Unhappy Hipsters

Please make your way as quickly as possible to Unhappy Hipsters, a site dedicated to annotating photographs from the too-cool-for-school magazine Dwell with angst-ridden captions.

I like it a lot.

The debate — whether the ubiquity of suburban neo-modern developments was really an upgrade from new-money McMansions — ended in a standoff, mired by the generation gap.

He tried to focus on the novel, and not how much his bedroom reminded him of a plywood coffin.

The Liturgical Mystery Tour

The New Humanist Magazine has a piece today about the state visit of the Pope to the UK in September 2010. In a recent address to British Catholic bishops Herr Ratzinger said:

"Your country is well known for its firm commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society. Yet as you have rightly pointed out, the effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs."

A recent BBC article also reported that Churches fear Equality Bill will conflict with faith. Well, good. Bloody good I say. The legislation, the Pope said, "violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded." Jesus wept. How very dare he! A religious figurehead sticking his nose into to the democratic enactment of a law? The fucking Pope indeed.

Click to enlarge

Shu-Yi Chou - Sadler's Wells dance contest winner

To Sadler's Wells of a Saturday for their justifiably well regarded annual event Sadler's Wells Sampled, a pick and mix of shows from their forthcoming season. What a wonderful evening's entertainment it was, and a steal at a mere tenner a pop.

My clear highlight was the performance of 1875 Ravel and Bolero - a stunning 25-minute piece choreographed by a 26 year old from Taiwan named Shu-Yi Chou - which won the 2009 Global Dance Contest. I arrived at the performance with no frame of reference whatsoever for appreciating dance of any style, be it contemporary, traditional or classical. I also had no inkling that I would find the joyousness of this piece, its sheer for-the-hell-of-it beauty, so incredibly moving.

Should it ever come to a town near you - beg, steal or borrow to get a ticket to see it.

We were also treated to ten minutes of these French cats, Phase T.

Charlie Brooker on the art of news

Dammit, this is good.

It's from the episode of Newswipe which was shown on BBC4 on 26 January 2010.

Sprechen sie Indo-European?

An English friend who lives in north Wales and works in France was recently asked by his Parisian colleagues what the relationship is between the French and Welsh languages. This rather excellent family tree allows you to see just that, as well as much else about the Indo-European languages.

(Click to enlarge. Red = extinct)

One of most notable quirks of the relationship between language families is the way their members rub up against non-members, as at the border between Iran and Iraq. I'd've thought, for instance, that it would be a safe bet - at the local pub quiz - to assume that a speaker of Persian living in Tehran is linguistically more closely related to a speaker of Arabic living in Baghdad than, say, a native English speaker in London. But I'd be wrong.

All of the languages presently spoken today in Iran, such as Persian and Kurdish, are Indo-Iranian, a sub-family of Indo-European. Arabic, the most widely spoken language in Iraq, is an Afro-Asiatic language, a family with brethren such as Hebrew, Somali and Amharic. All of which means that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a closer linguistic relative of Gordon Brown than he is of whoever is presently trying to run Iraq across the border.

There are some fascinatingly obscure curiosities in the tree - look at the names of some of the lost languages. One which I spotted is Yola, below English and Scots.

Yola is an extinct West Germanic language formerly spoken in Ireland. A branch of Middle English, it evolved separately among the English (known as the Old English) who followed the Norman barons Strongbow and Robert Fitzstephen to eastern Ireland in 1169.

There is plenty more here. Or try the even more daringly mysterious Celtiberian language, extinct from c.2nd century AD.

Dante's Internet

Via Glinner. I like it!

Click to enlarge.

Michael O'Brien

(This is an updated version of a post from 2009.)

"This extraordinary film [The Magdalene Sisters] is celluloid incendiarism, rabble-rousing cinema...it is a sustained and all-but-deafening howl of rage on behalf of vulnerable women whose story is only just beginning to be told..."
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

A major report was published in 2009 by The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (est. 2000) concerning the Catholic Church in Ireland. The summary alone will make you sad and angry in equal measure - the lives of hundreds of children were devastated by cruelly institutionalised abuse which could have been stopped decades ago.

A victim of the abuse, one Michael O'Brien, spoke recently on the RTE News programme Questions and Answers. You can watch him say his piece below: it's a profoundly heartbreaking and giddyingly powerful piece of oratory. His candour has a Shakespearean scope which completely transcends any "mealy-mouthed" political language. The government minister himself, Noel Dempsey, is silenced, as overwhelmed by the power of O'Brien's speech as everyone else present.



Questions and Answers ended its 21-year run a few weeks after O'Brien's appearance. John Bowman, the presenter of the programme, trawled through many questions from the series to produce an archive-based programme and in an interview in The Irish Times said, “The most important bit was in the last three weeks and that was Michael O’Brien. It was just the way he told the story”.

In July 2009 O'Brien was interviewed by Karen Coleman on Newstalk about his childhood experiences, as well as his unplanned and unscripted performance on RTE.

The clip of O'Brien's speech originally came via Graham Linehan.

The Guardian review of Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters is also worth reading - it's a great film, which succeeds in making you very angry, and I was reminded of it by O'Brien's "tough, muscular" rhetoric.

"Do bankers' bonuses really work?"

In a piece in The Times Sathnam Sanghera asks Do bankers' bonuses really work?

Sanghera's quoted comparison of salaries is especially striking given the fate eventually met by Lehman Brothers in 2008: Richard Fuld's enormous salary, we know now, did not equate to competent, sound, solid stewardship.

Interviewed in The Times, Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, the author of two books on motivating children, Raising and Praising Boys and Raising and Praising Girls, remarked: “Bribes work in the short term but they do not instil in children the purpose for good behaviour. In time, children learn how to manipulate and control them and start asking for more.”

This is a lesson that David Bolchover, a former City insurance broker who has written a new book called Paycheck: Are Top Earners Really Worth It?, says the City should absorb. “In almost 15 years as CEO of Lehman Brothers before the company went bust, Richard Fuld took home almost $500 million,” he says.

“In contrast, the head of the world’s largest bank, in China, which remained highly profitable through the financial crisis in 2008, earned less than $250,000 that year. What is so special about Western bank chiefs to justify such exorbitant salaries? Nothing."

David Attenborough, Jane Goodall and Carl Sagan

More magic stuff from The Symphony of Science. And another one in the eye for those pesky young earth creationists.

4.6 billion years condensed into 60 seconds

I wonder what these crazy cats would make of this intense little film?

Billy Connolly at the Hammersmith Apollo

I saw the Big Yin on Friday - he's in the smoke for most of January. One of my favourite bits of the show concerned the tale of his friend who, many years ago, found the bottle as well as the Lord...

"A drunk born-again: what a combination. One night he said something to me, and years later I still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and find myself laughing at it.

He turned to me one night, drunk, and said, "Billy: anyone who doesn't believe in Jesus is a cunt."

...I think that should be carved into the walls of churches and cathedrals."

Danish army bicycles

"It is also worth pointing out that in Britain we tend not to ride the sit-up-and-beg bicycles common in Holland; we ride mountain bikes and racing cycles that, you might well think, facilitate aggressive cycling. I once saw a cyclist respond to being abused by pedestrians for jumping a zebra crossing by leaping off his bike waving a D-lock like a mace. There is a medieval flavour to London's cycle scene. In that road environment, British cyclists dress up like extras from Rollerball or Blade Runner, almost as if they are going to war and expecting serious injury." So wrote Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian in 2008. Perhaps London cyclists would be aided in asserting their right to the road by taking a leaf out of the Danish army's book?

Via Copenhagenize.

Desire lines

Did you know that these wee corner-cutting, line-of-least-resistance trails have a name? I've always thought - since I first encountered the term in the mid-1990s - that there was something very appealing about them, how they represent the slow, quiet victory of time and countless individual actions over the fixity of planning.

I may be wrong, but I don't imagine that the discipline of urban planning is awash with poetic language - the term, coined by Gaston Bachelard in 1958 in his book The Poetics of Space, seems like a small gift to the profession.

They are absolutely everywhere, as this Flickr group confirms. Keep your eyes peeled for them...

In Search of the British Work Ethic

Make sure that you listen to the Radio 4 programme In Search of the British Work Ethic, written and presented by Melanie Phillips. It's worth listening to for two reasons: it shows a hitherto unfamiliar side of the oft-reviled Phillips - thoughtful, fair-minded and humane; and it's simply and powerfully an excellent piece of journalism. The prickly irascibility of her Moral Maze persona is absent here.

In one section she joins an immigrant worker who gets up at 3:40am every morning to travel on a night bus for two hours (because it's cheaper) to his cleaning jobs. It's a grim, humbling tale and Phillips uses her considerable intelligence to articulate a focused and tightly argued anger at his circumstances.

Harry Potter and the Crock of Shit

Thank you Mr Lee.