Culture

Cultural analysis

Review: Anne Boleyn, Globe Theatre, London

Culture, Review / May 24, 2021

Ann Boleyn Shakespeare's Globe TheatreThe company based at the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre on London’s South Bank have delivered another excellent production in the finest traditions of Elizabethan/Jacobean drama.

Complimenting their season of contemporary plays (Much Ado and Dr. Faustus) this modern production by British veteran playwright Howard Brenton presents the story of Henry VIII’s much maligned second wife in Brenton’s usual political context.

Forget the bodice-ripping BBC Tudors or Shakespeare’s own carefully white-washed commissions, this is the Tudor/Jacobean politics of religion at it’s most brutal and polemic… …

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Opinion: Educate and Entertain – More or Less [Guest Post]

Culture / May 23, 2021

When I gave out a list of rules for writing most kinds of text, I left one off the bottom:

  • Put the reader first
  • Be clear
  • Be specific
  • Get to the point. Then stop.
  • Express one thought at a time.
  • Use short phrases
  • Use short sentences
  • Use short paragraphs
  • Never use a long word when a short one will do.
  • Edit thoroughly; cut, cut, cut

Review: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Culture, Review / May 23, 2021

Part One: Love and Power
BBC Two, Monday 23 May

“A series of films about how humans have been colonised by the machines they have built. Although we don’t realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.”

Adam Curtis’s opening premise was that this was “a story about the rise of the machines” (no, not Terminator 3); how it was believed that computers and non-hierarchical networks could replace systems of political control to produce stable and self-regulating social order, a new kind of global capitalism free of all risk and without the boom and bust of the past.

What Curtis gives us is a dissection of human follies, belief systems that could be enabled by technology, how they failed and how they continue to fail… …

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Review: Perspectives Arts Documentaries

Culture, Review / May 24, 2021

ITV’s new arts strand replaces the much-mourned, if little-watched South Bank Show.

Perspectives is the short-season documentary arts strand “providing unique, individual insights into the arts.” This season’s Perspectives consists of four single documentary films, each from different film-makers, featuring celebrity (but ‘non-arts’) presenters and contributors offering “their take on subjects that resonate within our culture.” …

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My Rules for Social Networking

Culture, Opinion / May 24, 2021

A couple of things last month prompted this post.

First, I got hold of a little booklet by Hampshire Linux User Group member Damian Brasher, Damian’s Social Networking Rules.

Second, I saw the call for a Bloggers’ Code of Conduct over at O’Reilly.

Inspired, I decided to write out my (short) set of rules for social media. Apologies if this reads like Baz Luhrman’s self-help record Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) …

…

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Review: Birth of the British Novel, BBC4

Culture, Review / May 23, 2021

Currently on rotation on BBC4’s freeview TV channel.

Author Henry Hitchings explores the lives and works of Britain’s radical and pioneering 18th century novelists who, in just 80 years, established all the literary genres we recognise today. It was a golden age of creativity led by Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Fanny Burney and William Godwin, amongst others. Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy are novels that still sparkle with audacity and innovation… …

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