Sebastian Faulks - Human Traces

An Oxfam books buy for me. I'd say my buying experience was rather like my experience reading the book. I sorted of wanted it/liked it, but was constantly wondering/considering something better.

Kisses

This Irish film is on now at the Manchester Cornerhouse.

The focus is child abuse on a poverty stricken estate in Ireland, and the victims run away to Dublin for some fun and end up living on the streets, which turns out to be worse. The ending is a huge let down, as they simply return home. That's it.

It bears a strong resemblance to Anne Enright's The Gathering: Ireland, alcoholism, child abuse, violence and poverty.

Primavera Sound 2009

if only I had made it there.

Summertime

I wish I was at the Venice Biennale.



I must admit, I saw this image, and thought of one thing: Michael Barrymore.



Also:
- The centrepice of the Sunday Times today was an exposition on the life of Britney Spears. You know that's what those bankers like to read when they're in bed.

The Unloved

Samantha Morton's semi biographical television film on growing up in an institution. Set in Nottingham, this is a bleak picture of the town. It is a bleak picture of the care system of course, but I think the location is important.

Expenses scandal

I bought the Telegraph today.

For the first time. It will be the last too. Telegraph readers are clearly people with time, and space, on their hands. It's just so impractical. If you can't read it on the bus, it's not worth reading.

Daily Mail

...slanders a hero.

Not Bob Dylan

more Malcolm Bradbury

..for your intellectual delight.

"the media age, the age of simulation.... The age of no ideology, only hyperreality.... The streets are filled with gangs and terrorists, the women rage with anger, everyone lives for themselves.... down in the street people kill for drugs and kicks. Too little reality, also too much. Every- where, wild fantasies, everyone wants a violent illusion. Life is a movie, death a plot ending, no stories are real. And even the philosophers think in unrealities, [as] they describe a world of no ethics, no humanism, no self."

There Are Thousands of Alternatives

This video of a journalist reporting on the G8 protests is great:

Capitalism

You have got to love the BBC meeting the masses - 'who are these people? Why do they behave this way? What newspaper do they read, the Express?! I'm lost in a sea of Express readers....'

Quite ugly

artworks. Even if they are meant to be ironically ugly. I'm not sorry Morrissey.

Enlightening thought of the moment

"Democracy, the free market," she muses, do you really think they can save us? ... Marxism [was] a great idea, democracy [is] just a small idea. It promises hope, and it gives you [Kentucky] Fried Chicken."

Malcolm Bradbury.

The Melbourne Model

I love this. It is a promotion video for a theatrical performance put on at Melbourne University Student Union. They came up with a musical to document the trials and tribulations of the new academic regime that has been put in place there. Based on the American system, the Melbourne Model largely removes the opportunity for students to specialise. It is impossible to imagine something so critical of university management being put on at any British institution, probably because Australia is subject to a legal process called Voluntary Student Unionism. In short, students have to pay (quite a lot for people without an income) to be a member of the SU, making it a completely separate organisation from the university.

New Zealand

The teenager found guilty of the brutal murder of Scottish tourist Karen Aim in NZ has become the youngest person to be given a life sentence in the country's history.

Times article

Italian history

My enlightening fact of the week is:

"The Garibaldi biscuit was named after Giuseppe Garibaldi, an Italian general and leader of the fight to unify Italy, who made a popular visit to Tynemouth in England in 1854. It was here he accidentally sat on an Eccles Cake and 'invented' the biscuit."

I wish I could be in Manchester on 2nd July, because Kraftwerk are playing at the Velodrome, but alas, my exam on this very Italian history (Gramsci, to be specific) is on the 4th.

http://www.mif.co.uk/events/kraftwerk/