Culture Wars: Articles

Symbolic Lyricism - Man Booker Shortlist 2008

2008-11-13T16:20:34Z

As a beautiful young woman, Roseanne is surrounded and shaped by men. Not to labour the comparison, but as the country of Ireland, or Eíre, is often represented as a woman, it is not difficult to see parallels.

Schrödinger’s Villain

2008-11-13T14:47:26Z

None of this is in the slightest bit coherent. Perhaps constantly changing our understanding of what Greene does is meant to express the mysterious nature of his ‘Quantum’ network.

Therapy culture revisited

2008-11-13T14:20:54Z

Our view is that education is now the key to our future. This is not to revert to an archaic form of change through education but to recognise that, at the present moment, it is only by asserting subjects that we can develop subjectivity.

Life through a lens

2008-11-13T02:38:07Z

So the exhibition gives us the celebrity stuff we expect. Or does it? For the unexpected lurks here.

Gee, thanks Andy

2008-11-13T02:00:58Z

Glam rockers, punks, new romantics and today’s more extreme street fashion club kids can all be said to be Warhol’s children.

Raw meat

2008-11-12T18:04:24Z

It’s easy to dismiss Bacon as a gay schlock merchant and his work as a sort of story-board from a Hammer Horror film scripted by Oscar Wilde. An exhibition to mark the forthcoming centenary of his birth gives us the chance to re-evaluate this view

Reputation, reputation, reputation

2008-11-12T16:21:41Z

What the production loses is a sense of tragic downfall, as Jimmy Akingbola’s Othello is only great when viewed from within the culture under attack. He is a picture of hostile masculinity elevated from a pack of dopey shellsuited henchmen, too easily coaxed into irrational suspicion.

Blind luck and bluff

2008-11-12T16:19:36Z

Though Massey’s script is full of deliciously bleak witticisms, waxing lyrical on phone sex lines and Aldi, it is ultimately contained by its own linearity. His delicate build of tension in the first half is entirely undermined by the predictability of the outcome.

CW editorial note - 7 November 2008

2008-11-07T16:47:50Z

The week after the Battle of Ideas sees the election of Obama, and CW looks at negativity in supercapitalism, the ploys of fame and the implications of a puppy in the White House.

Reluctant celebrity

2008-11-07T16:02:57Z

In Cosmo’s cosmos, modern life doesn’t bustle: it is staid, boring and amounts to being buried alive. On the other hand, the squalid cash interpretation that many put on ‘being a success’ is diseased too.

How Bollywood portrays ‘the other’

2008-11-07T15:39:20Z

Although Hindi films have been known to be merely melodramatic, the portrayal of Indian Sikhs and Hindus as protagonists and Pakistani Muslims as antagonists is a theme that is reinforced throughout most but not all of the films dealing with the subject.

Against an ‘Ethical Lifestyle’

2008-11-07T13:38:46Z

Through ever-progressing ethics we ‘learned’ slavery was wrong a couple of centuries ago; racism and sexism turned out to be bad sometime during the 20th century; and homophobia became unethical a decade or so later. In another half century we’ll all become vegetarians.

The accursed cultural theory, excess and the morbid imagination

2008-11-07T13:10:22Z

Wilson sets the stage for a logical reconstruction of self loathing as it currently appears in the most advanced capitalist nation. But instead of stripping down this phenomenon and then rebuilding it to show how it is determined, Wilson takes us on a tour of its manifestations in the work of rappers.

Admirably and hopelessly idealistic

2008-11-06T11:40:55Z

Tony Graham’s lushly atmospheric production treats its young audience without patronising them, conjuring up a delicate exoticism through suspended rugs and the sway of Tunde Jegede’s music.

Clashing worldviews

2008-11-06T11:28:46Z

Where the message is left to the words and movements of a talented performer, DV8 create something special and, more importantly, human.