The Future of Landscape: Patrick Keiller
I had embarked on the essay as a way of clarifying the conclusions that I thought could be drawn from the film, which seemed to have been overlooked by many of those who had reviewed it. Film critics sometimes described it as a document of economic decline, whereas for me, by the end of the film’s journey, any such perception of the UK’s economy had been overturned. Robinson set out with the idea that the UK is a backward, failing capitalism, because it has never had a bourgeois revolution (the ‘Nairn-Anderson thesis’, also alluded to in London), but by the end of the cinematography this had given way to one in which the familiar (and enduring) manifestations of the ‘problem of England’ are revealed as symptoms, not of failure, but of neoliberalism’s success.
Interview by Andrew Stevens.
Beyond the Counter-Culture
Rejoice! A new print edition of Nude magazine has just seen the light of day: “So, where have we been? Well, to cut a long story short, when the recession first bit we took the decision to turn Nude into primarily an online magazine. But it just didn’t ever feel quite the same, and all […]
4 REAL
Richard is, for want of a better clich é, the portrait of an artist as a young man. It is about escape from mundanity and conformity through academia, culture, music, travel and self-mythologisation. It’s about the friendship and camaraderie shared by the Manic Street Preachers, and Richey Edwards’ pivotal role in the band; it is […]
Is the Atonal Hexed?
Early on in Fear of Music, Stubbs sympathetically announces his intention ‘to highlight the overwhelmingly rational and coherent reasons why a number of people have chose to make, and to listen to music which to uninitiated ears sounds cacophonous [and] atonal’. Of course, this raises questions about how one becomes ‘initiated’ and how far this process is related to the forming of a cultural elite, but the initial rejection of the belief that modernism is nothing more than the charlatanry of the contingent is gratifying in the context of a culture which seems increasingly to be shunning difficulty.
Joe Kennedy on David Stubbs’s‘s Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen.