Category: Language
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The Spectacle Strikes Back: Using protests for commercial gain
A morning ritual which I can’t seem to break out of is looking at the BBC’s ‘newspaper front page’ section (you know, just to make sure I start the day with a bit of outrage). Perusing the website this morning, I scrolled down to see the front page of the…
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Ode to the 21st Century
In the 21st century… What is making the news is now news, You can make money just by moving money, Politics is now about anything but politics, You now have to be taught how to teach, Having an education does not make you educated, The police need policing, Being creative…
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I hate EveryOne
When you read stuff like this, it really does make you realise the folly of structuralist thinking, or more accurately, the curse of the ‘ism’. I remember reading something by Marcus Doel once when the opening line was “I hate everyone” (I forget in which one of the myriad of his marvellous essays it…
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Visualising Cities: Part 4 – Ecstacity
During the course of navigating the gargantuan library of literature and visual material on urban life, finding a book which encapsulates the complexity of the urban condition succinctly and concisely is much like searching for some sort of knitting implement in some sort of stack. This is in part due…
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“Just a band?” – A conversation about language
A: “The Beatles, just a band”. Too true, the Beatles were ‘just a band’, as were Led Zepplin, the Beach Boys….” B: “How can you say that? The Beatles defined a generation of cultural trends! They had massive influences beyond the realm of just music! They created peace movements, wrote…
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Video lectures worth taking the time to watch….
Trawling the internet for videos worth watching is definitely a time-consuming exercise, yet I’ve found that over the course a year or so, I’ve manged to accumulate a host of bookmarked pages of videos that I felt I would want to watch again (for differing reasons I hasten to add).…
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Interlude 1: The futility of words
Words are peculiar things. They are the building blocks of verbal language, yet are woefully inadequate at their role of communicating what we are thinking. The classic book by Albert Mehrabian in 1971, ‘Silent Messages’ says that only 7-10 percent of our communication is through verbal language so the spoken…
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