Culture Wars: Articles

When America ran out of West

2013-06-14T14:13:19Z

It is so useful to see America’s history boiled down to this simple journey with a tangible end point. It renders the complex bleedingly obvious. Of course America was going to hit a dead end – it’s written down in the map of the world! America’s arrested development was never a question of if – only when.

The last throw of the dice?

2013-06-08T15:45:52Z

Stewart mentions how the Conservative Philosophy Group, involving Cambridge academics such as Roger Scruton, John Casey, Maurice Cowling and Edward Norman, helped to build a bridge between High Tories and classical liberal economists. But there is no discussion about why the conservatives as a whole failed even to try to change the intellectual as well as the economic culture of Britain, or indeed, if they saw any need for a hearts-and-minds campaign on this front.

The Ascendancy of the Ass-Backwards Masses … and How We Can Still Turn It Around

2013-06-08T15:12:24Z

Culture itself is now our counterculture … or it can be and must be if we still entertain any hope of combating the boorishness and buffoonery eating away at our life, public and private alike. It is time for a groundswell. We need a new protest movement centred around the notion that we must demand more of ourselves and each other, that we cannot be satisfied or complacent in the face of the culture of trash besieging us on all fronts.

Single, but not alone

2013-06-07T16:10:31Z

Cobb’s concept of ‘couplism’ is less comical than it sounds. Indeed, his coinage is politically serious. However, while I laughed with the author at the rest of this enjoyable book, I was ultimately unconvinced about being single in his sense.

Alone in an unbearable world

2013-05-21T15:01:22Z

It would be very easy indeed to leave the theatre thinking about the plight of soldiers and their families, or the particular evils of specific wars, or the inadequacies of psychiatry. And to provoke such real-life thoughts is one thing the arts can do. But Berg’s Wozzeck asks us to refrain from treating this human tragedy as a case study.

From bragging boys to haggard men

2013-04-29T16:10:59Z

Conor McPherson writes plays that feel simple but are tied together with such skill, the themes as delicate as silk, lightly binding everything together but never squeezing too tight.

Gleeful, distilled creativity

2013-04-28T15:30:09Z

The show pulses with the kind of knowing naivete that is now Little Bulb’s trademark. Everything – even the hugely sophisticated and high-end stuff – is performed with a great big twinkle in the eye.

The Batman of Pop Art

2013-04-19T14:08:06Z

Whatever interpretation we place on Lichtenstein’s approach to his work, it is chieﬂy the early Pop material for which he remains famous and it makes the major visual impact in this exhibition. It leaves us with contradictory emotions.

Every twitch, moan and flicker of the eyes

2013-04-16T13:42:13Z

There are no tangible divisions or barriers in Christopher’s world. When he walks about the streets, trying to track down the murderer of the neighbour’s dog, the houses have no walls. Christopher’s world is a without boundaries – or, at least, without divisions that he can easily recognise or understand.

Bloody exposing

2013-04-07T17:04:11Z

But for much of the time, we’re simply badgered and bullied by a number of aggressive types, the threat of execution held – ridiculously – over our heads. It feels silly. It also feels completely out of synch with Kafka’s novel, which doesn’t look death in the eye until the very final moment.

Posher, prettier, pricier, even perhaps more political

2013-04-01T14:54:18Z

The printed book, therefore, begins to be coded not as something uniform or production line but as almost artisanal – like spelt bread from a local baker as opposed to Hovis sliced white. And because of this it is changing from the often unconsidered vehicle for a text to an artefact in and of itself – something reflected not merely in the content of the book but in its physical form.

Bringing back working class values?

2013-04-01T14:49:29Z

Manion, for all his radical pretensions, is more orthodox than he imagines. His belief that public services should be redefined so that they ‘support and promote a safe, decent, healthy, responsible society’ is already in the mainstream of public service reform. The problems that he raises - both cultural and fiscal - are no less real and pressing for that, however, and he is to be commended for taking them seriously.

The customary and the disturbing

2013-04-01T14:12:43Z

It is, perhaps, ironic that that Man Ray — who participated in this movement which set out to challenge received social attitudes - could also produce photographs which are eye-catching, yet conventional. Perhaps he deliberately split his work into the customary and the disturbing, maintaining this juxtaposition of radically different things in a Surrealist spirit

Fill in the gaps

2013-03-23T15:06:03Z

The classic Kneehigh touches - the karaoke sessions, a moon that doubles up as a clock and the spooky cold music that trembles beneath every scene - only make the dialogue sound weaker still. While these kooky visual and aural touches scream out ‘THEATRE’, the dialogue whispers ‘television’.

Gruesome and abstract

2013-03-23T15:00:39Z

This disorientating disconnect between sound and reality lies at the heart of this show. At first, we resist the obvious inconsistencies between what we hear and what we know to be possible. But the 3D soundscape, which is so convincing and so overwhelming, gradually wears us down