Month: February 2024

  • Make Children Happier

    Make Children Happier

    As part of a series arguing for revitalising policies a future Labour government should adopt, Polly Toynbee proposes three key educational reforms:

    • “Bring back those 1,416 Sure Start centres that have closed”
    • “Schools need just one target: make children happier and education a pleasure”
    • “kickstart FE, with the resources and respect it deserves”

    Toynbee ends her piece by pointing out the fundamental issue of education at the moment:

    Too much education is designed to weed students out, not to find out their skills and encourage them in what they can do. Too many become alienated from learning altogether. Start with the idea that education matters for every child, at every level. They will never learn much if schools are places for exams, inspections, tests and torture, for teachers and pupils alike.

    Read the whole piece HERE.

  • Ending(s), Night Country

    Ending(s), Night Country

    LA Times interview with Night Country writer, Issa López reveals something about her thoughts regarding the ambiguity of the final episode’s end (and, to be honest, much of the season). In the interview, López stresses that she was deliberate in creating a story and setting where there can be both rational and supernatural readings of event. Much of what López says holds up – but I’m not entirely convinced that all the unresolved issues about the season are as easily reconciled as she says (for instance, the severed tongue isn’t satisfactorily resolved for me either by the in-show narrative or by López in the interview.

    López:

    I think that the entire series has two readings. One of them is that everything is connected to the supernatural. The other one is there’s absolutely nothing supernatural happening. The dark brings its own madness and neurosis to some characters. The men walking onto the ice — you can go with they froze to death in a flash freeze and they had paradoxical undressing and delirium because of hypothermia. Or \[you can believe\] they walked onto the ice, and faced the thing they woke up by being in the wrong place. It’s up to you to decide which one of those readings you are going to embrace.

    And:

    In the very last part of the episode, we see her at peace. It’s up to her to decide if she goes on a walkabout to find herself and come back, as Danvers asks, or if she goes to be with the other women in peace, and is visiting as an apparition.

    There’s a dreamlike, phantasmagorical atmosphere that pervades the final episode which makes me question what’s actually taking place. Danvers and Navarro climb through caves and tunnels only to find themselves back at the beginning of the investigation in the scientists’ research base – where Twist and Shout is still being played through the empty corridors and rooms full-volume on loop. Characters encounter the dead and appear to have experiences that are out of chronological order. They walk out into the ice, fall into water, sleep, wake up. There’s a surreal edge to what happens and, the final scene, with Danvers and Navarro share a verandah in a silent, quite peaceful, dreaming.

     

  • Future Days, Can

    Future Days, Can

    The latest episode of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking arts programme features a showcase of Can’s third album, Future Days. The programme is an enjoyable (and informative), presenting Can’s album in the context of post-Sixties Germany and of the original line-up of the band.

    I’m not sure why the programme chose Can’s third album rather than the more directly groundbreaking Tago Mago (or even all first three). In the programme, host Matthew Sweet describes Future Days as “ambient” and different from the preceding and susequent albums. Singer Damo Sazuki left the band after the album’s release in 1973 and his recent death might have contributed to the album choice. Future Days has certainly risen in the estimation of the critics over the last 50 years (Wow! It’s over fifty years old!). There’s a good write-up about the album from 2005 on Pop Matters (from which I learned that the album was recorded straight onto a 2-track machine).

    The radio programme prompted me to listen to Future Days again and I’m struck by its gentleness and optimism – as well as how short the album is: four tracks of around 40 minutes in total (Side A has three tracks; Side B is a meandering single track of nearly 20 minutes. It is a pretty uplifting, joyful record which the Free Thinking programme explores excellently.

    Can – Future Days (the Radio 3 show) can be listened to HERE.

     

  • Laird Barron’s Night Country review

    Laird Barron’s Night Country review

    Laird Barron is enthusiastic about the fourth season of True Detective, arguing that the writer/showrunner, Issa Lopez conjures an “ethereal undercurrent of magical realism”. He sees many of the artistic (and philosophical) decisions made reflect the lonely, estranged Alaskan setting. He also discusses the show as being within the tradition of “polar” horror, though refreshingly using women as the POV characters. Barron sees the new season as a “mirroring and jagged, splintered refraction” of the first season. He asserts that Navarro, one of the main characters is “an avatar/vessel of the Inuit goddess, Sedna” and praises the “dreamlike aftermath” of the final episode.

    I particularly liked Barron’s take on the season’s ambiguity and he provides a plausible explanation to the symbolism of the orange throughout the season:

    The recurring orange and coin suggest the mutability of physics, of reality at large. Time is circular, distance illusory, free will a charade. All matter, all space, condenses to an origin point if your field of view is broad enough. Or maybe it’s a parlor trick and we’re rubes. Chicanery and magic bear a close resemblance in the dark. The same could be argued of events in Ennis, the perspectives of its residents.

    Laird Barron’s review can be read on Slate.

  • Curations, artuk.org

    Curations, artuk.org

    Curations are a wonderful means of self-organising British art using the Art.org web site.  I use an installation of Pinry – essentially a self-hosted version of Pinterest – to generally keep and manage images and graphics I want to keep. The Art.org  curations makes keeping hold of images of British art I particularly incredibly easy. The site lets you display your curated “exhibition” as a storyline (where you can tell a narrative with added notes), an album (to show off thumbnails of the artwork) or showcase (that shows each piece individually).

    Here’s the curation of “Street Scenes” I’ve been putting together:

  • Dreamfear/Boy Sent From Above, Burial

    Dreamfear/Boy Sent From Above, Burial

    “caustic rave maximalism… [that] comes across like a forlorn mini cassette mix from the 90s vaults” according to The Quietus. Some sort of teleological excavation of a lost techno compilation from Ninties compressed into 25+ minutes of realtime aural actualisation. Of the two tracks, I find Boy Sent from Above pleasingly replayable. Pitchfork review describes it as “maximalist in the extreme: a full-bore throwback to the early days of rave that folds together breakbeat hardcore, hip-house, techno, electro, and freestyle.”

    Listen on Bandcamp.

  • Volta, Loula Yorke

    Volta, Loula Yorke

    Quietus review says that “Yorke’s new release Volta is deeply cyclical” and reflect a period of focused composition rather than Yorke’s previous improvised recordings. Makes comparisons with Hannah Peel’s Fir Wave. All seven tracks are great – though I’m especially taken with An Example of Periodic Time. Have listened to this album many times now.