“To everything turn, turn, turn; there is a season.” You may be familiar with this verse, adapted from Ecclesiastes for song by the musician Peter Seeger in the late 1950s and later sung by The Byrds in 1965. An excerpt from the original: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every…
Nothing quite affords anonymity like the internet does. One may choose to be anonymous there, and by its very nature you already are: a minute part of an enormous data set, where our merged identities form a gigantic collective, infinitesimal flashes of electricity, among trillions of others, in a remote server farm far, far away….
It was the saddest story most people had ever heard of. In 2006, the skeletal remains of a London woman were found in a flat, where she had lived alone, and died three years earlier, unbeknownst to anyone. Due to the body’s advanced state of decomposition, the cause of death was unknown, as was the…
“I’m not a dancer anymore, who am I?” – Jacques d’Amboise When prima ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq (1929-2000) played the part of a stricken polio victim in Resurgence (1944) when she was fifteen, little did she know that she was rehearsing her own sad fate. The biographical documentary Afternoon of a Faun (2013) tells the…
It seemed we had picked a good time to visit performance artist Marina Abramovic’s 512 Hours at The Serpentine Gallery in London. It was a bright sunny day, in the early morning and the crowds were sparse. We had been anticipating long and winding queues. Not today. We went straight in. To what exactly? We…
We all do it, some more so than others; but everyone has at some point, at least once, googled the name of a person that they haven’t seen in a while. It’s a strange, almost intrusive habit that we of the internet age have picked up. In more primitive times such individuals would have simply…
The Disappeared (2013-14) is a devastating and powerful documentary about the deadly and obscure fate of those deemed to be “traitors” by the IRA, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. “If there was a hierarchy of the victims of the Troubles,” says Darragh MacIntyre, the film’s presenter, The Disappeared were at the bottom. The invisible…
For 21 years the writer Alan Moore has been a practicing magician. He says in this interview that on his fortieth birthday, “rather than bore my friends by having anything as mundane as a mid-life crisis, I decided it might be more interesting to terrify them by going completely mad and declaring myself to be…
“I didn’t know if it was my birth I was re-experiencing; or my death, which was yet to come. This is the actual core of where all of reality is emanating from. This is where meaning comes from. Symbols were pouring out, they were intertwined, every symbol and letter in every language was pouring out…
Newborn babies have started appearing on my Facebook news feed, lovingly cradled by people that not too long ago (it seems) were holding bottles of cheap vodka with such tender care, playing disastrously drunken games of table tennis together, still in their first year of university, innocent and unaffected, with delusions of adulthood. I recently…
