Thinking about the ‘Bollocks To Nick Griffin‘ video I posted set me reminiscing about the Imagined Village ‘Empire and Love‘ concert I attended in 2010. Chris Wood is part of the collective, and before the main event he performed an acoustic set. Among the songs was an amazing, chilling song about the killing of Jean Charles De Menezes. I did not realise until now that the track is called ‘Hollow Point’ and actually won best song at the 2011 Folk Awards.
I still remember the chill I felt when I first heard Chris sing the words “He never heard the footsteps behind him / by the bus stop at Tulse Hill”. In that moment, what was an abstract story of an everyman trying to make his way in the world becomes a frighteningly specific narration of the final moments of one particular person. The accompaniment is a simple acoustic guitar, but the lyrics build to an inevitable crescendo, just as the CCTV footage we have seen of De Menezes on that day builds to the inevitable, appalling, unseen dénouement down in the carriage. Continue reading
Tag: culture (Page 11 of 13)
I think the strangest example of compulsive documentation is the bizarre need we feel to photograph events that are definitely going to be documented anyway. The athletes filming the Opening Ceremony from within the parade last week is a great example of this. I was very taken with this at the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Games and took a really bad photo of the athletes filming the crowd during that ceremony.
And I’ve noted this oddness before, when thousands took photos of the 2008 Presidential inauguration, Malia Obama among them. In these actions, (entirely superfluous in the age of the mass media), we see the audience authenticating their own experience. “I was there and I took my own pictures to prove it.”. It’s the digital equivalent of picking a pebble off a beach – banal in itself, but imbued with meaning and sentiment for the one who took it. Continue reading
Following Ed Miliband’s speech on national identity on Thursday, we were given a good look at the SNP’s communications strategy for their Independence campaign.
Responding to Miliband’s speech in a BBC interview, Humza Yousaf MSP likened ‘Britishness’ to ‘Scandanavian’ and asserted that an independent Scotland would still be British, by virtue of pure geography.
Later in the day, Alex Neil MSP made the same point on BBC Question Time. This is obviously disingenuous.
Continue reading
I’ve been laughing at this online web comedy series, asdfmovie by Thomas Ridgewell. Here’s episoide 5, which I sumbled upon because its one on the most top rated YouTube uploads today.
It feels like a distillation of comedy down to its purest elements. The punchline is all, illustrated in 2-dimensional simplicity. Its like tweeting on video. Very much of the internet age.
What a fantastic supercut from Zapatou:
I love stuff like this – it speaks to the idea of a shared humanity and global culture, something that only the internet reveals.
And it is enriching art like this which is likely to be compromised by the propose SOPA legislation in the USA. Yesterday a number of sites, including Wikipedia, went ‘dark in protest at the proposed law. SOPA is a US initiative and so its difficult to know what we in the rest of the world can do to support it. Signing this Aavaz petition (along with a couple of million other people) might be a good start.