When Edgar Rice Burroughs was 35, he decided to try his hand at pulp fiction. He’d already been a soldier, a railway policeman and a pencil sharpener wholesaler. Inspired by the pulp magazines in which his pencil sharpeners were advertised, he concluded that he could write stories “just as entertaining, and probably a whole lot [...]
Archive for the ‘Thinking’ Category
Deconstructing Tarzan
Posted in Going Out, Thinking, tagged edgar rice burroughs, king kong, musee du quai branly, tarzan, tarzan and the apes on July 26, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Climate change: Come back and tell me when you’re sure?
Posted in Thinking, acclimatizing, tagged anatomy of a silent crisis, blog of bloom, climate change, norman myers on June 3, 2009 | 2 Comments »
“Climate change is not something that is waiting to happen. It is having a real impact, on communities and individuals around the world. Some of them are losing their islands. Others have lost their farmland” So says Kofi Annan in the short film “The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis“, released to coincide with a new [...]
The colour of tragedy in Waltz with Bashir
Posted in Thinking, Watching, tagged ari folman, tragedy, waltz with bashir on December 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
When was the last time you noticed colour in a film? Perhaps it’s been a while, because rather like perfect dialogue or sound design, the best use of colour is often characterized by it’s very unobtrusiveness. In such cases, the cinematographer wants to nurture the illusion that you’re watching reality in all its winter grays [...]
A changing climate, at last
Posted in Thinking, tagged al gore obama, jason grumet, obama climate change on November 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
“Enjoy the holiday season…and rest up, because it’s going to be a very, very busy 2009,” Obama’s lead environment and energy adviser Jason Grumet told a carbon conference in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, according to Ian Talley at the WSJ. It sends a shiver of excitement down the spine. Obama promised that if he won [...]
Human traces
Posted in Thinking, tagged grandpa, human traces, memories on October 30, 2008 | 2 Comments »
The last time I visited my granny in Scotland, I was sitting at the piano, leafing through a battered old hymn book and trying out the odd tune, when the book flapped open at the very back. The two sides were covered in small, neat handwriting; hymn titles, with their page numbers for ease of [...]
Eighty per cent
Posted in Thinking, tagged 80 per cent CO2, ed miliband 80 per cent, greenpeace, UK CO2 emissions on October 16, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Wow. So last week the committee responsible for advising Parliament on climate change told the government in no uncertain terms that Britain needed to slash its carbon emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050. In 2000, policymakers came up with a target of 60 per cent, and have resisted calls to increase it [...]
When I grow up I wanna be
Posted in Listening, Thinking, tagged female chauvinist pigs, pussycat dolls, raunch culture, when i grow up on September 30, 2008 | 1 Comment »
It recently came to my attention that the Pussycat Dolls have a new song out. Ok I might as well say it. I watched T4. Confession over. Now, interested as I am in the issues behind gender inequality and female empowerment in the workplace, I was pretty intrigued by the lyrics of the ridiculously catchy [...]
Darling and the Politics of Truth
Posted in Thinking, tagged alistair darling and decca aitkenhead, alistair darling guardian on September 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Guardian‘s Decca Aitkenhead had an excellent interview with Chancellor Alistair Darling in Saturday’s Weekend, but with typical expediency, the newsdesk seemingly cut and pasted a few quotes powerfully adrift from their grounding context, added some scaremongering analysis and, wow, found itself with a front page story that was then barked all over the news [...]
At the coalface of climate change
Posted in Thinking, tagged coal power station, kingsnorth, stop kingsnorth on August 5, 2008 | 4 Comments »
The other day I got an email from my friend Matt asking if I was going to a mass protest at Kingsnorth, near the intriguingly-named Hoo Saint Weburgh in Kent: “going to this? we have plastic blow up canoes”, the email read. With great sadness and not a little shame, I must confess I’m not [...]
A new kind of war game
Posted in Thinking, tagged al gore, center for a new american security, climate change wargame, the we campaign on July 30, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Right now they’re playing a game over at the Center for a New American Security in Washington D.C. It’s called the Climate Change Wargame. Attendees include the Director of McKinsey’s Global Institute, the President of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Policy magazine, the Leader of Germany’s Green Party, a former majority leader [...]
Climate change: apocalypse now?
Posted in Thinking, tagged apocalypse, climate change, the stern report on July 9, 2008 | 4 Comments »
So I went through a phase of existential terror when I was about 12 years old, as I became temporarily convinced we were doomed to die in a nuclear holocaust. All due to an alarming novel called Children of the Dust which I borrowed one day from the school library. Don’t ever let your children [...]
Save Zimbabwe from Mugabe: Avaaz.org
Posted in Thinking, tagged avaaz, mugabe, save zimbabwe on June 24, 2008 | 1 Comment »
The situation in Zimbabwe is desperate. It’s easy to feel nothing but helplessness. My instinct is to get angry at the slowness of the international community to do anything concrete in support of the Zimbabwean people, but is that justified? Post-Iraq, the thorny issue of intervention – and at what point it becomes acceptable – [...]
Trailer of the Week: Great Expectations
Posted in Thinking, Watching, tagged BFI, british film institute, david lean, dickens, great expectations, magwitch, pip on May 11, 2008 | 1 Comment »
I can remember resting on my elbows in front of the television in my grandparents’ drawing-room when I was still quite young, and feeling keenly the terror of the poor, timorous Pip in the first minutes of this film, who is jumped on by an escaped convict while he lays flowers on his parents’ grave. [...]
Decline and Fall of the Labour Empire
Posted in Reading, Thinking, tagged boris, compass, Jonathan Freedland, ken livingstone, kiran stacey, london, mayoral elections, new labour on May 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Boris has won. This is a dark day. My friend Kiran has a good pre-emptive piece on how we got here and what Gordon Brown needs to do next. On Comment is Free, Jonathan Freedland tells it like it is, poetically: “On a sunny Friday in May, by the glittering waters of the Thames, Tony [...]
Suffering in silence
Posted in Thinking, Watching, tagged congo, democratic republic of the congo, e-petition, interahamwe, lisa f. jackson, medecins sans frontieres, mike thompson, rape in the congo, the greatest silence on April 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I was brought up in a house where Radio 4′s Today programme was part of the daily breakfast ritual. Getting up without a dose of it now feels all wrong; like waking to find oneself upside down or under the bed. The drawback is that my early morning dreamscapes are on occasion invaded by the [...]
Never again? It’s happening right now
Posted in Going Out, Thinking, tagged Aegis Trust, Darfur, Global Day for Darfur, Jonathan Freedland, Nick Clegg, Sudan on April 14, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Today was the London marathon. But at just after midday, before the streets started to fill with hundreds of shivering, traumatized-looking people cloaked in silver foil, the area around Pall Mall got busy anyway. Because today was also the fifth Global Day for Darfur. As I walked towards the Sudanese Embassy on Cleveland Row, I [...]
The future’s personal
Posted in Thinking, tagged AEG Electrolux, graphic splash expression, interactive advertising, mini advertising, minority report, personalized advertising, sony vaio, the beam team, tom cruise on April 11, 2008 | 3 Comments »
There’s a brilliant scene in Spielberg’s Minority Report where the fugitive Tom Cruise runs through a shopping mall and some adverts on the wall start to talk to him. Not only do they know his name, they also speak directly to his circumstances: “Need an escape? Blue can take you”; “John Anderton, you could use [...]
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