No Alarms and No Surprises. Please May 22nd 2017, 22.31 (BST) On Monday, May 22nd 2017, Salman Abedi walked into the City Room foyer at the Manchester Arena at Hunts Bank in Central Manchester and detonated an explosive suicide device. Within seconds, the innocent giddy replay of post-concert highlights as the kids typed-in messages and…
Category: The Modern Age
Death of Umberto Eco: Never Leaving, Always Arriving
He provided signposts in a world of infinite junctions, a road map in a world of infinite signs. Discovering Umberto Eco at University was a bit like discovering sex. During the long bleak months of winter 1990 I’d read his novel, The Name of The Rose back to back with Travels in Hyperreality — a…
A Film about Studio Electrophonique. Ken Patten — Sheffield’s Joe Meek.
I have an entry in my ‘Dairy Diary’ for 1984: Wednesday, July 18, 1984: “Demo Day. Got up at 8.00am and had a drink, then took sarnies and guitar up to Frazer’s. We left for Sheffield about 9.00am. We got there about 9.40 and got properly started about 10.05. We did Freezeframe first, then Friction (1…
поддельные новости: The Monocled Mutineer and the Red Under the Bed documentary
As news emerges that actor Ricky Tomlinson and members of the so-called Shrewsbury 24 are to have their 1970s convictions reviewed by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, we look at the role played in that conviction by Woodrow Wyatt’s Red Under the Bed documentary. The Monocled Mutineer wasn’t the only occasion that the book’s author…
The Shining Ending, July 4 1921. The Shining, Isolationism and the American Dream
The ending of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining has chilled and intrigued movie-goers for years. In the closing scene of the film the camera moves from Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance sitting upright, dead in the snow, to a gallery of pictures in the ballroom of the Overlook Hotel. On one of the pictures is Jack in…
The Cult of Tradition: Let’s Make The Past Great Again! ™
Before you went to the bar, Mr Farage, we were talking about why people like you and me were jumping into our little spaceships and hurtling back through time. I was talking about time just being another modern consumable and argued that providing there were enough independent time traders like your good self around, going…
Monocled Mutineer – Mutiny at the BBC
Why did Bleasdale’s drama cause such a media storm? Why was the BBC Director Alasdair Milne removed? And what were Willie Whitelaw’s links to Toplis’ killer?
The Garden of the Dead: The Cult of Nostalgia & Romantic Nationalism in Europe
Take a good look at this picture from The Daily Telegraph in 2015. This is Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party. By the way, Nigel doesn’t have a life outside of this picture. He doesn’t have family, he doesn’t have friends, he doesn’t come from anywhere, and if reports in the press are…
Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: the Death of George Martin
Fifth but by no means least … what a suitable ending. In some ways it seems entirely fitting that the death of Beatles producer, George Martin wasn’t accompanied by a burst of dramatic orchestration, a piccolo trumpet solo or a tumultuous crescendo of instruments followed by a dramatic final chord played on three different pianos….
We are stars: the death of David Bowie
So there we have it: the death of David Bowie, trending in its now customary fashion along the volatile cardiac graphs that characterise Social Media. It’ll probably reach a peak over the next few days when the waves on the Cultural ECG monitor practically shoot off the screens. It’s been a long time coming. 69…