To Mossley, Greater Manchester, a tiny town atop a mountain at the crossroads of Lancashire, Cheshire and the West Ridings. Must we brave the M6, the M52, the M60, where a three hour drive always ends up as five? We must, for a tour of the in-laws. Last week Gaw noted ... Read More...
Month: October 2012
A disproportionate number of composers have been homosexual, and in an age when it was necessary to hide the fact. This week Mahlerman looks at how repressed or forbidden love might have found expression in great music... If I were to try and make out a case for homosexual composers producing a 'gay ... Read More...
In the strange world where art meets fashion, teeth currently have the curiosity factor. Emma Montague’s jaw bone spectacle arms add a certain je ne sais quoi to plain old sunglasses. Friction can be found where luxury meets decay and the refined becomes raw. As raw remnants collide with smooth surfaces, hybrid ... Read More...
Another day and another depressing article about the obesity epidemic that’s engulfing the nation. Apparently millions are catching this deadly disease every day while innocently sitting on the sofa eating cake. It’s heart breaking – literally. According to this report, shops ran out of the largest sizes of school uniforms as ... Read More...
Happy Birthday, Aleister Crowley!... Today is Aleister Crowley's 137th birthday. To celebrate the great man, let us catch a glimpse of him in 1937, courtesy of Timothy D'Arch Smith's bibliographical essay “The Books of the Beast” (1987): On the eve of 21 December [1937], Crowley rounded up representatives of the white, black, ... Read More...
Right you landlubbers, hoist up your shack-painters and stow away your skillagalee, Mr Slang is setting sail with the King's Navy... Gazing at the illustrations in Emily Brand’s Georgian Bawdyhouse the other week, I came across Rowlandson’s picture ‘Portsmouth Point’ (1814), cropped and captioned with allusions to Jack’s propensity for carousal ... Read More...
The lead article in the current issue of the excellent Slightly Foxed quarterly magazine is by none other than our own Jonathan Law, who looks at the work (and alarming Nazi politics) of Tarka the Otter author Henry Williamson. Here is the original piece, and in the next two weeks ... Read More...
They called him Iron Felix - but did he have a soft spot? Daniel Kalder discovers the tender side of the man who established Russia's first concentration camp... When I lived in Moscow I regularly frequented an antique shop on Malaya Nikitskaya Street that had a small selection of English books. ... Read More...
To Portsmouth, birthplace of Charles Dickens, Christopher Hitchens and runner Roger Black. Also Isembard Kingdom Brunel, Peter Sellers and Hollyoaks actor Marcus Patric. Also, me. We moved away from Southsea when I was eleven but naturally roots remain because I was a happy child there. Roaming around my formative haunts ... Read More...
This week's Lazy Sunday is brought to you by Frank Key, and you're either going to love it or hate it... There is a small number of musicians we might categorise as “polarisers”, those who provoke the passions. Those who like them really like them, love them to the point of ... Read More...
