The Soundtrack to your Life
March 24, 2013
Music is probably our greatest invention. What else can so quickly lift our spirits or reduce us to tears, the two often being only seconds apart? Philosophers debate whether music really was an invention. Perhaps it was discovered. It might exist in a Platonic realm, which is our aspiration to comprehend. Certainly there is a …
Do Nothing
March 17, 2013
A few weeks ago I had an early morning flight to take. Due to poor forward planning, I was alone on board with no internet, no book or magazine and little charge on my laptop. In a restless world, such a situation seems almost a punishment to bear. What worse a torture can one inflict …
The Original
March 10, 2013
On the way home from a conference in Utrecht last week I had time to stop off at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. As far as I could tell, they have the biggest and best collection of Van Gogh paintings anywhere in the world. You can stand right in front of a Sunflowers or …
The Book
February 22, 2013
It lowers the heart rate. It stimulates your mind. It broadens horizons. Is there anything as lovely in life as reading a book, treating oneself to a few hours of escape? A book can be a window on a different world, perhaps a world of ideas. It can be a book of fantastic stories describing …
Nordic Knitwear – We’re all Scandinavian Now
February 17, 2013
Twenty years ago you have the feeling that if a Danish TV series had been aired in the UK it would’ve involved Scandinavian characters inexplicably speaking English to each other. But the appetite for Nordic noir seems insatiable nowadays, all in its original language and subtitled: Forbrydelsen, Broen, Wallander, Borgen, and so on. And why …
Feedback and Feed Forward
February 10, 2013
The opinions of others, no matter how much one produces art that pleases oneself, are a matter of pressing importance in relation to any creative endeavour. We want to be productive, because it pleases us to exercise our creative powers, but it cannot be denied that we want also to display our efforts to others. …
Film, Form and Function
February 3, 2013
Are there any classic movies you’re ashamed to say you’ve never seen? I rectified my biggest omission last week when I watched Citizen Kane, which many take to be the greatest film of all. At a movie industry dinner some months ago I found I was not the only one around the table for whom …
Professor Slug
January 27, 2013
Storytelling is a wonderful thing. While it serves no practical purpose it is something that takes our disposable income, for novels, films, plays and comic books. And we all have stories of our own, from favourite anecdotes brought out at family gatherings to the more serious narrative we construct about our lives as a whole. …
Soft or Hard?
January 20, 2013
We sometimes speak of the hard sciences, meaning physics, chemistry, mathematics and anything for which there are clear, determinate answers to be found. The hard/soft distinction can be found even in the arts. In philosophy we often distinguish between the hard end, of logic, metaphysics and epistemology, and the softer end of ethics, aesthetics and …
Of Theatre and Men (and Women)
November 27, 2012
What is the continuing appeal of the theatre? It is a format little changed in centuries, if not millennia. With the advent of cinema, television and YouTube, why do we still bother travelling to a live event and paying the ticket price? Why do the actors so inefficiently perform the same scenes night after night …
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