“If you’re lookin’ for me, you better look outside” sings John Gleason on the opening song of We Can Take Care of Ourselves, the fourth album from Roadside Graves. It’s a simple statement, a simple moment repeated in a song that’s anything but. (More…)
I was standing in line at the Mahane Yehuda post office in Jerusalem. When my turn came I asked the clerk, a young woman, for stamps. She put a sheet of stamps on the counter. The Postal Authority had just printed a new series of stamps commemorating West Bank settlements. I pushed the stamps back. “Give me others, please” I said. (More…)
The Green Wave, a new documentary directed by Ali Samadi Ahadi, tells the wired and informed what they already knew. It recounts the groundswell of support for Iranian presidential candidate and one-time Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, whose chosen campaign colour of green gives the film, not to mention the historical event (The Green Revolution) its name. (More…)
Collegno is not the first place you’d choose to receive a refresher on genocide. A small working class municipality on Torino’s west side, in my household, its claim to fame is its Ikea. Step inside on a Sunday afternoon, and you’ll find the cafeteria packed with local families enthusiastically gorging on plates of Swedish meatballs. (More…)
In the 1986 Wapping dispute that inaugurated the News of the World as the beast it would become, I have one outstanding memory. I am drinking sherry with friends at 2AM, on a highway we are convinced we have taken – only for TNT vans heavy with bundled copies of News of the World to exit from spidery side streets half a mile away.
In a year of picketing, we never once stopped the labyrinthine plant. (More…)
When I first noticed Monocle on prominent display near the cashiers at my local Barnes & Noble, I was excited. I’d heard a great deal about the magazine and been to its website. But I had yet to hold a copy in my hands. Sure, I could have subscribed to it, but spending upwards of $100 per year on a publication I’d never seen seemed excessive. And, to be frank, I’m more likely to make that sort of financial outlay for music or films than I am for reading material. (More…)
You have to savor the cross, and its proximity to ‘bacteria’. Euronews carries the most memorable adverts on British cable television. April, 2011.
Several blocks away from our apartment in Beijing’s Haidian district, a retro ‘red’ restaurant stands alongside the street. Its walls are decorated with photos of Mao Tse Tung and Zhou Enlai along with applauding Communist Party cadres. All the famous faces are here, with many enlarged photographs hanging on the walls and dining booths. (More…)
News of the World was always its own story. A paper that specialized in decrying the rot in British society, it turned out to be every bit as corrupt as what it covered. Falling on its own sword, after 168 years of publishing, was hardly surprising. The question is what took it so long. (More…)
It’s early June. I’m in the backseat of my car, returning from a week on the beach in California to the Arizona desert. We’ve already crossed the Colorado River and I’m staring into the wasteland outside, dreading the blast furnace that awaits me. (More…)
“Green & Dumb,” any one of a dozen songs that could rightly serve as a calling card for Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers, came late in the band’s 2011 Circus Mexicus set and as their fans have come to do, I joined my friends arm-in-arm, all of us swaying in time with the ballad. (More…)