The Salford Quays are being billed as the new cultural centre in Manchester. That’s where the Lowry theatre is, it’s where the fancy new Imperial War Museum North is, and it is pretty darn close to that football stadium, Old Trafford, and that humongeously big shopping centre, the Trafford Centre. I’ve taken some pictures to [...]
This Tuesday, I went to Manchester’s fanciest theatre venue, the Lowry, built on the remains of Manchester’s old industrial harbour at the Salford Quays, some two miles outside the city centre. I went to see a show, part music, part poetry, part storytelling, with one of the world’s most interesting and famously obscure (but then [...]
The French literary theorist and philosopher Paul Ricoeur died this Friday, aged 92. Ricoeur worked dialectically, drawing upon hermeneutics, phenomenology, existentialism, as well as historical and literary theory, not so much to create theoretical synthesis, but rather to juxtapose the differences of the various ideas. He combined these ideas through what he called a hermeneutic [...]
LUKE: No, my father didn’t fight in the wars. He was a navigator on a spice freighter. BEN: That’s what your uncle told you. He didn’t hold with your father’s ideals. Thought he should have stayed here and not gotten involved. LUKE: You fought in the Clone Wars? BEN: Yes, I was once a Jedi [...]
George Lucas finally admits to the political undertones in Star Wars: Asked whether Star Wars Episode III openly alluded to the Iraq war, he said: “When I wrote it Iraq didn’t exist. We were funding Saddam Hussein and giving him weapons of mass destruction. We were going after Iran. But the parallels between what we [...]
Spring is here, uninhibitedly seeping hormonal juices all over the place. Because humankind is such diverse bunch, people have found all sorts of ways to handle that sort of seasonal stress. Some of them extreme, others downright bonkers.
One of the few radically politically active anthropologists today is David Graeber, currently of Yale University. He has written some brilliant articles on the new generation of “anti-globalization” radicals, among who he has been doing some informal fieldwork of late. Among his articles I can recommend his look upon the role of anarchism as a [...]
Despite all of my exam induced disciplinary reading of only the most relevant of materials, I still managed to find to read Tom Wolfe‘s latest book I am Charlotte Simmons which was recommended to me by my stepfather. It’s a novel telling the story of one young ms. Charlotte Simmons, arriving from her outback North [...]
I’ve just finished my third of four essays. Leaving me with just one. Of course, since I haven’t actually turned any of the first three in yet (they’re not due until the 13th of May), there’s still ample room and chance for improvement. Therefore, I’ve made the three essays I’ve finished available in .pdf-format. Helpful [...]