAR decided Bailey was not interfering and the goal stood.
Next, further disaster – plus shame – for Ten Hag and his not very merry band. McGinn this time dropped a corner from the right on to the glaringly unmarked head of Clément Lenglet at the far post. Back went the ball to Leander Dendoncker whose hooked backheel made it 2-0.
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Erik ten Hag ‘looking forward’ to working with Sir Jim Ratcliffe
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This prompted jeers from the home congregation shocked by the shower before them. United’s response was to hurry upfield and illustrate how toothless they were as, by half-time, 426 minutes had passed since Scott McTominay – against Chelsea – last scored for them.
Rashford drilled into Martínez’s hands. Garnacho stabbed the ball past Højlund in front of goal. Dalot slipped in along the left and could not steady himself. These misses were compounded by an unwitting ability to be caught offside – Fernandes and Garnacho guilty of this more than once.
The pair were instrumental in United beating Martínez as Fernandes fed Rashford who fed Garnacho but, on scoring, the VAR ruled he was offside. This brought joy to the massed Villa support and despair to Ten Hag who greeted the decision with a forlorn shake of the head.
United were in desperation mode. Rashford’s next act was to dart in for a looping Fernandes dink. Out rushed Martínez to punt away, taking the No 10 down with him. Ten Hag went ballistic on the touchline but a throw-in was the correct call.
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But at last the drought was broken. Fernandes stole the ball and tapped to Rashford who rolled it over for Garnacho to slide in. Could United engineer more for what could be viewed as a rousing comeback? Yes, was the answer – thanks to Garnacho and Højlund. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2016/jun/21/clara-bow-wild-child-hollywood-history-silent-film | Film | 2016-06-21T10:45:04.000Z | Pamela Hutchinson | Clara Bow: the hard-partying jazz-baby airbrushed from Hollywood history | Clara Bow’s biography could have been a fairy story but instead it is a cautionary tale. This vivacious young woman exchanged the rags and deprivations of her slum childhood in Brooklyn for the glamour and riches of Hollywood, but lived to regret it. In 1921, she was a movie-mad teenager who dropped out of school after winning a talent-spotting contest (“She screens perfectly,” said a judge). The contest earned Bow a trophy and a small film role, but no contract. She still had to tout herself around the agencies and studios, swallowing rejections as she went. “There was always something. I was too young, or too little, or too fat. Usually I was too fat,” she remembered. It was two years before she moved to Hollywood, and another three before she signed a contract with Paramount.
The films she went on to make there included some silent classics: they, and she, were precociously flirtatious, youthful and saucy. “Flapper” movies such as The Plastic Age or Dancing Mothers were perfect for Bow, who had a stunning ability to move naturally in front of the camera, bobbing and smirking with humour and sexiness. Bow became a hugely popular actor, and, in tabloid-speak, a notorious wild child. On screen she epitomised the joie de vivre and permissiveness of the jazz age, and for many people she remains the ultimate flapper, the “It girl”, with charm and sex appeal to spare.
Sadly, while the movie contract took Bow out of Brooklyn, where she had spent her abusive and impoverished childhood, her new home had dangers of its own. For all her successes, Bow was snubbed by the in-crowd, and for years after her heyday she would be nudged out of history. Her film career held more future sadness and scandal than she could have possibly imagined when she signed on the dotted line. Studio executives tried to manipulate her, calling her a “birdbrain” and a “dumbbell” while she continued to make them masses of money at the box office.
And as confident as she was on a silent movie set, the looming microphones and wires of the sound era terrified her. Perhaps because of those misfortunes and the outsider status they brought, she can now be claimed as one of the sharpest commentators on show business, and the studio system. She knew what it meant to be a “jazz baby” and it wasn’t always a party. “All the time the flapper is laughing and dancing, there’s a feeling of tragedy underneath,” she said once. “She’s unhappy and disillusioned, and that’s what people sense.”
Bow will always be best remembered for It, a romantic caper adapted from Elinor Glyn’s novel, its title a euphemism for sexual magnetism. Bow plays a department store worker in hot pursuit of her handsome boss, and Glyn herself has a cameo. Bow’s character is modern, sexual, compassionate, funny and single-minded. She’s something of a Cinderella, but that means she is defined by her working-class status: ripping up her cheap work frock to pass for an evening gown on a ritzy date one night, or introducing her paramour to the raucous pleasures of Coney Island on another.
Hollywood saw Bow in much the same way – she was the scruffy, lower-class kid whose behaviour jarred with the smart set and who had to work twice as hard as the others for her success. Louise Brooks, who saw through the workings of Hollywood just as keenly as Bow, said that she “became a star without nobody’s help”. She found friends more readily among the studio crew than the actors and directors who should have been her peers. A magazine quoted her as saying: “Mosta my friends’re ones I knew before I paid income tax.”
In a town that liked to go to bed early, Bow stayed up late. Her love life was far more thrilling and varied than the films she made, and there’s a reason why she negotiated not to have a morals clause in her Paramount contract. But she paid a price for being brazen. Even at the height of her success, she was alone in Hollywood. As fellow actor Lina Basquette said: “She wasn’t well liked amongst other women in the film colony. Her social presence was taboo, and it was rather silly, because God knows Marion Davies and Mary Pickford had plenty to hide. It’s just that they hid it, and Clara didn’t.” Bow knew the truth. “I’m a curiosity in Hollywood,” she said. “I’m a big freak, because I’m myself!”
Beyond It, her film roles tended to reflect the industry’s ambivalence. Even when she has the opportunity to woo the audience by displaying her charms in a comedy such a Mantrap (“How she vamps with her lamps,” praised Variety), her inveterate flirting condemns her to an unhappy ending. In the blockbuster Wings, she plays the girl next door fighting for attention in a world full of men. It’s an energetic but thankless role but Bow knew full well how inessential she was in that movie. “I’m just the whipped cream on top of the pie,” she said, and she would come to regret the gratuitous nudity in that role too: “I don’t want to be remembered as somebody who couldn’t do nothin’ but take her clothes off.”
The biggest misconception about Bow is that her career foundered with the coming of sound because her Brooklyn accent was too ugly. She made several talkies, in fact, starting with The Wild Party, a big success that was directed by her friend and champion Dorothy Arzner. In truth, Bow’s physical and mental health issues (she had schizophrenia, like her mother) were exacerbated by the stresses of her fame, particularly the fallout from her notorious tell-all memoir in Photoplay and a lurid lawsuit brought by her former secretary.
The unfamiliar soundstages and the more rigid, less natural performance style required by talkies, added to her burden. She retired from acting in 1933, but two decades later her reputation received an extra blow with Singin’ in the Rain, which featured Lina Lamont, the talentless flapper with a Noo Yoik twang who can’t hack it in the sound era. The class snobbery that feeds into that portrayal is unmistakable.
Now we can watch It and Wings, and many other of Bow’s movies on DVD, but there was a time when her name had slipped through the cracks of film history. Kevin Brownlow’s essential oral history of silent Hollywood, The Parade’s Gone By, doesn’t even mention Bow, because none of his other interviewees gave her a namecheck (a fault rectified in his TV series Hollywood, in which Brooks ably discusses her career and her mistreatment at the hands of the studio system). Bow had died just before the book came out, aged 60 and living alone. Her mental health had continued to suffer in her retirement and she attempted suicide when her husband Rex Bell decided to re-enter public life as a politician in the 1940s. By three years, she had outlived both Bell and Marilyn Monroe, the star she saw as her natural successor: youthful, sexy, vulnerable, smart and sad.
For more on Clara Bow, I recommend the biography Runnin’ Wild, by David Stenn. This profile was written in response to a request in the comments by Dickthetag. If there is an aspect of silent cinema you would like to see featured in Silent but deadly! let me know below. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/may/03/hamilton-broadway-musical-tony-awards | Stage | 2016-05-03T15:15:16.000Z | Jana Kasperkevic | Hamilton: the Broadway musical sensation that's changing lives | ‘W
ho lives, who dies, who tells your story?” asks the cast of the musical Hamilton. This year, one particular story – that of the US founding father Alexander Hamilton – swept the Tony nominations with a record-breaking tally of 16.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, author and star of the show, was nominated for best book of a musical and best score of a musical, as well as best actor. In that category, he is facing off against his co-star Leslie Odom Jr, who plays Aaron Burr – “the bastard that killed him”. The cast of Hamilton received seven nominations in four acting categories leading it to break the record of 15 nominations held by The Producers and Billy Elliot.
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Hamilton became a national sensation after Miranda decided to give the historical figure a hip-hop makeover. Based on a biography written by Ron Chernow, the show is completely sold out for the rest of the year.
Among the musical’s many fans are US presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as well as the entire first family. Michelle Obama called the show “the best piece of art in any form that I have ever seen in my life”. When the cast performed at the White House, Barack Obama called it an “incredible musical”.
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“Hamilton is not just for people who can score a ticket to a pricey Broadway show,” said Obama. “It’s a story for all of us – about all of us.”
Thousands of Americans bought the Hamilton cast album. Millions streamed it. Americans everywhere are breaking out into song about immigrants who get the job done, not throwing away one’s shot and the room where it happens. Yet while the hip-hop musical appeals to the masses and the young, it remains “a pricey Broadway show” that’s out of their reach. As a result, the audience remains for a large part older and less diverse than the cast.
After Hamilton won the best musical theatre Grammy, it sold out for all of 2016. Premium tickets sold for as much as $549 (£377). Black market tickets can go for close to three times that. Fans have been known to forgo meals in order to afford tickets.
When the show held a daily lottery for 21 front-row tickets, sold for $10 each, as many as 1,000 people would show up to take part. Citing safety concerns from neighbours and police, the lottery moved online. After receiving more than 50,000 entires on the first day, the lottery site crashed. Everybody wants to be in the room where it happens.
Hamilton: creator of sold-out musical earns $105,000 a week in royalties
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On average, weekly ticket sales bring in about $1.5m. The show’s investors have been paid back their $12.5m investment months after the show made its Broadway debut. The producers and investors are not the only ones making money off the production. The show’s cast has reached a momentous profit-sharing agreement with its producers. Miranda alone was said to be making as much as $105,000 in royalties each week.
The show, often described as life-changing by fans, is likely to leave its mark on US theatre. “Oh, Alexander Hamilton / when America sings for you / will they know what you overcame? / Will they know you rewrote the game?” sings the cast at the beginning. “The world will never be the same, oh.”
They could not be more right. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/jul/19/idiocracy-a-disturbingly-prophetic-look-at-the-future-of-america-and-our-era-of-stupidity | Culture | 2021-07-18T17:30:36.000Z | Luke Buckmaster | Idiocracy: a disturbingly prophetic look at the future of America – and our era of stupidity | Are we living in the age of stupid? The era of the idiot? The answer of course is yes, with examples of monstrous moronicism everywhere – from climate deniers to the “plandemic” crowd who believe Covid-19 was cooked up in Bill Gates’ basement. On the other hand, human beings have always been illogical creatures. A better question is whether we are, as a species, becoming dumberer. If this is already the era of the idiot, what comes next?
An “Idiocracy”, according to film-maker Mike Judge. The Beavis and Butt-head, King of the Hill and Silicon Valley creator’s dystopian 2006 comedy (which he directed and co-wrote with Etan Cohen) arrived with its own terminology to help us prepare for the upcoming reality TV special that we may call The Collapse of Reality Itself.
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Suggesting that morons rather than nerds will inherit the earth, and that the results will be catastrophic, the film begins with a context-setting intro so real it hurts. Judge cuts between an intelligent adult couple discussing why they won’t be having children right now (“not with the market the way it is”) and a ... less intelligent couple breeding like rabbits (“I thought youse was on the pill or some shit?”).
Observing that “evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence”, the narrator explains that “with no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most – and left the intelligent to become an endangered species”.
In the current era I couldn’t help but think of the BirthStrikers, taking a reasoned response to the climate crisis while hordes of the hoi polloi refuse to accept there is even a problem. Also that famous quote often attributed to Charles Bukowski: “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
The story follows mellow everyman Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), who is selected by the US army to participate in an experiment to test cryogenic hibernation. He’s chosen because he’s average in every way: average IQ; averagely inoffensive personality; even an average heart rate. Placed inside a machine and expected to wake up one year later, the experiment goes awry and instead Joe and his fellow participant – a sex worker named Rita (Maya Rudolph) – emerge 500 years later. It’s the year 2505 and Joe is now the smartest person on earth by a very wide margin.
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The environment has crumbled and garbage is stacked in huge mounds, like the mountains of rubbish in WALL-E. A blunt-smoking doctor at the hospital (Justin Long) is shocked that Joe doesn’t have a barcode on his arm, like everybody else, and asks, “Why come you no have a tattoo?” He’s one of the more eloquent people; most speak a butchered dialect combining groans, grunts, insults and slang words.
This disturbingly hilarious film is as horrifying as 1984 or Brave New World, but takes a different route – emphasising the dangers of collective incompetence rather than oppressiveness of the state. Its Urban Dictionary entry reads: “A movie that was originally a comedy, but became a documentary.”
Luke Wilson as Joe Bauers in Idiocracy. Photograph: Collection Christophel/Alamy
In a 2017 interview discussing the end of political correctness, Terry Crews – who plays President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho – described Idiocracy as “so prophetic in so many ways it actually scares people”. When Camacho lets off rounds of an automatic rifle to get people’s attention in the House of Representatives (now called the “House of Representin’”), it’s hard not to think of the carnival US politics became under Trump.
Many visual and verbal gags highlight a capitalist hellscape, in which language has basically become a function of advertising. We see a billboard, for instance, with the spiel: “If you don’t smoke Tarrlytons ... Fuck you!” Every time customers enter Costco, an employee at the door greets them with: “Welcome to Costco, I love you.”
The restaurant chain Fuddruckers has changed its name to Buttfuckers. The most popular show on TV is called Ow, My Balls! and the current Oscar winner is a single unbroken shot of a naked butt. A Gatorade-like sports drink called Brawndo (the “thirst mutilator”) has replaced water; people even water crops with it (which of course no longer grow). Fox News is the only news source. Starbucks offers handjobs.
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The film’s savage critique of American corporatisation may be why 20th Century Fox, its distributor, got cold feet and effectively buried it, releasing Idiocracy in just enough cinemas (without so much as a theatrical trailer) to satisfy contractual requirements. The film got bigger with time and became a cult hit, roughly mirroring the trajectory of Judge’s previous feature Office Space (which also achieved popularity only on home release).
The jokes flow thick and fast and the premise, while a little one-note, never gets old. The underlying message of course is that humans ought to take such things as science, research and knowledge seriously, lest we create our own Idiocracy.
Will we heed the warning? In the cacophony of modern existence, with so much stupidity flying at us from so many directions, it’s difficult to be optimistic. One day future humans may very well ask – provided they are still capable of forming a sentence – why come we no listen?
Idiocracy is available to stream in Australia via Google Play, Amazon and iTunes.
This article was amended on 23 July 2021. Idiocracy was co-written by Etan Cohen, not “Ethan Cohen” as an earlier version had it. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/nov/18/west-eastern-divan-ensemble-michael-barenboim-queen-elizabeth-hall-southbank-london-review-meliora-collective-wimbledon-international-music-festival-sitkovetsky-trio-bath-mozartfest | Music | 2023-11-18T12:30:20.000Z | Stephen Pritchard | The week in classical: West-Eastern Divan Ensemble; Meliora Collective; Sitkovetsky Trio – review | When conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim joined philosopher Edward Said to establish the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, combining Israeli and Arab musicians, they knew it would be no magical bringer of peace. Instead, it was intended as a project against ignorance, giving space for opposing sides to understand one another and to disagree without “resort to knives”. For 24 years its achievement has been to show that mutual cooperation and respect can produce grace and beauty in a world too often defined by bloodshed and cruelty.
That spirit of understanding and friendship is distilled and refined still further in a spin-off from the orchestra, the West-Eastern Divan Ensemble, a flexible chamber group formed in 2019 and directed from the violin by Barenboim’s super-talented son Michael. That they should coincidentally appear in London on the day that the capital was engulfed by peace marchers and ugly counter-protests only served to highlight once more their example of supreme tolerance and understanding.
Anyone searching for a metaphor for fruitful coexistence could do worse than look at chamber music. Each player depends entirely on those sitting opposite them; without cooperation, the music will fall apart. It requires the humility to know when to fall back, combined with the confidence to take a lead; tempo must be felt, dynamics considered; above all, everyone has to listen carefully to one another. Would that our politicians behaved more like musicians.
Extra security on the door had suggested a tense night, but this was a cheerful audience determined to show its support
Central to the evening were two pieces of sunny congeniality, chosen, it would seem, to underscore the ideals the ensemble espouse: Felix Mendelssohn’s gloriously good-natured String Quintet No 2 in B flat, Op 87 and Beethoven’s first big hit in Vienna, his highly sociable Septet in E flat, Op 20.
Here, violinist Hisham Khoury and viola players Miriam Manasherov and Sindy Mohamed were joined by Assif Binness (cello), David Santos Luque (double bass), Daniel Gurfinkel (clarinet), Mor Biron (bassoon) and Ben Goldscheider (horn), with Barenboim at the helm. In the variations, we could almost have been witnessing a spirited, civilised debate, with ideas offered for consideration, examined, accepted or rejected. There were little jokes, too. Barenboim, with a twinkle in his eye, suddenly changed gear in the scherzo, upping the tempo and daring the others to play catchup.
There were more jokes in three late fragments by American modernist Elliott Carter, interspersed between the Mendelssohn and Beethoven. Written in the last decade of his long life – Carter died in 2012, aged 103 – each is startlingly brief, yet packed with consequence. The solo Figment IV, brilliantly played by Barenboim on viola, went in minutes from furrowed-brow solemnity to ecstatic excitement. Au Quai for bassoon and viola and Duettone for violin and cello brimmed with wry invention, with amusing passagework from bassoonist Biron and questing, tip-toeing pizzicato from cellist Binness.
Extra security on the door had suggested a tense night, but this was a cheerful audience determined to show its support for the ideals so clearly displayed, applauding between every movement and, to Barenboim’s amused consternation, even crashing in enthusiastically midway through Mendelssohn’s adagio.
Talking of enthusiasm, a new septet found its way on to a London stage last week, this time at the Wimbledon international music festival. The Meliora Collective is a freshly minted, flexible ensemble of young players, formed by clarinettist Steph Yim and flautist Meera Maharaj. Their welcome exuberance sometimes got the better of them, with balance wayward in Ligeti’s Old Hungarian Ballroom Dances, but there was some truly impressive duetting from Yim and Maharaj in Valerie Coleman’s Portraits of Langston. It’s quite an achievement to convincingly recreate a jazz club atmosphere with just two wind instruments.
‘Some truly impressive duetting’: Meera Maharaj and Steph Yim of the Meliora Collective. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer
Sibelius’s turbulent, unsettling En Saga, in its original septet form, seemed unfocused, the narrative nature of the piece not always obvious, but Jessie Montgomery’s Strum, with its mix of Latin rhythms, American folk song and quasi-classical string writing, was a winner – a welcome burst of sunshine on a wet November day.
One of the spookiest passages in all chamber music could be heard when the exciting Sitkovetsky Trio enlivened this year’s Bath Mozartfest with Beethoven’s Piano Trio in D major, Op 70 No 1, “Ghost”. This wildly dramatic piece has at its centre a lugubrious largo that groans and shivers, with much subterranean rumbling from the piano, which Beethoven possibly derived from an abandoned Macbeth project. It’s a curious movement in a work that otherwise basks in jovial sunlight, not least its explosive opening: a unison ladder-climb up the scale that, in the hands of these seasoned players, demanded we sat up and paid attention. You could feel backs straightening all around the room.
Alexander Sitkovetsky, Wu Qian and Isang Enders: the Sitkovetsky Trio in Bath. Photograph: Colin Hawkins
They had opened with an elegant account of Mozart’s Piano Trio in B flat major, K502, with pianist Wu Qian bearing the heaviest load in the concerto-like outer movements, scurrying around the keyboard while Alexander Sitkovetsky (violin) and Isang Enders (cello) offered refined insouciant interjections. Only in the central larghetto does Mozart push the string players forward, with Sitkovetsky making full use of the room’s fine acoustic to add bloom to his cantabile solo.
Schubert is far more even-handed in his Piano Trio in B flat major, with players sharing equal prominence in his stormy, passionate four-movement epic. For all the brilliance of the quicksilver scherzo and quirky country dance-like rondo, it was the songlike melody in the andante, swapped so dreamily between cello and violin, that will linger longest in the memory.
Star ratings (out of five)
West-Eastern Divan Ensemble ★★★★★
Meliora Collective ★★★
Sitkovetsky Trio ★★★★★ | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/2016/may/31/brexiters-eu-leavers-remain | Opinion | 2016-05-31T15:50:17.000Z | Gary Younge | Ridiculing Brexiters is a sure way to lose the argument for staying in the EU | Gary Younge | If, come 24 June, the liberal establishment should wonder what could have possessed voters to be so stupid and small-minded as to vote to leave the European Union, they could do worse than ponder whether they didn’t win people over precisely because they treated them as “stupid” and “small-minded”.
EU referendum: what's the one argument that has made up your mind?
Sarah Marsh
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It seems to have become an article of faith among many of those who wish to remain in the EU that there is not a single valid argument for wanting to leave. In their limited political imaginations their opponents are worthy only of ridicule. Captain Mainwaring in a Ukip blazer, Mrs Slocombe clutching a flag on St George’s Day: reference points so antiquated young people could never relate to them, throwbacks from the Formica years, class-ridden cliches from central casting. The arguments for staying in, it seems, are so self-evident they are barely worth making; the arguments for leaving are so obviously flawed they are barely worth taking seriously. Those who cannot be convinced deserve to be disparaged.
“In this camp we are the reasonable people,” says Labour’s in-chairman, Alan Johnson. “I think in the leave side they are the extremists on this.” The former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg said the referendum represented a choice between “Great Britain or Little England”.
As an electoral strategy this is clearly wrong-headed. You cannot persuade people by ridiculing them; you cannot allay their concerns by ignoring them. If this wasn’t already clear to those who lay themselves at the mercy of the voters every five years, you’d have thought Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader would have hammered it home. Tony Blair, and others, belittled those thinking of voting for Corbyn as people “who disdain government” and engaged in “Alice in Wonderland” thinking and then were stunned that the people they had insulted didn’t flock to their corner.
This would be an easier case to make if the entire referendum hadn’t been reduced to an internal spat within the Tory party that has pitted the fundamentalism of the market (we must remove barriers for business) against the fundamentalism of the nation (we must erect barriers against people). When Boris Johnson evokes Hitler and Michael Gove suggests Britain follows in Albania’s footsteps they do not engage but entertain.
‘When Boris Johnson evokes Hitler and Michael Gove suggests Britain follows in Albania’s footsteps they do not engage but entertain.’ Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
But the issues raised by this referendum are bigger than the Tory party, its internal power plays and its oafish buffoons. They go to the essential questions of the role of the nation state in the neoliberal age: the capacity for democratic engagement under globalisation, and the ability of a continent once riven by war and genocide to keep the peace. These are not questions to which there are simple answers. Whether we vote yes or no, they will continue to challenge us and everyone else.
Globally, the crisis in immigration won’t be solved by tougher laws and more lethal border guards because migration is not primarily being driven by people deciding they would, on balance, rather live in one place than another, but by people forced to flee their homes because they cannot live at all. The US cannot control its borders; nor can Turkey or Pakistan. None of them are in the EU. Regionally, while immigration from eastern Europe could be stopped, it could not feasibly be reversed by diktat. So long as capital can roam freely in search of labour, labour will move in search of work. There is now a net flow of Mexicans leaving the US, not because of the escalation in deportations under Barack Obama but because the US economy has been so weak. If Donald Trump did get to build his wall along the Rio Grande it would, for the time being, actually keep people in. And none of this would have much impact on terrorism.
EU referendum: Brexit for non-Brits Guardian
The most recent heinous terrorist atrocities on the continent have nothing to do with immigration. They were for the most part committed by EU citizens who were born and raised here. Indeed with the number of young people heading to Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere for training and military engagement we are probably a net exporter of terrorists, not an importer. If ending immigration were really the answer to terrorism we should lobby Syria, Turkey and Pakistan to tighten their borders against Britons.
I choose the ditch that offers free movement of people, limited labour protections and a court of human rights
The issue of sovereignty is similarly complicated. Greece last year brutally illustrated the limits of national democratic power when confronted by blunt, regional economic force. Greeks voted for a party that was against the bailout. Then they voted in a referendum to reject the terms of the bailout. Then Greece was forced to accept the terms anyway. While this was more a crisis of the euro than the EU, the two are intertwined and the essential contradiction remains glaring: it doesn’t matter who you vote for, capital gets in.
But once again, this issue isn’t settled by staying in or out of the EU. Capital currently has the run of the planet. In the three months between the Workers’ party in Brazil winning the election in 2002 and taking office, the currency plummeted by 30% and $6bn left in hot money. Any radical South American or African leader would face similar challenges, as would a Britain under Corbyn whether we were in or out
I have yet to meet someone who supports remain who will not concede that the EU is remote, elitist and profoundly undemocratic. This is no minor point, even if it is generally brushed off as the price you pay for doing business in a multilateral institution.
All of which is to say there are real issues at stake here. There is a real debate to be had. It is not a battle between cosmopolitans and internationalists on one side and bigots and bumpkins on the other, though there is something to that. Indeed it could just as easily be framed as a vote between bankers and bureaucrats against democrats and anti-capitalists, since there is something to that too. In the absence of a broader challenge to the neoliberal order, simply voting yes or no is tantamount to choosing a ditch to die in. I choose the ditch that offers free movement of people, limited labour protections and a court of human rights, and will vote remain. I make no great claims for that ditch – how can I, when I share it with David Cameron and George Osborne? But I’m not in it so deep that I can’t see that there’s a valid argument on the other side. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/04/planning-a-uk-mini-break-see-how-the-price-has-gone-up-from-hotels-to-fish-and-chips | Business | 2023-08-04T10:54:59.000Z | Pamela Duncan | Planning a UK mini-break? See how the price has gone up – from hotels to fish and chips | It’s enough to make you drop your chips – official figures show that over the past five years the price of a takeaway fish supper has risen by more than 50%.
A portion of fish and chips isn’t the only British summer break staple that has become far more expensive since then: hotel, restaurant and bar bills have also all shot up.
The soaring costs come as more and more Britons choose to take trips within the UK. Results from the latest VisitBritain poll, released late last month, indicate that the boom in domestic holidays that began at the height of the Covid crisis has not subsided: 75% of Britons said they planned an overnight UK trip in the next year, up five percentage points on last summer.
According to the Travel Association’s Holiday Habits travel survey, Britons took an average 2.3 holidays in the UK last year, up from an average of 1.8 in 2018. Here’s how much the essentials of a classic British getaway have risen in price over that period:
While the biggest individual cost of any stay is a hotel room, restaurant prices have also shot up. Fish and chips by the seaside is often described as a national treasure but for some the dish may feel as if it now costs a king’s ransom, coming in at £9.29 in June, up more than a pound in a year.
If you are planning on holidaying with friends, the cost of your round will have jumped considerably. The combined bill for a premium lager, vodka tonic, whisky and a mineral water cost almost £16 in June, well over a pound a round more than last year.
Bringing the same group bowling will cost considerably less: a game in a tenpin bowling alley would have set you back £7.41 in June, a 1.9% year-on-year increase and well under overall inflation.
Prefer sitting on the hotel balcony with a good paperback? You’re better off: this year’s bestseller is one of the few items on our list that has increased in price by less than annual rate inflation (7.9% in the year to June).
And maybe you should choose to sit in the shade: suncream is rising at a higher rate than inflation at 17%, a full 99p higher than a year ago. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/sep/25/american-sweetcorn-budget-recipes-jane-baxter-stew-corn-cakes | Food | 2023-09-25T10:00:23.000Z | Jane Baxter | Jane Baxter’s budget recipes for American-style sweetcorn | Native Americans grew corn alongside climbing beans and squash in a symbiotic planting system known as the three sisters: the corn stalks gave the beans something to climb while fixing nitrogen into the soil, and the squash leaves provided shade. This stew uses all three sisters and is an economical, autumnal bowl of goodness. I’ve listed frozen corn in the ingredients, but you could also use fresh corn, scraping it straight off the cob. The corn fritters, meanwhile, can be served for breakfast with bacon and tomatoes or as a side with a bowl of chilli, ideally with some salsa and creme fraiche.
Squash, bean and corn stew (pictured top)
Prep 15 min
Cook 40 min
Serves 4
2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, peeled and chopped
½ red pepper, chopped
3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
1 pinch ground cumin, to taste
1 tsp smoked paprika
150g frozen sweetcorn, rinsed
1 butternut squash, halved, seeds removed, peeled and cut into 1cm dice
200g chopped tomatoes, tinned or fresh
250ml vegetable stock
1 x 400g tin borlotti beans, drained and rinsed
1 tbsp chopped coriander
Salt and pepper
Put the oil in a large pan on a medium heat, then saute the onion and red pepper, stirring, for about 10 minutes, until soft. Stir in the garlic and spices, cook for a few minutes more, then add the corn and squash, and stir to coat. Tip in the tomatoes and stock, bring to a simmer and leave to cook on a low heat for 15 minutes, until the squash is tender.
Stir the beans through the stew, adding a little water if it seems a little dry, and cook for just a couple of minutes to warm through. Stir in the coriander, season to taste and serve.
Corn cakes
Jane Baxter’s corn cakes with avocado salsa. Photograph: Yuki Sugiura/The Guardian. Food styling: Hanna Miller, Prop styling: Louie Waller
Prep 10 min
Cook 30 min
Serves 4
200g frozen sweetcorn
1 pinch red chilli flakes, or to taste
½ red onion, finely chopped
125g plain flour
2 tbsp polenta
1 tsp baking powder
2 eggs, plus 1 egg yolk
125ml milk
2 tbsp creme fraiche
1 tbsp chopped coriander
Salt and pepper
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp butter
1 avocado
6 cherry tomatoes
1 garlic clove, peeled and crushed
1 tsp sweet chilli sauce
Juice of ½ lime
Bring a small pan of water to a boil. Rinse the corn under cold running water, drop into the boiling water, cook for two minutes, then drain.
Put the chilli flakes, chopped onion and drained corn in a large bowl, add the flour, polenta and baking powder, then whisk to combine. Add the eggs and egg yolk, stir in well, then mix in the milk and a tablespoon of creme fraiche. Whisk to make a thick batter, stir in the coriander and season generously.
Put the oil and butter in a nonstick pan on a medium heat. Working in batches, spoon in tablespoon-sized dollops of the batter to make small fritters – do not overcrowd the pan – and leave to cook for two minutes on each side, until nicely coloured. Repeat with the remaining batter.
Stone and peel the avocado, then roughly chop the flesh and put it in a bowl. Roughly chop the tomatoes, add to the bowl with the garlic, chilli sauce and lime juice, and season.
To serve, top the pancakes with a little salsa and a small blob of creme fraiche.
Jane Baxter is chef/co-owner of Wild Artichokes in Kingsbridge, Devon. Her next book, Recipes for a Better Menopause, co-authored with Dr Federica Amati, is published in October by Octopus at £25. To pre-order a copy for £22, go to guardianbookshop.com
This article was edited on 25 September 2023, to clarify that, in the corn cake recipe, the drained corn should be mixed with the onion and chilli before adding the rest of the batter ingredients. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/mar/13/10-favourite-readers-of-fiction-in-fiction | Books | 2014-03-13T07:30:07.000Z | Hannah Jane Parkinson | 10 favourite readers of fiction in fiction | It’s not hard to find fiction within fiction – passing references to novels abound in literature, on TV, and across cinema screens. But it is more difficult to pick out fictional characters whose reading truly says something about their personality; or in some way relates to the plot of their fictional realm.
Intertextuality comes in many forms, so we were keen to set some rules. We decided to look for fiction or poetry (no non-fiction allowed) that characters who were fictitious themselves (but across any medium – literature, films, TV, stage) had read prominently. And their reading matter had to exist in the real world.
So, despite being one of the most famous bookish protagonists, Hermione Granger didn’t make the cut. Nor did Belle from Beauty and the Beast, as we never get to see the particular books she is reading.
Here is our selection; share your choices in the comments below.
Warning: possible spoilers ahead.
The Mysteries of Udolpho – read by Catherine Morland, Northanger Abbey
There is probably no better example of a novel within a novel influencing plot and character. It is Catherine’s passionate love of Gothic horror novels – and Ann Radcliffe’s Udolpho in particular – that shapes her own naive outlook and leads her astray.
On first visiting Northanger Abbey, Catherine is disappointed to find that it is not the dark and frightening abbey of her imagination, but a perfectly normal and hospitable house. She gets into trouble exploring Mrs Tilney’s old rooms, her mind filled with tales of murder and dark excess. Eventually, the inexperienced Catherine learns to separate reality from the fantastical elements of Gothic fiction.
Everything That Rises Must Converge – read by Jacob, Lost
The ITV series Lost teemed with literary references. Not an episode aired without a character flicking sand from the centre crease of a novel and getting the pages stuck together with sun cream (OK, not quite). Cue huge climb in Amazon sales for whichever author (or author’s estate) was lucky enough to have been featured. One of the key literary cameos was the Flannery O’Connor novel, Everything Rises Must Converge in the finale of season five.
O’Connor’s starring moment came when Jacob was seen reading the book moments before John Locke falls from a window. The themes of the book (it’s a short story collection) foreshadow a lot of what happens in season six. You can find Lost literary references here.
The Great Gatsby – read by D’Angelo Barksdale, The Wire
Getting down with Gatsby ... D’Angelo Barkside in The Wire
One of the most underrated scenes in The Wire is this one in which D’Angelo Barksdale, after listening patiently to his fellow inmates in the prison book club, gives an astute analysis of The Great Gatsby. (He has been working in the prison library). “He’s saying that the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it – all that shit matters,” he tells the group. An important life lesson for any of The Wire’s characters, and indeed, anyone at all.
La Vie de Marianne – read by Adèle, Blue is the Warmest Colour
A key scene in Abdellatif Kechiche’s adaptation of Julie Maroh’s graphic novel is Adèle’s first date with Thomas (also the first day she catches sight of Emma). Adèle’s monologue about her love of reading, and in particular La Vie de Marianne by Pierre de Marivaux, is a perfect microcosm of her personality. She loves to read and she loves to learn; whole scenes of the film underscore this point. Adèle becomes an infant school teacher in order to “pass on” her love of books. Meanwhile, Thomas says he prefers Les liaisons dangereuses.
Great Expectations – read by Matilda Wormwood, Matilda
Roald Dahl’s Matilda is one of the best-known bookworms in literature. The very first book Matilda reads is the only one she can find in the house; a guide to easy cooking. After she ventures out to the library, however, a whole new world of words opens up.
Her favourite children’s book is The Secret Garden, but when she moves onto the adult section of the library with the help of Mrs Phelps, it is reading Dickens’s Great Expectations that further inspires her love of literature. She also indulges in Hemingway, Greene, and Orwell. She cements her role as one of fiction’s literary elite by managing to finish Ulysses.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – read by Joan Holloway, Mad Men
In just the one hurried conversation about DH Lawrence’s controversial novel, we get a miniature sketch of the key women at advertising firm Sterling Cooper. “I can see why it got banned”, says Joan archly, before adding: “It’s just another testimony to how most people think marriage is a joke.”
Peggy, in her first-season wide-eyed innocence, asks to borrow it. Don Draper is also seen in one episode reading Frank O’Hara’s collection, Meditations in an Emergency. There are more Mad Men literary references here.
The Catcher in the Rye – read by Jerry Fletcher, Conspiracy Theory
This one is a slight cheat, given that Jerry never actually reads Salinger’s classic bildungsroman. However, his character is programmed to buy it whenever he sees it, so it plays a pretty significant part in the plot – especially when the electronic record of one purchase gives him away.
Leaves of Grass – read by Neil, Todd et al, Dead Poets Society
In probably the most famous film about poetry, Robin Williams stars as the inspirational English teacher John Keating, who encourages his students at a strict private school to appreciate verse and embrace unorthodox methods of learning. In particular, Keating introduces a group of pupils to the poetry of Walt Whitman, asking them to call him “Captain, O Captain!” in reference to the poem. The group of boys get in trouble for re-establishing the Dead Poets Society of the film title, discussing and debating poetry in their spare time. John Keating is the archetypal inspirational teacher on screen. Well, him and Tina Fey as Ms Norbury in Mean Girls.
The Velveteen Rabbit – read by Kathy, Friends
In the Friends episode The One With The Dirty Girl (um), Chandler manages to win the affection of his crush – but also Joey’s girlfriend – Kathy, when he buys her a first edition copy of her favourite book from childhood, The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. (Joey has bought her a “pen which is also a clock”). Rachel is also a fan of the book, exclaiming: “The Velveteen Rabbit! When the boy’s love makes the rabbit real!”
Nausea – read by Tony Stonem, Skins
It’s a typical choice for an intelligent, sometimes belligerent teenager having an existential crisis, smoking a fag round the back of the sixth-form common room – Sartre’s Nausea. Who didn’t read this as a 16-year-old ball of confused arrogance, insecurity, zits and lust, trying to find their way in the world and searching for meaning in a life that consists of 80% physics theory revision and 20% getting rejected by a crush? It is a brilliant novel, of course, but also a rite of passage.
In 2007, Skins burst on to UK television on E4, a programme purporting to show the reality of British teen life. While most of the scenes of wild drug-taking in mansions didn’t ring true, the sight of Tony flicking through Nausea on the loo certainly did. It was a great way to introduce his character within minutes of the opening episode; Tony the pseudo-intellectual, Tony the poseur, Tony the confused wannabe nihilist.
Of course there are plenty more bookish fictional characters. Rory Gilmore from The Gilmore Girls references over 250 books, so we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on fictional characters’ reading habits. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/oct/22/tom-watson-refuse-murdochs-sky-bid-after-32m-oreilly-cover-up | Media | 2017-10-22T17:54:05.000Z | Peter Walker | Refuse Murdoch's Sky bid after $32m O'Reilly 'cover up', says Tom Watson | Tom Watson is to write to the competition watchdog urging it to refuse the Murdoch family’s takeover of Sky after it emerged that Fox News gave presenter Bill O’Reilly a new contract after paying $32m (£24m) to settle a sexual harassment suit against him.
Labour’s deputy leader and shadow culture secretary said the revelations showed Fox “allowed a culture of bullying to flourish” and made its parent company, the Murdoch-owned 21st Century Fox, an unsuitable owner for Sky.
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The fact that O’Reilly, the pugnacious and hugely popular Fox News host, was given a more lucrative contract a month after settling the harassment lawsuit, was “jaw dropping”, Watson said. “It raises yet more questions about the corporate culture at 21st Century Fox. It has now been demonstrated beyond doubt that executives at Fox News were free to act with impunity in the knowledge that their actions would go unpunished.”
The culture secretary, Karen Bradley, said last month she was minded to refer the proposed takeover of Sky by 21st Century Fox to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on the grounds of its commitment to broadcasting standards, as well as media plurality.
The decision means the CMA will scrutinise the editorial standards of Fox, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his sons Lachlan and James.
According to a report in the New York Times on Saturday, O’Reilly was given the improved contract in February, a month after he agreed the $32m (£24m) payout to a regular on-screen analyst on Fox, who said O’Reilly repeatedly harassed her and sent indecent material.
According to documents seen by the newspaper, and the testimony of people who knew about the deal, it followed allegations covering 15 years by analyst Lis Wiehl.
Fox told the New York Times that it did not pay the amount to Wiehl, and was given no details of the amount.
Tom Watson, deputy leader of the Labour party. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian
But the paper said Rupert, Lachlan and James Murdoch had “made a business calculation to stand by Mr O’Reilly despite his most recent, and potentially most explosive, harassment dispute”.
It is at least the sixth such settled case involving O’Reilly, who was eventually sacked by Fox in April. He has denied any wrongdoing, telling the New York Times he paid the money to protect his family.
Watson said he would write to the CMA to urge it to take all this into account when deciding on the Sky takeover, calling the latest revelations about O’Reilly “depressingly familiar”.
He said: “They show that 21st Century Fox engaged in a prolonged campaign to cover up allegations of serious sexual harassment by a senior employee instead of investigating the claims and taking action against him. The fact that Fox handed Mr O’Reilly a lucrative new contract worth $25m months after he reportedly paid $32m to settle a claim by a colleague is jaw-dropping.”
Fox News has faced similar controversy before. In 2016, the network’s founder, Roger Ailes, was forced to resign after a series of sexual harassment accusations from female colleagues. Ailes died earlier this year.
“[Fox executives] knew they could rely on their employer to ignore serious allegations of sexual misconduct and pay huge sums to silence the women who made them,” Watson said.
“The parallels with the phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper empire are unsettling. Instead of admitting wrongdoing, the Murdoch family’s first instinct is to deny it took place and, in many cases, to label those who try to establish the truth as liars or fantasists. It is a pattern that keeps on repeating itself.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/mar/29/alvaro-barrington-90s-hip-hop-exhibition | Art and design | 2022-03-29T15:46:09.000Z | Janelle Zara | ‘We saved each other’: Alvaro Barrington’s 90s hip-hop exhibition | For his debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles, London-based artist Alvaro Barrington hosted an all-day barbecue in the Blum & Poe gallery parking lot and invited Ghostface Killah to perform. From the pop-up stage, the Wu-Tang Clan scion looked out on the crowd and bashfully called it “mixed”; there were adult Ghostface fans as well their children, plus moneyed art collectors who had come to buy new, very in-demand work. What ensued was, in modern parlance, iconic – a half-hour singalong of Wu-Tang hits, with bonus tracks commemorating the late Biz Markie and Marvin Gaye. There were even product samples of Killah Bee, Ghostface Killah’s gold-speckled, cannabis-infused brownies. The opening was uplifting, in every sense of the word.
‘She’s creating her own language’: Christine Sun Kim’s unique sound art
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“The show wouldn’t have been complete without Ghost,” Barrington said. His exhibition, 91–98 jfk–lax border, on view at Blum & Poe through 30 April, is an acutely personal look back at the 90s through hip-hop, an unvarnished record of an era ripe for closer examination.
In 1990, when Barrington was eight years old, he left his home in tropical Grenada. He and his mother moved to Flatbush, Brooklyn, the West Indian enclave of a much larger, concrete island. With the same approach as recording an album, he organized his show to include features – that is, guest appearances – by other artists who resonate with elements of the community: Teresa Farrell, Aya Brown, Paul Anthony Smith, Jasmine Thomas-Girvan, and his teenage cousin, Ariel Cumberbatch. The wall-mounted sculpture by Thomas-Girvan bears “a kind of magic realism that is so deeply Caribbean”, Barrington says, in its sinuous assemblage of wood, costume feathers, and strands of brass curled to resemble plumes of smoke. He compares her work to a trumpet solo that Olu Dara, Nas’s father, played on a track of the Illmatic album: “It’s reaching down to the roots, but it’s also reaching to the heavens. It gets you to this place of serenity.”
Brown’s portraits of Missy Elliott, Lauryn Hill, and Li’l Kim, rendered in soft pastel on brown kraft paper, had reminded him both of a specifically New York style of drawing, and the way punk rock had influenced the work of Elizabeth Peyton.
Alvaro Barrington - This week 25 years ago Buffy Rose, 2022. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo. Photo: Josh Schaedel
“In music, you understand the role of a feature; it’s kind of the antithesis of painting, where we think of the painter as an individual genius,” Barrington says. “But Aya looks at these women in a way that I can’t represent myself. The lesson I learned from hip-hop is that it makes more sense for her to speak in her own voice.”
In his own works, Barrington chose materials that would evoke the textures of his childhood, assembling basketballs and milk crates, rebar and cement, into homages of two of the greats, 2Pac and DMX. “I see Pac and X as a continuation of each other; they both tell the story of the war on drugs as a war against working-class black communities,” the artist says. “When politicians were calling young Black men newly released from prison super-predators, X was talking about what being locked in a hole would mean for a 14-year-old’s mental health.”
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Homages to DMX bookend the exhibition, beginning with two floating monuments mounted to the gallery walls. Cut-out images of the rapper, microphone in hand, are encased in cement boxes that Barrington inscribed with lyrics while the cement was still wet:
The two years in a box, revenge, the plots/ The 23 hours that’s locked, the 1 hour that’s not/ The silence, the dark…
Those 23 hours reverberate into a separate gallery space, where, in contrast to the colors and textures of the show as a whole, a row of cold steel frames line the perimeter of completely white walls. Within each frame, a cardboard panel cut with the digits of a quartz alarm clock bears a time, from 00 to 23h00. They amount to a day in solitary confinement the way that DMX had described – a prolonged, silent procession of hours.
Alvaro Barrington - DMX the 2 years in a box LA, 2022. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo. Photo: Josh Schaedel
In both nostalgic and mournful turns, this is a show about history, both public and private, and who counts as a reliable narrator. Looking back at the 90s, Barrington describes the decade as a “fundamental shift in the American imagination”, where neoliberalism’s veneer of prosperity glossed over increasingly punitive measures against communities of color. He recalls Bill Clinton charming Black audiences on Arsenio Hall, while simultaneously vilifying the so-called “inner city” and its “superpredators” in a campaign of fear. Former mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, was crediting aggressive law and order policies as having “cleaned up” the city: “There was a rising media culture that used Black people as an excuse to cut whatever social program they wanted to cut, and enforce whatever kind of policing they wanted to enforce.”
In contrast to the denigrating media narratives, Barrington’s community swaddled him in affirmation. At a young age, he found his truth: “I grew up in places where the majority of people looked like me, and everything in my life to that point reinforced my dignity, and my sense of self.” When his mother died in 1993, the artist was looked after by a network of aunties, and found solace in his cousins’ music. It was the golden age of hip-hop, a new, intimate era of storytelling that aligned with the events of his life.
“There was a one-to-one in terms of what Ghost was saying and what I was going through,” Barrington says, referencing the lyrics to All I Got Is You. “There are lines about ‘15 of us in a three-bedroom apartment’, and there were eight of us in a one-bedroom apartment. His mama passed away, and my mama passed away.”
The song ends with lines about looking up at the stars and looking forward to tomorrow. “If I didn’t have that song,” the artist says, “I would’ve had to find another way to cope with the situation I was in.”
Aya Brown – Ms. Hill, 2021. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist, REGULARNORMAL, and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo. Photo: Josh Schaedel
History, Barrington has found, has had a longstanding habit of erasing the contributions of Black culture. He offers up the fact that Matisse had spent time in Harlem, cultivating relationships with black jazz musicians. “He was trying to paint jazz,” he says, both its rhythms and spontaneity. “You go to art school, and you never hear that.”
In 91–98 jfk–lax border, hip-hop fills holes in the historical record, recounting a contentious decade as Barrington remembers it. His recurring use of cement adds a sense of weight and permanence to stories that have been subjected to erasure. “Through making, I’m putting out ideas of what I think I know,” he says. “I might be right, I might be wrong.” He’s also adamant about his work always being accessible, and reaffirming his community: “It’s important that my family don’t feel dumb because they don’t know who Rothko is.”
Foregoing the traditional gallery dinner, Barrington opted instead to throw a small concert by one of his all-time favorite artists. (Blum & Poe co-founder Tim Blum says that he first heard that Ghostface would be performing at his gallery on Instagram: “You’ve really got to stick along for the ride with Alvaro”.)
Writing his own press release, the artist described the exhibition as “my thank-you to some of my heroes … Biggie, JAY-Z, and Lil’ Kim gave us the commandments to get fly and carry our heads high ... [Ghostface] made us want to ground our souls and reach for the skies.” And where the 90s were filled with conflicting accounts, “The only real narrative was that we saved each other.”
91–98 jfk–lax border is showing at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles until 30 April | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/nov/11/basic-income-for-all-a-500-year-old-idea-whose-time-has-come | Guardian Sustainable Business | 2016-11-10T23:28:56.000Z | Gideon Haigh | Basic income for all: a 500-year-old idea whose time has come? | In the echoey theatre of modern political gesture, welfare has recently had one of its periodic stagings. A minister has honed his ideological credentials; columnists have extracted culture war content; tabloid journalists have parroted shamelessly grossed-up figures and patrolled Bondi beach for dole bludgers.
Yet for once it was worth cocking an ear. For if the world of employment is facing upheaval, then so is its counterpart of unemployment. And if the future of work is, as many argue, increasingly flexible, casual, various and scarce, it’s arguable that those short of it will steadily face exacerbated economic risk. What might a welfare system of the future look like? What is the potential of ideas such as a universal basic income or a negative income tax, long discussed by economists, mostly beyond the ken of politicians?
Despite its regular depiction as a peeler of lotuses for layabouts, Australians have reasons to be proud of their social safety net. Australia’s taxes are steeply progressive, moderating inequalities of income, and its welfare system comparatively cheap, certifiably efficient in delivering to those in greatest need. Most of the bill is absorbed not by the dole but by the aged pension, even if no tabloid has ever sent reporters to scour those opulent retirement homes and bingo halls in search of the spongeing workshy elderly.
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Tim Dunlop
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But being fit for purpose is no help if purpose should change. “What we have now is a welfare system designed around a whole bunch of policy settings that aren’t there any more – a parsimonious dole predicated on a protected economy in what’s now a dynamic, unprotected, trade-exposed economy,” argues Tim Lyons of the thinktank Per Capita. “The dole makes sense if you’re a cook and you lose your job as a cook and you want another job as a cook in the same town you live in. But it’s not going to get you through a long period of unemployment without a decline into poverty, it won’t help you retrain and it’s not sufficient to help you move.”
Possibilities of gales of creative destruction are mitigated somewhat by slow growth in the supply of new workers. “One thing that’s happened over the last five years is that the growth rate in supply of workers has shrunk quite rapidly,” notes economist Saul Eslake. “Since 2011, we’ve seen slowest growth in working age population since the great depression … and unemployment has fallen by more in the last three years than in any other three-year period.”
Average job duration too has changed relatively little in the past 30 years and the much-discussed gig economy is as yet small, its impacts anecdotal rather than substantive – even if that may partly be a factor of official measurability.
In some respects, Australia is better prepared than other economies for the challenges of job churn. “We’re well ahead of a lot of other countries that tie a lot of things into the employment package,” observes the shadow assistant treasurer, Andrew Leigh. “For example, when you tie healthcare into employment, it makes it much harder to move between jobs. When you have defined benefit pension plans tied to a particular job, that makes transition towards an economy in which people start working multiple jobs far more problematic. In that sense, we’re starting in the new economic world with less lead in our saddle bags than much of North America and Europe.”
Economists and futurists have been bad at pointing to emerging jobs [and] whether people will be equipped to do them
Economist Saul Eslake
Developing a sense of future employment prospects, moreover, is something about which humility is advisable. Says Eslake: “While it is easy to point to jobs that are threatened by technological change, what economists, futurists and others have been very bad at is pointing to the jobs that will emerge, whether people will be appropriately equipped to do those jobs and whether they will produce adequate incomes.”
Yet some facts can now be constituted as trends. Wage growth is anaemic, with all manner of entailments, including a property boom that is the empowered consumer’s response to income insecurity. Casual work, meanwhile, is as profuse as full-time employment is flat. In 1988, just over a fifth of workers were employed part-time and adult full-time wages were 21% higher than wages paid to all. Today almost a third of workers are employed part-time and the wages gap yawns at 36%. Employers are ever more reliant on the ranks of casuals, part-timers, workers on short-term contracts, migrants on short-term visas and even full-time school students, who now constitute 2.3% of the workforce. The underemployed – those who would like to find more work but cannot – have reached unprecedented proportions, their circumspection acting as a drag on demand.
The Turnbull government’s peculiar mix of effervescence and inanition suggests a superficial engagement with future possibility – imprecations to “nimbleness” have replaced the valourising of “working families”. But its rhetoric about welfare – variations on lifters and leaners, workers and shirkers – sounds more like a pandering to constituencies.
The benefits of the laissez-faire approach have been whittled away, leaving concentrations of prosperity, a more general residue of exhaustion and discontent. “We’re about to fall into that low-inflation trap that we’ve previously avoided, even though we’re still growing – wage growth is the lowest it’s been since they started collecting that data,” reports George Megalogenis, the author of the Australia’s Second Chance (2016). “You can’t say people are slack and don’t deserve a pay rise. They’re working harder than ever and productivity has boomed. But the profit share has swung too far to capital without it being reinvested. So we need a reset, for same reason as you always need a reset – to maintain stability and smooth out the cycle.”
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Says veteran economist Ross Garnaut: “There will be a certain number of jobs in future that give very good incomes, with a degree of luck involved in who gets those – even people of talent could work their guts and out and not get one. We want a system of transfers that help the rest, the people who are unlucky, enjoy a reasonably secure life.”
But how? There are big ideas abroad. At the cutting edge is one with paradoxically ancient antecedents. Universal basic income, a form of social security involving the state paying its citizens a regular unconditional lump sum regardless of whether they work, claims a 500-year intellectual pedigree, the notion of providing “everyone with some livelihood” having been countenanced by Thomas More in Utopia (1516) as an antidote to crime.
It has since been approved by a remarkable range of reformers and redistributionists. In Agrarian Justice (1797), Thomas Paine envisioned a national fund, provisioned by the levying of a “ground-rent” on landowners, which would make two kinds of payments to every person: a fifteen-pound lump sum at the age of 21 “to enable him or her to begin the world” and a ten pound annual stipend to everyone over 50 “to enable them to live in old age without wretchedness, and go decently out of the world”.
In The Road to Serfdom (1944), FA Hayek argued that the universal assurance of “some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work” was “no privilege but a legitimate object of desire” and could be provided “outside of and supplementary to the market system”.
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For a long time, then, universal basic income has looked like an elegant solution in search of a problem, including in Australia, where it was first mooted in the context of postwar reconstruction in a 1942 monograph by the radio journalist RG Lloyd Thomas and was a proposition entertained in Prof Ronald Henderson’s landmark Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Poverty (1975). Lately it has found another articulate Australian advocate, the academic Tim Dunlop, whose The Future is Workless (2016) deems it “suddenly very sexy” – not a description often applied to social security schemes.
“To me the real efficacy of basic income is that even if we’re not headed into a workless future, we’re destined for a future where work will be based on short-term contracts,” Dunlop says. “That might be very lucrative for some people. And you might be able to string together a lifetime of that stuff. But, for a lot of people, even if there is plenty of that sort of work, there are going to be periods where you’ve got nothing. And if you have a society based on that insecurity, that’s a bad society.”
The argument is being heard in a number of countries. Swiss voters pondered such a scheme this year, before rejecting it; Finland is running a non-universal pilot program next year; Y-Combinator, a Silicon Valley incubator firm, will sponsor a similar test in Oakland, California.
And one of the most interesting features of a universal basic income is its variety of advocates, from wings of the egalitarian left, who see it as decommodifying labour and transforming labour relations, rallying behind such works as Guy Standing’s The Precariat (2011) and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future (2016), and the libertarian right, eager to winnow the welfare bureaucracy away, inspired chiefly by Charles Murray’s In Our Hands (2006).
A feature of a universal basic income is its various advocates, from the egalitarian left to the libertarian right
Dunlop finds common cause with both. “The way the welfare system works now is insane,” he says. “It’s all outsourced to private providers, yet neither the government nor the provider can get you a job, only an interview. So the government is paying all this money to providers for getting people into interviews without access to the most obvious performance metric: did they get a job? All they can ask is are people ‘job ready’? So they come up with all these measures. Have you done a CV? Have you done training? Have you done this or that? All this government money is being spent basically on compliance costs, on policing people. I’m all for the libertarian argument in that sense. If we can get rid of that, I think everyone’s better off.”
The trouble with having some supporters on left and right is that annoys others. Many on the left hear the echo of “to each according to his needs”; a sizeable proportion of right still yearn to distinguish between “the deserving poor” and “the undeserving poor”. Welfare in Australia long ago sheered away from a social insurance model; it has traditionally been targeted, generally been niggardly. The idea of money for nothing would go against a deeply grained idea of a reciprocal bond between state and citizen – embedded in our national anthem, of course, is the notion of “wealth for toil”. Given work’s perceived ennobling characteristics, a basic income would strike some as morally corrosive.
But most now uncontroversial forms of income support were first condemned. And a universal basic income might prove less of a disincentive to work than generally imagined. In the most famous basic income experiment, Mincome (1974-79), residents of a poor town in the Canadian province of Manitoba were sent monthly cheques. Working habits among males in Dauphin changed hardly at all, households remained thrifty, and other life measures were enhanced: teenagers remained in school longer; mental health outcomes were better.
Mincome was doomed by a conservative shift in Canadian politics and its findings were buried – perhaps in part because they cast doubt on an abiding assumption that the poor immiserate themselves by carelessness with money. On the contrary, it seemed, for having had little, they were all the more careful.
Occurring as it did only on a local scale, however, Mincome only takes the argument so far. A truly universal basic income would reach many who neither need nor want it. “If the proposition is for a basic income, then, as someone who earns more than $200,000, I say: ‘Don’t cut me a cheque’,” says Labor’s Andrew Leigh. “It will do nothing to change my behaviour and it will be produced either by raising taxes unnecessarily or, worse still, by taking money away from people who need it more than me. And we would be doing it in a country where the total burden of tax is one of the lowest in the advanced world.”
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A basic income would, indeed, be exceedingly expensive: even calibrated at the minimum wage, it would require the disgorging of almost the entire tax take. “Our system isn’t perfect,” says economist Eslake. “It can be improved on the expenditure and the revenue sides but that can be done. Whereas if you were to say to the Australian people we need to raise the level of tax by 10% of GDP, I can’t see that flying. It is less of an issue for Scandinavian countries who recycle a lot more through the tax and transfer system.”
Dunlop is not so starry-eyed that he sees the universal basic income as an idea whose time has come. “I guess I end up at the view, as I do with lots of things about the future of work, is that we actually have to get to the crisis,” he says. “That you don’t argue your way into this, because the social and cultural norms are so entrenched that you need to come to a point where alternatives demand it. We only got a welfare state because of two world wars. You’ve also got to convince the one per cent that their income is being legitimately redistributed. They’re very powerful and it’s not like society is falling down around their ears – not yet anyway. In the meantime they can insulate themselves from it. Things will have to get very bad to get their attention.”
As Tim Lyons notes: “At the moment we’re a country that can’t come to grips with increasing the dole by $35 a day, which everyone, even the Business Council of Australia, accepts is a ridiculously low level.”
Sometimes drawn into discussion of universal basic income is a less ambitious but more robust welfare variation – that of the targeted cash transfer. Its advocates first stirred in the mid-1990s and again have numbered some interesting individuals. In his maiden speech to parliament in 1994, for example, young backbencher Tony Abbott outlined an inchoate plan for a broad-based, non-means-tested “family wage” of $100 a week payable to the principal carer of dependent children. Again the allure was simplicity, reduced bureaucracy.
While voters have shown an innate mistrust of radical change to the tax system, everyone understands and hardly anyone objects to a cash payment. A family wage is quite different from welfare. It is a recognition of responsibilities, not need. It is a payment for services, not a handout. It means that personal choice could replace economic necessity as a rationale for family decisions. One beauty of a family wage system is that it would take one public servant, just one, and a computer to administer. Payments would start the moment a birth is recorded on the registrar of births, deaths and marriages database and finish 16 years later.
The showpiece, however, has come from the left of politics, specifically Lulism in Brazil. Now 13 years old, Bolsa Familia is a mean-tested basic income allocated to poor families through the female head of household, delivered via a citizens card that operates on a debit basis, conditional on contrapartidas (counterpart responsibilities) such as children attending school, receiving vaccinations and medical check-ups. It is overwhelmingly popular, a quarter of Brazilian households being eligible recipients. It is also disarmingly cheap, absorbing less than half a per cent of GDP.
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Bolsa Familia has its critics, from the right, including the Catholic church, and from the left, who see it as too paternalistic and consumerist – the contrapartidas are arguably as much about legitimising the scheme in the eyes of the middle class as improving public health outcomes. There have been the inevitable issues of abuse, enforcement and burden on overtaxed social services. Yet many initial objections have been disarmed: the evidence is against it breeding improvidence or dependency, with the bulk of the money spent on basics such as food and clothing, while three-quarters of adult recipients still undertake paid work.
If the disbursement of cash might seem a crude device, a third device has already been run up a mainstream political flagpole. The negative income tax, in which those earning below a set amount receive supplemental pay from the government, has described a zig-zagging intellectual course, one of its most committed advocates being Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom (1962), who saw it as eliminating the need for a minimum wage, addressing disincentives to work posed by high marginal tax rates, and consolidating overlapping welfare circles.
A negative income tax was first mooted here by the classical liberals Wolfgang Kasper, Dick Blandy, John Freebairn, Douglas Hocking and Robert O’Neill, who in Australia at the Crossroads (1980) envisioned it being financed by “a reduction in the provision of ‘free’ government services and subsidies to private producers” (they also promoted life-endowment grants: sums of ‘the order of $20,000’ payable to young people 15-21 as a start in life or ‘stake’ in society). It was subsequently promoted as an anti-unemployment measure by Freebairn, Peter Dawkins, Ross Garnaut, Michael Keating and Chris Richardson in their Five Economists’ Letter of October 1998.
Most people want to feel that government is on their side: not because they want handouts, they want government involved
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Garnaut, a former senior adviser to prime minister Bob Hawke and an ambassador to China, now a professorial fellow of economics at University of Melbourne, remains an advocate: “A simple way of making it work would be to give all Australian citizens or residents [an] automatic payment into their bank account every fortnight, subject to a means tests, principally an assets test, [and] you’d be taxed at a basic rate from the very first dollar of income … It’s just a much simpler system for employers and you don’t get high marginal tax rates discouraging people on social security as they do now.”
Its attractions were noted by the McClure review of welfare in 2000, which recommended a single “common base payment” to people of working age replacing all other pensions and allowances, with a few add-ons for those with special ability and housing needs.
Tony Abbott, by then the employment minister, thought that it “should be possible to build a consensus for a single working-age payment with supplements based on special needs and participation in the community”.
But the push lost momentum: its outgrowing instead was the low income tax offset and to a degree the raising of the tax-free threshold. The only political party in Australia still advocating a negative income tax is the Pirate party, whose platform in the last election included a tax designed to ensure of minimum income of $14,000 for everyone over the age of 18.
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Whatever transpires, a shift in the paradigm of work poses a challenge to the recently evolved bargain between citizen and state. For much of last 20 years, Australian governments have explored variations on the theme of shifting costs back to the electorate, coaxing voters along the route of private provision for education, health, infrastructure, services and retirement. This slow but steady heaping of expenses on the household table has exacerbated domestic financial precariousness.
“You go underwater very quickly without a wage,” says Megalogenis. “Which suggests that, technically, if your open market model can’t provide your working-age population with a steadily rising income any more, you’ve reached the limits of that cost shifting, especially in education and health. That’s a big problem for the economy overall. It was a shortcoming of laissez-faire capitalism in the 19th century: it could never get its mind around the idea that when it got rid of a worker, it was robbing itself of a consumer. We face something like that problem now.”
To Megalogenis, the global financial crisis should be recognised as the day the future began: “The last few years in politics have diverted us from the great lesson of 2008-9. We now have a federal government looking at a structural budget deficit, a Reserve Bank that has lost its discretion on the price of money because global interest rates are now so low and a wages system not rewarding the worker for what the open market has demanded they do for the last 20 years, which is adapt – a model that’s broken but exhausted. Yet knowing how successfully the state leaned against the GFC, basically all the levers working exactly as you would wish, you could be pretty confident of it getting things right.”
The future requires, he believes, a state more active and more robust in alleviating the cost of day-to-day living. “Before the robots take over, I’d be thinking about where the state can get back in, with the commonwealth as the borrower and the states as the spender,” he says. “Most people want to feel that government is on their side. Not because they want a handout, which is the way it’s frequently been misinterpreted. They want government involved. So the state should be thinking hard about keeping on its books the costs it can bear on behalf of the community. Without an active state you can’t prepare the population for the next big hit, which is coming anyway, whether we’re ready or not.”
The welfare nostrums of the Turnbull government? Largely pointless, argues Tim Lyons. “What this mob has returned to is a view that it’s necessary to punish people who are unemployed, to get them in a headlock,” he says. “It’s a recurrent rightwing fantasy of the last 25 years that there’s this vast imaginary army of malingerers and a ton of money to be saved in welfare – the idea that we’re going to save the federal budget by finding a whole bunch of Paxton kids.”
In fact, believes Garnaut, the stakes could hardly be higher. “We’re testing how democracy works when wages are stagnant or falling,” he says. “Well, I think we already know how it works, which is badly. In fact, unless we get used to the idea of doing something systematic and non-stigmatising to support the incomes of ordinary people, it may not be viable as a political system.”
And the answers will not be found on Bondi beach. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2000/aug/29/newsstory.sport1 | Football | 2000-08-29T22:42:43.000Z | Chris Taylor | Round-up | The bad blood lingering from last season's tempestuous Worthington Cup semi-final was evident in the decision by the Bolton manager Sam Allardyce to boycott the changing rooms at Prenton Park for the First Division clash with Tranmere .
He had been unhappy with Tranmere's alleged gamesmanship during the cup tie, won 4-0 on aggregate by the Wirral club, which included providing ball boys with towels to wipe the ball for their long-throw expert Dave Challinor.
Allardyce ordered his players to change into their kit at the Reebok stadium and his unusual approach paid off as Bolton won courtesy of a goal from their captain Mike Whitlow which was celebrated with gusto by players and supporters alike.
When the Tranmere defender Gareth Roberts was sent off for a crude foul on Bolton's Bo Hansen late in the game, tempers flared on both sides.
Tranmere's manager John Aldridge said: "I hope the referee will look at the red card and amend it, but we didn't get what we deserved today. Bolton only had one shot on target and they scored."
Allardyce said: "I'm saying nowt," and along with his players, still wearing their dirty kit, he immediately drove off in the team bus back to Bolton.
Watford 's hopes of bouncing straight back to the Premiership were boosted by yesterday's emphatic 4-1 victory over Sheffield United at Vicarage Road. Graham Taylor's team made light of the absence of Nordin Wooter and the new signing Allan Nielsen, with Heidar Helguson establishing an early lead which Tommy Mooney restored just before half-time after Wayne Quinn's equaliser. Gifton Noel-Williams and Micah Hyde completed the scoring but it could have been more as Watford missed several good chances.
"I had three players who I did not think would last 90 minutes," said Taylor. "All three scored and that certainly helps because they lasted well in the end.
"The funny thing is that after we'd gone 3-1 ahead United had their best spell and we had our worst. Had United scored then we might have been hanging on. I did not relax until the fourth one went in."
West Bromwich Albion responded to a verbal volley from their manager Gary Megson to register their first points. "I decided to give them a real telling-off because I was so angry about the start we had made to our season," he said. "They took the words I threw at them and rammed them down my throat."
Goals from Lee Hughes and Jason van Blerk ended the unbeaten run of QPR, who had gone ahead through Chris Kiwomya.
Bristol Rovers may have lost their sharpshooters Jason Roberts and Jamie Cureton but they still hit Brentford for six.
The Latvian midfielder Vitalijs Astafjevs opened the scoring at Griffin Park after five minutes and Nathan Ellington and Lewis Hogg both scored twice before the defender Scott Jones, on loan from Barnsley, scored the sixth. Paul Evans, from the penalty spot, and Andy Scott were on the mark for the well-beaten Bees.
Bury are up to an unexpected second place after Darren Bullock scored the only goal of the game against Northampton in the 72nd minute at Gigg Lane.
The newcomers Kidderminster moved into the top three of the Third Division with an impressive 2-0 win at Brighton thanks to goals from Ian Foster and Dean Bennett.
Rushden and Diamonds continued their commanding start at the top of the Football Conference with a 4-0 win at home to Southport. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/09/abc-australia-leaves-twitter-x-elon-musk | Technology | 2023-08-09T06:51:47.000Z | Amanda Meade | ABC exiting Twitter: Australia’s national broadcaster shuts down almost all accounts on Elon Musk’s X | The ABC is shutting down almost all of its official accounts on Twitter – now known as X under Elon Musk’s ownership – citing “toxic interactions”, cost and better interaction with ABC content on other social media platforms.
There will only be four remaining official accounts for Australia’s public broadcaster: @abcnews, @abcsport, @abcchinese and the master @abcaustralia account. ABC Chinese reaches Chinese-speaking audiences on X.
“Starting from today, other ABC accounts will be discontinued,” the ABC managing director, David Anderson, has told staff. Musk responded to the move by accusing the ABC of embracing censorship.
Well of course they prefer censorship-friendly social media.
The Australian public does not.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2023
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Anderson said the closure of the Insiders, News Breakfast and ABC Politics accounts earlier this year limited the amount of toxic interactions, which had grown more prevalent under Musk and made engagement with the shows more positive.
Several high-profile ABC journalists left Twitter after being subjected to abuse, including News Breakfast host Lisa Millar and Australian Story host Leigh Sales.
“We also found that closing individual program accounts helps limit the exposure of team members to the toxic interactions that unfortunately are becoming more prevalent on X,” Anderson said.
“Concerningly, X has reduced its trust and safety teams. Additionally, it is introducing charges which make the platform increasingly costly to use.”
The ABC has closed its @abcemergency X account and directed people to their local radio station and ABC website for emergency information.
The @Q+A account has also been archived, bringing to an end a long relationship between the talk show and the platform.
This account is now archived. To stay in touch:
Watch Q+A on ABC TV or ABC iview: https://t.co/fC34LuXafO
Follow us on Facebook: https://t.co/7HXXRZfht5
And follow ABC News on Twitter: @abcnews
— QandA (@QandA) August 9, 2023
The ABC Media Watch account will stay on X because the program is independent and can’t post on the ABC news account.
The announcement comes after the ABC recently shifted resources towards making content for other social media platforms including TikTok and Instagram.
Anderson said the vast majority of the ABC’s social media audience was located on official sites on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
“We want to focus our effort and resources on where our audiences are,” he said.
The ABC is the third big public service broadcaster to remove itself from Twitter, following NPR and PBS in April. They left Twitter after Musk branded them “state media”.
In April the ABC and SBS were also labelled “government-funded media”.
At that time a spokesperson said the ABC was not planning to follow NPR and PBS by quitting Twitter.
“The ABC doesn’t currently have any plans to shut down all its Twitter accounts. We’re liaising with Twitter regarding changes to account verification and labels,” they said.
The withdrawal marks the end of the ABC’s rosy relationship with Twitter, which former ABC managing director Mark Scott once called a “joy” to use for breaking news and conversation.
Scott was an evangelist of the value of social media in journalism, encouraged journalists to join the platform and promoted the ABC’s use of Twitter for disseminating ABC content.
“Twitter reminds me of sitting in the newsroom, watching the feeds come in from the world’s great media organisations: Reuters, Dow Jones and Associated Press, the New York Times, The Guardian, AFP,” he said in 2010.
“Now anyone, simply by following their Twitter feeds, can have these great media organisations delivering a stream of updates to them no matter where they are. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/09/debenhams-appoints-administrators-and-liquidates-irish-chain | Business | 2020-04-09T14:53:33.000Z | Zoe Wood | Debenhams appoints administrators and liquidates Irish chain | Debenhams has fallen into administration, casting fresh doubt over the future of the struggling chain, which employs more than 20,000 people.
Like other fashion retailers, Debenhams is facing financial turmoil as the coronavirus lockdown prevents Britons from shopping. However the indebted retailer had problems prior to the health crisis and on Thursday confirmed the appointment of restructuring firm FRP Advisory to handle a “light touch” administration of the 142-store chain.
Debenhams said administrators would work alongside existing management to “get the business into a position to re-open and trade as many stores as possible again when restrictions are lifted”. However it also warned that FRP Advisory would be putting its Irish chain into liquidation which would mean the permanent closure of 11 stores that employ around 1,260 people.
Stefaan Vansteenkiste, chief executive of Debenhams, said: “We are desperately sorry not to be able to keep the Irish business operating but are faced with no alternative option in the current environment.”
The Irish chain, which includes four branches in Dublin and two in Cork, employed 958 Debenhams staff as well as 300 others who worked for in-store concessions. The staff have already been stood down under the Irish government’s wage support scheme.
It was anticipated that Debenhams’ owners and lenders would make additional funding available to fund the administration period, Vansteenkiste said. “In these unprecedented circumstances the appointment of the administrators will protect our business, our employees and other important stakeholders, so that we are in a position to resume trading from our stores when government restrictions are lifted.”
The retailer’s stores are all closed anyway due to the government-mandated shutdown, although its website is still operating as normal. The majority of its UK workforce has also been furloughed.
Debenhams, which is hobbled by a £600m debt pile, was listed on the stock exchange until last April, when its deteriorating finances resulted in an administration that wiped out shareholders and transferred ownership to a group of financial investors that includes the US hedge funds Silver Point and GoldenTree.
Like other struggling chains, it has used an insolvency process known as a company voluntary arrangement (CVA) to cut rents and close unprofitable stores including a group of 19 shops in January. Since the coronavirus lockdown it has written to landlords asking for a five-month rent holiday and written to the suppliers to inform them they would be getting their money a month later than expected as it seeks to conserve cash.
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Sofie Willmott, a retail analyst at consultancy firm GlobalData, said Debenhams’ second administration in 12 months was “stringing out its demise and its long-term future remains bleak”.
She said: “With significant further investment in the business now very unlikely, it is difficult to see what will attract shoppers back once its stores can reopen.
“The department store chain was already in trouble before the Covid-19 pandemic hit and the sharp shift in consumer shopping habits will only speed up inevitable changes in the UK market. Weaker retailers without a unique selling point will be weeded out, with many unable to survive the year.”
Debenhams Ireland stores to close permanently
Cork - Mahon Point
Cork - Patrick Street
Dublin - Blackrock
Dublin – Blanchardstown
Dublin - Henry Street
Dublin - Tallaght
Galway
Limerick
Newbridge
Tralee
Waterford | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/05/manufacturing-face-shields-mat-bowtell-3d-printing-australia-fight-coronavirus | World news | 2020-04-04T20:00:09.000Z | Christopher Knaus | Manufacturing face shields within days: how Australian industry is pivoting to fight coronavirus | Achoice lay before engineer Mat Bowtell as he walked out the gates of Toyota’s Altona factory for the last time. He could watch on, helpless, as the local car manufacturing industry fell apart around him, or he could put his skills to better use.
Bowtell used his redundancy payout to set up a 3D printing facility in a small warehouse on Victoria’s Bass coast, where he began manufacturing free prosthetic hands for children with a disability.
Now, as Covid-19 fractures the economy and brings entire industries to their knees, Bowtell’s skills have again found a new purpose.
Fourteen of his 20 3D printers are now being used to manufacture thousands of face shields for healthcare workers, who are struggling to access personal protective equipment amid widespread shortages.
“With 3D printing, we’ve been able to go from making hands to making face shields in a matter of, well, days,” he told the Guardian. “To completely revamp our line, that’s how agile this technology is and how flexible it is.”
“It’s mind-blowing.”
Mat Bowtell’s 3D printing factory that has rapidly shifted into production of face protectors to help frontline medical workers deal with Covid-19. Photograph: Free 3D Hands
Bowtell’s story is not unique. All across the country, catastrophe has caused remarkable transformations. Industry in the pandemic age is finding strange ways to meet the strangest of demands. Local gin distilleries are making hand sanitiser. Carmakers are offering design expertise for hospital ventilators.
Detmold, a food packaging company, is now producing surgical masks. Textor, a company that previously created materials for nappies, sanitary pads and baby wipes, has repurposed its business toward personal protective equipment (PPE) with the help of the CSIRO.
The manufacturing industry’s guide during this pandemic-induced transformation is the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre, a not-for-profit working with the federal government.
It is trying to help the sector pivot into Covid-19-related work, setting up a central portal where businesses can register their skills, supplies, and capabilities.
“Once we set up the portal, heaven broke loose,” the AMGC managing director, Dr Jens Goennemann, told the Guardian.
“Up to today, we had 1,000 registrations from companies who not only said ‘I want to help’, but they said how they could do that.”
“So that means we can make a heat map of different skills and capabilities, which we can then throw at the most targeted need.”
The speed of the pivot has been remarkable. But it has also raised a broader question.
Before the crisis, only a single Australian factory, Med-Con’s Shepparton plant, was producing surgical masks. Similarly, there was only one significant onshore producer of ventilators, a company named Resmed.
Labor senator Kim Carr, a former industry minister, says this highlights a failing that extends well beyond just PPE and ventilators.
How, he asks, has Australia allowed key strategic industries to disappear? And why has it taken a crisis for Australia’s shortcomings to be so greatly exposed?
“This is a profound problem now,” Carr says. “For even the most simple-minded of our rightwing economists, understanding the implications of these matters surely now demonstrates the importance of us developing a more economically complex society and a more sovereign nation.”
The consequences of shortages in PPE, as one example, have been thrown into sharp relief in recent weeks.
The paucity of supplies forced hospitals to stop elective surgeries and left aged care providers with serious threats to their ability to deliver services.
Workers at dialysis units have been left to scrounge for their own masks, despite their patients being one of the most at-risk groups from Covid-19. A cancer treatment centre had to begin producing its own sanitiser using donated chemicals after vast quantities mysteriously went missing from its stores.
Catholic Healthcare Australia, which represents members with 80 hospitals, warned the federal health minister, Greg Hunt, the situation was dire and that it held “grave concerns” about PPE access.
Local manufacturing has now become a critical part of the pandemic response, both in Australia and across the world.
The World Health Organization has urged every country to boost its domestic PPE production by 40%.
“Without secure supply chains, the risk to healthcare workers around the world is real,” WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “Industry and governments must act quickly to boost supply, ease export restrictions and put measures in place to stop speculation and hoarding. We can’t stop Covid-19 without protecting health workers first.”
The Australian government has responded with a multifaceted strategy. It issued a callout to domestic industry to understand who may be able to pivot into PPE manufacturing, while releasing stocks from the reserves in the national medical stockpile. It has also sent the army in to help Med-Con, which is aiming to double or triple its production.
Exports of PPE have also been banned.
Some say Australia’s current situation exposes a failing of crisis planning.
The chair of the Australian Healthcare Reform Alliance, Jennifer Doggett, said the gradual offshoring of PPE production was “clearly extremely risky” in the event of a pandemic.
“This situation should prompt a rethink of our approach over the past several decades to move away from domestic manufacturing towards a reliance on imports,” she said. “This may save money in the short term but it is costing us now. In a wealthy country like Australia, it is unacceptable to risk the lives of health professionals because we do not have the facilities to manufacture simple materials such as masks and swabs.”
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Unions take a similar view. The national secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, Paul Bastian, told the Guardian: “I think this crisis has certainly exposed the dangers of destroying Australian manufacturing and relying entirely on an import-based model.
“Of course, as we move forward out of this crisis sometime in the future, we hope that government continues to invest in Australian manufacturing, as they have to do right now when they don’t have an alternative.”
Adamm Ferrier, a lecturer in public health at La Trobe University who helped set up Health Purchasing Victoria, agrees that there has been a “movement offshore of many manufacturing processes to countries where labour costs are more competitive”.
But Ferrier also says the problem is partly explained by the way hospitals had changed their stocking of PPE in recent years.
“Since the 1990s there has been a movement towards a ‘just in time’ supply practice that replaced a ‘just in case’ practice, where hospitals held vast quantities of supplies that often went out of date,” he said.
“The ‘just in time’ practice has served the system well, but was always predicated on the ability for the manufacture and medical supply chain to respond nimbly to changes in demand.”
Goennemann, a leader in the industry, disputes suggestions that manufacturing is in decline in Australia.
He is careful to distinguish Australia’s manufacturing sector from what people generally associate it with – producing things in factories. Production, he says, is just one part of the manufacturing process, along with research, development, design, logistics, distribution, sales and services.
In fact, Goennemann said Australia may be uniquely placed to respond. He points to 3D printing, of which Australia has an “incredible onshore capability”, as an example.
“The 3D printing capability onshore is a massive distinguisher for Australia to step up to the crisis,” he said.
Mat Bowtell (right) in one of the face shields printed on 3D printers in his Cowes factory. Photograph: Free 3D Hands
When asked how else 3D printing might be deployed in practice, Goennemann points to the supply of ventilators, which are needed to assist breathing in the most seriously ill Covid-19 patients.
A lack of ventilators has been a critical issue in countries like Italy, where doctors in swamped intensive care units have been forced to make heart-wrenching decisions about who gets access to the life-saving machines.
Australia has about 2,300 ventilators in intensive care units across the country. The government wants to increase the number of ICU beds dramatically to prepare for the peak of the pandemic, and is attempting to source more ventilators through a combination of domestic production, procurement from abroad, and the conversion of existing equipment, including from veterinarians.
Goennemann says Resmed, the main ventilator manufacturer, could struggle to get parts due to the disruption of global supply chains.
That’s where 3D printing can help.
“I don’t want to speak on behalf of Resmed, but that’s an area where we have critical supply, and parts can be 3D printed onshore rather than being procured offshore,” he said.
The industry minister, Karen Andrews, is heading up the government’s efforts to ramp up domestic production of PPE and ventilators. A special unit has been convened within her department to specifically look at PPE supply.
Aboriginal health services warn of 'catastrophic' shortage of coronavirus protective equipment
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Andrews says the response of industry is a testament to the ingenuity that exists in Australia.
“So many companies are putting up their hands to help – whether it’s ramping up manufacturing, looking to switch up what they produce, or even just connecting with each other to make sure they have what they need,” she said.
For Bowtell, the decision to shift his production to face shields had nothing to do with profit. It was about doing what he could in the most extraordinary of times.
“It’s about survival at the moment,” Bowtell said. “Just helping people to get through this together.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/14/oscars-delirium-madness-critics-star-struck | Opinion | 2015-01-14T16:06:09.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | Oscars delirium: a seasonal condition in which even critics become starstruck | Peter Bradshaw | With the announcement of the Oscar nominations, we shall undoubtedly see examples of what I call “awards season transference”, a strange phenomenon that afflicts film journalists called upon to comment on radio and TV. I myself am an occasional sufferer.
It’s simply the delirium in the air. Just as patients can fall in love with their psychoanalysts, so movie journalists can take these prizes very personally. Critics who are so airily humorous and drily detached the rest of the year will sternly announce that they are actually pretty angry or upset that their personal favourite hasn’t been nominated. They will undergo a radical personality change.
Having steadfastly refused to as much as sip the Kool-Aid for the preceding 12 months, they suddenly glug down about a gallon of it in five minutes and effectively proclaim their deep personal stake in what happens on Oscar night.
And what is seen as good news produces even more extraordinary behaviour: a kind of luvvyism-by-proxy. Actual grownup journalists with mortgages and adult responsibilities will coo: “I’m just so delighted for Meryl …” or “I’m so happy for Emily …”
Did these starstruck reporters meet the celebs briefly at some press junket or interview? Did these stars convince these poor unfamous journalists that they were their mates? I fear so. And they are therefore brilliant actors, and deserve every Oscar going.
Recipes for resentment
Confectionery lovers are enraged at news that the US owners of Cadbury have been tampering with the recipe for the Cadbury’s Creme Egg, and at what they say is an outrageous lack of any consultative process with the consumer. The shell is no longer made from Cadbury’s Dairy Milk but from the inferior “standard cocoa mix”.
This insidious messing with its components could provoke an Indian mutiny among Creme Egg lovers. Surely we need one of those change.org online petitions. I personally have never quite got over my childhood suspicion that the spelling “creme” means that the Creme Egg is not in fact made of actual cream. But I have been prepared to put these considerations to one side in the cause of continued snacking.
For me, however, this is not the worst snack-related catastrophe imaginable. If Pringles started tinkering with the recipe for their Sour Cream & Onion flavour, that would be appalling. If, for example, they started using a kind of artificial “creme” instead of “cream”, and introduced some form of artificial substitute instead of actual onions … Unthinkable.
Echoes of another Charlie
There are new and interesting reasons to relish the imminent release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s fascinating film Inherent Vice, based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel of the same name: a quasi-noir about a bleary stoner private detective on the trail of his ex-girlfriend’s kidnapped lover. It is set in Los Angeles in 1970, and its black-comic tone of paranoia is crucially set by the horrendous killings carried out in that era by the Charles Manson gang.
Manson passionately wanted those killings to trigger an apocalyptic race war, and was every bit as serious about his ideological vision as the Charlie Hebdo murderers were about theirs – and as an American political issue, racial tension was and is real enough. But of course no one took Charlie Manson seriously as a revolutionary warrior. And Thomas Pynchon and Paul Thomas Anderson find the right register to respond: with comedy, scorn and a resilient and healthy sense of surreality and the absurd that, however dark, absorbs and transcends hate.
@PeterBradshaw1 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/sep/21/arrested-development-why-are-adults-still-playing-high-schoolers-on-screen | Culture | 2021-09-21T06:13:33.000Z | Stuart Heritage | Arrested development: why are adults still playing high-schoolers on screen? | By all accounts, Dear Evan Hansen has plenty of problems to contend with. Transplanted to cinema from its Tony-winning Broadway run, it has been battered by critics for everything from its “overlong” runtime to its “wretched” writing to its “tone-deaf” plot. But nothing has set people’s teeth on edge quite like the sight of 27-year-old Ben Platt playing a teenage boy.
Dear Evan Hansen review – ghoulish Ben Platt sinks high school musical
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In fairness, the casting choice does make a sliver of sense on paper. Platt began playing Evan Hansen onstage in 2014. But he was 20 years old then, and so it wasn’t completely unthinkable that he could play a handful of years younger. The film, however, is a different story. On camera, which is always much less forgiving than the distance of a theatre seat, he is clearly much older than everyone else in his school. Add this to his twitchy, mannered, two-dimensionally outsidery performance, and Dear Evan Hansen suddenly takes on a sinister new bent. Watch the trailer alone and you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s a film about a dangerous pervert with a pathological desire to pose as a child, or a grown man hired by the government to infiltrate a school and tacitly teach the students about the lingering spectre of death.
If anything, Platt’s performance is concrete proof that adults need to stop playing teenagers as soon as possible. If you’ve seen Hulu’s PEN15, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The series – in which Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle play adolescent versions of themselves attempting to navigate high school – recently aired an animated episode. At the time I pegged it as my favourite of the series so far, but then I went back and thought about why. It was because Erskine and Konkle were only voicing their characters, rather than dressing up like schoolgirls and acting them out. Seeing two women in their mid-30s pose as children, especially in scenes where they have to be romantic with actual children, is a hell of a hurdle to clamber over. If it were simply a cartoon all the way through, I’m sure many more people would be willing to try it.
Look hard enough and you’ll be bombarded with less egregious examples. Sex Education’s Eric, for example, is supposed to be 17 years old. However, the actor who plays him, Ncuti Gatwa, is just weeks away from his 29th birthday. Mindy Kaling once congratulated herself for casting a teenage actor as the lead of her Netflix sitcom Never Have I Ever. That said, her 16-year-old love interest is played by Darren Barnet, who turned 30 in April.
And then there’s Stranger Things. The first season derived all of its charm from watching an excitable band of tweenagers cosplay their way through nostalgic sci-fi tropes. But they all got the job six years ago, when they were actually young. Technically just 20 months separates the first and third season of Stranger Things, but the cast aged four years in that time. By the time season four arrives next year, Caleb McLaughlin will be pushing 21, with the rest of the cast in hot pursuit. So what happens? Do they play their age and destroy the central theme of the show, or do they go full Ben Platt and pretend that the ageing process can be halted?
In fact, Stranger Things is a very good example of why adult actors are often used to play teenage roles on TV. Your teenage years are a highly volatile time, when your face, body and voice can change again and again in a matter of months. By the time you’re in your 20s, that has all settled down, so there’s a case for arguing that a young adult will make a more consistent teenage presence than an actual teenager.
The cast of Stranger Things. Photograph: Netflix
But Dear Evan Hansen isn’t a TV show. It’s a film, and a film filled with actors who are visibly much younger than Ben Platt. Perhaps the film could have gone down the Grease route and just filled the entire school with transparently adult adults to lessen the shock. Olivia Newton-John was 29 when Grease was filmed. Michael Tucci was 31. Stockard Channing was 33.
And it worked, sort of, because everyone was that age. If they’d stuck an actual 17-year-old in there for fun, staggering around in abject terror because all their schoolmates suddenly looked like their parents, then the jig would have been up. But they didn’t, because they’re not stupid. Dear Evan Hansen, meanwhile, has done the opposite. There are loads of children, and then a disastrously de-aged adult hoofing around in the centre of them looking like somebody has tried to draw a human face on a thumb. It’s horrible.
Still, at least Platt has a way to go before he catches up with the weirdest ever adult-as-teen performance in screen history. Barbara Streisand was 41 when she played a 17-year-old girl in Yentl. Perhaps Platt can match her by holding on and revisiting the character in Dear Evan Hansen 2: The Ickening. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/13/field-day-festival-review-skepta-deerhunter-james-blake-pj-harvey | Music | 2016-06-13T12:24:57.000Z | Dorian Lynskey | Field Day festival review – a collective roar in the face of the storm | “M
aybe you can just dance the rain away,” says one member of cheerful Brooklyn art-pop band Yeasayer to a soggy field of umbrellas and plastic ponchos. “I dunno. I’ve tried everything.” The best way to enjoy Field Day is to dash around the site sampling as much as possible, but that’s a lot harder on a grey, sloshy day which never quite recovers from a punishing mid-afternoon downpour.
The bands do their best in sub-optimal circumstances. On the main stage, Atlanta’s unpredictable Deerhunter have never sounded so warm and inviting, signing off with the joyfully slinky Snakeskin. Elsewhere, Kelela performs dreamy, slow-motion R&B, Floating Points reboot jazz fusion for clubbers and ferocious young Dubliners Girl Band play techno-influenced noise-rock like someone trying to cough up a razor blade.
Warm and inviting … Bradford Cox leads the charge for Deerhunter at Field Day. Photograph: Burak Cingi/Redferns
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There are two very different manifestations of urban ill-temper: the permanently furious Sleaford Mods and grime star Skepta, whose panicky mean-streets anthem It Ain’t Safe is bellowed lustily by people whose biggest anxiety is wet feet. Notwithstanding brief episodes of techno and grime, James Blake is an unusually intimate headliner but his introspective electronic soul swells to suit the occasion, reaching a powerful climax with The Wilhelm Scream’s oceanic roar.
On Sunday the average age of the performers vaults at least a decade, and the crowd is bigger, older and drier. The Shacklewell Arms tent fills to overflowing for the thrillingly volatile Fat White Family. Like the young Libertines, they strike you as the kind of band who would ask to crash at your place and then make you regret saying yes. Frontman Lias Saoudi ends the set stripped down to his pants, as is his wont. Sweden’s mysterious Goat also have a sinister edge. Dressed in robes and headdresses, they play sinewy, shamanic psychedelia that could be the soundtrack to a hair-raising ritual. John Grant, contrastingly, is charm incarnate with his funny, beautiful songs about depression and self-hatred. Only the Avalanches disappoint; the Australians are about to release their first album in 16 years but this messy DJ set leaves many fans nonplussed.
Mean-streets anthem … Skepta. Photograph: Gus Stewart/Redferns
When PJ Harvey takes to the main stage, feathered and regal like a black swan, storm clouds are roiling and lightning flashing. It’s a fittingly dramatic backdrop to a set which begins with five forbidding songs from recent album The Hope Six Demolition Project, before slowly ratcheting up the energy. Harvey is never less than mesmerising as she physically inhabits each song: a serpentine hypnotist for Down By the Water, a thrashing live wire for 50 Ft Queenie. During the eerie When Under Ether she arches her neck and holds the pose so that she resembles, on the black-and-white screens beside the stage, a still from a silent movie. Her band, which includes former Bad Seeds, look like grizzled bodyguards protecting an exiled monarch. She closes with A Perfect Day Elise, crying: “It’s a perfect day!” Field Day wasn’t quite that this year but Harvey’s theatrical intensity makes for a memorable finale. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/dec/04/biography.features1 | Books | 2005-12-04T00:41:03.000Z | Rebecca Seal | Observer review: Teacher Man by Frank McCourt | Teacher Man
by Frank McCourt
Fourth Estate £18.99, pp258
Frank McCourt's stock in trade is writing about his own life, and so this follow up to Angela's Ashes and 'Tis details his life as an English teacher in New York high schools.
To say he didn't start out as a great teacher is something of an understatement - in fact he was removed from a number of jobs before it was recognised he had any capacity to teach anyone anything. That, and the fact that he was addled by self-doubt and not infrequent heavy drinking for the rest of his working life, is finally a good thing for him now that he is a bona fide writer. The ups and many downs of his career - sometimes hilarious, sometimes cringingly awful - provide invaluable material for this book which traces his life up to his retirement from teaching and the beginning of his life as a novelist.
McCourt seems to have existed on the edges of everything he's done except teaching: 'If there was a circle I was never part of it. I prowled the periphery.' He has lived as an Irishman who was raised in New York, who returned to Ireland with an American accent, and then returned to America with an Irish one.
After leaving the American army he did his teacher training at New York University but then couldn't impress any schools enough to get a job. Next, he worked on the New York docks, where he didn't really fit in because he was university educated. He married but the marriage failed, went to Trinity College in Dublin to do a PhD, but never felt a part of the student body and didn't manage to complete the course.
The only place he ever seems to have belonged was in front of a class, and it took him 15 years to manage to do that with any aplomb, although it's difficult to know whether his self-deprecation is disingenuousness or exaggeration, or if he really was as shy, miserable and irrational as he portrays himself to be.
Whatever the answer, one consequence is that it is hard to tell quite how he arrives at the point where his creative writing classes are over-subscribed. He can't ever have been the truly awful teacher he suggests he was, or he would never have been given the jobs he got, nor would he have been allowed to continue with his completely unorthodox teaching methods: by the end, the book becomes a paean to ignoring the curriculum.
This book is charming, and it relies heavily and successfully on the lilting style and phonetic writing that marked out his last two books. At times McCourt can be a deeply frustrating protagonist, but this is, none the less, a really good read. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/jan/22/on-my-radar-mark-oliver-everetts-cultural-highlights | Music | 2022-01-22T15:00:56.000Z | Kathryn Bromwich | On my radar: Mark Oliver Everett’s cultural highlights | Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Mark Oliver Everett, 58, is the frontman of alternative rock band Eels and is also known by the stage name E. Since 1996, Eels have released 13 studio albums including the acclaimed Beautiful Freak, Electro-Shock Blues and Blinking Lights and Other Revelations. Eels won best international breakthrough act at the 1998 Brit awards, while a 2007 BBC documentary about Everett and his father, physicist Hugh Everett III, won a Royal Television Society award. He lives in Los Angeles. The new Eels album, Extreme Witchcraft, will be released on 28 January and they tour the UK from March.
Photograph: Feral House
1. Book
Glamour Ghoul: The Passions and Pain of the Real Vampira, Maila Nurmi by Sandra Nurmi
I really like biographies, because I’m interested in the possibilities of human life and what people have been through. I stumbled upon this book about the first American TV horror host, Vampira – she was portrayed in the Tim Burton film Ed Wood. It was written by her niece and it’s fascinating and full of jaw-dropping moments. For example, she ends up getting pregnant with Orson Welles’s child, but never tells him and gives the child up for adoption. The child had no idea his father was Welles until Vampira’s niece contacted him as a 50- or 60-year-old.
2. Documentary
Get Back (Disney+)
The Beatles in the studio. Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy
I was very sceptical about this, from all the hype around it – I am an extreme Beatles nerd. There is nothing I know more about than the Beatles and I just thought this was going to be a glossing over of history. I’m happy to say that Peter Jackson proved me completely wrong – it’s incredible. I don’t know how no one else thought to do this for 50 years. It was really interesting to me just how sweet and agreeable John Lennon was through the whole thing. And, of course, when Ringo admits to farting, that’s a highlight.
3. Movie
Coco (Pixar, 2017)
A scene from Coco. Photograph: Pixar/Disney/Allstar
One of the great things about the Get Back documentary was, as a father of a four-year-old, I was excited that there was finally something on Disney+ for Dad to watch. One of the other things I discovered there was the movie Coco, which I was late coming to. I’ve now seen it probably 100 times with my son and I’m still not sick of it. It’s particularly in my wheelhouse because it’s about life and death and manages to connect the two in a beautiful, really moving way. I honestly think it’s one of the best movies ever made.
4. YouTube
Brittany Howard NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
Watch Brittany Howard’s Tiny Desk Concert.
I was aware of Brittany Howard’s music and I liked her songs that I’d heard. And then I stumbled upon her Tiny Desk Concert and it’s stunning. It’s as good as music gets, in my book. You’ve got to watch this and listen to the first song, Stay High – it’s an amazing, spine-tingling performance. It’s got that unspeakable magic: it’s gospel-like, super soulful and what it’s saying is a beautiful sentiment, said in a way that no one’s really said before.
5. Graphic novel
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist by Adrian Tomine
Panels from The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist by Adrian Tomine. Photograph: Adrian Tomine/Drawn & Quarterly
Graphic novels were a huge influence on me in the early days of the Eels. This is a really beautiful autobiographical book and it’s simultaneously really funny and cringeworthy because Tomine depicts a lot of embarrassing stories about himself. He’s very open and honest, and it also has some really moving parts and will probably make you cry at some point. My favourite genre: funny and heartbreaking. He’s really great at being completely honest about being an artist, to having some renown and navigating people knowing who he is or not knowing him.
6. Box set
The Girl from Chickasaw County: The Complete Capitol Masters by Bobbie Gentry
Bobbie Gentry. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
Bobbie Gentry is an amazing, somewhat unsung artist. This box set has all seven of her albums – the last one was in 1971 – plus tons of unreleased stuff. She is one of the few people who said: “I’m going to go away” and meant it. She really knew what she was doing in every area: singing, songwriting, choreography. She was often producing her music but didn’t get credit for it. I think the reason she quit and disappeared was because she was a woman who wasn’t being taken seriously in the music industry. She probably just got fed up with it and said: “Nah, I don’t need this.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/may/11/why-im-heading-to-the-isle-of-wight-after-lockdown-tom-jackson | Travel | 2020-05-11T10:00:04.000Z | Tom Jackson | Postcard from the future: 'Why I'm heading to the Isle of Wight after lockdown' | One reason I spend so much time wading through boxes of old postcards in junk shops is to snoop on holidays I can never take. On one side are pictured places that are no longer quite there, reproduced in colours that nature doesn’t recognise; on the other are semi-legible messages from holidaymakers 50 or 60 years ago.
“They say it was hot last week. Just our luck.”
As I flick through the thousands of postcards, I’m often struck by how many are from the Isle of Wight: the SRN6 hovercraft with its bulbous rubber skirt, the Needles set in a deep turquoise sea, the manicured thatch of the old villages at Shanklin and Godshill.
When lockdown is over and the coast is clear, the contact tracing-app forgotten, I’m heading straight for the island. I haven’t been there for 20 years but something is calling me. I’ve seen the faded postcards. I get the message. It won’t be an ambitious holiday, but it will feel right.
“We’ve nearly seen everything now, and then I suppose we’ll start again.”
I’ll be happy to take the chairlift at Alum Bay as we did, clutching a Norfolk terrier, on a family trip in 1998, and intend to enter fully into the spirit of Blackgang Chine, which must surely have outgrown its decorated rockery and large plastic dinosaur. If we plan it right and the weather holds, we can also look forward to doing absolutely nothing on the beach at Sandown.
Inevitably, my journey will be a postcard pilgrimage. Since the publisher J Salmon closed in 2018, WJ Nigh & Sons has inherited the title of the UK’s oldest postcard publisher. In 1903, William James Nigh was an Isle of Wight postman who saw just how much of his postbag was taken up with postcards and decided to get himself a slice, setting up his own company in his shed. By the 1950s, it was producing more than a million postcards a year.
As I write this, I’m missing the funeral, held on the Isle of Wight under lockdown, of my aunt, who died two weeks ago. In normal circumstances I would have been there. A long overdue post-Covid trip will also, importantly, give me a chance to pay my respects.
“What more could you wish for – except for another week.”
Tom Jackson’s latest book is Postcard From The Past (HarperCollins, £8.99). Follow him on Twitter @PastPostcard | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/dec/25/james-webb-worlds-most-powerful-telescope-makes-its-first-call-to-australia-on-christmas-day | Science | 2021-12-24T19:00:33.000Z | Tory Shepherd | James Webb: world’s most powerful telescope makes its first call to Australia on Christmas Day | As the James Webb space telescope hurtles away from Earth at 38,000km/h, its first communication will be with Canberra.
CSIRO’s Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex is expecting to hear from the $13.6bn craft on Christmas night.
Nasa says the James Webb, which replaces the Hubble space telescope, will “gaze into the epoch when the very first stars and galaxies formed, over 13.5bn years ago”.
But before it enters an orbit around the sun, it will check in with Canberra. Glen Nagle, from CSIRO’s Nasa tracking station, said it will be like receiving an email.
James Webb space telescope mission gets ready for Christmas Eve launch
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“We know where it’ll be in our skies. We will lock on to the signal with our antenna, then we’ll refine the signal,” he said.
“It’ll still be relatively close, not more than a few hundred kilometres away, but it’s going straight out. We’ll track it, follow it, as it accelerates to about 38,000km/h to reach escape velocity.
“It’s sending a set of demands, the digital ones and zeroes and then the space craft sends back the info we’ll have asked for, which in this chase will be its health. Has it deployed its solar panels correctly, is it generating power, are all the systems on board OK?”
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The team will also make sure it’s on the right course. Then they hand over to the Spain tracking station, who in turn will pass over to the US tracking station, before Canberra picks it up again about 20 minutes after it has separated from its main rocket.
Then, 1.5m kilometres away from Earth, it will unfold its mirrors, its sunshield, and then astronomers will be able to use what it sees to study the beginning of the universe, as well as planets that could harbour liquid water and other signatures of habitability.
Swinburne University of Technology scientists will be among those using the telescope’s findings. Prof Karl Glazebrook, from the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, will be using its optical and infrared capabilities. It will “revolutionise the study of space”, he said.
The Hubble space telescope orbiting the Earth (left) and an illustration of the James Webb space telescope, which is 100 times more powerful. Photograph: AP
“The telescope is up to a million times more sensitive to infrared than any ground-based telescope, allowing us to see back to the beginning of time, to the first stars and galaxies after the big bang, and solve some of the greatest mysteries of the universe.”
Dr Benjamin Pope, from the University of Queensland, will work with an international team to enhance images from the telescope.
“We will use hardware and new software to achieve very high resolution and contrast, in order to study the process of planet and star formation,” he said.
After decades of planning, the telescope’s launch was delayed by high winds this week, but is now slated to blast off at 11.20pm AEDT on Saturday. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/may/25/galileo-uk-will-build-own-satellite-system-if-frozen-out-of-eu-brexit | Politics | 2018-05-25T08:06:46.000Z | Daniel Boffey | UK will build own satellite system if frozen out of EU's Galileo – chancellor | The chancellor, Philip Hammond, has warned that the UK will build its own satellite navigation system to rival the European Union’s €10bn (£9bn) Galileo project if Brussels carries out its threat to block access.
The European commission has cited legal issues about sharing sensitive information with a non-member state to justify its decision to shut British firms out of the project. The EU has also said it will restrict access to encrypted signals from Galileo.
Speaking as he arrived in Brussels for a meeting of finance ministers on Friday, Hammond said the UK could not accept the EU’s decision to block British companies from the satellite’s manufacture and the government from secure aspects of the project.
EU split over exclusion of UK from Galileo after Brexit
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He told reporters: “We need access to a satellite system of this kind. A plan has always been to work as a core member of the Galileo project, contributing financially and technically to the project.
“If that proves impossible then Britain will have to go it alone, possibly with other partners outside Europe and the US, to build a third competing system. But for national security strategic reasons we need access to a system and will ensure that we get it.”
The UK is said to be hopeful that Australia could be a partner for such a rival project, should the impasse with the EU continue.
The EU is insistent that the UK had agreed in 2011 as an EU member state on the rules on blocking non-EU countries from access to secure elements of the project.
A senior EU official said, after some fraught negotiations this week, that it had become clear the UK “would like to transform Galileo from a union programme to a joint EU-UK programme, and that is quite a big ask for the EU”.
“They want to have privileged access to the security elements of PRS (the encrypted navigation system for government-authorised users) and to be able to continue manufacturing the security modules which would mean that after Brexit the UK, as a third country, would have the possibility to turn off the signal for the EU,” the official said.
“It also means they are asking for information and the possibility to produce the security modules that would give them information that currently not all member states have.”
The European commission will to report back to member states to gauge their views, but the UK’s approach has been described as a “big ask”.
On Thursday, the EU accused British negotiators of “chasing a fantasy” and failing to get to grips with the consequences of Brexit. A senior EU official also claimed progress on the problem of avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland was proving elusive, something the UK government sources suggest is mere posturing by Brussels.
In a sign that the criticism has been felt, the prime minister’s chief Brexit adviser, Olly Robbins, who has been leading the talks this week, wrote a rare tweet on Friday morning.
He said: “Very proud of the x-Government team that worked so hard to support technical talks in Brussels this week. UK proposals for a deep relationship, calmly and professionally presented.”
The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, said: “On the same day the Office for National Statistics has confirmed that UK economic growth is the weakest it’s been in six years, it’s not surprising the chancellor is looking to focus on matters in outer space.
“Working people will be rightly angry that Philip Hammond can find billions of pounds at the drop of a hat for a space programme, yet is not prepared to find the money our vital public services like the NHS desperately need.
“It’s time the chancellor came down to Earth, to prove he is on the same planet as the rest of us by recognising what he is putting people in our country through with his austerity cuts.”
The EU wants the UK to agree by a European council summit in June to present a workable backstop position for Northern Ireland that would come into force should a future trade deal or bespoke technological solutions fail to arise that could avoid the need for a hard border.
In recent days, the prime minister has suggested a solution could be found in the UK staying in the customs union for a time-limited period.
But the EU is insistent that the backstop must be “Northern Ireland-specific”. The official said: “We have to do away with the fantasy that there is an all-UK solution to that.”
Responding to the EU’s withering assessment of the UK’s approach, Hammond told reporters: “We’re having very constructive discussions. I don’t think that’s a particularly helpful comment; there are obviously a wide range of views on both sides.“Everybody I’ve engaged with has been very constructive, very keen to find a way to move forward. We’re very conscious of the ticking clock and the need to make significant progress for the June European council and that’s what we’re here to do.”
Hammond said the government was looking at “all sorts of options to deliver the reassurances that are being sought around maintaining the Irish border in an open condition”.
He said: “That’s a priority for us. We’re very keen to find a way to move forward and we’re looking at all the options.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/03/nhs-religion-tories-health-service | Opinion | 2018-07-03T05:00:29.000Z | Polly Toynbee | The NHS is our religion: it’s the only thing that saves it from the Tories | Polly Toynbee | Glorious celebrations for this week’s NHS 70th birthday mark the proudest social democratic moment of our history. The Labour party descended on Tredegar, Nye Bevan’s birthplace, to march through the streets to brass bands, and London marched too. Everything lyrically expressed in Danny Boyle’s Olympic ceremony, with its 300 glowing NHS beds filled with bouncing children, is emotionally reprised in this reminder of our better selves.
'We felt we were special': 70 years of saving lives on the NHS frontline
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Welshman Owen Sheers’s epic poem, crafted from intense interviews with staff and patient, made a heart-stopping BBC2 film, The NHS: To Provide All People, on Saturday. This eulogy was a psalm to humanity, to life and death, survival and tragedy, care and peril – everything precious and terrifying that happens in hospitals, our temples to mortality. Sheers calls the NHS “the most radical and beautiful idea we’ve ever realised”.
Over the top? Pass-the-sick-bag sentimental or plain delusional, considering the NHS’s current state of precipitous decline? “The envy of the world,” boasts NHS England’s own glorifying 70th birthday website. This great hullaballoo was cunningly devised by the NHS England chief Simon Stevens, who long ago started spreading the unstoppable, irresistible rumour that Theresa May must mark the day with a big funding gift or else this would become a national wake – and her party’s too. Despite Treasury and other spending ministers’ resentment, the birthday idea ensured the NHS got just enough to hobble on in its current state, averting immediate catastrophe.
The public’s passionate political support abides in good times and bad – and there is nothing Conservatives can do to shift that, try as they might. Sucking lemons, grinding their teeth – every Tory hoping for office must bow down at the altar and pretend. When one MP simply couldn’t keep it in, exploding mid-Olympic ceremony with a tweet calling it “leftie multi-cultural crap!” he was rapidly stamped on.
But he spoke for a strong gut feeling in his party. The Tories voted 22 times against the creation of the NHS, warning it was “Hitlerian” and it would “sap the very foundations on which our national character has been built. It is another link in the chain that is binding us all to the machine of state.” The British Medical Association, then mostly Tory doctors, said it was “a dagger blow to personal freedom” that would “enslave the medical profession”. Ever since, a strong core of the Tory party has kept calling for NHS “reform” that would end its founding principles. Their newspapers and thinktanks bristle with bright ideas for top-up fees or personal insurance. It’s insufferable to them that the state, not the market, should run such a mighty enterprise efficiently, even when underfunded. The BBC and the NHS are the best of social democratic symbols, whose very existence, let alone their success and popularity, are an affront to all that Tories believe.
When Nigel Lawson called the NHS “the closest thing the English people have to a religion”, he said it with sneering despair: why is this usually Conservative-leaning nation so stubborn in its NHS adoration? But the party’s leaders know they tamper at their peril with one of our island story’s key creeds, one that inspires authentic patriotism.
So Tories prowl angrily around the edges, pretending they only want NHS improvements. Yesterday Alex Massie in the Times walloped the Guardian for “a great eruption of cant” about “the greatest cult of our time”, full of “guff and unctuous flattery” that has become “a block to the reform and change it needs”.
Some are even more outspoken. Charles Moore in the Spectator writes: “The government’s pledge to increase NHS spending is disgusting.” Last Friday’s Times leader was more of the same: “Sooner rather than later the NHS needs to be rethought from the ground up.” The Sunday Telegraph calls the NHS “unaccountable and unmanageable”. You might think the great destruction wrought by the Health and Social Care Act 2012, which wasted £2bn and broke the NHS into expensively bureaucratic fragments designed to invite in private companies, would have scotched all appetite for yet more “reform”. But on they go: the word “reform” has become a never-ending threat.
I have covered the NHS since writing a book about it in 1976, reporting on myriad “reforms” as every new health minister thinks they have a new answer. But there is no fundamental problem, just a need for eternally vigilant pursuit of improvements inside every clinic and ward, spreading best practice and innovations. Prevention is better than cure; public health and easing social deprivation matters more than medicine. Shifting resources out of hospitals into the community, and blending the NHS with social care, are longstanding unachieved endeavours – irrelevant to Tory calls for new payment or private provider systems.
Results in the NHS reflect its funding. It does less well at saving heart and cancer patients than countries that are better funded: Germany and France spend more than 11% of GDP, Britain spends 9.7%. Our comparative results outperform our fewer doctors, nurses, beds and cash – but our overall results, well below similar countries, are caused more by our worse poverty and inequality than by NHS failings.
Protect the NHS – but don’t protect it to death
Harry Quilter-Pinner
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Our system is more efficient than insurance-based ones that involve complex paper-chasing. Recent high productivity in the NHS – at 1.4% a year, far better than the UK average – is a bit illusory, though mainly due to severe pay freezes and high vacancy rates: exhausted staff treating more patients is causing a haemorrhage of professionals. Our problem is the erratic see-saw funding, plunging under Tory governments and rising to 7% extra a year under New Labour, only to plummet again. It’s not a bottomless pit: the usually zip-lipped head of the National Audit Office warns it needs considerably more to care for a sicker, older population.
Bevan may or may not have said: “The NHS will last as long as there’s folk with faith left to fight for it.” But that’s a political truth: to Tory chagrin, polls show there still are plenty such folk. Whenever the Tories are in power, an underfunded NHS staggers, allowing outriders to claim this proves it’s “unsustainable”, in need of some other (private) funding formula. So far, in each of these crises, political necessity has forced Tory governments to capitulate and pay out, even now in the depths of their austerity. Bevan definitely did claim: “We now have the moral leadership of the world.” And at that moment we did, the first country to bring in free health and social security. But who, looking at our society, could claim leadership in social progress now?
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2012/aug/01/how-make-perfect-salade-nicoise | Food | 2012-08-01T13:00:00.000Z | Felicity Cloake | How to make the perfect salade niçoise | Having spent about two-thirds of my life to date avoiding salade niçoise I'm taking a deep breath before wading into this subject. It is as contentious as the exact rules of pétanque or the optimal ratio of pastis to water at l'heure de l'apéro, and I feel scantily qualified.
In my defence, when I actually spent some time in Nice and its environs I realised my prejudice was entirely based on the British version of the dish, which regards tinned tuna (my bete noir) as a mandatory ingredient. In the cafes of the Alpes Maritime, however, the constituent parts are far more of a lottery – and tuna, in my happy experience, is definitely less popular than the diminutive anchovy. As Nigel Slater observes, "whenever I say 'hold the tuna' I am invariably told that I wasn't going to get any anyway".)
In this country, then, as well as the objectionably odoriferous fish, a salade niçoise will always, always contain hard-boiled eggs, potatoes and French beans – and perhaps a couple of rubbery black olives. These are exactly the kind of ingredients that provoked the considerable ire of Nice's former mayor, Jacques Médecin, who managed to take time out from sympathising with the Front National to write a Niçoise cookbook, in part, he says, inspired by the horrific experience, "all around the world' of seeing 'the remains of other people's meals being served under the name salade niçoise".
"Whatever you do," Médecin begs, "if you want to be a worthy exponent of Niçoise cookery, never, never, I beg you, include boiled potato or any other boiled vegetable." And, just because the man was convicted of embezzlement and accused of womanising and racism doesn't mean he couldn't make a decent salad. Just ask any chef.
The matter of fish
Gary Rhodes recipe salade niçoise - heavy on the tuna. Photograph: Felicity Cloake
As it's the issue that looms largest in my mind, first I'm going to tackle the issue of fish. Médecin says that traditionally anchovies are a more common addition than expensive tuna, which was saved for special occasions, and that the two would never be used together (although he admits sadly that "nowadays even the Niçois often combine anchovies with tuna").
I'm surprised to find that the first few recipes I look at eschew the tuna altogether – Rowley Leigh, Nigel Slater and Simon Hopkinson all prefer it without – but finally, I find an exponent in good old Delia Smith, who calls the niçoise "one of the best combinations of salad ingredients ever invented". And, although I also expect to find lots of recipes calling for seared fresh tuna, as served in what Delia describes as many a "slick restaurant", I actually have to hunt around a bit for one of them too, finally finding one in an old Gary Rhodes book. Perhaps the idea has gone the same way as sun-dried tomatoes and balsamic reductions.
In order to give the fish a fair trial, I shell out for the priciest tinned tuna I can find (Ortiz, which, as well as passing muster on sustainability, I am gratified to later discover, also has a fan in Mr Hopkinson), and enlist a tasting panel of less biased niçoise fans. I try a bit straight from the can, and it's actually not bad, even when sniffed at close quarters, but in the salad I'm not convinced. It's nice enough, but it has quite a mild flavour which doesn't have a hope against the strident saltiness of the anchovies. Indeed, the majority of my tasters agree it's "a bit pointless" in this context – so that's tuna out. If you do want to use it, I'd obey M Médecin and leave out the anchovies.
Gary serves his chargrilled tuna with a sort of niçoise salsa. It makes, I must admit, a very fine supper, but it's not a salade niçoise – and chopping up such an expensive piece of fish and tossing it together with the salad would seem like a terrible waste. Anchovies it is. And again, we'll go with Ortiz.
Fruit and vegetables
Delia Smith recipe salade niçoise. Photograph: Felicity Cloake
Gary and Delia Smith are the only recipes that use potatoes – waxy little new ones, as in the finest potato salads. I'm unsurprised to find that they're utterly delicious with the anchovies, capers and eggs, but I'm not convinced by them with the tomatoes and cucumber – indeed, Médecin's diatribe has given me pause for thought.
Although the Provencales aren't averse to the odd spud (see also brandade), you'd be hard-pressed to call them a typically Mediterranean ingredient, and I think they clash with the sunshine flavours of the rest of the salad. A French website I find notes that, all too often, "salade niçoise" is simply used as another name for a mixed salad – and however nice potatoes are in a salad, they quite possibly have no place in this particular one. Reluctantly, I ditch the spuds.
On to French beans, again as used by Delia and Gary, and which also have their fans in Nigel Slater and Simon Hopkinson. Rowley Leigh is strongly against them, and David Lebovitz, who proclaims himself a disciple of Médecin on this point, goes for raw broad beans instead. The tasting panel is divided: two of our number come out very strongly in favour of the French beans, while the rest of us like the broad variety.
What is certain is that both add body to the salad, tomatoes and cucumbers being undeniably rather watery entities, so I'm going to sit on the fence on this one and recommend broad beans for as long as you can get the fresh kind. If you really want to make a salade niçoise at any other time of the year (which I wouldn't recommend, with ripe tomatoes so hard to get hold of in this country at the best of times) go for French beans instead.
Rowley Leigh recipe salade niçoise. Photograph: Felicity Cloake
Lebovitz uses torn lettuce in his salad, as does Nigel Slater, while Delia says she now likes "to abandon [it] in favour of a few rocket leaves". The panel unanimously prefers the salads, like Rowley Leigh's, which contain no leaves whatsoever – although I serve the Lebovitz salad immediately one taster describes it as "a little bit sad' in comparison with the robust crunchiness of its competitors. Even the peppery rocket seems a bit of an afterthought.
Cucumber is pretty much a constant, apart from in a version by Jean-Noël Escudier in his La Veritable Cuisine Provencale et Niçoise, quoted by Elizabeth David in French Provincial Cooking, which is a very simple affair of tomatoes strewn with anchovies, chopped green pepper and black olives. I like the crunch it adds – and the simple refreshment it provides in a dish which, for maximum enjoyment, should be saved for very hot days. Deseeding it is essential however, so it doesn't make the salad too watery, and peeling it in stripes, as Rowley Leigh suggests, is a very easy way to make it look pretty too.
Escudier recipe salade niçoise. Photograph: Felicity Cloake
As Escudier's recipe suggests, tomatoes should be a major part of every niçoise – and they have to be really ripe. I'm tempted to regard skinning them, as Rowley and Delia suggest, as an unnecessary cheffy faff for such a rustic salad, until I realise that without their skins they absorb even more of the dressing. It only takes a minute in any case. Deseeding them is another must, for the same reason as the cucumber.
Gary and Rowley Leigh use spring onions, Delia shallots, and David Lebovitz suggests spring onions or thinly sliced red onion. The raw shallots are too aggressive, but I quite like the red onion – the flavour of the spring onion, however, wins on freshness grounds.
Médecin uses green pepper, as does Escudier, which suggests to me it's the traditional choice. Gary opts for yellow, presumably for the flash of colour it delivers, but I prefer the sweetness of Rowley Leigh's red pepper with the saltiness of the anchovies and olives. Rowley also uses radishes, which seem too northern. Médecin suggests small globe artichokes, sliced and added raw, which I'm unable to find – Nigel's marinated artichoke hearts seem like a clear contravention of the cooked vegetable rule.
The eggs factor
Sadly missed in the Escudier recipe, eggs should be hard boiled, as Rowley Leigh suggests. Hot things in cold salads are not particularly nice, and cold soft-boiled eggs are divisive. One of my tasters sagely observes that they maintain their integrity better cut into wedges, rather than sliced.
The dressing
David Lebovitz recipe salade niçoise. Photograph: Felicity Cloake
Médecin, and thus David Lebovitz, dresses his salad with fruity olive oil (local of course). Rowley Leigh and Escudier go for a simple drizzle of red wine vinegar and olive oil, Delia makes a garlicky, mustardy vinaigrette, and Gary mixes finely chopped eggs with garlic and herbs and olive oil. Delia's dressing is too dominant: you don't need Dijon mustard if you have Provencale olives and anchovies (although Delia actually uses English mustard powder). A hint of vinegar is nice though – Lebovitz's salad tastes a bit too oily without it.
Garlic, however, is an absolute must – and adding it to the dressing is a more reliable way of doing things than the classic rubbing of the salad bowl trick. I'm also borrowing an idea from Gary Rhodes' salsa niçoise and finely chopping a few anchovies in addition to the slivers of fish used as a topping; this way you get a punch of gloriously salty anchovies in every bite, which is definitely a good thing as far as I'm concerned. Capers are, I think, optional – Médecin doesn't use them, but they do work well with the other Provencale goodies in the dish.
A classic fines herbes is a popular addition to salade niçoise – Delia suggests chives and chervil and tarragon, among others, a combination also favoured by Escoffier, and she also adds chopped parsley but I finally decide on the basil preferred by Leigh and Médecin – it puts the final, Mediterranean stamp on the dish.
Perfect salade niçoise
Felicity's perfect salade niçoise (served on the no-no crockery. For the finished shot, scroll to the top of the page). Photograph: Felicity Cloake
Serves 2
2 eggs
500g broad bean pods or 50g French beans
4 ripe tomatoes
¼ cucumber
2 spring onions, finely chopped
½ red pepper, thinly sliced
50g small black olives, pitted
1 tbsp capers
4 anchovies, cut into slivers
A few basil leaves, roughly torn
For the dressing:
1 small clove of garlic
Pinch of coarse salt
2 anchovies, finely chopped
Small handful of basil leaves, torn
4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
½ tbsp red wine vinegar
Black pepper
1. Put the eggs in a pan of cold water and bring slowly to the boil. Simmer for 7½ minutes, then decant into a bowl of iced water. Meanwhile, pod and then peel the broad beans (if using French beans, top and tail them, then cook in salted boiling water until just tender and decant into iced water) and drop the tomatoes into boiling water for 15 seconds, then peel, slice and deseed them. Peel the cucumber in stripes, then deseed and cut into half moons.
2. Make the dressing by pounding the garlic to a paste in a pestle and mortar along with a pinch of coarse salt. Add the anchovies and then the basil, and pound to a paste, adding the olive oil and the vinegar as you go. Season with black pepper.
3. To put the salad together, toss the beans, tomatoes, cucumber, spring onion and red pepper together with two-thirds of the dressing and decant on to a plate. Peel and quarter the eggs and arrange on top, along with the olives, capers, anchovy strips and basil leaves. Spoon the remaining dressing over the salad and serve immediately.
Are you passionate about potatoes, fanatical about French beans, or do you think a salade niçoise wouldn't dare step out on the Promenade des Anglais without its tuna? Does anyone make it with whatever's in season, peasant-style, and is it a dish that demands expensive anchovies, or will anything from a tin do? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/13/labor-misinformation-bill-objections-freedom-of-speech-religious-freedom | Australia news | 2023-11-13T01:37:37.000Z | Josh Taylor | Labor to overhaul misinformation bill after objections over freedom of speech | The Albanese government will overhaul a draft bill targeting misinformation and disinformation online after strong pushback against the proposal.
It will also delay introducing the legislation into parliament until 2024.
The draft legislation, released for consultation earlier this year would have allowed the Australian Communications and Media Authority to require social media companies to toughen their policies on “content [that] is false, misleading or deceptive, and where the provision of that content on the service is reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm”.
The consultation drew 23,000 responses, including 3,000 submissions, many of which were critical of the bill. The large response also came after campaigns against the bill from the Coalition, One Nation and former LNP MP George Christensen.
The aim was to give Acma more powers to enforce an already-in-place voluntary industry code that includes companies such as Meta, X (formerly Twitter), Microsoft and Google.
Why is Labor’s bill on combatting disinformation so controversial?
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Reaction to the bill claimed that it would stifle speech online, and would not protect religious speech in particular.
Those opposed claimed companies would over-censor to avoid being fined by Acma – which would gain information gathering powers, and could also fine individuals and companies for providing false evidence during this process, up to $6.875m or 5% of global turnover.
On Sunday, the communications minister, Michelle Rowland, said the government would take on board the responses in the public consultation and would “improve the bill”.
“The government is considering refinements to the bill, including to definitions, exemptions and clarification on religious freedom, among other things.”
She said the government remained committed to “holding powerful digital platforms to account for seriously harmful misinformation and disinformation on their services”.
“In the face of seriously harmful content that sows division, undermines support for pillars of our democracy, or disrupts public health responses, doing nothing is not an option.”
Under the proposed legislation, Acma would not direct companies to remove pieces of content but rather focus on the processes the company has in place to tackle misinformation, Acma chair Nerida O’Loughlin told Senate estimates last month.
“Do the digital platforms have systems and processes in place? Are they sticking to those systems and processes? Are they making transparent the decisions they’re making about what they’re doing with particular pieces of content?”
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Australian Christian Lobby says plans to combat social media misinformation will ‘cancel Christian posts’
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“We’d be looking at those types of questions rather than looking at the content.”
The voluntary code was developed under the former Morrison government, arising out of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s digital platforms inquiry, and the Coalition went to the 2022 election promising legislation to give Acma powers “to hold big tech companies to account for harmful content on their platforms”.
The department had not begun drafting a bill prior to the election, a Guardian Australia freedom of information request has determined.
Since then, however, the Coalition has opposed the bill, and argued Labor’s model is not one the opposition would introduce. The shadow communications minister, David Coleman, said on Sunday despite the proposed changes, the Coalition remained “fundamentally opposed” to the bill.
Despite the lack of detail from the government about the specific changes to the bill, Coleman said the outlined changes do not deal with central problems in the legislation, including exempting the government from the proposed legislation.
LGBTQ+ equality group Just.Equal Australia slammed the government’s decision to bring in a religious exemption.
“There are already mountains of harmful misinformation and disinformation about LGBTIQA+ people in the public domain, and a religious exemption in the proposed legislation will just make this worse by sending the message that such misinformation and disinformation is OK if it is dressed up as religious doctrine,” spokesperson Sally Goldner said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/aug/13/athletics-world-championships-new-names-usain-bolt-coleman-stefanidi | Sport | 2017-08-13T08:00:08.000Z | Sean Ingle | Coleman and Stefanidi offer hope to athletics – a sport in need of new names | Sean Ingle | When Sebastian Coe wakes up on Sunday morning he will have a 6ft 5in-shaped headache. Usain Bolt, track and field’s greatest weapon as well as its biggest crutch, has run his last race. Mo Farah is heading to the roads. And the question of how the sport can shout loud enough to be heard by casual fans without the great Jamaican or the most successful British athlete in history – or a major global championships on the horizon – will move from a theoretical to an intensely practical problem.
If Lord Coe, the president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, feels this huge weight on his shoulders, he does not show it. He believes London 2017 has highlighted a number of new stars to go alongside established big names such as Wayde van Niekerk, Allyson Felix, Kendra Harrison and Nafissatou Thiam. He just wants them to promote themselves and their sport better.
“The agents and managers are incredibly cloying,” Coe claims. “They say: ‘You don’t want to say this, you don’t want to say that,’ to their athletes. We need to be relaxed about what they say. Look at Conor McGregor, who has got my kids talking about UFC. I’m not saying people should be like him – but I want more of them to give a view on things and to show their personality. “We’ve got to encourage the athletes to be themselves. That will make the media find them more interesting and help the public to become more engaged.”
Coe adds: “Usain Bolt, for whatever reason, was probably a personality the second he walked into his classroom. You are not trying to choreograph that but I do think it is important that athletes realise they are part of the entertainment business. The reason Usain is going to be missed is not because he wins all those medals – it is because he is prepared to give a view about things. He has instincts. He is not looking either side to his handlers.”
First lesson from world championships: there is no next Usain Bolt
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Coe believes Christian Coleman of the USA – who has an unbeaten record against Bolt having beaten him in their 100m semi-final and final – can help fill the void. Coleman says: “I have the utmost respect for Usain Bolt when I heard that I am only the only person who is unbeaten against him, I thought: ‘That’s pretty crazy.’ When I get older, that’s something I’m going to tell my grandkids. He pushed the sport along but we have other great athletes coming forward – and hopefully one of those is me.”
Other athletes have shown their personalities at these championships, too. They include the French runner Pierre-Ambroise Bosse, whose exuberance on television having won the 800m gold earned him thousands of new fans, and the Norwegian Karsten Warholm, whose shocked face when he won the 400m hurdles showed that he was more surprised than anyone else.
Coe accepts the IAAF also has to do more to promote its sport and stars. According to preliminary research conducted by athletics’ governing body, 75% of respondents said that track and field has to change – not only in how it does things in the stadium, but how the sport is shown on TV and online.
“There’s more need for us to really demonstrate that we have some incredible talent out there,” says Coe. “If you just look at the youth which has surfaced in the championships – it’s the youngest cohort of medallists, youngest cohort of winners. We had a 21-year-old who won the 400m hurdles and the youngest ever finalists in the men’s 800m. It’s very good out there – we just have to make sure that people know that.”
One of the stars in London this week was the Greek pole vaulter Katerina Stefanidi, who delighted the crowd in dancing to Zorba the Greek after taking gold. She urged Coe to do more to talk to millennials, push field events into the centre of the area to give them more attention, and find ways to make the whole sport move a bit quicker.
“Even little things can make a difference,” she says. “It sounds silly but when I won and they played that music I got 20,000 followers on Twitter. I just wish I could dance better.”
Coe, incidentally, still believes that engaging with young people is the main challenge he faces – not doping. And he knows that Bolt, even as he heads to retirement, plays a key part. “I was chatting to him before the medal ceremony and, slightly tongue-in-cheek, he looked at me and said: ‘So what do you want me to do now, boss?’” Coe says. “And I went: ‘Anything you want to do, really.’” A more rounded answer to that question cannot come soon enough. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/quiz/2010/dec/16/business-quiz-economics | Global | 2010-12-16T07:31:00.000Z | Graeme Wearden | Business quiz 2010: part four, economics | 1.Who is the only member of the Bank of England's MPC to vote to raise interest rates this year?
David Miles
Adam Posen
Andrew Sentance
Reveal
2.What is the Bank of England's QE programme worth?
£50bn
£200bn
£500bn
Reveal
3.UK unemployment reached what level this year?
2.5m
2.75m
2.99m
Reveal
4.For how many months this year did CPI inflation come within the government's target?
None
Three
Six
Reveal
5.Which of these measures was announced in Ireland's austerity fiscal plan in November?
A new maximum wage of €1m a year
A €1/hour cut in the minimum wage
A €5bn bank levy
Reveal
6.Which country waded into the foreign exchange markets in October to devalue its own currency?
Japan
Iceland
Argentina
Reveal
7.Which Republican presidential hopeful criticised the Federal Reserve's foray into quantitative easing?
Newt Gingrich
Sarah Palin
Mitt Romney
Reveal
8.Which sector was credited with driving the UK's surprisingly strong GDP growth early this year?
Services
Manufacturing
Construction
Reveal
9.What did World Bank president Robert Zoellick claim would help restore the global economy to health?
The abolition of the federal Reserve
The return of the gold standard
The reintroduction of the Deutschmark
Reveal
10.Which of these countries emerged from recession at the start of December?
Australia
Greece
Iceland
Reveal | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/28/first-thing-russian-rouble-crashes-as-sanctions-make-their-mark | US news | 2022-02-28T11:18:53.000Z | Nicola Slawson | Russian rouble crashes as the west's sanctions make their mark | First Thing | Good morning.
The rouble crashed more than 40% after trading began today amid unprecedented international sanctions against Russia’s financial system over Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russia’s central bank more than doubled interest rates to 20%, and banned foreigners from selling local securities, in an effort to protect its currency and economy.
The news came as Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, told the British prime minister that the next 24 hours would be crucial for his country amid reports that a column of Russian tanks was heading for the capital.
Meanwhile, a US official believes Belarus is preparing to send soldiers into Ukraine in support of the Russian invasion. The Washington Post spoke to an unnamed US administration official on Sunday evening who said the deployment could begin as soon as today.
Is the US doing anything more to help? Yes. The US stepped up the flow of weapons to Ukraine, announcing yesterday it would send Stinger missiles as part of a package approved by the White House.
What about the UN? A rare emergency special session of the UN general assembly is due to be held today in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, marking the first time in 40 years the security council has made such a request.
Is there any chance of a ceasefire? Ukraine has agreed to send a delegation to meet Russian representatives on the border with Belarus, which would be the two sides’ first public contact since war erupted. Zelenskiy said he was not confident that any progress would be made, but that he would try.
Supreme court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson ‘beyond politics’
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson with President Joe Biden. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
The supreme court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson should be placed “beyond politics”, the politician who extracted Joe Biden’s politically priceless promise to instal the first Black woman on the court said on Sunday.
Some Republicans have complained that nominations should not be made on grounds of race or gender – ignoring promises to put women on the court acted on by Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.
James Clyburn, the South Carolina congressman and House Democratic whip whose endorsement propelled Biden to the presidential nomination and produced his promise to pick a Black woman, appeared yesterday on CBS’s Face the Nation.
He said he hoped “that all my Republican friends will look upon” the nomination of Jackson as being “beyond politics”.
Why would it be such a big deal with Jackson gets approved? Of 115 supreme court justices, 108 have been white men. Two have been Black men, five women.
But is she qualified? She definitely seems to be. In fact, Steve Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas, has pointed out that Jackson has more trial experience than four current justices combined – including the chief, John Roberts.
William Barr uses new book to outline case against Trump White House run
Donald Trump and William Barr at the White House in 2019. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA
In a new memoir, the former US attorney general William Barr says Donald Trump must not be the Republican candidate for president in 2024.
The man he served between 2019 and 2020, Barr writes, has “shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed”.
Trump, Barr says, has surrounded himself with “sycophants” and “whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories”.
Trump hinted again on Saturday that he intends to run in 2024. He did not immediately comment on Barr’s analysis.
When will Barr’s book be out? His book, One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, will be published on 8 March, its title taken from a description of the job by Ed Levi, appointed by Gerald Ford after the Watergate scandal.
In other news …
Marjorie Taylor Greene is ‘missing a few IQ points’, according to Mitt Romney. Photograph: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images
Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, members of Congress who spoke at a white nationalist event in Florida this week, are “morons” with no place in the Republican party, Mitt Romney said yesterday. “I have to think anybody that would sit down with white nationalists and speak at their conference was certainly missing a few IQ points,” he said.
The Russian star conductor Valery Gergiev has been dropped by his management over his close ties to Vladimir Putin as he faces a looming deadline to publicly denounce the Russian president or lose yet another role in his rapidly crumbling career, with Munich Philharmonic poised to fire him next.
At least 368,000 people have already fled their homes in Ukraine, according to the UN refugee agency, and more than 4.5 million more could follow if the fighting spreads, Ukrainian authorities have said, with reports of tens of thousands on the move within the country itself.
The number of new people getting vaccinated in America has steadily declined in recent months, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data. But doctors emphasize that the virus remains a threat in the US and that people who are not vaccinated are at greater risk of become severely ill or dying.
Stat of the day: Biden’s polling plummets to 37%, his lowest yet
Biden will project optimism when he speaks on Tuesday night, despite a worrying low approval rating. Photograph: Shawn Thew/EPA
Two days before his first State of the Union address, with war raging in Ukraine and inflation rising at home, Joe Biden’s approval rating hit a new low in a major US poll. The survey from the Washington Post and ABC News put Biden’s approval rating at 37%. The fivethirtyeight.com poll average pegs his approval rating at 40.8% overall. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told ABC’s This Week that Biden would acknowledge challenges but also project optimism when he speaks to Congress and the nation at the Capitol on Tuesday night.
Don’t miss this: Patrisse Cullors on co-founding Black Lives Matter, the backlash – and why the police must go
Patrisse Cullors: ‘I feel like I’ve been treated as the fall guy for a movement that is much bigger than me.’ Photograph: Philip Cheung/The Guardian
It is 10 years since she helped launch possibly the biggest global protest movement in history. But then came controversy as huge sums of money flowed in. Patrisse Cullors describes how her childhood inspired her activism – and the hurt she has suffered. “I was thrust into a global spotlight, but at the end of the day I’m a local community organiser. I can sustain local organising work. I think being the face of a global movement was turning me into something I didn’t want to be. I didn’t want to be a shark. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth,” she tells Nesrine Malik.
Climate check: Impact of climate crisis much worse than predicted, says Alok Sharma
Firefighters during the Windy fire in the Sequoia national park in September 2021. Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images
The impacts of the climate crisis are proving much worse than predicted, and governments must act more urgently to adapt to them or face global disaster, the UK president of the UN climate talks has warned on the eve of a landmark new scientific assessment of the climate. Alok Sharma, who led the Cop26 climate summit last year, said: “The changes in the climate we are seeing today are affecting us much sooner and are greater than we originally thought. The impacts on our daily lives will be increasingly severe and stark.”
Last Thing: Turmoil in small Italian town after judge silences church bells
Sant’Ulderico church in Dolina. Photograph: Sant’Ulderico church
All eight Slovenian MEPs have weighed in to a ding-dong in a small town in northern Italy, calling on the European Commission to act to “protect traditions” after an Italian judge silenced a church’s bells. For some in Dolina, a town with a minority Slovene community close to Italy’s border with Slovenia, the bells of Sant’Ulderico church were essential to the rhythm of their day. For others, the “loud and excessive” ringing was a bane, leading to a petition that in turn led a judge in nearby Trieste to remove the bells in an unprecedented ruling.
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If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email [email protected] | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jul/24/star-wars-jj-abrams-quit | Film | 2013-07-24T09:46:24.000Z | Andrew Pulver | Star Wars director JJ Abrams not jumping ship, says studio | The studios behind the forthcoming Star Wars Episode VII have been forced to deny that director JJ Abrams is about to quit the project.
Disney and Lucasfilm have issued a statement in response to persistent rumours that Star Trek Into Darkness director Abrams was unhappy in his role, most recently in a post on the Badass Digest blog by writer Devin Faraci. Faraci stated: "This has been something I've heard for a while now, and from multiple insiders.... This weekend at Comic Con I continued to hear these whispers. No director for Trek 3 has been found yet - might Abrams end up coming back after all, leaving Star Wars to someone else?"
A spokesperson for Disney said: "There is no truth to the rumour. JJ is having a great time working on the script and is looking forward to going into production next year."
If Abrams was to leave Star Wars, it would represent a significant setback for the attempt to reboot the popular franchise. When he was unveiled as director in January this year, it was seen as something of a coup, poaching the man behind the success of Star Wars' rival franchise, Star Trek. Star Wars creator George Lucas said at the time the film "couldn't be in better hands". However, Abrams was known to be unhappy with the decision to make the film in the UK due to concerns over relocating his young family.
Star Wars Episode is due to begin shooting in early 2014 and is aiming for release in 2015. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jul/24/do-you-really-need-it-or-only-want-it-oliver-burkeman | Life and style | 2020-07-24T14:00:17.000Z | Oliver Burkeman | Do you want it – or do you need it? Here's how you know | Oliver Burkeman | As anyone who counts a three-year-old among their acquaintances will know, there’s a fiery purity to the will of a small child that’s difficult to oppose. Once my son has figured out that there’s ice-cream in the freezer, and decided he wants some for dessert, my role is equivalent to that of the ineffectual UN diplomat attempting to persuade a major nation-state to stockpile fewer weapons: good luck with that. Yet frequently, on receiving the ice‑cream, he’ll decide to let it melt before consuming it – then forget about it completely. He wants ice cream, monomaniacally, with a force his little frame almost can’t contain. But he doesn’t like it so very much that some other absorbing activity can’t banish it from his mind.
I only clearly grasped this distinction – and realised how it applies to me, too – when I encountered the findings of a study of coffee drinkers reported on the Research Digest blog. Using various psychological tests, researchers showed that “heavy” drinkers (those consuming three or more cups per day) had a much greater desire for coffee than those who consumed less of it, or none. But they took roughly the same, far lower level of pleasure as light drinkers when it actually came to drinking it. More serious addictions – to alcohol, or hard drugs – are characterised by a similar split between wanting and liking: you want the substance more and more, but like it less and less. And it’s been demonstrated that if you deprive people of a prize they want, they’ll desire it more; yet if they do then eventually acquire it, they’ll value it less.
The ancient idea that what we desire isn’t necessarily what we enjoy has received support from modern neuroscience, which indicates that the two processes involve distinct circuits in the brain; dopamine, the so-called “pleasure chemical”, is probably better understood as a desire chemical, which can be triggered in huge quantities in the near-total absence of pleasure. (The mismatch is clearest, for me, with social media: seconds after succumbing to the desire to log on to Twitter, I realise, once again, that I won’t be having any fun there.)
This makes evolutionary sense, too. From your genes’ point of view, it’s helpful that things like sex, or eating a meal rich in sugar and fat, should be pleasurable – but what’s really crucial is that they’re alluring. It’s much more important that you should want them, than that you enjoy them once they arrive.
Life in a post-coronavirus world: will it feel so very different?
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Just bearing this distinction in mind, as you trundle through the day, can be surprisingly empowering: there’s at least a chance you’ll remember, next time you’re gripped by the urge to check your phone, or have a second cocktail, or say something mean, that you might not enjoy it as much as you predict. It’s not that desire needs to be squelched, as some more joyless interpretations of Buddhism or stoicism might have it. It just needs to be understood as a not-useful guide to an enjoyable life. Wisely or not, I’ve also found myself surrendering to the three-year-old’s demands (even) more often. That way, wants arise and move through him, like a passing storm, and soon enough we’re back to enjoying ourselves. It’s a lot easier than trying to fight the weather.
Read this
In How Pleasure Works (2011) the psychologist Paul Bloom shows how even our strangest modern desires have their roots in our ancient survival needs. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/25/trump-sanctuary-cities-funding-executive-order-blocked | US news | 2017-04-25T20:37:15.000Z | Sam Levin | Trump's order to restrict 'sanctuary cities' funding blocked by federal judge | A US judge has blocked Donald Trump’s order cutting off funding to “sanctuary cities”, dealing a major blow to the president’s anti-immigrant agenda and setting the stage for another legal battle after the ongoing travel ban dispute. The White House has responded with fury, calling it another case of “egregious overreach by a single unelected judge”.
A California judge issued a nationwide injunction on Tuesday blocking enforcement of Trump’s executive order targeting cities and counties across the US that have pledged to be a safe haven to the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. The order, in line with one of Trump’s signature campaign pledges, is aimed at forcing cities to cooperate with federal immigration agencies in deportation efforts by withholding government funding.
San Francisco was the first US city to challenge the order with a lawsuit in January, arguing that blocking funding to municipalities that protect immigrants was unconstitutional and a federal overreach that violated the sovereignty of the liberal California city.
Mayors resist Trump's immigration policies: ‘We cannot submit to a bully’
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US district judge William Orrick ruled that San Francisco and Santa Clara County, which joined the lawsuit, have demonstrated that they are “likely to succeed on the merits of their challenge” and that “the balance of harms and public interest weigh in their favor”.
The ruling is a significant rebuke to Trump as he nears the 100-day mark of his presidency and is the latest example of local progressive governments successfully thwarting key policy efforts of the administration, which has promoted a xenophobic agenda and promised an aggressive crackdown on immigrants.
The decision came days after the US Department of Justice sent letters to nine jurisdictions demanding that they provide proof of cooperation with federal immigration authorities or risk losing grant money.
The DoJ claimed in a statement on Tuesday that the ruling upheld the government’s “ability to use lawful means to enforce existing conditions of federal grants” and said “it will follow the law with respect to regulation of sanctuary jurisdictions”. It’s unclear how the DoJ may challenge the order, which temporarily halts the president’s executive order as the lawsuit moves forward.
An angry White House statement on Tuesday night said the judge’s ruling facilitated “the dangerous and unlawful nullification of federal law in an attempt to erase our borders”. The Trump administration would “pursue all legal remedies to the sanctuary cities threat”.
“This San Francisco judge’s erroneous ruling is a gift to the criminal gang and cartel element in our country, empowering the worst kind of human trafficking and sex trafficking, and putting thousands of innocent lives at risk,” said the statement.
Trump echoed this early on Wednesday morning, tweeting: “First the Ninth Circuit rules against the ban & now it hits again on sanctuary cities – both ridiculous rulings. See you in the Supreme Court!”
He added: “Out of our very big country, with many choices, does everyone notice that both the ‘ban’ case and now the ‘sanctuary’ case is brought in … the Ninth Circuit, which has a terrible record of being overturned (close to 80%). They used to call this ‘judge shopping!’ Messy system.”
Trump was referring to the ninth circuit court based in San Francisco, where judges have also ruled against Trump’s travel ban. Orrick does not sit on the ninth circuit, but his district is encompassed in the territory of the appeals court.
Trump criticized sanctuary cities throughout his campaign, arguing that the local governments protecting undocumented immigrants from deportation were enabling crime. Researchers, however, have found that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes than people born in the US and that high rates of immigration are tied to lower rates of property crime and violent crime.
The city of San Francisco has argued that it has about $1.2bn in federal funding at stake. Sanctuary policies vary by local government, but one analysis has suggested that there are 39 cities and more than 360 counties that have some kind of law in place limiting cooperation with federal authorities.
Proponents of sanctuary cities argue that the policies are critical to public safety and that if local police collaborate with immigration agents, undocumented immigrants won’t report crimes or work with law enforcement. In recent months, there have been reports that deportation fears have led to a drop in victims of violence coming forward, witnesses refusing to cooperate in police cases and workers declining to speak to government officials investigating exploitation and wage theft.
“Because San Francisco took this president to court, we’ve been able to protect billions of dollars that fund lifesaving programs across this country,” San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera said in a statement. “This is why we have courts – to halt the overreach of a president and an attorney general who either don’t understand the Constitution or chose to ignore it.”
In his decision, Orrick noted that San Francisco’s sanctuary law is designed to “ensure community security” and “due process for all” and that the city uses federal funding to “provide vital services such as medical care, social services, and meals to vulnerable residents, to maintain and upgrade roads and public transportation, and to make needed seismic upgrades”.
Trump has also repeatedly failed at his efforts to ban travel from a number of Muslim-majority countries, stopped by federal judges and Democratic state officials who challenged the ban in court.
The first version of the ban he introduced in January led to chaos at airports across the globe and went so far as to target lawful permanent residents from seven countries, along with suspending the US refugee program. After federal judges shot down the order, which critics argued was discriminatory, Trump introduced a revised version of ban that targeted six countries and removed language prioritizing minorities for refugee resettlement, which was considered anti-Muslim.
But a federal judge in Hawaii blocked the second order just before it was implemented and later rejected the US government’s efforts to overturn his ruling, thereby extending the ban on Trump’s order.
The Hawaii state attorney general had argued that the travel ban continued to discriminate based on religion, saying in court that the revised order was “like a “neon sign flashing ‘Muslim ban, Muslim ban’”.
Trump and the US attorney general, Jeff Sessions, have faced backlash for their criticisms of federal judges. Sessions made headlines last week when he criticized the Hawaii rulings by saying he was “amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States”. He later declined to apologize.
The president has also lashed out at the judges who have blocked his ban on numerous occasions, saying a US judge in Washington state had “put our country in such peril”, adding, “If something happens blame him and court system.” During his campaign, Trump also attacked US judge Gonzalo Curiel, arguing that he was biased because of his “Mexican heritage”, a comment that was widely condemned as racist.
The Associated Press contributed to this report | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/nov/16/life-in-theatre-michael-boyd | Culture | 2012-11-16T12:43:29.000Z | Andrew Dickson | A life in theatre: Michael Boyd | Michael Boyd remembers his first day as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company very clearly. It began at dawn, with him being driven from London to Stratford-upon-Avon to be presented to the company; it ended late in the evening, watching himself being forensically dissected on Newsnight.
It was July 2002. The RSC was flailing: Boyd's predecessor, Adrian Noble, had been torn apart by critics for simultaneously abandoning its base at the Barbican, pushing through a costly internal shakeup and announcing that he would demolish the Royal Shakespeare Theatre – something the Guardian's Michael Billington likened to a man deciding "to leave his job, his wife and his house all on the same day". After months of fervid speculation and more off-the-record briefings than a Tory conference, Noble finally caved in, and Boyd assumed the job. Headline writers reached immediately for that hoary Shakespearian cliché: poisoned chalice.
"It was a tough old time," Boyd allows. He emits a gruff chuckle as he remembers yet another scene from that endless first day, doing an interview for Radio 4. "Mark Lawson started with, 'So tell me, do you think you've inherited a hollow crown?'" He pauses for the punchline. "Things got better."
You can excuse the story being delivered with relish. Things have not just got better for the RSC – it's almost as if the dark days a decade ago never happened. The curtain has just come down on a mammoth festival of global Shakespeare, estimated to have reached 1.5m people (and, perhaps as significantly, carried out in collaboration with some of the RSC's sworn enemies). The financial books are balanced. The long-term acting ensemble Boyd instituted is flourishing, reviving a tradition that many had thought impossible to achieve in British theatre. The company has just celebrated two full years in the spanking new RST, an Elizabethan-style space constructed within the shell of the old one. The irresistibly joyous musical Matilda, having won just about every award going in the West End, will land on Broadway next spring. After the alarums and excursions of the past, the remarkable thing is that Boyd and his team have accomplished all this with that rarest thing in theatreworld – a minimum of drama.
Earlier this year, after 10 years in the job, Boyd announced that he would be off; he's now in rehearsals for his final RSC show, a new adaptation of Pushkin's Boris Godunov, which opened at the Swan theatre this week. It's a good time to talk, if not quite the setting I'd imagined: we're crammed into a changing room at a temporary rehearsal venue in London. He squats on a wobbly chair near the sink; I squash in next to the shower. With his shirt flapping free of his suit, wheezing like an old accordion (he is an unrepentant smoker), Boyd is not the most commanding presence – but, as we talk, I sense the steel beneath.
Born in Belfast in 1955 to a doctor of public health and a part-time art teacher, Boyd spent his first years in Northern Ireland, until the family moved with his father's job to London. He is eloquent about his father's medical achievements – a tradition continued by his sister, who worked as a medic in South Africa and Lesotho – but you sense his mother's influence in the person he became. Discouraged from going to university, she joined the WAAF to learn photography. "She was not expected to move on to further education, and so her strategy was to volunteer. I slightly idolised her father, an extraordinary man who ended up the youngest professor of botany ever at Queen's University, Belfast, but he was also the patriarch who wouldn't let my mother go to art school."
Boyd's own father fought bitterly to prevent his only son from studying literature at university, insisting he should do something more worthwhile, then threw him out at the age of 19. "There was a real culture clash," Boyd says. "I'm sure I was pretty snooty and annoying, and he'd probably had one too many. He got so angry with me, he grabbed me around the throat. But there was a reconciliation." He looks victorious. "I got to have my cake and eat it. I left home and I did English."
Though Boyd got what he wanted – not for the last time, one suspects – he soon began to have doubts about whether he should have gone to drama school. He'd always been interested in theatre: his first foray was at the precocious age of nine, with a piece he wrote about Sherlock Holmes. ("A masterpiece. I played Sherlock, my best friend played Watson.") But when the family moved to Edinburgh when he was 16, just as the festival was getting into swing, it changed everything. "Swiss mime clowns, French puppet companies, avant-garde mixed-media artists, all a walk away. It was astonishing."
Boyd's real education came not from Edinburgh University's lecture halls, but at the festival – watching, writing, directing, performing. "I never went on summer holiday. I finished term, started rehearsals, did shows, went back to university." One piece that he wrote, God, Herbert, Donne and the Devil, went on to the National Student Drama festival and was staged at London's Royal Court. He wheezes with laughter. "I played God and the Devil, so it was just like Sherlock all over again."
Edinburgh also gave Boyd his first flavour of life elsewhere. One day, he was called in to translate for a visiting Russian director, Anatoly Efros (Boyd had crammed in a course in the language at university). The next thing he knew, he had successfully wangled his way into assisting at the Malaya Bronnaya theatre. He arrived in Moscow during the bitter winter of 1978, into a deep freeze that seemed as much political as physical. "I arrived 36 hours late. The British Council had lost track of me. It was like the Moon. These huge building-sized portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Then I go into this fusty old waiting room [at the British embassy] and what do I see but Country Life, the Sunday Post and Tatler. And I think: fuck me, this is British culture." Another lung-rattling laugh.
He stayed only six months on that occasion, returning to Britain to take up a coveted place on the Regional Theatre Young Director Scheme. But Russian theatre – its unswerving dedication, its tradition of lifetime-long acting ensembles – laid the foundations for much of Boyd's subsequent career. "My first read-through lasted six weeks," he says, a faraway look in his eyes. "That degree of concentration." And in most Russian rehearsal rooms, I say, the director is god. He nods. "Gorgeous. If I was going to be a director, if I was trying to learn what my art might be, it was really important to go to a country where it was seen as an art."
Twelfth Night at the RSC, 2005. Photograph: Neil Libbert
Although Boyd's changes to the RSC were presented as a return to its roots, lurking behind them was this formative contact with Russia, and with a style of theatre that was – and in some ways still is – alien to the literary English system, with its stringent focus on text and its fly-by-night contracts, where actors no sooner finish one job before they're on to another. There was some scepticism, Boyd admits, about importing these values to Britain. "It's a bit like cooking," he reflects. "Why are you messing about with that meat, with those spices and sauces, it's perfectly good meat. There's a sense here that it's a perfectly good text, leave it alone."
It wasn't that Boyd was unaware aware of politics (an early memory is of being driven down the Crumlin and Shankhill Roads, sporting a tricolour and a Union flag) – but living in recession-struck Coventry in the grim winter of 1979 and 1980 reminded him that theatre wasn't a polite distraction from current events, but could be a way of channelling them. One of the shows he created there was a musical called Risky City, which featured music by Roddy Radiation from the Specials. "My proudest moment was us doing better business with this new play about violence in Coventry than we did with Mollie Sugden in the latest West End transfer," he grins. What on earth was it like? "Very hard-hitting, part punk, part ska, with a band on stage. The set was a great big chunk of the ringroad."
The Trick Is To Keep Breathing by Tron Theatre Company at the Royal Court. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Boyd's taste for tough-minded, politically engaged drama led to him being appointed the first artistic director of the Tron theatre in the east end of Glasgow in 1984, where he shook up the city's new-writing scene and demonstrated that Scottish talent was up there with the best. The country was clearly a nurturing environment: he talks passionately about the influence of Philip Prowse of the Citizens theatre in the Gorbals, and of that seminal piece of Scottish agitprop, John McGrath's ferocious satire The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1974). Boyd's biggest hit there was his own adaptation of Janice Galloway's The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (1993–96), a punishingly powerful story about a teacher in the grip of a mental breakdown – staged by Boyd abstractly, amid the screeching of microphone feedback and a susurration of ghostly voices. The Times's critic concluded: "Seldom or never have I seen inner turmoil evoked with such theatrical resourcefulness."
Though he's hardly allergic to the grand gesture – his 2002 RSC Tempest was an epic spectacle in which the inhabitants of Prospero's island had somehow acquired circus skills – Boyd's productions have a sonorousness of purpose that isn't always present in British theatre. The first production of his I saw, a Measure for Measure from 1998, a few years after he left Glasgow to join the RSC as an associate, was semi-Edwardian, semi-eastern European, filtered through the greying fog of the Major government: though it captured the skin-crawling hypocrisy of power, it couldn't seem to locate the play's subversive fun. A much more recent production, his 2008 As You Like It, began in a winter that seemed somewhat more Soviet than English, and which jettisoned much of the play's comedy in favour of its political machinations. Even the forest, lamented the Guardian's critic, "is sadly lacking in trees, as if Arden has suffered a calamitous deforestation".
Though he insists he isn't as dour as he seems ("I'm serious in some ways, very silly in some ways"), slick entertainment isn't really Boyd's thing; when I ask him what makes him most annoyed, he says, almost fiercely, that it's superficiality: "a bland, sentimental, acceptable, handsome sort of approach. There's a vanity about that kind of work, a self-preening quality. The RSC has been as guilty of that as anyone in its time. But I like to think not often in my time."
As he rehearses Boris Godunov – full run-throughs of a scene, followed by thesis-length feedback, delivered in the monotone of a patient but unforgiving don – it's clear how seriously Boyd takes the job. He admits he isn't a fast worker. "I think I've definitely done my best work when I've been able to spend a lot of time on it," he says, cautiously. "Perhaps I'm just slow or something. Either wilfully or out of incompetence, I don't come to a rehearsal room knowing what to do."
Though he has now directed a thick slab of the Shakespearean canon, it's the histories – with their thrilling mix of steely realpolitik and warring ideologies – that have most fired Boyd's imagination. He has directed cycles of the plays twice: first in 1998, as part of the RSC's This England season, where he took on the neglected Henry VI plays; and again in 2006–08, when he and a taut ensemble of 34 actors took on the challenge of all eight histories, Richard II to Richard III (with a full pack of Henries in between).
Watching the plays in chronological order over two days and nights – a feat of endurance for the audience, never mind the actors – it struck me that this was one of the milestones of modern British drama: a chance to watch the young Shakespeare testing himself against the rockface of English history, and also the moment when the reborn RSC could measure itself against its illustrious past. Boyd nods. "That and The Trick Is to Keep Breathing are my proudest moments: one relatively tiny, one huge and sprawling. It was also the moment that best embodied the spirit of the organisation, completely coming together."
Boyd is the first to admit he hasn't got everything right: the RSC's new writing has been fitful for too long (Matilda has been a lonely recent highlight), and the problem of finding a permanent London home is one he has left to his successor, Gregory Doran. (It's quite a conundrum: no theatre in London resembles the remodelled RST, meaning that the company is experimenting, improbably enough, with a flatpack version like the one it recently imported to New York.) Though the RSC's audience is changing, not least because of its pioneering education work ("in some ways," Boyd suggests, "that's our avant-garde"), it is still older and less diverse than its closest rival, the National. Boyd concedes that the World Shakespeare festival and the 2006 Complete Works festival were – among much else – attempts not merely to expand the RSC's own horizons, but those of its audiences. "We didn't want to scare the horses," he says.
I remind him of an interview he gave at that very first press conference, where he declared that his ambition was "to create a space where there will be no excuses not to aspire to great art". The space is now up and running; is the art always great? He seems a little peeved. "I think we've produced more than our fair share of great art, actually," he replies, then reels off a long list of highlights. "The word great is only appropriately applied after 20 years. But I'm proud of enough of the work to feel that."
Is the RSC still the most exciting place to see Shakespeare? He pauses for a long time, then delivers a politician's answer. "It would be foolish to try to maintain a monopoly, and I think it would also be foolish if it tried to be authoritative or particularly consistent."
I remind him of another comment from early on, in which he suggested that the only way to keep the place on its toes was to plant "a little semtex" underneath. How much did he end up deploying? He laughs. "I said that before I became artistic director, when I was able to be a glib person with lots of views. But you do need to be in a constant state of revolution."
Boyd himself won't be resting on his laurels; he's cagey about his plans, but mentions collaborations with playwrights Lee Hall and David Greig, an international Cherry Orchard. "Making plays," he says with satisfaction. Would he rule out running another theatre? "Never say never," he says, more quickly than I expect. "But I don't feel the need."
In the meantime? Long holiday? Zumba lessons? He mentions walking and, a little unconvincingly, rock-climbing. He can't wait to read more. There's London life with his partner Caroline Hall – their daughter, Rachael, has just gone to secondary school, though his two older children, Gabriela and Daniel, twins from his previous marriage to playwright Marcella Evaristi, have flown the nest.
I have difficulty imagining him relaxing, I say. He looks inscrutable. "Well, once Boris is over," he says, "there'll be a wee bit of catching up." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/mar/29/interpol-environmental-crime-ivory-poaching | Environment | 2012-03-29T15:04:53.000Z | Stanley Johnson | Interpol demands crackdown on 'serious and organised' eco crime | Environmental crime such as ivory poaching and illegal logging has become "a form of serious, organised and often transnational crime", Interpol's executive director of police services told an international law enforcement summit on Thursday.
Bernd Rossbach told the Unep- and Interpol-hosted event in Lyon, attended by representatives of 80 countries, that there was increasing evidence that environmental crime was connected to other forms of serious and organised crime.
Interpol is now carrying out the largest anti-elephant ivory poaching operation ever mounted. Wildlife agents in 14 African countries have been raiding outlets and pursuing traders, in a crackdown on the multimillion pound industry. Through its Operation Worthy, as it is being called, Interpol aims to stifle the increasing demand in illegal elephant ivory, mostly from Asian countries such as China.
Melanie Virtue, Treaties Officer for UNEP's Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), said that, in Cameroon, more than 400 elephants had been slaughtered in the past two months.
Police and enforcement officers highlighted other examples of rampant wildlife crime. John Scanlon,executive secretary of the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) said that, though more than 500 rhinos had been killed over the past 18 months in South Africa, fewer than 50 rhinoceros horns had been recovered. "Ounce for ounce, rhinoceros horn is now more valuable than gold," he told delegates.
Significant losses are occurring among the chimpanzee population of Guinea, with 69 chimpanzees illegally exported to China in 2010 alone, and at least 130 in the past three years. Also mentioned was the recent arrest of traffickers in Kazakhstan with 4,704 horns from the endangered saiga antelope, destined for China.
The meeting stressed the need for stronger enforcement and intelligence-led pursuit of high-level wildlife traffickers. The environmental crime summit also discussed the problem of illegal wildlife trade over the internet, and called for more action to be taken to ban internet trading in endangered species.
A report presented by UNEP to the meeting pointed out that illegal logging accounted for 15-30% of timber globally. Deforestation, largely of tropical rainforests, is responsible for an estimated 17% of all man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, and 50% more than that from ships, aviation and land-transport combined. Today, only 10% of primary forest cover remains.
Masa Nagai, speaking on behalf of UNEP, co-host of the meeting, said: "Countries around the world and the international community as a whole have made important progress in establishing national and international environmental policies. But the implementation of environmental commitments and the enforcement of environmental laws remain a tremendous challenge for many countries."
Stanley Johnson's new book Where the Wild Things Were will be published in July | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/05/tories-local-election-results-general-england-conservatives-labour-lib-dems-greens | Opinion | 2023-05-05T13:14:29.000Z | Katy Balls | What do the Tories' dismal local results mean for the general election? Our panel responds | Katy Balls and others | Katy Balls: Rishi Sunak’s recovery narrative has taken a hit
Few in the Tory party expected the local election results to be anything other than painful. Yet the first wave of results still managed to be worse than anticipated internally, as the party lost support to Labour in various “red wall” areas and to the Liberal Democrats in the traditional Tory shires. “You know something’s gone wrong when the expectation-management figure becomes the reality,” sighed one Tory MP – following early morning suggestions from the polling expert John Curtice that the Conservatives could be on course to lose 1,000 seats.
The hope in CCHQ is that later results, including gains in the Midlands, create more of a balanced picture – and if that fails the king’s coronation quickly moves the news agenda on. But even if this comes to pass, Rishi Sunak will not emerge unscathed from his first significant electoral test since entering No 10. Sunak’s recovery narrative has taken a hit. The prime minister and his team have been trying to build a sense of momentum that they are closing the gap with Labour. Widespread losses across the board – including in several cabinet ministers’ home territories, such as those of Oliver Dowden and Grant Shapps – show how far the party still has to go to have a chance of turning the tide.
One ray of light for Tory MPs is that, while the Conservative party is suffering most, the votes aren’t all going to Labour – with Liberal Democrats, Greens and independents enjoying a good night. Now this could pave the way for anti-Tory tactical voting come the general election. But it could also be read as a sign the electorate is not yet sold on Keir Starmer. In the 1989 European election, the Green party won 14% of the vote and Labour came out on top. In the 1992 election that followed, the Tories won. The prior vote was an indicator that the voters were not sold on Neil Kinnock.
In the meantime, some in the party are trying to see the positive by reminding themselves of 2017 – when Theresa May excelled in the local elections only to lose her party’s majority in the general election that followed. It’s not a happy memory for the Conservatives – but it does suggest that things can change quickly.
Katy Balls is the Spectator’s political editor
John McDonnell: A robust result – but Labour still has more to do
The next general election will be a contest between the two most basic slogans in politics. It will be “Stick with what you know” versus “It’s time for a change”.
In both 1992 and 2019 the Tories used a change in leaders to combine the two and win. In 2023, after 13 years of Conservative rule, the unmitigated disasters of the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss leaderships look as if they have put beyond Rishi Sunak the chance of pulling that off again.
Even with the blatant attempt to suppress the vote via the introduction of voter ID, the local elections have confirmed that there is a strong anti-Tory vote that can be mobilised. People are so fed up with wage cuts, run-down public services and little light showing at the end of the tunnel under this government that they are desperate to get rid of it.
This has produced a robust performance by Labour, but wiser heads in the party will respect the caution of our premier psephologist, John Curtice. What the elections haven’t confirmed yet is that there is an equally strong, motivated support for Labour. Hence the diversion of a sizeable element of the anti-Tory vote to the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the spectrum of independent candidates.
On current polling it looks near certain that the Conservatives will lose the next general election, confirming for some the old saw that governments lose elections, oppositions do not win them.
Some Labour supporters will say: “So what, if we win anyway?” The importance of winning with a bloc of motivated support and not by default comes in the mid-term of the next Labour government, when things start getting tough and the next election comes into sight. That’s when a mass of convinced support built up on a strong policy offer now will be needed.
John McDonnell has been the Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington since 1997. He was shadow chancellor from 2015 to 2020
Martin Kettle: The opposition parties can beat Sunak – but perhaps only together
There are two important political consequences of the 2023 local elections. One for the Conservatives, the other for the opposition parties.
Tories first. Memories can be short. So don’t forget why these elections matter for Rishi Sunak – and it’s not because he cares about local government. This week has been in his diary for months as his potential moment of greatest personal vulnerability before the general election. A Tory collapse could trigger a grassroots revolt in a party that did not vote for him as leader, leading to calls to bring back Boris Johnson. A lot of rightwing Tories want that to happen.
A few of the usual suspects still sniff an opportunity. But neither John Redwood nor David Campbell Bannerman, both of whom have gone public with their criticisms of Sunak today, is a political rainmaker. It therefore looks as though the Johnson moment really has passed. The Tory chairman, Greg Hands, even chided the ex-PM today for not campaigning in these elections. So the big story for Tories is that Sunak will lead them in the general election, whether they like it or not.
The big story for the opposition parties is that they can beat Sunak – but perhaps only together. These results clearly punish the Tory party for the chaos and hardship of 2022. But there’s been vanishingly little in the results to suggest that Sunak’s Toryism has gamechanging voter appeal either.
The opposition parties have a lot to celebrate. Labour confirmed that it can win back the seats that Johnson captured in 2019 and succeed in southern counties too. That’s key. Meanwhile the Lib Dems did better this week than at any time since 2010. They confirmed that, even facing Sunak, not Johnson, they can win Tory seats that Labour cannot. In some places, such as East Hertfordshire, where they are now the largest single party, the Greens have done the same.
With as much as 18 months still to go before the general election, with Scotland unexpectedly up for grabs (there were no elections there this week) and a lot of economic hardship still to come, these elections don’t tell us what the result will be in 2024. But they surely pave the way for the return of significant tactical anti-Conservative voting when the moment comes.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
Caroline Lucas: Taking action on the climate emergency is now a clear vote-winner
This is a massive breakthrough moment for the Green party. From record-breaking results last time these seats were contested four years ago, we’ve leaped even further forward. From South Tyneside in the north to Bath and North East Somerset in the south, from East Hertfordshire in the east to Worcester in the west, Green gains are flashing up right across the country.
And though the results are not yet fully in, rumour has it that in Mid Suffolk, we are about to secure a majority-controlled Green council – a first not only in the country, but in the entire northern hemisphere.
This may come as a surprise to some in the media who tend to turn a blind eye to the Green party – but it won’t to voters electing and re-electing Greens in their communities across the country. That’s because, first and foremost, Greens are active and hardworking all year round – providing both a listening ear and a powerful voice. With local government budgets being slashed by Tory austerity, putting crucial services from libraries to youth programmes under massive pressure – just as soaring food prices mean the cost of living scandal continues to bite – anger at the national government is clearly filtering down to a local level. That’s why having a Green in that council chamber, to challenge and scrutinise every decision, is vital.
And it’s been more evident at this election than ever before that environment and climate issues have well and truly entered the mainstream. Sewage and water pollution blighting our rivers and seas has been coming up on the doorstep over and over again. It epitomises a sense that communities are under-funded and uncared for not only by local politicians, but by this national Tory government too.
Taking action on the climate emergency is now a clear vote-winner – and when the government approves a new coalmine, flirts with a return to fracking and gives the green light to 100 new oil and gas licences, people can see that the Tories simply can’t be trusted to deliver it.
As we break through on to more new councils and the party goes from strength to strength, voters know that the best way to secure fairer, greener communities is to vote Green.
Caroline Lucas is the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion
Moya Lothian-McLean: Britain’s disengaged and disenfranchised slip further from view
What a drubbing. Results are still trickling in from local elections that saw 8,000 seats contested across England, but the writing on the wall is stark. “The clear headline,” said polling guru John Curtice early on Thursday morning, “is the Conservatives are in trouble.” At that point, Tory seat losses were sitting at a rate of one out of three; key battlegrounds such as Medway, Stoke-on-Trent and Plymouth had already turned red.
But Curtice also cautioned that this wasn’t a full-throated Labour victory. The party, he noted, was not up on the advance it made in last year’s local elections. Yet competitors such as the Liberal Democrats and the Greens were. The results see voters expressing their distaste for a Tory party in terminal decline, but it’s not accompanied by any great passion for Keir Starmer’s Labour, which seems to be organising its political ambitions for the next general election around the mantra: “we’re the only other option”.
For their part, the Tories are locked in internal war over where blame for the losses lie – in Medway, Tory MP Kelly Tolhurst blamed a backlash over housebuilding targets. Meanwhile, her colleague Charles Walker was on Times Radio with the opposite take, stating that the Tories were being punished for their U-turn on compulsory housebuilding goals. It’s a reflection of the divisions around housing policy that have riven the party this week, as reported via leaked WhatsApp messages in the Times. Tory cohesion in the face of an uphill electoral battle seems a pipe dream.
These, of course, were the elections that made even more of a mockery of democracy in Britain. New voter ID laws, brought in by the beleaguered Tories to tackle the nonexistent problem of ballot fraud, meant “countless” people were turned away from casting their vote. We may never know how many were prevented from participating in their democratic right, thanks to a sleight of hand in the system being used to count those newly disenfranchised.
With local elections historically seeing a far lower turnout – and engagement – than national ballots, the furore over the legislation has been worryingly muted. By the time we reach the looming general election, the horse may have bolted and this restriction on suffrage will be permanently entrenched, with no repeal movement able to gain traction. Labour looks certain to cinch a win – but Britain’s disengaged and disenfranchised slip further from view.
Moya Lothian-McLean is a contributing editor at Novara Media | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/16/against-interpretation-susan-sontag-100-best-nonfiction-books | Books | 2016-05-16T04:45:26.000Z | Robert McCrum | The 100 best nonfiction books: No 16 – Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag (1966) | Susan Sontag saw herself as a novelist. The years between 1962, when she completed her first novel, The Benefactor, and 1965, when she began her second, Death Kit, were for Sontag “a sharply defined period” in which she wrote many of the literary critical and cultural pieces that came to define her even more strongly than her fiction.
In her Paris Review interview of 1994, Sontag confessed: “Writing essays has always been laborious. They go through many drafts, and the end result may bear little relation to the first draft; often I completely change my mind in the course of writing an essay. Fiction comes much easier, in the sense that the first draft contains the essentials – tone, lexicon, velocity, passions – of what I eventually end up with.”
Sontag’s earliest essays, nonetheless, have a heady and self-confident originality. This collection for instance contains two modern classics, Against Interpretation and Notes on Camp, as well as discussions of Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Godard, a memorable demolition of Ionesco, together with psychoanalysis and science fiction cinema. Sontag, who came to influence generations of readers around the world and saw herself at war with philistinism, was nothing if not transgressive. And always intensely varied.
In the same Paris Review interview, she said of her writing that “it’s supposed to be diverse, though of course there is a unity of temperament, of preoccupation – certain predicaments, certain emotions that recur – ardour and melancholy. And an obsessive concern with human cruelty, whether cruelty in personal relations or the cruelty of war.”
Notes on Camp, which first appeared in 1964 in the Partisan Review, an early patron, fell to one side of that “unity”, but caused a sensation that propelled Sontag to instant prominence in American intellectual circles. Summarising Sontag’s reputation, Time magazine declared that “she has come to symbolise the writer and thinker in many variations: as analyst, rhapsodist, and roving eye, as public scold and portable conscience”.
Sontag would have been gratified by such a description. “I had come to New York at the start of the 1960s,” she wrote later, “eager to put to work the writer I had pledged myself to become.” Her aesthetic was, and would remain, omnivorous. “My idea of a writer: someone interested in ‘everything’… The only surprise was that there weren’t more people like me.”
But of course there weren’t. Sontag was inimitable, in both life and work. Her writing quickly became the quintessential commentary to the 1960s, which was unfolding, raucously, and sometimes violently, around her in New York. Typically, she spurned any kind of easy pigeonhole. “It wasn’t the 60s then. For me it was chiefly the time when I wrote my first and second novels, and began to discharge some of the cargo of ideas about art and culture and the proper business of consciousness which had distracted me from writing fiction. I was filled with evangelical zeal.”
Susan Sontag at a writers’ conference in 1966. Photograph: Bob Peterson/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
In its review of this volume, the New York Times latched on to Sontag’s moralistic side, describing her as a “thoroughly American figure standing at the centre of Against Interpretation. The dress is new, true enough, and the images strange. The haunting image is that of a lady of intelligence and apparent beauty hastening along city streets at the violet hour, nervous, knowing, strained, excruciated (as she says) by self-consciousness, bound for the incomprehensible cinema, or for the concert hall where non-music is non-played, or for the loft where cherry bombs explode in her face and flour sacks are flapped close to her, where her ears are filled with mumbling, senseless sound and she is teased, abused, enveloped, deliberately frustrated until – until we, her audience, make out suddenly that this scene is, simply, hell, and that the figure in it (but naturally) is old-shoe-American: a pilgrim come again, a flagellant, one more self-lacerating Puritan.”
This is super-fine, as far as it goes, but it misses Sontag’s appetite for intellectual exhibitionism. There was, I think, always more than a touch of Oscar Wilde about “Miss Sontag”. Like Wilde, she was a self-confessed “pugnacious aesthete”; like Wilde she revelled in aphorism; and, like Wilde, she absolutely refused to play safe. Despite the promise of her brilliant university career, she had other ideas. “I was not going to settle for being an academic: I would pitch my tent outside the seductive, stony safety of the university world.”
Like her contemporary, Germaine Greer (No 13 in this series), Sontag was for “freedom”, a throwing off of “old hierarchies”, but she was also self-consciously placing herself squarely in a line of American thought: “The ardours I was advocating seemed to me – still seem to me – quite traditional. I saw myself as a newly minted warrior in a very old battle: against philistinism, against ethical and aesthetic shallowness and indifference.”
Like the fumes of heavy industry… the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities
Susan Sontag
As well as commenting on the 60s, Sontag came to embody the decade. “How one wishes,” she wrote later, “that some of its boldness, its optimism, its disdain for commerce had survived. The two poles of distinctively modern sentiment are nostalgia and utopia. Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of the time now labelled ‘the 60s’ was that there was so little nostalgia. In that sense, it was indeed a utopian moment. The world in which these essays were written no longer exists.”
Sontag’s work, however, unequivocally outlives her. The title essay, which even carries an epigraph from Wilde (“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible”) sounds a passionate appeal for “an erotics of art”.
Sontag’s argument, expressed with much greater brilliance and subtlety than any simplification can convey, is that critical “interpretation”, which takes its cue from Plato and Aristotle, has become reactionary and stifling. “Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities.” This, says Sontag, “is the revenge of intellect upon the world.” Thus, the task of the critic is “not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art… Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”
Sontag’s Wildean provocations reached their apogee in her famous 1964 essay, Notes on Camp, also collected here. The debt to Wilde is manifest on almost every page. Remarkably, Sontag holds her own with verve. “The essence of camp,” she begins, “is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric – something of a private code, a badge of identity, even, among small urban cliques.” Cleverly recognising that “it’s embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp” and run the risk of having perpetrated “a very inferior piece of Camp”, Sontag proceeds to set out 58 witty and coruscating numbered “notes”, culminating in the ultimate Camp statement: “It’s good because it’s awful.”
What we need now, more than ever: this kind of originality and risk.
A signature sentence
“A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about; there are special reasons why Camp, in particular, has never been discussed.”
Three to compare
Susan Sontag: Illness As Metaphor (1978)
Camille Paglia: Vamps & Tramps (1994)
Susan Sontag: In America (2000) | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/mar/20/queen-of-puddings-anna-jones-mothers-day-recipes | Food | 2020-03-20T12:00:40.000Z | Anna Jones | Queen of puddings: Anna Jones' Mother's Day recipes | The modern cook | We recently discovered a notebook filled with my maternal grandma’s recipes in my mum’s loft.
I hadn’t realised quite how much I had longed for it; and I hadn’t thought we’d had many recipes passed down in my family. My memories of Grandma Catherine are from the years after her dementia took hold, so I never saw her cook. I just remember a kitchen cupboard full of jars of mint sauce – the result of muddled trips to the shops.
The notebook feels like a way to get to know her in those years when she was more herself. Queen of puddings, according to Mum, was her favourite, so I’ll make it this and every Mother’s Day from now on.
Queen of puddings (pictured above)
My grandma’s recipe is a bit like a Bake-Off challenge: no oven temperatures and a very lean method. I guess it harks back to a time when our cooking instincts were more honed. I’ve stayed as close to her version as I could, but have added some timings. You could add a little spice or vanilla in with the breadcrumbs, if you like; and you can use any jam here. The mandarin one below works wonderfully, but she would have used strawberry or raspberry from a jar.
Prep 20 min
Cook 45 min
Makes 1 pudding
100g homemade white breadcrumbs
120g golden caster sugar
10g butter
475ml whole milk
3 eggs, separated
2 tbsp jam of your choice
Heat the oven to 180C (160C fan)/gas 4. Mix the breadcrumbs and 50g of the sugar in a bowl.
Put the butter and milk into a saucepan, heat gently until the butter has melted, then take off the heat and leave to cool. Beat the egg yolks in a small bowl. Add the breadcrumb mixture to the milk mixture, then whisk in the egg yolks.
Pour the mixture into a greased, 24cm round baking dish or pie dish, and bake for 20-30 minutes.
Meanwhile, make the meringue. Whisk the egg whites until stiff, then fold in the remaining sugar and whisk again for 10 minutes, until smooth and silky.
Take the dish out of the oven, spread with the jam, then top with the meringue, using the back of a spoon to create peaks; you could also pipe on the meringue mixture if you wanted to.
Return the pudding to the oven for 10-15 minutes, until the meringue is browned.
Quick mandarin compote
I like the brightness of citrus, both on my toast and in this queen of puddings. It’s not the jam my Grandma would have used for her pudding, but it does remind me of the tinned mandarins I ate from the tin at her house.
Anna Jones’ quick mandarin compote.
Prep 5 min
Cook 20 min
Makes 1 pot
8 mandarins (or clementines), peeled
3 tbsp honey or maple syrup
1 pinch flaky salt
A few sprigs of thyme (optional)
Put the peeled mandarin segments in a saucepan, removing any big pieces of pith as you go.
Heat the pan to low-medium and add the honey, salt and thyme, if you’re using it. Gently simmer until the fruit breaks down, using a masher to make a jam-like consistency. This should take around 20 minutes.
Set aside to cool and use in today’s queen of puddings recipe, or spoon over your toast or yoghurt at breakfast. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jan/05/take-more-breaks-at-work-put-your-head-in-the-freezer-an-experts-eight-simple-tips-for-better-sleep | Life and style | 2023-01-05T10:00:17.000Z | Elle Hunt | Take more breaks at work, put your head in the freezer … an expert’s eight simple tips for better sleep | Many of us are hoping for a happier, healthier life in 2023. We may already be trying lifestyle changes (daily meditation, giving up dairy), but for most of us the greatest gains to be had are in sleeping better. Regardless of your specific goal – whether it be to lose weight, reduce stress, get fitter, advance at work, or be a better friend or partner – it is hard to achieve anything when you have had insufficient sleep.
On the flipside, everything seems more possible when you are well rested. Sleep boosts the immune system, regulates mood and metabolism, and can make you more productive, patient or creative. It sharpens the mind and can prolong your life.
“Sleep is one of the most powerful things you can do for your body. It’s just critical to make that a priority,” says Aric Prather, author of The Seven-Day Sleep Prescription. A psychologist and professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, Prather practises cognitive behavioural therapy for the treatment of insomnia (CBTI).
In his book, he shares his strategy for “unlocking your best rest”. He says: “Life is hard, there is always stress, sleep is disrupted, but there are things we can do.”
Better yet, the effort pays dividends. “The more work you put into it, the better you’ll sleep,” says Prather. Here are his tips on how to get started.
Start keeping a sleep diary
The aims of Prather’s practice are to regulate our internal clock and to address any anxieties or hangups we have developed around sleep. Reliably restful nights take both, he says.
It may be that you have unwittingly formed bedtime habits that promote wakefulness, but before you can change your behaviour, you must become aware of it.
A sleep diary can help to identify patterns of behaviour. Photograph: Iryna Imago/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Prather asks his patients at the UCSF insomnia clinic to start keeping a handwritten “sleep diary”, recording facts such as how long it took them to fall asleep, the number of times they woke during the night, their wake-up time and estimated sleep quality. The aim is to highlight patterns and possible areas for improvement. “Sleep is universal, but it’s also really personal,” says Prather. The diary is the first step towards an approach that will work for you.
Manage your expectations
Often Prather’s patients have had one “terrible” night, and worry about it happening again. They may go to bed early to make up for it, then lie there fretting that sleep won’t come, which exacerbates their insomnia.
Sometimes, he says, they are chasing a unicorn. “They have maybe had one fantastic night when they’ve fallen asleep and woken up in the same position, feeling great, and that’s become what they’re shooting for … You can savour that experience, but that can’t be your goal.”
Accepting that sleep will sometimes elude you, for reasons outside your control, helps to relieve the stress, frustration and anxiety around drifting off, perhaps making it more possible.
“It’s really about teaching people that one bad night won’t ruin your life,” says Prather. “We’re resilient, we’re built for sleep.”
Wake up at the same time each day
If you are struggling to sleep, it is tempting to “catch up” with a lie-in at the weekends or when you can, but this can backfire by further confusing our internal “drivers” of sleep, says Prather. “Our brain is always taking on information, trying to keep us alive, making predictions about what’s going to happen next – so the more things can be stable and consistent, the better those predictions are.”
Striving to go to bed at the same time every night can pile on pressure that is not conducive to sleep, says Prather. Instead, he advises waking up at the same time (or within a half-hour window) every day to regulate your circadian rhythm, which governs your bodily processes and whether you are a night owl or an early bird.
Getting up at the same time each day helps to regulate circadian rhythms. Photograph: blackCAT/Getty Images
What time you choose is up to you, says Prather; the key is consistency. If it is a challenge to begin with, he suggests anchoring it in a ritual that you look forward to such as making a cooked breakfast.
After a while, you should naturally start to feel sleepy around the same time every night. “It’s like restarting your sleep drive … all that can be anchored to one time in the morning.”
Let yourself wind down
Your brain needs time to decompress from the pressures of the day and prepare you for sleep – if possible, about two hours before your ideal bedtime.
“Often people treat their brains and their bodies like laptops: ‘Well, turn it off!’” says Prather. “I wish it was that way … but we need to have an adequate transition.”
The optimum post-work, pre-bed activity will be different for everybody: some people clean, others listen to a podcast, some might write in a journal or do some gentle stretching.
These rituals can become environmental triggers, encouraging us to shift gears into sleep. Even television can help us wind down, says Prather (though he advises against watching it in bed).
But, he adds, there is a big difference between starting a nail-biting new drama, and zoning out to reruns of a familiar show such as Friends. Likewise, the anxiety-inducing content of your Twitter timeline is probably more harmful to sleep than the blue light being emitted by your phone.
If, after two hours of winding down, you are still wide awake, it may be that your routine is too stimulating. Prather recommends meditating before bed (“If that’s your thing”) or listening to gentle music.
To sleep better at night, start with your days
“Sleep and your daytime experience are intimately intertwined,” says Prather.
If you go full tilt from dawn to dusk without taking any breaks, the pent-up stress will inevitably catch up with you come bedtime – and, once chronic, it is hard to shut off.
For this reason, Prather says, it is vital to manage your workload, build downtime into your schedule and actively strive to manage stress.
He challenges his patients to take five “microbreaks” of five to 15 minutes every day, preferably without reaching for a caffeine boost every time. He suggests meditating, phoning a friend or even – if you’re really flagging – sticking your head in your freezer. “There are ways to get through the midday doldrums without an extra cup of coffee: that cold exposure is absolutely alerting … You can also do a brisk walk outside.”
If you are concerned about being seen to be shirking, or you feel you are just too busy to step away, Prather suggests reframing it as an investment in your health. “There’s just such a long history, at least in western culture, around the merits of productivity. You have to really make the case that by investing in sleep, it actually improves your productivity in the day.”
Our thoughts likewise need to be managed, with dwelling on problems or replaying past regrets believed to be one of the major factors in insomnia. CBT techniques such as learning to observe your thoughts from a distance, without engaging with the content – as though they are faraway clouds, or passing cars – can be helpful in shutting them off at night. Prather suggests setting aside 15 minutes each day for “intentional worry time”. Set a timer and list the things you are worried about, without attempting to solve them.
It helps to relieve latent anxiety, he says. If those worries do crop up again at night, tell yourself you will deal with them in tomorrow’s “worry window”, or write them down.
Meditation can help you to switch off. Photograph: AntonioGuillem/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Test your sleep drive
Once you have at least a week’s worth of data in your sleep diary, Prather says, you can work out your “sleep efficiency” score. That is the approximate number of minutes that you spent asleep, divided by the number of minutes you gave yourself to sleep (including how long it took to drift off, and any time spent out of bed due to insomnia).
The threshold that Prather aims for with his clients is average sleep efficiency of at least 85% for adults aged up to 65, and about 80% for those over 65.
If you routinely fall short, you may have become conditioned to associate being in bed with being awake. Start by restricting your bed to sleep and sex only, and don’t go to bed until you are sleepy. If you are still very much awake after 20 to 30 minutes, get up and continue to wind down elsewhere, with a cup of tea or a book, until you feel like drifting off again.
If this doesn’t produce results, Prather’s next suggestion is perhaps counterintuitive: go to bed late. He rarely tells his patients to be asleep by a particular time, but he often tells them that they cannot go to bed any earlier.
The idea is that – by restricting their time spent in bed to the number of hours that (their sleep diary suggests) they are actually sleeping, plus 30 minutes in which to drift off – they reduce the time spent lying awake, and foster an association between the bed and sleep.
“With insomnia, people say they’re tired, but they’re often not sleepy – they just feel bad and fatigued,” says Prather. “That feeling of sleepiness is rare. So that’s why pushing on that drive, that biological need, is so powerful … Then, as they get some success, it helps shift their mindset: ‘Oh, I can sleep. It’s not broken.’”
After a week, many of Prather’s patients report falling asleep almost instantly and sleeping through to their alarm. That late bedtime can then be gradually brought forward, in 15-minute increments every few days.
Investigate other possible issues
Prather urges against pharmaceutical sleep aids, especially for long-term insomnia. “It just masks the symptoms … People can become really psychologically dependent on them.”
If your sleep troubles persist despite your best efforts, he advises consulting your doctor. It may be that you need personalised support for CBTI to be effective.
Insomnia could also be indicative of another sleep disorder, or underlying medical issue. Obstructive sleep apnoea, for example, often goes undiagnosed but is disruptive to sleep.
“Often, people will wake up in the middle of the night, feeling anxious, and it’s due to the fact that their airway was obstructed,” says Prather.
A sore jaw or headache might suggest night-time teeth-grinding, which can be alleviated by wearing a mouthguard. Another potential cause of low-quality sleep is depression, with both oversleeping and waking up early possible symptoms.
Sleep is such a fundamental building block, seeking to improve our routines can be “a great entry point” to better overall wellbeing, says Prather. “Most people don’t want to talk about their depression or anxiety or trauma, but they’ll talk about their sleep.”
Fight for your right to sleep
We may be built to sleep, but the modern world isn’t. Our schedules are tethered not to the sun but technology. We are awash in artificial light every hour, we feel that we can’t afford to switch off.
In truth, not everyone has equal opportunity to sleep, with race and socioeconomic status often connected to less or lower-quality rest.
Prather advocates for sleep to be recognised as a human right: to be promoted in and of itself, and enshrined with social and policy change.
In his dream world, this could mean greater protection for night-shift workers; later school start times allowing for teenagers’ need for sleep; and “right to disconnect” laws restricting work emails. Employers could promote the importance of switching off after work.
The post-pandemic shift to hybrid working was a chance for greater flexibility; instead, says Prather, “people have shifted to being available at all times – really impinging on opportunities for rest”.
This has led to what has been termed “revenge bedtime procrastination”, where people stay up late just to claw back a few hours for themselves. “People feel like their time isn’t theirs any more,” Prather says. “It’s this constant struggle.”
The solution to that resentment and time-pressure is not to deny yourself rest, he argues, but to fight for it. “It may seem like you’re kind of shortchanging that time, but actually, it’s doing an incredible thing to try to enhance your wellbeing, your creativity, your cognition, your ability to deal with stress. All of those things will serve you well in living your best life – when you’re awake.”
The Seven-Day Sleep Prescription by Dr Aric Prather is out now. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2005/sep/01/features11.g21 | Global | 2005-08-31T23:02:32.000Z | Stanley Johnson | Bird flu boundaries | The prospective arrival of bird flu seems to have created quite a stir on the continent. After the death of a Dutch vet who had visited several poultry farms, the authorities in the Netherlands decided to shut free-range poultry indoors to avoid, so they stated, any possible contamination from birds migrating from Russia. Apparently they have run into trouble from the EU Commission because they are still trying to claim the free-range egg premium. As George Canning put it in 1826 when he was Britain's top diplomat: In matters of commerce, the fault of the Dutch is offering too little and asking too much.
In Britain, there doesn't yet seem to be a sense of crisis over bird flu. Cricket probably has a lot to do with this. The current Test series between England and Australia has had an hypnotic effect and it has been difficult to take anything else seriously. Moreover, the British government, which holds the presidency of the EU, seems determined to keep the lid on any outbreak of hysteria. Our leaders are certainly not following the Dutch example.
Bully for them, I say. The number of human deaths worldwide from avian flu is probably less than 100. There are many uncertainties. Where does the disease originate? How is it spread? Can it really be transmitted from human to human? Let's look before we leap.
Rob Hepworth, an old friend of mine who looks after the Convention on Migratory Species from an office in Bonn, is deeply concerned.
"It's the usual story of wildlife getting the blame," he told me over the telephone. "There's no evidence that any wild bird has passed on the disease to humans. Human deaths have come from persistent contact with poultry."
There were sinister rumours, Rob said, that the Russians had started their hunting season early this year. "If we rush to scapegoat migratory birds, we could push some species over the edge into extinction, like the Siberian crane or the bar-headed goose. If we're going to look for a culprit, let's look for the real culprit."
Wasn't it more likely, he argued, that the root causes of avian flu lay in the horrendous overcrowded and insanitary conditions under which most poultry was reared around the world?
To me, the logic of all this is inescapable. If avian flu is indeed a problem, and industrial methods of poultry-rearing are to blame, the way to deal with it is not to wipe out wild birds, but to curb the excesses of modern farming.
Last week in this column I wrote about a former governor of an east African territory who had an endearing way of taking his leave when invited out to dinner. He would bring his official band with him and when the moment came he would order the national anthem to be played. The gist of this story was correct. However, I erroneously stated that the governor in question was an uncle of my Exmoor neighbour, Jeffrey Jowell. I now understand from Jeffrey that I got the wrong end of the assegai. He was referring not to one of his own esteemed collection of uncles, but to the late father of an equally esteemed colleague at University College London.
To make amends, I have done some further research. I have discovered that Sir Edward Twining was governor of Tanganyika, now Tanzania, between 1949 and 1958. Tanganyika was, of course, a former German colony. When the Germans captured the country at the end of the 19th century, the head of the Hehe chief, Mkwawa, was cut off. The Germans sent the skull home and it was kept in the Bremen Anthropological Museum. Germany lost all its colonies at the end of the first world war. The 1919 Versailles Treaty stipulated in its Article 246 that the Hehe chief's skull should be returned. In 1922, Tanganyika was mandated to the British by the League of Nations.
Soon after he took up his post in 1949, Sir Edward formally asked for the return of Chief Mkwawa's skull to Tanganyika. In 1953, he went to Bremen in person (one imagines without the official band) to inspect the rows and rows of human skulls that lined the shelves of the museum there. He knew the shape and dimensions of the skull he was looking for, as well as the place where the shot had made a hole.
On July 9 1954, 56 years to the day after Chief Mkwawa's death, Twining handed the skull over to Chief Adam Sapi Mkwawa in a colourful ceremony at Kalenga. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/apr/21/five-of-the-best-lockdown-dances | Stage | 2020-04-21T05:00:56.000Z | Lyndsey Winship | Shut up and dance! Five of the best routines made during lockdown | 1. Robbie Fairchild’s #roofseries
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Possibly the best thing to come out of lockdown. Ex-New York City Ballet dancer turned Broadway and Cats star Robbie Fairchild dancing on his Manhattan rooftop with his flatmate, dancer/choreographer Chris Jarosz. Watch this to feed on their alfresco freedom. Fairchild is an electric dancer and the juicy energy is both slack and taut, masculine and feminine, low slung and light-footed. It’s very cool and very now.
2. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Alvin Ailey’s most famous work, Revelations, gets a lockdown edit, splicing together the dancers performing a short excerpt at home. The settings couldn’t be more busily domestic: furniture and fridge magnets, indifferent flatmates and curious dogs. But, as the hum of the spiritual I Been Buked rises, the dancers arms stretch into a low V, faces upturned to the heavens, and they briefly transcend the everyday. Another clip, of Rennie Harris’s Lazarus, features funky house footwork for immediate uplift.
3. Alexander Whitley: Digital Body
If you know what to do with an .fbx file, this one’s for you. Choreographer Alexander Whitley was due to premiere his latest work, Overflow, last weekend, but he’s now musing on digital choreography instead. He’s released a series of motion capture improvisations and is sharing all the digital files so that anyone – designers, composers, digital artists – can create a response. Trippy visuals ahoy!
4. Ivan Vasiliev and the Mikhailovsky Ballet
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Stars of Moscow’s Mikhailovsky Ballet offer a domestic take on some of the great ballets, led by Ivan Vasiliev, a mighty virtuoso dancer with an endearing silly streak. He enacts Giselle with his wife, the Bolshoi’s Maria Vinogradova, while she cooks lunch, Valeria Zapasnikova does Don Q with a dinner plate for a fan, and Ella Persson’s Cinderella, alas, really cannot go to the ball this time.
5. Francesca Hayward and Cesar Corrales
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The lockdown has put paid to one big date in the ballet diary, Francesca Hayward’s debut in Swan Lake, but she and partner Cesar Corrales are keeping their muscles warm. The videos are only a matter of seconds long but it’s worth it for the joy on Hayward’s face as Corrales spins her in dizzying multiple pirouettes, her smile getting wider with each turn. A treat to see dancers out of character, just loving dancing. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/16/womens-prize-for-fiction-shortlist | Books | 2013-04-16T14:54:00.000Z | Mark Brown | Women's prize for fiction reveals 'staggeringly strong' shortlist | One pundit called it a "staggeringly strong" shortlist – and who would argue given that the contenders for the 2013 Women's prize for fiction include two former winners, Zadie Smith and Barbara Kingsolver, and Hilary Mantel, who could become the first writer to bag all three of the UK's top literary awards.
Mantel is the only novelist to win the Man Booker and Costa book prizes in the same year for Bring Up the Bodies, the second in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Completing the shortlist for the award, formerly known as the Orange prize, are books by Kate Atkinson, AM Homes and Maria Semple.
This year's chair of judges, the actor Miranda Richardson, called it an "incredibly strong, thrilling and diverse" shortlist; one which took about two hours for the panel to agree on. "It shook down fairly rapidly because the stories communicate and sustain all the way through, you can't argue with the quality."
Each of the six books were stories of significance and potential future classics, said Richardson.
There are some who say that Mantel has won enough, but that was not an issue for the judges, said Richardson. Nor was the recent furore over a wildly misinterpreted lecture she gave which explored the media portrayal of the Duchess of Cambridge.
"Bring up the Bodies is a wonderful book and it deserves its place, you can't ignore something which is of such great quality," said Richardson. "We have, particularly in the UK, this tall poppy syndrome – success is not well thought of, the inference is that you're trying to set yourself above others when it's nothing to do with that. It is outside opinion that has put you there and then you're not allowed to enjoy the fruits of your labour, that's what I feel is very wrong in this country.
"This is a very celebratory award and it makes me feel good that she has come through and we can genuinely say, 'What a book.'"
Many people thought Smith should have been a Man Booker contender last year so there will be pleasure at seeing NW, her moving and gripping story of city life set in north-west London, in the mix. Smith won the Orange prize with On Beauty in 2006 and could become the first double winner, as could the American novelist Kingsolver, who won in 2010, shortlisted for her eighth novel Flight Behaviour.
Two other American writers are on the list, for very funny novels. Homes, who was a writer and producer on The L Word, is shortlisted for May We Be Forgiven, which chronicles the deranged and life-changing family events encountered by a college Nixon scholar. And Semple, a writer on TV shows including Ellen and Arrested Development, is on the list for Where'd You Go, Bernadette, which uses emails, letters and official documents to explore the world of Bernadette Fox, once revered as the most brilliant architect of her generation but now a stay-at-home mum married to a workaholic Microsoft executive.
The sixth novel is Atkinson's Life After Life, in which the narrative begins over and over again as it analyses life's what-ifs.
Early reaction has acclaimed the list as particularly strong. Jonathan Ruppin, web editor for Foyles, said of the finalists: "Last year's shortlist was possibly the strongest in the prize's history, so this year's had a lot to live up to, but I think the judges have come up with a staggeringly strong shortlist."
Ruppin tipped Homes as winner. "She's the perfect example of a female author who should be acclaimed as one of the great contemporary American novelists, alongside authors like Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo. May We Be Forgiven is poignant, blackly humorous and a groundbreaking portrait of an America turning to nostalgia, wondering if its best years are now behind it."
He was joined by Jon Howells of Waterstones, who said: "I will be placing a bet on AM Homes's novel May We Be Forgiven, her best book to date and so far removed from Bring Up the Bodies that it is impossible to compare – and therefore in a good position to take the prize."
The award – created after frustration at an all-male Booker shortlist in 1991 – had been known as the Orange since it was first awarded, to Helen Dunmore, in 1996. Other winners have included Linda Grant, Ann Patchett, Andrea Levy and Marilynne Robinson. When Orange pulled out last year a number of people, including Cherie Blair and Joanna Trollope, stepped in with personal donations to sustain the prize while a new sponsor is found.
The list has been whittled down from 140 submissions and the overall winner will be announced at the Royal Festival Hall on 5 June.
By then, organisers say, a new sponsor for 2014 prize will have been announced.
The shortlist
Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel
Flight Behaviour, by Barbara Kingsolver
Where'd You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple
Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson
May We Be Forgiven, by A M Homes
NW, by Zadie Smith | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/apr/24/labour-sunderland-local-elections-conservatives-partygate | UK news | 2022-04-24T11:00:21.000Z | Josh Halliday | ‘Everybody’s ready for a change’: Labour losing grip on Sunderland | The village of Rickleton, near Sunderland, is a scene of quiet suburban bliss on a warm April morning. But the sound from the cricket field of leather on willow has been disturbed by frantic electioneering before a vote that could spell danger for the Labour leader, Keir Starmer.
Labour has ruled Sunderland with an iron grip for decades but the recent political upheaval has left it clinging to power. The party has a majority of only six councillors, meaning it could lose overall control of the council next month for the first time since it was founded in 1974.
Starmer has visited the city twice in recent weeks in a bid to avert a disaster that would undermine what could be a strong set of local elections for Labour across England on 5 May.
Sunderland council’s headquarters, City Hall, on the banks of the river Wear, a building it is renting for £2.4m a year. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
Rickleton is representative of Labour’s struggle outside the big cities. The former mining village, 10 miles west of Sunderland, has been core Labour territory for generations. But last year it broke with tradition and elected a Conservative councillor, one of six voted in across the city on a night when Labour lost nine seats. This year, the council leader’s own seat is up for grabs, and the Tories are eyeing what would be a major scalp.
“I think everybody’s ready for a change now,” said Linda Delaney, walking her 12-year-old springer spaniel, Olly, on the playing fields where Harraton colliery once stood. Delaney, 69, said she would vote Conservative because she felt Labour had taken people for granted and misused money locally: “I think they could do with a reality check.”
As she spoke, Boris Johnson was repeating his apology to MPs for breaking lockdown laws in June 2020. The Partygate saga has helped Labour to a six-point poll lead nationally and appears to be putting off some would-be Tory voters fromturning out at all.
Shoppers in Sunderland, where the Conservatives are confident of taking control of the council after the local elections in May. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
One Labour figure said they had encountered many Labour-Tory switchers from 2019 planning to stay at home on 5 May, rather than return to Labour. “There’s a big poll lead nationally and we are getting a hearing again, but I’m still not sensing that love on the ground,” he said.
For Antony Mullen, the 30-year-old leader of the Sunderland Conservatives, out canvassing in the Barnes area of the city on Wednesday, the prime minister risked derailing what could have been a big night for the party in north-east England. “It’s going really good. I’m just worried that something else might happen nationally,” he said.
Local elections: ‘It’s Partygate versus low council taxes’
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Mullen, who has previously called for Johnson to resign, believes the prime minister’s days are numbered: “I think he’s done for. I don’t think he’ll be leading us into the next general election.”
Seventeen of the seats up for grabs in Sunderland are held by Labour. Seven of those are occupied by Labour councillors stepping down, taking with them almost 70 years of council experience. “Jumping before they’re pushed, some of them,” said one Labour councillor.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, are aiming to build on the gains that have seen the party go from six councillors in 2015 to 19 today. The party took nearly 24,000 votes across the city’s three constituencies in the 2015 general election. In 2019, that had almost doubled to 40,685 votes, slashing Labour’s majorities to about 3,000 and making Sunderland a key battleground in the next national poll.
Three recent council byelections have given Labour hope of survival in Sunderland. The party gained a former Ukip seat in March and took two seats in neighbouring County Durham, including one from the Conservatives last week.
The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, talks to young people in Southwick during a recent visit to Sunderland. Photograph: Tom Wilkinson/PA
The former Labour councillor Iain Kay, who lost his seat four years ago but is standing for election again, said there had been a “big step forward” from recent campaigns: “The last few years have been brutal. The outright unbridled unfriendliness has been tangible. This year I’ve not had one single negative response and a lot of people are reporting that.”
After decades of stagnation and failed projects, there have been signs recently of progress in Sunderland. New arts studios and cultural spaces have opened, including a live music venue inside a former fire station; hotels and office blocks have sprung up on the skyline. Only last month, the council officially opened its gleaming new headquarters, City Hall, on the banks of the River Wear, a building it is renting for £2.4m a year. The eye-watering cost – double the annual spend on sports and leisure – has irked voters facing the biggest fall in living standards since the mid-1950s.
Tories face heavy local election losses over Partygate, PM told
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While Labour still holds 43 of Sunderland’s 75 council seats, a loss of six councillors would take the town hall into no overall control for the first time in 48 years. Paul Edgeworth, a Lib Dem councillor, said there had been “no conversations” with the Tories about forming a coalition but that they would be willing to work together on “basic services issues”.
There is potential, however, for Partygate to help Labour cling on. Marilyn Henderson, a former NHS physiotherapist, said she had always voted Labour but switched to the Conservatives in 2019 owing to the “shambles” under Jeremy Corbyn.
The 75-year-old remain voter said she would not vote for Starmer’s party this time but that Johnson’s rule-breaking had put her off voting for the Tories. “Nationally there’s so many ridiculous things going on,” she said. “It really is awful and it has upset so many people.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/16/housman-country-heart-of-england-peter-parker-review | Books | 2016-07-16T08:01:06.000Z | Blake Morrison | Housman Country: Into the Heart of England by Peter Parker review – the inverse of roast-beef heartiness | It’s easy to see why AE Housman might appeal to supporters of Brexit. With his deep attachment to England and its countryside, he evokes the same feelings the out lobby played on: pride, patriotism and nostalgia for the kind of unspoilt landscape – streams, farms, woods, spires, green pastures and windy wealds – that people think of as quintessentially English. Such sentiments, Peter Parker remarks in this excellent book, have become a “comfort blanket for adults in which they can wrap themselves against the chill winds of the present”. But as he points out, Housman’s poems, closely read, offer no such consolation. The “land of lost content” will never be regained; its “blue remembered hills” exist only in the memory; its “happy highways” are ones to which we “cannot come again”.
As Ted Hughes said, Housman’s poems “have entered the national consciousness”. But as a go-to poet for xenophobes, he can’t help but disappoint. His poems may be scattered with local place-names but his range is global and his tone the inverse of roast-beef heartiness. “The essential business of poetry,” he said, “is to harmonise the sadness of the universe.” Love is elusive; life is fleeting; God no longer exists – those are his recurrent themes. His attachment to the nation is less pervasive than his awareness of “the nation that is not”, AKA death, where “revenges are forgot / And the hater hates no more”.
Housman Country offers three books for the price of one: a lucid biographical portrait; a study of Housman’s lasting influence on our culture; and, as an appendix (taking up 100 or so unnumbered pages), the whole of A Shropshire Lad – a volume that has never been out of print in 120 years. The poet who emerges is complex: cheery, grumpy, generous, begrudging, gentle and robust.
As a go-to poet for xenophobes, he can’t help but disappoint
He was born in 1859, the eldest of seven children, and grew up just outside Bromsgrove, in Worcestershire. Not a Shropshire lad at all, then, but he claimed to have “a sentimental feeling for Shropshire because its hills were our western horizon”. West was where the sun went down, and the dusk-light of his poetry derives in part from the losses he suffered: his mother died when he was 12, his improvident solicitor father the year before he wrote the bulk of A Shropshire Lad. By then, despite failing his classics degree at Oxford and spending years in the lower rungs of the civil service, Housman had become a professor of Latin with a reputation for dry-as-dust asperity. But he’d always written poetry, and in the first few months of 1895 he wrote with “continuous excitement”, some of the poems coming to him as he walked round Hampstead after drinking a lunchtime pint of beer.
He initially thought of publishing them under a pseudonym, Terence Hearsay, and always denied that they were autobiographical. But however rueful and resigned, the sorrow in them was an expression (or repression) of his unrequited love for Moses Jackson, the friend he’d known since Oxford days, who later married and moved to India. Though the “troubles” the poems describe aren’t exclusive to one gender, gay men had no difficulty recognising the subtext. “A stranger and afraid”, Housman guarded his privacy while reaching out to future generations as tortured as he’d been: “This is for all ill-treated fellows /Unborn and unbegot, / For them to read when they’re in trouble / And I’m not.”
The keynote was melancholy. His poems, he said, were a “morbid secretion”, a kind of funereal disease or goner-ia. He hit his stride as early as adolescence with a poem about the advantage that the natural world enjoys over the human: “After Summer what? / Ah! Happy trees that know it not.” It’s a mark of Housman’s glumness that when Larkin uses the same conceit, in his poem “First Sight’, it’s positively joyous (winter-born lambs don’t know “What so soon will wake and grow / Utterly unlike the snow.”) Housman was well aware how miserable he sounded. “The verse you make, / It gives a chap the belly ache”, his alter ego accuses him in the penultimate poem of A Shropshire Lad, “Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme / Your friends to death before their time”. But Housman gives himself the last word, defending his draughts of ague as the apt response to a world in which there’s “much less good than ill” – “take it”, he says, “if the taste is sour, /The better for the embittered hour”.
Indifferent to royalties and piracy (uniquely for an author, he even lent money to his publisher), Housman gave his blessing to cheap pocket editions of his work. They sold in thousands and many “luckless lads” going off to fight in 1914 carried one with them. “Housman foresaw the Somme,” Robert Lowell said, and it’s true he was a war poet avant la lettre. A Shropshire Lad appeared even before the Boer war (in which his brother Herbert died), yet Housman’s evocation of the pity of war is as bleak as Owen and Sassoon’s: “East and west on fields forgotten, / Bleach the bones of comrades slain.” To men in the trenches, the feelings Housman explored – misfortune, stoicism, male companionship, yearning for home – were strangely consoling, though when a Selected was distributed free to US servicemen in the second world war, a few poems were judiciously omitted, in case lines such as “Lovely lads and dead and rotten, / None that go return again” proved bad for morale.
Autobiography by Morrissey – review
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“Housman has left no followers,” Louis MacNeice wrote in 1938, but as well as the poets he influenced (Auden, Larkin, Betjeman) there are all the composers who set his poems to music – Vaughan Williams, Butterworth, Ireland, Lennox Berkeley and Ivor Gurney among them. Housman charged no fee for the privilege (by the time he died, 75 songs and 29 song cycles had originated from A Shropshire Lad), but he remained ambivalent about the process. When one composer wrote to complain of the impropriety of using that adjective “rotten” in reference to dead soldiers, he replied that he regarded music (or at any rate modern European music) “as unsuitable for union with words”. Perhaps he’d have been happier with the jazz versions that Johnny Dankworth wrote for Cleo Laine.
To demonstrate Housman’s enduring impact, Parker ranges far and wide: Morrissey and YouTube are here as well as EM Forster and the Ramblers’ Association. Among the odder cases he includes is that of the American lawyer Clarence Darrow, who quoted from the poems in a summing-up that saved two young men from the death penalty. Or the case of Julian Hurd, who killed himself at 19 in a mood of despair that his brother Douglas believes was linked to him having just read Housman. More happily, there are films and TV series that have referenced Housman, from Out of Africa to The Simpsons. The name Shropshire Lad has been given to beers, trains, roses and narrowboats; Bromsgrove has a Housman Trail; and the 150th anniversary of his birth in 2009 included “a walk in Housman country”.
How he’d have felt about it is hard to say. Unlike Wordsworth, Hardy and the Brontës, he didn’t live or work in the place associated with him nor foresee there’d be pilgrimages to a country that existed chiefly in his head. But it’s a country people recognise. And you don’t need a British passport to be allowed in – as Parker shows in his fine study, the borders of Housmanland are uncontrolled and stretch as far as Russia and China.
To order Housman Country £20.50 (RRP £25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/04/beautiful-things-review-hunter-biden-donald-trump-addiction-ukraine | US news | 2021-04-04T05:00:59.000Z | Lloyd Green | Beautiful Things by Hunter Biden review – the prodigal son and Trumpists' target | Robert Hunter Biden is not a rock star. Instead, the sole surviving son of Joe Biden – senator, vice-president, president – is a lawyer by training and a princeling by happenstance. Regardless, life on the edge comes with consequences.
Lucky review: how Biden beat Trump – and doubters like Obama and Hillary
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As Hunter Biden grudgingly acknowledges in his memoir, comparisons to Billy Carter, Roger Clinton or the Trump boys, appendages to power who sought to capitalize on proximity, may be apt. Indeed, Biden cops to the possibility that his name might have had something to do with his winding up on third base without hitting a triple.
“I’m not a curio or a sideshow to a moment in history,” he writes, defensively, channeling the mantra of those with parents in high places: “I’ve worked for someone other than my father, rose and fell on my own.”
But Biden is not content to leave well alone. Instead, he announces: “Having a Biden on Burisma’s board was a loud and unmistakable ‘fuck you’ to Putin.” He protests too much.
Glossed over by Beautiful Things is that while his overseas venture may have ended up at the heart of Donald Trump’s first impeachment, it also discomforted Barack Obama’s White House. Confronted with Hunter’s foray into Ukraine and the energy business, the 44th president’s spokesman, Jay Carney, declined to express support.
“Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens, and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the vice-president or president,” said Carney, back in 2014.
Hunter possesses little filter. His craving for absolution is hardwired
Biden also portrays the relationship between his father and the Obama crowd as uneven to say the least. He points a finger at David Axelrod, an Obama counselor who played naysayer to Joe Biden’s chances in 2020, on CNN.
Hunter recounts the aftermath of a conversation between his father and then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton, about Afghanistan: “Goddamnit … Axelrod’s gotten in her ear!”
As for Clinton, Biden elides the tension that existed between his father and the 2016 nominee. It wasn’t just about Obama encouraging Clinton. Back then, Joe Biden was scared of running against her.
In Chasing Hillary, written by Amy Chozick in 2018, Joe Biden is paraphrased as saying to the press, off the record: “You guys don’t understand these people. The Clintons will try to destroy me.” Hell hath no fury like a Clinton crossed.
The younger Biden’s book shows flashes of his grasp of power politics. But he also demonstrates a continuous blind spot for his own predicament. Confession should not be conflated with self-awareness.
Biden recounts a conversation with Kathleen, his first wife, after the funeral in 2015 of Beau, his brother. He goes so far as to muse about running for office – despite his multiple addictions, all now detailed extensively on the page, and the ups-and-downs of his marriage.
She responds: “Are you serious?”
That Biden even went there is beyond puzzling. Or as he puts it, “I underestimated how much the wreckage of my past and all that I put my family through still weighed on Kathleen.”
This was before Biden commenced an affair with his late brother’s wife.
Hunter possesses little filter. His craving for absolution is hardwired.
Describing a series of interviews he granted to the New Yorker’s Adam Entous, regarding Burisma, Ukraine and all that, he writes that he “didn’t know how cathartic the experience would be”. For good measure, he adds: “It was my opportunity to tell everyone out there, ‘This is who I am, you motherfuckers, and I ain’t changing!’”
The italics are his.
Through it all, Joe Biden is shown as a loving and caring father, like the dad in the story of the prodigal son. Biden depicts his father’s efforts to intervene in his personal nightmare and the times he rebuffed such entreaties. The family’s Catholicism is present throughout his book.
The empathy and emotion Joe Biden conveys on television are part of who he is. His own setbacks and suffering helped elect him amid a terrible pandemic. Whatever facade exists is thin – and transparent.
That said, the president’s capacity to forgive his son’s trespasses makes recent stories of his low tolerance for prior marijuana use among political appointees hard to comprehend.
Joe Biden is greeted by his wife Jill and sons Beau, right, and Hunter, second left, following his inauguration as vice-president in 2009. Photograph: Paul J Richards/AFP/Getty Images
Beautiful Things is smoothly written and quickly paced. We know how and where the story ends. Hunter Biden appears to have found happiness in his second marriage. His father is now president.
Still, the son cannot hide his bitterness in being turned into the whipping boy of the Trump campaign. The ex-president is “a vile man with a vile mission” who sank to “unprecedented depths” in his bid to retain power. The 6 January insurrection was vintage Trump. Charlottesville was prelude.
The Ten Year War review: Obamacare, Trump and Biden's battles yet to come
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Recent events offer Hunter Biden some measure of personal vindication and schadenfreude. A report by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) assessed that he and his father were targeted by Russia as part of campaign to swing the election in favor of Trump.
According to the NIC, Moscow used “proxies linked to Russian intelligence” –including “some close to former President Trump and his administration” – “to push influence narratives including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden”. Rudy Giuliani looks like a Kremlin dupe.
But it doesn’t end there. In December 2019, the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz belittled Hunter Biden for his substance abuse. It was a no-holds-barred takedown, unleavened by Gaetz’s own history of drinking and driving.
Timing is everything. Biden returns the favor in his book, calling Gaetz a “troll”. On Tuesday night, Gaetz admitted to being under justice department investigation “regarding sexual conduct with women” and allegedly trafficking a 17-year-old girl.
Beautiful Things: A Memoir is published in the US by Gallery Books | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/aug/16/i-was-once-the-target-of-jeremy-paxmans-world-weary-look-of-disdain | Television & radio | 2022-08-16T17:30:36.000Z | Jim Waterson | I was once the target of Jeremy Paxman’s world-weary look of disdain | Jeremy Paxman’s world-weary look of disdain has been a feature of British television screens for decades. Most of the time it has been aimed at politicians on Newsnight. But back in 2009, after recording an episode of University Challenge, it was aimed at 20-year-old me.
With the air of a man annoyed at being kept from his lunch, he spoke to the studio audience at Manchester’s Granada Studios and announced: “We have one answer to re-record. Waterson said: ‘Oh shit.’”
It turns out the microphones had picked up my cursing as I attempted to dredge up the name of the walking route that ran between Helmsley and Filey. Eventually I got it – Cleveland Way, five points, a deep pride in being a student who knew the name of long distance walking routes – but production was delayed while he read out the question a second time and the cameras could film me tapping it in without the swearing.
Jeremy Paxman to step down as University Challenge host
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Anyone who has been on University Challenge will immediately be asked what it was like to be around Paxman. This is a man whose public persona is still defined by him repeating the same question 12 times during a 1997 interview with Michael Howard. Friends and family want war stories of Paxman’s barbs and rudeness. They want to hear, for some reason, how you were emotionally crushed by being in the sheer presence of the man.
The reality can disappoint them. As a student taking part in the show you are the well-looked-after human meat on a perfectly delightful quiz show production line. Episodes are filmed back-to-back, with short gaps for Paxman to change his jacket to stop viewers at home thinking he’d been sleeping in the same suit for weeks. Direct contact with the presenter consisted of a stilted chat before the first episode – while keeping out of the way of the Jeremy Kyle show which was being filmed in the studio next door.
Paxman is not going to be your mate and he might play up to his character by dismissively shaking his head when you fail to answer some supposedly obvious question. At best he’d be quietly encouraging. At worst, you were left with the impression that he really thought he’d do something more with his life than read out questions from cards.
Jim Waterson and his team on University Challenge.
As my friend Tom Whyman, a writer and academic who also appeared on University Challenge, puts it: “It’s not like he was all warmth and smiles. But he’s not a quizzer himself and the truth is that if you did well he was honestly really impressed. The mystique dissolves as soon as you’re finished filming your first episode and he has to be filmed repeating questions because he’s mispronounced one of the words.”
The new presenter will bring their own approach to University Challenge. Abrasive behaviour by television quizmasters is less fashionable now, with chummy chat preferred to eye-rolling at teenagers. There’s also an opportunity to subtly tweak the programme – such as updating which institutions are selected. But for now viewers have one final season hosted by Paxman to watch – and just remember, it’s more bark than bite. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/aug/21/from-the-observer-magazine-archive-interviews-with-surgeons-1988 | Life and style | 2022-08-21T05:00:01.000Z | Chris Hall | ‘It’s just glorified plumbing’: incisive interviews with Britain’s surgeons, 1988 | Ann Morris spoke to a variety of surgeons for the Observer Magazine of 17 July 1988 (‘Who should put the knife in?’), including general consultant surgeon Jerry Kirk, who said: ‘The character of surgeons has changed because the character of surgery has changed. It is no longer the blood and guts thing it once was.’
Terence English, a pioneer of heart transplant surgery, was ‘tall, imposing and softly spoken’, and ‘epitomises every patient’s idea of a surgeon’ with his coolness under pressure. The crux of it, he said, was that ‘the transplanted organ has to work perfectly at the end of the operation. It has got to take over the circulation immediately. There is no room for error.’
The character of surgery has changed. It is no longer the blood and guts thing it was
Jerry Kirk
It was telling that the only female surgeon Morris spoke to, the vascular surgeon Averil Mansfield, downplayed her specialty in domestic terms – ‘It’s just glorified plumbing, really.’
Consultant gynaecologist Frank Loeffler remembers the first operation he saw. ‘I was a schoolboy and I thought it was fantastic.’ Interesting that although he had three children, he wasn’t present at any of their births.
Brain surgeon Jason Brice said his kind tended to be meticulous, obsessional and a bit strange. ‘I think we are laughed at by other surgeons,’ he said. ‘It’s a gory subject.’
‘When I started we had to chop a lump out of the brain to make room to get in,’ he continued, slightly alarmingly. ‘We could only do that where there was a bit of brain that people weren’t using at the time. Now we can get in virtually anywhere…’
Brice made it sound as if he were conducting an orchestra rather than a team of medics. ‘I enjoy operating. My theatre sister says I am hooked on adrenaline. I like to operate fairly rapidly, to whip up a certain amount of tension and enthusiasm.’ That’s not really what you want to hear as you go under… | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/feb/17/tory-mps-backlash-easing-uk-china-trade-uyghur-genocide | Politics | 2022-02-17T15:23:25.000Z | Jessica Elgot | Tory MPs warn of backlash against easing of UK-China trade | Conservative MPs have warned of a parliamentary backlash following steps taken by the government to ease tensions with China, designed to pave the way for better trading relations.
Over the past few weeks, Boris Johnson has quietly signalled a thaw in frosty relations since the decision in 2020 to exclude Chinese telecoms giant Huawei from the UK’s 5G network.
His communications chief, Guto Harri, is a former spinner for Huawei, though his previous chief of staff, Dan Rosenfield, had also been an advocate of mending relations.
The prime minister has ordered a restart of the UK-China Joint Economic and Trade Commission [Jetco] and this year Rishi Sunak is understood to be on the verge of agreeing the return of annual trade summit, the 11th UK-China Economic and Financial Dialogue (EFD), which has not been held since 2019.
“The Treasury cannot shake the orthodoxy that we must have better trading terms with China,” one senior source said. “But it is Downing Street who really wants this. Boris has always been uneasy about having to cancel Huawei.”
The EFD has previously been used to announce lucrative commercial contracts and closer trade cooperation but a Treasury source played down the significance of the return of the EFD, “if it goes ahead at all”, and said it would be a chance for dialogue rather that leading to any major changes.
The source said it was wrong to portray Sunak as the driving force. “It’s the chancellor’s view that our principles should guide our relationship with China. We need to be eyes wide open about their increasing international influence and must take a principled stand on issues that conflict with our own values.”
The move to defrost relations with Beijing is understood to be a source of tension between Johnson and his foreign secretary, Liz Truss. “Liz is a proper China hawk,” another senior government source said. Truss is scheduled to meet the delegation of MPs who were banned from China for lobbying for sanctions to oppose the Uyghur genocide in the coming days.
The UK’s trade deficit with China has more than tripled in the last year, importing £40.5bn more from China than it exported to the country.
Any significant change of approach threatens to reopen splits with backbenchers, especially those who have been blacklisted by Beijing and who are understood to feel they have received no tangible support from government, including on crucial issues like cybersecurity.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former cabinet minister, said it “beggars belief that we are about to re-invent the failed project kowtow” and blamed the Treasury and Downing Street for an overeagerness to normalise relations. “Whether it is the CCP’s illegal seizure and militarisation of the South China seas or the trashing of the Sino/British agreement on Hong Kong, the Treasury seems ready to turn a blind eye to it all.”
There is also continued frustration about Johnson’s stonewalling over the appointment of Tim Loughton, one of the MPs banned from China, to the chair of the Conservative Human Rights commission.
The body had been a leading internal Tory pressure group, particularly on Hong Kong which led to its blacklisting by Beijing, but Johnson has declined to approve Loughton as chair for more than a year. Its previous chair, Fiona Bruce, resigned after being appointed a special envoy on religious freedom by Johnson.
Loughton has been a strong critic of the prime minister’s conduct over “partygate” as well as the cut to international aid. The rights activist Benedict Rogers, the commission’s deputy chair, is understood to have privately expressed deep frustration at the impasse. Rogers declined to comment.
Another source from inside the group said they were “deeply troubled about this government’s commitment to freedom and human rights, the rule of law and democracy”.
Other MPs who have been sanctioned include Tom Tugendhat, chair of the foreign affairs select committee, Nus Ghani, the former transport minister who has been a leading campaigner on Uyghur genocide, and Neil O’Brien, the Levelling Up minister.
The sanction came after their campaign to insert a clause in the trade bill, which would have permitted the high court to make a preliminary ruling on whether genocide was occurring in a potential trading partner, a clause design to put barriers on a trade deal with China.
Loughton, MP for East Worthing and Shoreham, said the government should be aware of a significant parliamentary backlash to any change of approach towards China.
“Parliament has made it very clear that a government guilty of genocide needs to be treated with extreme caution and cannot be welcomed as an equal partner,” he said. “It would be an insult to parliament if the government were to ignore our concerns not least when seven Parliamentarians remain sanctioned simply for speaking the truth and standing up to China’s bullying and abuse.”
Bob Seeley, who will lead a backbench debate on China next week, said: “We need to engage, but we have to engage as much on our own terms as possible and was understanding the risks of doing so.
“I think we have not yet got our heads around these new authoritarian states and both the obvious threats they pose but also the more subtle threats they pose. We are trying to have business as normal. The world has changed. You’re not a sabre-rattler or a war monger for stating what everyone can see.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/25/british-hiker-aidan-roche-found-dead-switzerland-alps | World news | 2023-09-25T10:43:57.000Z | Mark Brown | British hiker found dead in Switzerland three months after going missing | Police in Switzerland have found the body of a British hiker who was missing for three months, his family have confirmed.
Aidan Roche, 29, an offshore chemical engineer from Middlesbrough, was last heard from on 22 June while hiking on the Eiger trail in the Grindelwald area of the Swiss Alps, about 50 miles (80km) from Berne.
His brother Connor Roche said his family were told last week that Aidan’s body had been found by police near the trail. “The news has hit us all hard, even with this outcome on our minds over the last few months,” he said.
“On behalf of my entire family I want to say a massive thank you to everyone who helped us through all of this. The outpouring of support from so many people has got us through all of the uncertainty and anguish, and shows just how loved Aidan was.
“For all the messages of support, the sharing of Aidan’s pictures and posters online, and the donations to aid in finding him, you have our deepest gratitude. All of this helped to bring him home to us. Thank you so much.”
Roche had been on the 12th day of a two-week camping trip and is believed to have been walking back to his caravan after visiting a glacier when he disappeared.
A fundraising appeal raised nearly £32,000 to help pay for an advertising campaign to help generate new leads for the Swiss authorities in the search. It also helped pay for the use of a helicopter used by the search team.
Relatives and friends shared his last videos in the hope someone would recognise the people he was with.
His friend Beth Taylor said: “He’d never just disappear like this. There isn’t a day goes by normally without him making contact with friends and family, sharing pictures or videos. We’re part of a massive group of really close friends – he wouldn’t just randomly go missing.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/06/modern-art-threat-life-limb-hayward-gallery | Opinion | 2018-10-06T05:00:13.000Z | Stuart Jeffries | Why has modern art become a threat to life and limb? | Stuart Jeffries | This week Cuban artist Tania Bruguera’s installation tackling the migration crisis opened at Tate Modern, in London. She pumps the huge Turbine Hall with a tear-inducing compound. Visitors also hear a low-frequency sound, creating an “unsettling energy”.
This unsettling vibe isn’t some ruse by the museum to speed up visitor throughput to gift shops and cafes, though muffin and keyring sales are expected to rise for the duration of the exhibition.
It’s a bold move by Tate Modern, which in the past has had to pay out tens of thousands of pounds to visitors injured on a slide that formed part of a Carsten Höller art installation. Another visitor injured a foot in Doris Salcedo’s artwork consisting of a large crack in the gallery’s floor.
Tania Bruguera at Turbine Hall review – 'It didn’t make me cry but it cleared the tubes'
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Yes, these are challenging times for art lovers. Last month a visitor to the Serralves museum in Porto, Portugal, fell into a 2.5-metre circular hole called Descent Into Limbo that Anish Kapoor had put there, and had to be taken to hospital. Art critic Jonathan Jones wrote: “Descent Into Limbo was first seen in 1992, but the inevitable accident has finally come.”
And then there was the US student who got stuck in Fernando de la Jara’s marble vagina sculpture, Chacán-Pi (Making Love) and had to be freed by Tübingen firefighters. Which, you’d think, isn’t want Tübingen citizens had in mind when they paid their emergency services precept.
What we’re witnessing is the revenge of the artwork. It’s had enough of you gormlessly wandering galleries to get your Fitbit steps on the way to the gift shop.
Haven’t we already suffered enough in art galleries? I know I have: at the Hayward Gallery, near Tate Modern, last Saturday morning, to be precise.
It was my fault. Let me say that at the outset. The warning sign outside the gallery was very clear. The man who checked my ticket also explained that the exhibition contained artworks designed to disorient visitors and and so I should be careful.
There were going to be trick mirrors that made you disappear or unacceptably fat, a ballroom of shiny spheres like a simulacrum of the Ikea creche that implies you’re a narcissist for looking at it, and a reflective oil slick that would earn you a cavity search if you dipped a finger in it.
A 12-year-old trips and puts his hand through a painting at an art exhibition in Taiwan
Yeah, whatever, I thought as I strode into the Space Shifters exhibition. I’m not some rustic doughnut, but a sophisticated aesthete steeped in Ernst Gombrich’s thoughts on art and illusion. I’ve written about the historical role of the mirror in art, for crying out loud. I’m not going to get duped by mere installations.
I’m not like the four-year-old Chinese boy who destroyed a £10,000 Lego model of the fox from Zootopia. Or the 12-year-old boy who, stumbled and used a $1.5m Paolo Porpora painting to break his fall, punching a hole through the canvas. I didn’t destroy a priceless statue of two Hercules when me and my lover decided to take a selfie as two people in Cremona in Italy did. True, I did cycle into the canal once, but found the dip quite refreshing and appreciated the kindness of strangers who helped lift the bike out of the water. I am not, despite what this may suggest, a complete moron.
Soon there was a loud thudding sound in the downstairs gallery. Somebody had collided with Larry Bell’s Standing Walls (1969-2018), which the artist describes as not so much a sculpture as a perceptual environment. It consists of alternating clear and grey panels, which visitors walk through, and it is what the artist describes as an exploration of “various properties of light and the way it interacts with surfaces”. What he perhaps didn’t realise was that he has created an accident waiting to happen.
The collider was me. I smacked into one of Bell’s surfaces, thinking the pane of glass was just air. It wasn’t. Who knew the shock of the new was quite so literal? On the plus side, as I bounced back I realised I hadn’t smashed the glass. On the down side, all I could see through the glass as I struggled with concussion was my wife and daughter giggling helplessly. That’s the kind of people they are.
A smug arty couple, neither of whom was wearing socks, snorted and disappeared behind one of Helen Pashgian’s reflective resin columns. My wife and daughter, still cackling loudly, hared off upstairs.
The guard couldn’t have been kinder, asking me if I’d like to sit down and examining me for injuries just like the solicitous couple who pulled me out of the canal. He didn’t ask me how many fingers he was holding up, but I would have been prepared for that question: I always answer three when concussed because it usually is.
Only later I realised it’s possible that he was being kind so as to put me off from launching a class action suit that would close the gallery and destroy the artist. “Does this happen much?” I asked. “All the time. Despite the warnings.”
That’s the problem with art in the 21st century. They shouldn’t let us anywhere near it. Not because the art is a liability; but because we are. Let me own it: because I am.
A gallery assistant sits among Narcissus Garden by Yayoi Kusama at the Hayward Gallery Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images
As I carried on round the exhibition to the soundtrack of family laughing, I looked for a mirror to study the bruise. But of course I was in exactly the wrong place to do that – I was in a hellish hall of mirrors. I knelt before one of Yayoi Kusama’s steel spheres to see the damage; but all I could see was, as she intended, “infinity, self-obliteration and compulsive repetition in objects and forms”. Cheers for that, Yayoi.
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Just before leaving I examined the Larry Bell work again. There was a smudge where I’d head-butted it. If the Hayward Gallery staff don’t clean the exhibition’s acres of glass, and they really shouldn’t, it’ll still be there until the show closes. My little contribution to 21st century art.
Years ago I walked into a lamp-post and, being English, before I realised it was inanimate, apologised. I didn’t apologise to Larry Bell’s Standing Walls, though I am thinking of writing to Larry to thank him for knocking me off my smug pedestal and bringing me down to earth with a bump. Perhaps that’s the kind of perceptual challenge he had in mind.
The lump has now gone down, you’ll be pleased to learn. Now I’m off to Tate Modern for a good cry.
Stuart Jeffries is a freelance feature writer
This article was amended on 6 October 2018 because the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery is called Space Shifters, not Shape Shifters as an earlier version said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/sep/02/why-women-and-social-media-stars-are-becoming-college-sports-big-winners | Sport | 2021-09-02T10:00:22.000Z | Joan Niesen | Why women and social media stars are becoming college sports’ big winners | In the early hours of 1 July, an Uber crossed into Manhattan, carrying a pair of 20-year-old twins who’d never before seen the bright lights of New York City. After an excruciating day of travel, they were set to arrive at their hotel around 3am Somehow, though, the twins were giddy. They laughed and chatted as they rode, talking about Times Square and a deal they had just signed.
The twins figured their driver was eavesdropping, and they didn’t care. They figured he found the conversation strange, confusing. And really, they did too – so Haley and Hanna Cavinder can forgive the driver if he wondered: Who on earth are these women?
They are identical twins, rising college juniors, guards on Fresno State’s basketball team, TikTok stars. And on 1 July, they became the first college athletes to legally sign a major endorsement deal under the NCAA’s new name, image and likeness (NIL) regulations. The rules mean that college athletes can now earn money from sponsorship or public appearance, something that was previously forbidden (universities are still prohibited from paying them salaries).
And in New York, after only a few winks of sleep, the twins would arrive in Times Square to see their deal with Boost Mobile (one of three they inked in the first hours of college sports’ NIL free-for-all) flashed on a massive billboard. They’d bounce from interview to interview. And, of course, they would post photos and videos from the scene.
Less than two years after they filmed their first TikTok video, the Cavinders have become the faces of the NIL movement, which is redefining what it means to be a college athlete. In 2019, the year the twins enrolled at Fresno State, California passed a law that prohibited schools and governing bodies from punishing athletes for profiting off their name, image and likeness. Soon, 20 more states followed suit, and in April 2020 the NCAA, the main governing body of US college sports, under intense pressure set in motion the process of changing NIL rules. It was the first concrete step toward economic freedom in college sports – but it was impossible to predict how the new normal would take shape. Would dollars fall easily to football and men’s basketball stars and leave women and athletes in smaller sports scrambling for loose change? Would jersey sales drive profits? What brands would bite?
One fact, though, seemed certain: social media would play a huge role in this new economy. In fact, it had already helped force the NCAA’s hand. “The rise of social media … has dramatically increased the opportunities for college students to make commercial use of their NIL,” the NCAA board of governors wrote in a report in April 2020. “Current divisional rules on this subject… can prevent student-athletes from engaging in NIL-related activities that their nonathlete peers on campus frequently pursue.”
In other words, while models or musicians who were at college could earn large sums from their social media followings, athletes were forbidden from bringing in even a single cent.
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In March 2020, the Fresno State women’s basketball team entered the Mountain West Tournament as the top seed, and they played their way into the finals before losing to Boise State. When they returned to campus, it was with every intention of playing in the women’s NCAA tournament – the biggest event on the college basketball calendar – later that month.
The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted those plans, and by the middle of the month, Haley and Hanna Cavinder had returned home to Phoenix, where they quarantined with their parents and three sisters and finished their freshman-year coursework. Soon, they were bored, and in search of entertainment, they logged into the TikTok account, @cavindertwins, they’d created. The twins weren’t prolific on the app, but they’d filmed videos at school and racked up a couple thousand followers. At home, they filmed a video with their sisters, another where they danced outdoors. And then, on 23 March, Hanna had an idea. “I just told Haley to come up one day and to do dribble beats to a sound on [TikTok],” she says. “And it kind of just went from there. Our audience loved it, and it was a domino effect for the rest of our social media accounts.”
The dribbling video went viral, and four days later, the twins posted another. (Those first two videos now have 2.1m views each) By the end of May, they estimate, they had one million followers on TikTok (that number is now up to 3.5m), and their Twitter and Instagram audiences were growing at warp speed. “I just think people really like twins,” Hanna says, laughing.
When the twins shot that first dribbling video, they were aware the NIL landscape would shift someday, perhaps during their college careers. A month later, when the NCAA working group released its report, they began to suspect changes would come more quickly. But the timeline remained unpredictable; the NCAA delayed a planned vote, the US supreme court got involved, and it was only in the weeks leading up to 1 July that athletes like the Cavinder twins realized their lives were about to change –imminently.
For the twins, filming videos, uploading them and watching the likes pile up was one thing. Managing a business as a paid influencer is another. So earlier this year, Haley and Hanna enlisted their older sister to manage their business. They also hired an attorney who helped them with all three major deals they signed that first week: the Boost Mobile sponsorship as well as contracts with Gopuff and Six Star Nutrition.
And it is athletes like the twins who stand to benefit the most from the NIL rules. Unlike big name basketball and football stars, they will not go on to lucrative professional sports careers. Once they graduate they won’t even have a college team to boost their brand so making the most of their following now is vital in financial terms.
“We’re not at a [big name] school,” Haley says. “We’re not male athletes. So kind of just shows the younger generation, it doesn’t matter what gender you are or sport you play, you can make a brand for yourself.”
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In the first 24 hours after the NIL rule change, college athletes signed thousands of deals to promote companies of all sizes on social media. Auburn quarterback Bo Nix posted an Instagram ad for Milo’s Tea. Trey Knox, an Arkansas wide receiver, posed with his husky, Blue, outside of Petsmart; he’d just signed a deal to endorse the store. Runza, a Nebraska fast-food joint, signed 100 athletes at schools in the state to deals to promote its app.
“For the huge majority of student athletes, they will never be more popular, more famous, more influential than they are [in college],” says Sam Weber, the director of brand marketing and communications at Opendorse, a company that connects athletes with marketing opportunities. “So there’s an opportunity for the kid that – maybe they have 5,000 followers on Instagram. That’s not huge, but they can still earn a couple hundred bucks a month getting support from local businesses.”
In the near term, smaller deals focused on social media posting will most likely drive the market for athlete endorsements. Larry Mann, the executive vice president of rEvolution, a sports marketing firm, said in July that big brands – think Amazon or Pepsi – aren’t yet ready to turn to college athletes for marketing campaigns; the NIL landscape is still evolving too quickly, and the rule change is too new. But mid-size and smaller companies – which often have less traditional marketing aims – will seize upon athletes with an audience. And that doesn’t always mean they’re seeking out the players who are likely to become stars in professional sports. Mann points out that college sports are a regional brand, full of tribalism and local ties. So smaller businesses might see big wins from working with a star wrestler or volleyball player, or even a third-string defensive end. If they can build a network of followers, they can profit.
But less than two months into the new NIL landscape, it’s impossible to know the extent of those profits. Still, that’s not stopping the projections. Last year, FiveThirtyEight published Opendorse’s estimates of what a few athletes might be able to make in an open market. It forecast that UConn basketball star Paige Buekers, still in high school at the time, might be able to pull in upwards of $600,000 per year. Quarterback Trevor Lawrence, had NIL rules changed while he was still at Clemson, might’ve been able to pull in more than $400,000 annually. And the data projected that Patrick Glory – don’t worry, it’s okay if you’ve never heard of him – a Princeton wrestler, could net about $2,500. Recently, Opendorse officials projected the NIL industry as a whole to gross $500m in 2022, $1bn in 2023.
Mann, the marketing executive, has seen those numbers, and he cautions against locking into projections so soon. Too many rules around NIL and social media (and NIL in general) are still solidifying, and though companies like Opendorse provide an efficient marketplace for athletes and companies to connect, it’s still too soon to say how the industry will take shape. Plus, to assume that athletes linking with brands for social media promotion is the endpoint of this grand experiment would be a massive oversimplification.
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Almost 1,000 miles north of Fresno, in Pullman, Washington, Dallas Hobbs had racked up about 2,500 Instagram followers by the time of the NIL rule change, and he had roughly the same size audience on Twitter. The Washington State defensive lineman isn’t an influencer. He’s not clamoring for brand partnerships. No attorney negotiates his paydays. But on 1 July, he was as thrilled as the Cavinder twins.
For years, on top of attending school and playing football, Hobbs has been working as a graphic designer. Over time, he has figured out the best way to market himself without raising the NCAA’s ire – but now, finally, he doesn’t have to be quite so crafty. The loosening of arcane rules about athletes’ social media will help Hobbs build his business career at the same time as he finishes his football career with the Cougars.
Back in 2016, when Hobbs committed to the University of Connecticut, he designed his own announcement graphic to post on social media. He’d always been artistic, and he was pleased with the results. Soon after, a friend in his recruiting class asked if Hobbs would design a graphic for him, and word got around. “I started doing designing on my phone, actually on just a phone with my finger,” he says. Two months later, he and most of his class decommitted after a coaching change, and when he committed to Washington State, he inherited a new group of teammates –or clients. “And then it continued to the next [recruiting] classes, and it just kept going on and on. And then it branched out to people committed to other schools. That’s where I started falling in love with graphic design.”
Hobbs registered as a digital technology and culture major and set his sights on a career in design. Five-star recruits from across the country sought out his design services. (He names Oregon linebacker Justin Flowe as one of his highest-profile clients.) But the NCAA forced him to make a decision: If he wanted to promote his work on his personal social media pages, the ones that identified him as a Washington State lineman, then he’d have to work for free. And if he wanted to get paid, he’d have to rely on word of mouth.
At first, Hobbs took the paychecks, tiny as they were. Hobbs Designs earned $5 here, $10 there. Eventually, though, the lineman realized he was doing his future career a disservice. If he wanted to work in design, he needed a public portfolio and a better way to get his name out into the design world. He needed to be able to acknowledge when a five-star recruit used his service, to post about it on Twitter or Instagram.
“I just wanted to grow as Dallas Hobbs, have a portfolio,” he says. “I started getting into sports design, connecting with some other graphic designers. … I needed something to show for, like, hey, this is who I am.”
So Hobbs decided that working for free was the best way to invest in his future. He began to take credit publicly for his work and gain a reputation in the field. Last year, a group of businessmen in Washington reached out and asked Hobbs to make them a logo. They were impressed with his work, and as their plans developed, they asked him if he’d like to have an ownership stake in their project, a brewery that’s set to open in Spokane. Hobbs was thrilled and signed on as the brewery’s director of marketing and design – but there was one drawback: He couldn’t promote it, couldn’t so much as mention it in an interview or post a press release on his Instagram.
His job was, in effect, a secret. But on 1 July, everything changed. Hobbs got in touch with compliance officers at Washington State, and after some back and forth – there was a bit of red tape due to the nature of what a brewery sells –he was granted permission to go public. He also was, in an instant, able to charge for his freelance design services again.
I will be donating 40% of all proceeds to organizations & foundations around the country that I am passionate about. These orgs & foundations will be ones that are working/supporting mental health, racial injustice, communities, sports and a variety of other areas. (2/2) pic.twitter.com/gysJ2DuTo8
— Dallas Hobbs (@Dhobbs92) August 13, 2021
“Everyone thought it was going to be the jersey sales and like big time sponsorships, and [really], you can get on YouTube, you can get on social media and you can take on small businesses, you can get a little bit here and there,” Hobbs says. “Not everyone’s concerned about getting a sponsorship with, like, AT&T or these big names. We just wanted to make some type of income, because we’re on a busy schedule, and that’s the easiest way that we can work for the future right now.”
Hobbs, who’s been a vocal proponent of economic fairness in college sports, is thrilled to get a chance to profit off the rule change. He won’t get a billboard in Times Square, won’t get adoring comments from millions of fans when he posts about his dinner or his girlfriend or his latest workout. And that’s fine. Because for every Haley or Hanna Cavinder, there are many more Dallas Hobbses, athletes who just want to make the most of the audience that comes with athletic excellence, who want control over their voices and the power to benefit from whatever they’re saying, singing, signing, selling.
“This is going to build a spotlight and create things for a lot of these athletes that weren’t able to have that spotlight,” Hobbs says. “They’re able to generate their own spotlight now.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/mar/26/utah-forced-to-move-hotels-at-ncaa-tournament-after-racial-hate-crimes | Sport | 2024-03-26T12:09:13.000Z | Guardian sport | Utah forced to move hotels at NCAA tournament after ‘racial hate crimes’ | Utah women’s basketball coach Lynne Roberts said her team experienced a series of “racial hate crimes” and were forced to change hotels due to safety concerns during the NCAA Tournament.
Utah played their games in Spokane, but were staying about 30 miles away in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho due to a lack of hotel space in the host city.
Roberts didn’t go into detail but said there were several incidents that happened last Thursday night after the team arrived in the Coeur d’Alene area for the tournament. However, Utah deputy athletics director Charmelle Green, who is Black, spoke to Utah broadcaster KSL on Tuesday and gave more details.
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Green said the team, cheerleaders and members of the school band were walking to dinner when a truck approached the group, revved its engines before someone in the vehicle shouted the n-word.
“We all just were in shock, and we looked at each other like, did we just hear that? ... Everybody was in shock – our cheerleaders, our students that were in that area that heard it clearly were just frozen,” Green told KSL.com. “We kept walking, just shaking our heads, like I can’t believe that … I was just numb the entire night.”
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When the group came back from dinner, something similar happened, this time with two trucks revving their engines. The n-word was directed at the group again.
“I will never forget the sound that I heard, the intimidation of the noise that came from that engine, and the [n-word],” Green said. “I go to bed and I hear it every night since I’ve been here ... I couldn’t imagine us having to stay there and relive those moments.”
Far-right extremists have made a presence in the region. In 2018, at least nine hate groups operated in the region of Spokane and northern Idaho, including Identity Evropa, Proud Boys, ACT for America and America’s Promise Ministries, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Utah, South Dakota State and UC Irvine were all staying at hotels in Idaho even with Gonzaga as the host school because of the lack of hotel space in Spokane. Roberts said the NCAA and Gonzaga worked to move the team after the incident.
“Racism is real and it happens, and it’s awful. So for our players … no one knew how to handle it and it was really upsetting,” Roberts said. “For our players and staff to not feel safe in an NCAA Tournament environment, it’s messed up … This should be a positive for everybody involved. This should be a joyous time for our program and to have kind of a black eye on the experience is unfortunate,” Roberts said.
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Gonzaga issued a statement saying that the first priority is the safety and welfare of everyone participating in the event.
“We are frustrated and deeply saddened to know what should always be an amazing visitor and championship experience was in any way compromised by this situation for it in no way reflects the values, standards and beliefs to which we at Gonzaga University hold ourselves accountable,” the statement said.
Utah lost to Gonzaga in the second round of the NCAA Tournament on Monday night, ending their season. Roberts said the incidents had affected her team’s performance. “It was a distraction and upsetting and unfortunate,” she said.
Utah filed a police report but there have been no updates as yet. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/03/labour-housing-policy-chaos-cheap-homes-exemption | Society | 2015-02-03T12:37:49.000Z | Robert Booth | Labour condemns housing ‘chaos’ as developers call for policy U-turn | The government’s housing policies are in chaos, Labour claimed on Tuesday, after Britain’s biggest property companies condemned a scheme allowing them to avoid potentially hundreds of millions of pounds in affordable housing contributions.
Emma Reynolds, the shadow housing minister, has called on Brandon Lewis, the Conservative housing minister, to scrap a new rule exempting developers of empty buildings from paying for much-needed cheap homes after developers warned it risks wrecking London’s social mix.
British Land, Land Securities, the Crown Estate and Grosvenor Estates are among the property companies represented by the lobby group, The Westminster Property Association, which said the policy was deeply flawed, and wrote to Lewis on Monday urging him to scrap it as it stands.
They said: “The unintended consequences of such policies will actually lead to a further erosion of the ability of people from a wide range of backgrounds to live in the heart of the capital.”
Lewis had cast the reform as removing a “stealth tax” that hindered regeneration and encouraged properties to be left empty but councils estimated that it could boost property companies’ profits by hundreds of millions of pounds. The City of Westminster said it stood to lose £1bn in affordable housing contributions and the director of planning at the Conservative-controlled authority, John Walker, described the policy as “insane”.
Reynolds said on Tuesday: “It’s quite something when those who might benefit the most from this ill-thought through policy are calling for it to be scrapped citing the impact on young people and families that need affordable housing.
“David Cameron’s government has consistently and repeatedly watered down affordable housing requirements depriving local communities of badly needed affordable homes, and have failed to assess the impact of their policy. But one thing is clear – it will lead to fewer affordable homes. Ministers should urgently scrap this policy and think again.”
The City of London has estimated the policy will slash around £8m from its affordable housing budget. It said it would work with other London boroughs to seek to overturn it.
The authority’s chief planning officer, Annie Hampson, said the rules “will reduce significantly the ability of local authorities to provide additional affordable housing”, which was concerning given the “crisis in provision”.
The Department for Communities and Local Government has confirmed that it has not formally assessed the policy’s impact, even though its own figures show it affects cash payments to councils towards affordable housing totalling £1.9bn across England last year.
Defending the policy, Lewis said on Monday: “These deregulatory reforms will reduce the cost of converting empty and redundant buildings into new homes. This is part of a package of measures by the government to reduce the number of empty buildings across the country, which is good for both the environment and for society. Excessive section 106 tariffs [which include deals on payments for affordable housing] just lead to no housing, no regeneration and no community benefits.”
Tessa Jowell, the bookmakers’ favourite to become the next mayor of London, has demanded an immediate halt to the exemptions on the payments “until ministers can produce a comprehensive impact assessment that clearly demonstrates it won’t further damage London’s supply of affordable housing”.
She said: “This government is carelessly giving away hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of affordable homes urgently needed by Londoners, rather than standing firm on the side of families desperate for affordable housing.
“This is a very clear statement of the priority of this Tory-led government. It is a bitter truth about this government that, given the choice between developers’ interests or badly housed families, they seem to choose the developers every time.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/28/attitudes-poo-life-on-earth-mass-extinction-bodily-functions | Opinion | 2015-10-28T12:08:54.000Z | Philip Hoare | Why we need to change our philosophical attitude towards poo | Philip Hoare | It’s a logical result of extinction, so one wonders why no one bothered to do the sum before: what happened to the world when it lost the cumulative billions of tonnes of faeces produced by mammoths, sloths and whales? A new study from the University of Vermont has shown that the planet has suffered twofold from the removal of this biomass. Not only from the lack of diversity created by the extinctions of ancient megafauna and modern, human-induced depletions of many species – from seabirds to elephants, and whales – but from what they once did for our planet by spreading their poo around, redistributing nutrients and fertilising new growth.
“The past was a world of giants,” the new paper rhapsodises, evoking an Edenic world – albeit one full of poo. Dr Joe Roman, co-author of the study, says: “This once was a world that had 10 times more whales, 20 times more anadromous fish like salmon, double the number of seabirds, and 10 times more large herbivores like giant sloths and mastodons and mammoths … this broken global cycle may weaken ecosystem health, fisheries and agriculture.”
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Remove all that guano and poo from the planet and you are left with a greatly reduced fertility. The scientists behind the study estimate that the capacity of land animals to spread nutrients has fallen to 8% below its value before 150 species of ice age mammals went extinct. Until now, it was thought that animals played a minor role in the process. But the new study indicates that they acted, en masse, as a “distribution pump” (nice image, eh?), fertilising new areas that would otherwise be unproductive.
The paper is a follow-up to one that appeared last year, also co-authored by Roman, which reported the ameliorating effect that whale faeces has on climate change, fixing carbon in the oceans by fertilising phytoplankton growth. Indeed, the “Save the Whale” campaigns of the 1960s and 70s might have been retitled, “Save the World” (and thereby countered Peter Cook’s expletive-ridden Derek and Clive tirade in 1973, “They’ve produced nothing in the way of literature. All they’ve produced is a load of other fucking whales”). Last year’s much-reported scientific paper from the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Robert Rocha and others indicated that in the 20th century alone, nearly 3 million whales were killed. The removal of such a vast volume of biomass from the Earth’s environment has had an incalculable effect.
As George Monbiot notes in his book Feral, sperm whales, the deepest diving of all whales, also stirred up nutrients from the ocean bed. Before commercial hunting, whales and other marine mammals moved 375,000 tonnes of phosphorus to the surface each year. The current figure stands at just 82,500 tonnes. There is an even greater irony here, too. In the whaling armageddon of the last century, the bones of great whales ended up being ground down for fertiliser.
In the past, human excrement was a vital part of the food chain
But the University of Vermont’s report also speaks to our philosophical attitude to faeces. Why do we spend billions of pounds getting rid of our waste – other than out of a strange hatred of our own bodily functions? Imagine what all those lost nutrients could do – not least in generating bio-responsible power. Our modern disassociation from poo speaks volumes. In the past, human excrement was a vital part of the food chain, with “night soil” regularly used to feed the ground – and thus the plants that we, or our animals, ate.
During the 19th century, the gathering of dog poo for the tanning industry was a specific trade, somewhat paradoxically known as pure finding.
Imagine, too, in a pre-combustion engine city the size of London, New York or Paris, the volume of horse manure being produced each day. Characteristically, the great horse manure crisis of 1894, when it was predicted that London’s streets would be overwhelmed by dung – was precipitated by the invention of chemical fertilisers, thereby creating a whole new set of problems for the environment. Now we can barely bring ourselves to mention the subject. But without poo, we would be nothing. Funny how it takes mass extinction to remind us of that fact. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/10/sarah-churchwell-scott-fitzgerald-print | Books | 2012-08-10T21:54:00.000Z | Sarah Churchwell | F Scott Fitzgerald's 1936 piece finally appears in print | You might expect that a writer as celebrated as Scott Fitzgerald would have no unpublished material languishing in archives – but you would be wrong. Perhaps as many as 15 short stories that he was unable to sell have never appeared in print; many more have been published once and then forgotten; a few have been lost.
Several were stories Fitzgerald "stripped", by which he meant that he pulled his favourite sentences and used them elsewhere, afterwards considering the stories unsuitable for publication. Most of the stories he couldn't sell were written during the Depression, in the mid-1930s; sections of several found their way into Tender is the Night.
Last week, the New Yorker published for the first time a 1936 vignette called "Thank You for the Light", without explaining its history – perhaps because that history begins with the New Yorker rejecting it.
Throughout the 1930s the New Yorker published the occasional Fitzgerald sketch, as well as a poem ("Obit on Parnassus"). In 1937, they bought a sketch called "A Book of One's Own", which opens: "In this age of drastic compression, it is the ambition of all the publishers I know to get everything worth reading into one little book." So Fitzgerald proposes "a new super-anthology": "All you want to read in one pocket-size volume! A miracle of book-making." Prescient as ever, he recommended binding it "to look like a small radio". Fitzgerald's first piece for the magazine, "A Short Autobiography", comically told his life up to 1929 through a catalogue of cocktails.
Seven years later, the cocktails had caught up with him, and it was no longer funny. On 19 June 1936, desperate for cash, he sent his agent "Thank You For the Light", suggesting that it might be suitable for the New Yorker: "It's an old idea I had hanging around in my head for a long time." The New Yorker rejected "Thank You for the Light" (and then rejected a poem called "Thousand-and-First Ship"). Seventy five years later, Fitzgerald is famous enough to have received his acceptance slip at last; the irony would not be lost on him.
The summer of 1936 was a difficult one for Fitzgerald. From February to April 1936, he had published the essays in Esquire magazine that are now well known as The Crack-Up, the articles that helped invent confessional journalism, in which he revealed the collapse of his life and his hopes, and his determination to save himself with his art. Contrary to the impression most people have, The Crack-Up pieces never mention Fitzgerald's alcoholism: that was the main cause of the fracture (although Zelda's mental illness certainly contributed), but Fitzgerald was too firmly in denial to admit his alcoholism in public.
The book we consider Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, had been largely dismissed when it appeared in 1925. Fitzgerald spent the next nine years struggling with his drinking, and Zelda's breakdown, before pinning all his hopes on Tender is the Night in 1934. It received mixed reviews and sold poorly; its failure pushed him over the edge. He was hospitalised four times for alcoholic breakdowns over the next two years, reaching the bottom of his personal abyss at the end of 1935. "My life looked like a hopeless mess there for a while," he wrote later, "and the point was I didn't want it to be better. I had completely ceased to give a good god-damn."
'Thank You for the Light", finished a few months after The Crack-Up essays were published, is certainly slight, but it acquires more poignancy in this context. It is about addiction: in the story Mrs Hanson is addicted to cigarettes, but Fitzgerald's deep knowledge of the mechanics of addiction drives the tale. And it is a story about starting to give a good god-damn again.
The symbolically (and magically) returning light at story's end is too trite for a writer of Fitzgerald's calibre, to be sure, but the story has one small, tired flourish: Mrs Hanson thinks that her cigarette is "an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road". The pun is not accidental – language, for Fitzgerald, was always a release from imprisonment.
"Thank You for the Light" suggests that Fitzgerald's faith – in life, in art, even in Catholicism – may have lapsed, but it never expired. A year or so later, he would begin work on his last, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. Mrs Hanson's lit cigarette is not a green light at the end of a dock, but it's an image of renewed faith, and signals the beginning of Fitzgerald's struggle to regain his capacity for hope – his greatest theme of all. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/06/best-biographies-2015-ts-eliot-ted-hughes-john-le-carre-margaret-thatcher | Books | 2015-12-06T08:00:14.000Z | Robert McCrum | The best biographies of 2015 | Half a century after TS Eliot’s death, a year of literary biographies kicked off well with Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford (Jonathan Cape). This enthralling portrait of the midwesterner who reinvented himself in England exposes the harrowing backstory to the making of The Waste Land. A shy, brilliant and deeply wounded young man, tormented by a prolonged struggle to reconcile his public and private face, “Tom Eliot” became “Old Possum”, the elderly Anglophile who would later dismiss The Waste Land as “a piece of rhythmical grumbling”. It was as if, says Crawford at the conclusion of this biographical milestone, “he had never been young”.
Ted Hughes, who died too soon in 1998, was always young, trapped in the afterlife of his youthful, impetuous and doomed marriage to Sylvia Plath. I did not expect to like Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised biography, which was initially sponsored by the Hughes estate, whereupon it became the subject of a bruising contractual bust-up. But, setting that issue aside, Ted Hughes (Harper Collins) narrates an extraordinary life with sympathy, tact, and very wide research. Hughes’s life is littered with unexploded literary ordnance that his biographer steps past more or less unscathed. His best pages are literary critical more than biographical. Bate, who modestly admits his cannot be the last word, has crafted a persuasive, credible and nuanced portrait of one of Britain’s greatest poets.
Beth Mackintosh, who wrote under the name Josephine Tey, in 1934. Photograph: Sasha/Hulton/Getty
Beth Mackintosh, born 1896, was a young Scottish woman who might have understood, and even investigated, the emotion in Hughes’s life. Having lost her sweetheart in the early days of the first world war, she turned to literature. First as Josephine Tey, and then as the playwright Gordon Daviot, she established one of the strangest and most unexplored literary careers of the 20th century. Josephine Tey by Jennifer Morag Henderson (Sandstone Press) is doubly important. It strips away a lot of the myth surrounding Mackintosh; and it also tells the moving story of a major leading Scots writer for whom the detective novel became “a medium as disciplined as any sonnet”.
In the department of criminology, Adam Sisman deserves the biographer’s equivalent of the military cross for having brought his authorised life of David Cornwell before the public. John le Carré (Bloomsbury) will not be the final word on this fascinating subject but, as an interim report, it could hardly be bettered. In 2016, we will read what Le Carré himself has to reveal in the autobiographical volume scheduled for next autumn.
Elsewhere, “life writing” hardly comes more personal than Words Without Music by Philip Glass (Faber), a fascinating account of the composer’s work with Nadia Boulanger, Samuel Beckett, Martin Scorsese and Ravi Shankar among many, plus the inside story of Einstein On the Beach.
The novelist Adam Mars-Jones, and the painter Matthew Spender, both had well-known, and dominant, fathers with strong views on homosexuality. One was for it; the other against. In Kid Gloves (Penguin), Mars-Jones gives a moving, lucid and frequently hilarious portrait of life with a demented homophobe. Spender’s A House in St John’s Wood (HarperCollins), though less entertaining, is a painfully frank and impressive negotiation with his father’s ghost.
And so to two Tory PMs, both outsiders. Benjamin Disraeli remains extraordinarily modern. His seductive “one nation” rhetoric was appropriated by Ed Miliband. His Regency metrosexual aesthetic anticipated Oscar Wilde by some 70 years. And then there’s his marriage. Daisy Hay’s Mr & Mrs Disraeli (Chatto & Windus) reminds us, yet again, how much more complex and intriguing the Victorians were than we sometimes think.
Orson Welles. Photograph: NBC via Getty Images
Everything She Wants (Allen Lane), the second volume of Charles Moore’s authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, is (if possible) even more impressive than its predecessor. The lady herself is no longer with us, and Moore’s spellbinding narrative seems liberated by this freedom. If volume three equals its predecessors, we shall be hailing this as one of the great political biographies of our time.
Thatcher aside, the year’s most entertaining biography is Orson Welles: One-Man Band (Cape), the third and probably final volume in Simon Callow’s study. This wonderfully vivid account of Welles’s tireless exploits in theatre, radio, film, television and even ballet is compulsive reading. Only an actor, director and writer as gifted and ebullient as Callow could have found the nerve to do this. Callow becomes Welles and, strangely, Welles almost becomes Callow. The only mystery is why, in Welles’s centenary year, his publishers waited until the end of 2015 to release such a tour de force.
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/education/2017/jul/05/poorest-students-will-finish-university-with-57000-debt-says-ifs | Education | 2017-07-04T23:01:12.000Z | Richard Adams | Poorest students will finish university with £57,000 debt, says IFS | Students from the poorest 40% of families entering university in England for the first time this September will emerge with an average debt of around £57,000, according to a new analysis by a leading economic thinktank.
The Institute of Fiscal Studies said the abolition of the last maintenance grants in 2015 had disproportionately affected the poorest, while students from the richest 30% of households would run up lower average borrowings of £43,000.
It’s delusional to think tuition fees are fair. Poorer students are being penalised
Amatey Doku
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Jack Britton, one of the IFS report’s authors, said that changes in recent years have been “heavily focused on further reducing the cost to central government” and that it had made the system more unequal.
“Replacing maintenance grants with loans reduces the government deficit but results in students from low-income families graduating with the highest debt levels,” he added.
The economic thinktank’s conclusion immediately prompted a sharp political exchange between the main parties and elite universities over the fairness of student finance – and a hint from the minister responsible that amid soaring debts the system could be reviewed again.
The end of tuition fees is on the horizon – universities must get ready
Peter Scott
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Gordon Marsden, Labour’s shadow higher education spokesman, said the IFS study made a nonsense of the government’s defence of the current system.
“From scrapping the maintenance grant to freezing the repayment threshold [at which students start repaying their loans], this government has focused on increasing the debt burden of students from disadvantaged backgrounds,” Marsden said.
“Under the Tories, student debt continues to rise with no end in sight, and students will now graduate with a shocking average of over £50,000 in debt. The government must decide if they believe a lifetime of debt and a tax on aspiration are the best way to fund our higher education system.”
Tuition fees were lifted to £9,000 a year in 2012 by the coalition, in defiance of promises made by the Liberal Democrats in the run up to the 2010 election.
During the 2017 election campaign, Labour promised to scrap tuition fees and hinted that it might also find ways of helping graduates with their existing borrowings. The pledges were credited in helping the party win over scores of young people and gain seats in university towns such as Canterbury.
Why would we scrap £9,000-a-year tuition fees when we know they work?
Jo Johnson
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Writing in the Guardian, the higher education minister Jo Johnson describes as “misguided speculation” the idea government was likely to scrap the current system of loans that hiked from £3,600 a year in 2012.
But significantly, the minister went on to concede that the political climate makes demands for change hard to ignore, and pledged that he would also look again “at the details of the student finance regime to ensure it remains fair and effective”.
Johnson also attacked Labour and said that its policy was unaffordable. He said that Labour’s policy of scrapping tuition fees would cost a “mind-boggling” £100bn by 2025.
Abolishing tuition fees & funding unis out of general taxation would be regressive, benefiting richest graduates, as IFS has repeatedly said
— Jo Johnson (@JoJohnsonUK) July 1, 2017
Student loan debt has been soaring and its total value rose above £100bn for the first time earlier this year, underlining the rising costs young people face in order to get a university education. Outstanding debt on loans jumped by 16.6% to £100.5bn at the end of March, up from £86.2bn a year earlier, according figures released by the Student Loans Company.
Many debts will not even be paid off within the 30-year time scale.
The IFS also found that more than 77% of those taking out student loans will have some or even all of the loans paid off by the government because graduates will not earn enough to repay their loans within that time.
Defending the situation, Johnson wrote: “The fact some loans never get fully repaid is a deliberate subsidy for the lowest-earning graduates, not a symptom of a broken student finance system.”
Students from low- and middle-income families are also made worse off by the government’s decision to hold down the income level at which graduates must start repaying their loans to £21,000.
By leaving the figure unchanged the proportion of graduates who have to start paying back loans quicker increases because average wages are rising. The thinktank added that it means that students will have to pay back £4,000 more over their working lives than otherwise.
The government’s position was criticised by the elite Russell Group of research-led universities, which includes Cambridge, University College London and Manchester.
What about the debt we owe to graduates? | Letters
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“Higher education should also be affordable for students and it may be helpful for the government to consider how to address concerns over things like the interest rate applied to undergraduate loans,” said Sarah Stevens, the Russell Group’s head of policy.
The report also found that university income from teaching has boomed since 2012, with fees from teaching up by 25% per student. Arts subjects have particularly benefited, with universities receiving a 47% increase in fees income from those subjects. By contrast science or medicine courses received much lower increases in funding since 2012 because they are more expensive to run.
“Universities are undoubtedly better off under the current system than they were before the 2012 reforms,” said Laura van der Erve, an author of the report. “However, their incentives have shifted towards providing low-cost subjects. This does not sit comfortably with the government’s intention to promote typically high-cost Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects.”
The IFS also highlighted changes to the interest rates charged introduced since 2012, with students now charged 3% plus the retail price index on loans accrued while they are still undergraduates. From September, students will be forced to pay higher interest rates on their loans of 6.1% after a surge in inflation.
“Due to their higher principal debt, students from poorer households accrue the most interest during study; students from the poorest 40% of families now accrue around £6,500 in interest during study,” its briefing note states.
In contrast students accrued just £1,500 in interest under the system in force before 2012, the IFS said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jan/01/brexit-is-nothing-to-celebrate-says-irelands-foreign-minister | Politics | 2021-01-01T16:05:39.000Z | Simon Murphy | Brexit is nothing to celebrate, says Ireland's foreign minister | Brexit is “not something to celebrate”, Ireland’s foreign minister Simon Coveney declared after the UK formally severed ties with the EU, as he warned of trading disruptions due to fresh red tape.
Brexit trade deal places Europe back at centre of UK politics
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In stark contrast to Boris Johnson’s buoyant characterisation of the country’s future following the end of the transition period at 11pm on Thursday, Coveney painted the UK’s departure as a source of regret.
Calling it the end of an era, Coveney said trade across the Irish Sea would be “disrupted by an awful lot more checks and declarations, and bureaucracy and paperwork, and cost and delays”.
But on Friday, as the first ferries arrived in the Republic of Ireland from Britain under the new post-Brexit trade rules, events appeared to unfold smoothly. In Dublin, Irish Ferries’ ship Ulysses docked at 5.55am with about a dozen trucks on board, after travelling from Holyhead in Wales, and there were no delays as the freight trailers cleared customs checks.
Meanwhile, the first ferries also sailed in and out of the port of Dover uneventfully, although it is thought that the real test is yet to come as the New Year is typically quiet and importers had been stockpiling products before the end of the transition period.
In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday, Coveney said: “For 48 years, the United Kingdom really has been a central part of the European Union. And that is now firmly ending with the end of the transition period … For all of us in Ireland, that is not something to celebrate. Our relationship with the United Kingdom is so close, so integrated, so interwoven, if you like, politically, economically and from a family perspective.
“My own personal story is so shaped by the Anglo-Irish relationship, and that’s the same for so many other Irish people, so we’re seeing the United Kingdom moving in a different direction on its own, chasing some notion of trying to re-find its sovereignty and … that is something that we regret but, of course, we accept because it was a democratic decision.”
'Betrayed': Dover residents furious over building of Brexit lorry park
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Despite Downing Street securing a trade deal with Brussels on Christmas Eve – which was subsequently fast-tracked through parliament on Wednesday as MPs approved a bill making the agreement UK law – Coveney warned there would still be trade issues. “We’re now going to see the €80bn [£72bn] worth of trade across the Irish Sea between Britain and Ireland disrupted by an awful lot more checks and declarations, and bureaucracy and paperwork, and cost and delays,” he said.
“That is the inevitable consequence, unfortunately, even with a trade agreement which everybody, I think, is very relieved was signed on Christmas Eve.”
However, he said there would be no additional checks on goods between Northern Ireland – which is staying in the EU’s single market, as well as applying EU customs rules at its ports – and the Republic of Ireland. Newly introduced checks on goods arriving in Northern Ireland from mainland Britain would be “as limited as possible”, he said.
“In terms of checks on goods, the whole point of the protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland linked to Brexit is to maintain an all-Ireland economy in terms of the movement of goods as it is today,” he said. “The only checks will be on goods coming from GB into Northern Ireland, and those checks will be as limited as possible to protect the movement of goods and services within the United Kingdom as a whole.”
The first ferry from Great Britain operating under the terms of Northern Ireland trading protocol docked in Belfast on Friday on schedule at 1.45pm – the Stena Line ship arrived from Cairnryan, in Scotland, with no evidence of disruption or delay.
In France, the president, Emmanuel Macron, used his New Year’s Eve message to take aim at Brexit, calling it the product of “lies and false promises”.
Meanwhile, in a piece for the Daily Telegraph to mark the new year, Johnson wrote: “Despite the many predictions of failure – and constant suggestions that the talks should be abandoned – we got a great new deal with our European friends and neighbours.”
More than four years on from the Brexit referendum, Johnson also said the country had “taken back control of our money, our laws and our waters”.
He added: “And yet it is also the essence of this treaty that it provides certainty for UK business and industry, because it means that we can continue to trade freely – with zero tariffs and zero quotas – with the EU.”
He described it as a “big win for both sides of the Channel”, continuing: “For us, it means the end of the rancorous bickering about “Europe” that has bedevilled our politics for so long. It means the end of that uneasy feeling that we were constantly being asked to sign up for the details of a project – a giant federal fusion of states – in which we didn’t really believe and hadn’t really bargained for.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/oct/01/richard-keogh-waking-up-paramedics-car-crash-derby-sacking-blackpool | Football | 2021-10-01T20:00:39.000Z | David Hytner | Richard Keogh: ‘The next thing I know I’m waking up and speaking to paramedics’ | Richard Keogh could feel the pain but at first he did not know where it was coming from. He could hear a voice yet it made no sense. The scene was lit by blue emergency lights and the focal point was a black Range Rover, its front end crumpled around a lamp-post. Keogh began to process. His hand hurt like hell and so did his eye. Then he understood the words. “You’ve been involved in a crash,” the figure in front of him said. “You’ve been unconscious.”
It was Tuesday 24 September 2019 and for Keogh, the Derby captain at the time, it was the start of the nightmare, a fusion of physical and mental torment that would see him abandoned by his club – his contract terminated – and pushed to the brink. Depression would grip and there was a period when he came to hate the game he had always loved, when he was ready to stop the fight to recover fitness, when he considered retirement.
Keogh’s story is heavy on the extremes of emotion, taking in bereavement and betrayal. More latterly, there has been understanding, particularly when he turns the focus inwards; elements of healing. He could celebrate the birth of his second son, Myles, in May – shortly after he had won a lengthy and draining compensation claim against Derby for breach of contract.
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Keogh has since had three clubs – MK Dons, Huddersfield and now Blackpool, having rebuilt himself physically after the injuries he suffered. Derby, meanwhile, have become synonymous with crisis – their plunge into administration and a 12-point deduction with potential further sanctions coming after the owner, Mel Morris, found himself in over his head and unable to sell.
It is the psychological aspect of Keogh’s journey that is most complicated and, of all the grim vignettes, one stands out. It comes from his wife, Charlie, without whom he admits he would be bereft.
“There were times when I went to bed with him downstairs thinking that I’ve got to go down and get a glass of water because he could have done something to himself,” she says. “I was going to bed thinking: ‘Oh my God,’ getting that sick feeling. It was awful.”
Richard Keogh in action for Blackpool against Bristol City in the Championship this season. Photograph: Simon Galloway/PA
At this lowest ebb, did Keogh contemplate suicide? “No,” he says firmly. “I’ve had this conversation before. I wasn’t feeling suicidal. I wasn’t. Some days, I was in depression – I genuinely do believe that. But mainly I think I was right on the cusp of it. I was literally on the line for a lot of the time.”
Keogh has had to wait for legal reasons to give this interview and the only place to begin is at the Joiners Arms in Quarndon, where he and his then Derby teammates had gone for dinner and drinks, after a game of 10-pin bowling. The team-bonding day was just what Keogh needed after the devastation of losing his grandmother Iris the previous Friday. She was the matriarch of the family; a day-to-day figure in his upbringing.
Keogh is overcome when he remembers how Iris’s cancer suddenly worsened and he and Charlie could not get to Harlow in Essex, where she lived, in time to see her.
“We got a call to say that she’s going to die, basically,” Keogh says. “Luckily, we managed to get her on the phone. That meant a lot, just to speak to her. I think she knew it was me. Ten minutes after that, she passed away. My family were with her and she was kind of holding on.”
Keogh told nobody at Derby and, the next day, he led the team out for the 1-1 draw at Leeds. This is what Keogh does. He plays. It does not matter if he is carrying a knock or, in this case, dealing with trauma. He plays. In seven-and-a-bit seasons at Derby, he started 316 of 330 Championship matches and all 10 of the club’s play-off ties. Keogh did not want to disrupt the preparations for Elland Road. He decided that he would tell everyone about Iris another time.
Tom Lawrence (far left) and Mason Bennett are escorted by police from Derby magistrates court in October 2019. Photograph: Jacob King/PA
At the Joiners Arms, Keogh was part of a group that stayed on until last orders. “I would say I was a bit drunk,” Keogh says. “I wasn’t drinking heavily. I think with my nan passing, it was a combination of emotionally not being in a great place and having a few drinks. It’s probably not a great combination for anyone.”
Then came the ill-fated decision. Keogh had missed his lift home but his teammate Tom Lawrence was in his Range Rover, keys in the ignition, ready to go. Did Keogh want to jump in? There was a Derby player in the passenger seat and another in the back. Keogh does not name them. Everything happened so fast. Keogh believed that Lawrence was sober and, with two others already in the car, he saw no reason not to get into the back.
“I hadn’t spent the evening with Tom,” Keogh says. “I had no reason to believe he was over the limit. Everyone was in there before me so I didn’t think: ‘Hang on a minute.’ It was just: ‘OK. I need to get home. Let’s go.’ The next thing I know I’m waking up and speaking to the paramedics.”
Lawrence had followed another Derby player, Mason Bennett, out of the pub. Bennett drove his Mercedes – with no passengers – and, after a minute or so, when he stopped at a give-way line, Lawrence went into the back of him, before careering into the lamp-post. In the panic that followed, everyone fled the scene. Everyone, apart from Keogh. He had been abandoned by his teammates, left unconscious in the wreckage of Lawrence’s car. To all intents, he was left for dead and it was certainly a difficult moment for Keogh when he realised that later on. “I was like: ‘Wow. OK,’” he says.
Richard Keogh says: ‘If we could all turn back the clock, we would.’ Photograph: Fabio De Paola/The Guardian
Lawrence and Bennett returned to the scene 45 minutes later, by which time Keogh had headed home. Desperate to avoid being taken to A&E – where he stood to be recognised and, doubtless, caught by cameraphones – he somehow persuaded the paramedics to let him walk. He had set off along the A6, adrenaline battling the disorientation, before a police car picked him up and drove him the short distance back.
Lawrence and Bennett were arrested and they would plead guilty at Derby magistrates court on 15 October 2019 to drink-driving and failing to stop at the scene of an accident. They got community service and driving bans rather than jail. Keogh had always got on well with Lawrence. What of their relationship now?
“I could tell he was very remorseful,” Keogh says. “He came and visited me and we stayed in touch so from my point of view he was genuine. If we could all turn back the clock, we would.”
The morning after the crash, Keogh continued to feel that his hand and eye had borne the brunt of the impact. That would change. The big injury was to his knee; he suffered extensive damage to the medial collateral and anterior cruciate ligaments – both would require operations – and he will never forget the moment when the surgeon, Sam Church, told him that he was looking at 15 months out. Twelve months was the best case scenario. The sliver of positivity came when Church assured him that he would make a full recovery.
Keogh describes the pain for the two weeks after the first surgery – to the MCL – as “horrific, 12 out of 10, next level”. According to Charlie, he was “nearly passing out every time he stood up”. Yet the psychological agony would be worse, possibly because it involved factors beyond his control – namely, the uncompromising stance of the Derby hierarchy, led by Morris.
The inconsistency at the heart of the saga was that Morris chose to sack Keogh at the end of October 2019 for gross misconduct, having retained the services of Lawrence and Bennett. Morris did fine the latter pair but he essentially stood by them, despite their criminal convictions.
Derby have not wanted to compare their treatment of Keogh with that of Lawrence and Bennett; to them, each case had to be judged on its own merits. But the optics are jarring. To repeat, Keogh was a passenger; the other two drove the cars. “I’ve struggled with this part of it – I think that’s what upset me the most,” the 35-year-old says.
In Keogh’s opinion, it is impossible to overlook the financial context. As a veteran player on a basic £24,000 a week plus bonuses until June 2021, he had no value on the transfer market whereas Lawrence, a former Manchester United trainee, who was 25 at the time, and Bennett, then 23, were saleable assets. Bennett would move to Millwall in January 2020, initially on loan. “I think it’s pretty obvious to most people what happened,” Keogh says.
Richard Keogh enjoys Derby’s FA Cup win over Southampton with teammates in January 2019. Photograph: Dan Mullan/Getty Images
Derby had first tried to agree a settlement with Keogh’s agent, Cos Toffis – they made an offer to him worth a fraction of the remaining value of Keogh’s contract. They also promised the central defender an unspecified non-playing role. To Keogh, it felt like enforced retirement. There was never any way that he could have accepted it.
“Derby tried to say it was a negotiation but in my view it wasn’t,” Keogh says. “I felt pressured to accept the offer.”
Derby’s gross misconduct case hinged on Keogh’s failure to wear a seatbelt in Lawrence’s car and how his judgment had been impaired by alcohol. They also said in a statement that the players had “ignored the opportunity to be driven home using cars laid on by the club”, although Keogh disputes this particular line. According to him, there were no club cars outside the pub at any point. Instead, there was merely a club employee who had a number to call for a driver.
“The way they put it was as if the club had officially laid on cars and we ignored them, that we walked straight past the chauffeurs to get into our own cars,” Keogh says. “It’s just absolute nonsense. The car thing annoyed me and it annoyed the other lads as well because there were no cars.”
Stripped of his livelihood and mired in an unforgiving rehabilitation, Keogh felt his mental health crash. Friday nights and Saturday afternoons were awful, when he ought to have been preparing or playing, but he reached his lowest point when the first Covid lockdown kicked in at the end of March 2020. He was getting up late and losing his drive – tell-tale signs of depression.
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“He had a full-on breakdown one night,” Charlie says. “He was just sobbing, saying: ‘What’s the point?’”
Keogh adds: “I had a 10-day period where I was in a pretty bad place. Everything got on top of me and I didn’t know how to deal with it. What they did to me made me hate football and I did say: ‘That’s it. I can’t be arsed to do it any more.’
“Being the best husband and the best father is more important than being a footballer and if I had to retire to be that, then I would do it. But as Charlie pointed out, if I retired, would I be happy and able to be that person? I had to come out the other side.”
Keogh has come to realise who his friends are and the bond with those who have supported him with words and deeds has deepened. The list is long and the names on it reflect Keogh’s standing in the game.
It includes his Republic of Ireland managers and coaches Martin O’Neill and Roy Keane, Mick McCarthy and Terry Connor, plus Paul Clement and Frank Lampard, who managed him at Derby. Player-wise, Keogh mentions Tom Huddlestone, David McGoldrick, Mason Mount, Bradley Johnson, Craig Forsyth, Martyn Waghorn and Lee Grant. Mount, the Chelsea midfielder, who spent the 2018-19 season on loan at Derby, was at the hospital when Keogh came round after his MCL operation.
Martin O’Neill (left) and Roy Keane, under whom Richard Keogh played for the Republic of Ireland, are among those who have supported him. Photograph: Lee Smith/Action Images via Reuters
Keogh is in a better place now, helped by the success of his injury rehabilitation – he was back on the field for MK Dons after 12 months, having signed for the League One club in August 2020. He returned to the Championship in January of this year with the move to Huddersfield and he remains in the division with Blackpool, whom he joined in July.
Keogh’s decision to employ a life coach from the summer of 2020 has also made a difference. “I’ve learned a lot about myself – why certain things affected me a lot more because of character traits and values that I have,” he says. “I just think I have more clarity.”
One phrase recurs. “Time is a healer,” Keogh says. “And as much as it’s never going to heal everything, it does heal certain wounds.”
Keogh might be expected to have negative feelings towards Derby but the opposite is true. When he played at Pride Park with Huddersfield in February, he felt “all these memories come flooding back … of all the fantastic times”.
Keogh lived the relationship with such passion and intensity that he will always carry a torch for Derby, even if the low point led to such distress. “It’s really affected me to see the club in the state it’s in,” he says. “It’s made me realise that it’s still a massive part of me and always will be.”
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What of Morris? “Our relationship has gone but, again, time is a healer,” Keogh says. “I think that’s probably how far I’ve come, mentally, with everything.”
Could Keogh even see himself back at Derby? “If there is an opportunity in the future, then yes,” he replies.
It is easy to imagine that Keogh’s legal victory brought a measure of closure for him. Derby were ordered by the EFL’s Player Related Dispute Commission (upheld on appeal to the League Appeals Committee) to pay up the full value of the remainder of his contract – a sum of about £2.3m. Keogh was also found to have been wrongly dismissed by Derby and not to have committed gross misconduct or brought the club into serious disrepute.
But there is no happy ending here. At least not yet. Keogh may forever wish he could have his time again at the Joiners Arms when a momentary decision changed everything.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email [email protected] or [email protected]. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/apr/14/stalkers-fat-girls-and-listen-again-to-the-lyrics-of-your-favourite-pop-songs | Stage | 2015-04-14T04:58:37.000Z | Alexandra Spring | Stalkers, fat girls and murder: listen again to the lyrics of your favourite pop songs | When a song like Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines or Shaggy’s It Wasn’t Me is released, feminists around the world are usually up in arms. Not so cabaret group Lady Sings It Better. “When one of those songs comes out that’s really offensive, everyone else is just angry,” says artistic director Maeve Marsden. “We’re angry, but we also schedule a rehearsal.”
Marsden leads the Sydney-based group who rework popular songs – the Police’s Every Breath You Take sung as a choral piece; Jason Derulo’s Wiggle as a doo-wop song – to reveal some concerning lyrics couched in their catchy beats.
The idea for the show came to Marsden in 2009 as she watched Alan Cumming sing Mein Herr from Cabaret. As a teenager, she has been told by a singing teacher to change the pronouns of the song if the singer was male, because audiences had “an expectation of heterosexuality”. Yet here was Cumming – and the cabaret fraternity – playing with gender and sexuality.
It was then she decided to put together a group of female singers to interpret songs traditionally performed by men. “What stories or challenges to gender or moments of comedy would we get out of that?” she wondered.
The concept clearly struck a nerve. Lady Sings It Better, which these days also includes performers Libby Wood, Annaliese Szota and Fiona Pearson, have played Edinburgh fringe festival in 2012, Sydney comedy festival in 2013 and 2014, and the 2015 Adelaide fringe among others. In April, they play the Melbourne international comedy festival.
Lady Sings It Better’s George Michael medley.
Their set list is constantly evolving because there’s so much material to mine. While R&B and hip-hop artists are the obvious and repeat offenders, the group find new content in unexpected places.
“You don’t expect to find the same aggressive sexuality in old 60s music,” says Marsden, but songs like Tom Jones’s Delilah (“I crossed the street to her house and she opened the door, she stood there laughing, I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more”) and the Beatles’s Run For Your Life (“I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man”) reveal the depths of pop’s potential back catalogue.
We’re angry [when one of these songs comes out], but we also schedule a rehearsal
Maeve Marsden
Nothing is sacred. Marsden says audiences are horrified when they hear the Knack’s My Sharona (“I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind”) or Hunters and Collectors’s Throw Your Arms Around Me (“I will come for you at night-time, I will raise you from your sleep, I will kiss you in four places as I go running along your street; I will squeeze the life out of you ... ”)
The only thing the group won’t do is bland. “We keep looking at Red Foo songs, but they are such bad songs that we can’t find anything to do with them musically that we actually want to sing,” Marsden says with a laugh.
From Bridget Christie’s A Bic for Her to Adrienne Truscott’s Asking For It, feminist comedy has proved critical and box office gold in recent years. Comedy is a useful way of tackling issues, says Marsden. “If I wanted to write an essay about misogynist lyrics in music, it would never get me to as wide an audience as a comedy cabaret show does. The more tools, approaches and strategies feminists have in their kit, the further the message goes.”
And there’s nothing more pleasing than winning over the doubters. “It’s satisfying when we draw in a guy who thinks he’s been brought along to a feminist cabaret and wasn’t keen and, by the end, he’s really on board – when he says: ‘I was really into that and I didn’t think I was going to be.’”
There is still some way to go. Although the number of women performers has increased at Melbourne international comedy festival, they are still underrepresented, with only 19% of shows performed by women compared with 73% by men in 2015. And while it’s encouraging to see the increase and be part of the accompanying debate, it’s still a frustrating situation, says Marsden, who was similarly disheartened by the male-dominated lineup of Sydney’s Vivid Live festival.
“Programmers have a responsibility to program extra women and to provide platforms if they care about diversity in the arts,” she says. “You can’t cut out half the population of a creative space and not be cutting out audience experience. We should do it for quality, not just equality.”
Two more Lady Sings It Better medleys
1) The horse medley
2) The fat girl medley
Lady Sings It Better play The Butterfly Club, Melbourne, from 15 to 19 April | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/18/eddie-marsan-class-act-speaking-up-for-talent-all-quarters | Opinion | 2018-08-18T15:00:53.000Z | Rebecca Nicholson | Eddie Marsan, a class act speaking up for talent from all quarters | Rebecca Nicholson | As an actor, Eddie Marsan often serves as a kind of “Tesco Finest” or “Taste the Difference” label for films and TV series. You know that if he’s in it, it’s likely to be decent, likely to be worth the extra 99p.
He was unforgettable as a grieving father in Southcliffe, the strange and beautiful Channel 4 drama about a mass shooting that seems unjustly forgotten. He was brilliant in Happy-Go-Lucky, keeping up with Sally Hawkins, which must be no easy task. Last week, Marsan added his voice to the low but steady rumble of other working-class actors, including Idris Elba and Julie Walters, who have been trying to draw attention to the fact that young people who aren’t from wealthy or privileged backgrounds are still struggling to break through.
Marsan added his experiences to statements by new Equity president, Maureen Beattie, who warned that a lack of funding and compulsory arts education was turning acting into an elite profession, the preserve of the middle classes and beyond. Marsan says that there are fewer working-class actors, but also fewer working-class casting agents, writers, directors, which can only mean that the stories we’re being told are coming from an increasingly slim pool of experience.
Acting is acting, of course. Good actors play characters and it shouldn’t matter where they come from. But the problem is that it does, because while opportunities should be the same for everyone, they simply aren’t. There is no meritocracy if only rich people can afford to go to drama school; the playing field is so uneven that it’s practically a slope. Working-class actors can play working-class characters, but they have to fight much harder to prove they can slide up the social hierarchy than middle-class actors do when they’re playing at moving down it.
A few weeks ago, Olivia Cooke, who is about to be the new Becky Sharp in ITV’s adaptation of Vanity Fair, said she felt discriminated against in the UK because of her northern accent and that in America this was less important. The idea that northerners can’t be posh is for another column entirely, but hers is another voice warning of a growing homogeneity. That sameness sounds like a death of creativity.
Every time someone such as Marsan speaks up, it’s a reminder of how much representation matters, not because we need actors to be the person they’re playing on screen, but because we need all sorts of people, telling all sorts of stories, as much and as often as possible.
From material girl to exultant birthday girl
The Queen of Pop is 60. Photograph: Amy Sussman/WWD/REX/Shutterstock
Many were excited to celebrate Madonna’s 60th birthday, but Madonna seemed to be the most excited of all. She’d been counting down on Instagram for days, announcing, amid a series of posts about cake, that she was “Getting Ready For My Spankings!” On the big day, my favourite post was of her looking regal in a magenta dress, with the emoji-strewn caption, “Finally and at last its [sic] my birthday! I have survived! Life Is Beautiful!”
When Madonna joined Instagram in 2013, I worried it would be like hearing Kate Moss after years of glacial silence, that any mystique would be punctured by over-exposure, by unnecessary insight into what makes a star. Instead, her rapid flow of posts conveyed the unapologetic, seen-it-all shrug of freedom that makes this current Madonna era so worth every fabulously entertaining second.
On her birthday, my Facebook feed turned into a scrapbook of Madge memories. People talked about why they loved her and shared photographs, clips and memes, even a screengrab of that time Cher replied to how she had celebrated Madonna’s birthday with: “I got a colonic.”.
Everyone had a Madonna first time; mine was asking my mum if I could buy a magazine because she was on the cover. My mum flicked through it, only to find her in a photo Instagram would remove. She put it back on the shelf. Madonna’s birthday seemed to unite social media, which I see as her gift to us, along with a photo of her with a sign that reads, “the Queen” (“in case someone forgot!”). Happy birthday, Madonna. Life Is Beautiful!
Not even Trump can part them
Kellyanne and George Conway: ‘Incredibly, they’re still married.’ Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP
You can choose your friends, as the old saying goes, but you can’t choose the fact that your wife is forever and inextricably tied to the Donald Trump administration when you really loathe Trump. Last week, the Washington Post published an astonishing profile of alternative facts pioneer Kellyanne Conway and her husband George, who so despises the president that he regularly tweets his public criticisms, much to his wife’s dismay.
They disagree on so much that it makes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? look like a manual given out by Relate. She decides he’s upset because she thinks he feels she chose Trump over him. She finds his tweeting “disrespectful”. He regrets introducing her to Trump, whom he calls “that man”. She says he likes being the “agitator”. He has changed his political affiliation from “Republican” to “unaffiliated”. And yet, incredibly, they’re still married. They have four children. He even admits that he holds back in his tweets, adding: “I think the reason why is obvious.” By showing that their relationship can endure in even the most seemingly impossible cases of division, it offers everyone hope – a first, perhaps, for Kellyanne Conway.
Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/aug/21/right-to-buy-council-houses-record-high | Money | 2014-08-21T11:42:04.000Z | Hilary Osborne | Leap in right-to-buy sales of council houses sparks call for reforms | Campaigners have called for reforms to the right-to-buy scheme after figures showed the number of homes sold by councils was up by almost a third in the second quarter of the year, compared with the same period in 2013, as the housing market recovery and discounts for buyers fuelled sales.
Official figures showed that in England 2,845 council-owned properties were sold to tenants between April and June, a 31% increase on the same period last year. Local authorities in London accounted for 33% of sales – the highest percentage since the quarterly statistics became available in 2006-07.
Over the same period, the Department for Communities and Local Government said 675 new dwellings were started or acquired by councils using right-to-buy funds, more than 10 times the figure in the same quarter of the previous year.
Right-to-buy was a flagship policy of the Conservative prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who launched it in 1980 to allow social tenants to own their own homes. In the first three decades about 2m council properties were sold, but during the financial crisis the figure fell to less than 2,500 a year.
In 2012 the government “reinvigorated” the scheme, offering tenants discounts of up to £75,000. The report from DCLG said this was one of a number of possible drivers behind the recent increase in sales.
“The increase in right-to-buy sales since 2011-12 may, in part, be explained by the increased discounts available to tenants from 1 April 2012, the reducing of any effect of the financial crisis and the increased marketing surrounding the changes,” it said.
“In addition to this, in March 2013 the government further increased the maximum discount available for tenants living in London boroughs to £100,000.”
Councils received approximately £211m from right-to-buy sales, an average of £74,000 for each property sold, compared to £60,000 in 2013. They have three years to use the money they receive to fund replacement homes.
The maximum discounts available to tenants have just increased, to £77,000 outside London, and £102,700 in the capital and will be increased annually by the consumer prices index level of inflation.
The housing minister, Brandon Lewis, said the figures showed hard-working tenants were benefiting from government assistance.
But Darren Johnson, Green party member of the London Assembly, said right-to-buy was “a disaster” for London, where 948 council homes were sold to tenants over the quarter.
He said: “A lot of council homes sold today will be in the hands of private landlords tomorrow. Fewer low-rent homes will drive more low paid people out of inner London. The mayor should lobby for it to be scrapped and for councils to be allowed to borrow to invest in building many more.”
Separate figures for housebuilding show that in London 1,150 homes were started by housing associations and councils during the quarter, while 1,420 were completed. These figures were up by 5% on the same period of the previous year.
Across England, housing associations and councils started building 6,350 new homes and completed 6,180.
Catherine Ryder, head of policy at the National Housing Federation, which represents housing associations across England, said: “We support measures that help people buy their home but not at the expense of affordable housing for those in need and languishing on waiting lists.
“As these figures show, the discounts on offer now are very high, over £100,000 in London, meaning homes are sold at a price that makes replacing them very difficult. Right-to-buy needs to be urgently reformed to make sure every home sold is replaced by a new affordable home, otherwise the consequences for the next generation could be severe.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/may/14/alcoholism-mission-impossible-simon-pegg-bbc-desert-island-discs-drinking | Culture | 2023-05-14T05:01:45.000Z | Vanessa Thorpe | ‘I kept my alcoholism secret on Mission: Impossible set,’ Simon Pegg reveals | Simon Pegg faced his own mission impossible, tackling both his addiction and eventual recovery, while working on the major Hollywood film franchise alongside Tom Cruise, he will explain in a revealing radio interview on Sunday morning.
Speaking of a secret reliance upon alcohol that he hid while working on film sets in the early 2000s, Pegg admits: “You become very sneaky when you have something like that in your life.”
The actor and writer, who grew up in Gloucestershire, is the guest on the latest edition of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, where he details his grim realisation that he was a depressive alcoholic, despite having a burgeoning film star career.
“You learn how to do it without anyone noticing because it takes over. It wants to sustain itself and it will do everything it can to not be stopped,” the 53-year-old tells Lauren Laverne, host of the show. “But eventually it just gets to a point when it can’t be hidden, and that’s when, thankfully, I was able to pull out of the dive.”
Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames in Mission: Impossible - Fallout. Photograph: David James/AP
Pegg’s mental health problems began with a bout of teenage depression after his A-level exams and before studying at the University of Bristol. A seriously low mood returned unexpectedly in 2006, while he was working on Mission: Impossible III, and Pegg recalls using alcohol to numb his emotional pain. The birth of his daughter, Matilda, in 2009 forced him to admit to his dependency and accept the need for recovery.
He also talks to Laverne about the boundaries of his relationship with Cruise, who stars alongside him in the Mission: Impossible films. The Hollywood star is now a friend, Pegg says, but he still steers clear of discussing Cruise’s controversial faith in the Church of Scientology, believing it would “abuse my privileged access that I get to him”.
“My relationship with him is just very simple and amiable,” he tells Laverne. “It’s always been a very easy relationship. I think you realise, when you meet the person rather than the thicket of mythology that’s built up around them, it’s a different experience. I mean, he loves [the fame] and he really relishes it, it’s all he knows. It energises him and spurs him on.”
Pegg, who is also known in Britain for his cult sitcom Spaced, as well as for his leading roles in the “Cornetto” film trilogy, Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End, says he teases Cruise about his fame. “We joke about it. I mean, I always make fun of him for it, you know, about the things that he can access,” he says.
Pegg recalls an incident in South Africa when Cruise took a break from filming to fly him in a helicopter to a bay where he could swim with sharks. It was, he says, “a real Tom Cruise kind of day”.
“He kind of appreciates the ridiculousness of it sometimes,” says Pegg. | Full |
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