It is not often that we see our peace heroes on the big screen. It can be a source of great joy or a complete disaster. So it was with some anxiety that I watched A Hidden Life, written and directed by Terrence Malick, telling the story of Franz Jägerstätter and his wife Franziska (‘Frani’).
The name may be familiar to readers. Franz was an Austrian conscientious objector who refused to serve in Hitler’s army and who was executed in Brandenburg an der Havel in 1943.
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The physician and award-winning writer Michael Blumlein, started his career as a medical researcher in San Francisco. Published in 1988, his first science fiction novel, The Movement of Mountains, set the tone for his subsequent work: short stories, essays and novels merging science fiction, fantasy and horror and featuring his own signature perspective on the human species. His stories are imbued with a deep sense of social justice and individual freedom - as well as a good dose of…
'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world' - Shelley
Suppose that Shelley is right and poetic sensibility (and by extension) artistic sensibility really does create the underpinning of decisions by the legislature. If so, a country with a taste for good poetry and art will make good laws. It also follows that bad poets and bad artists lay the foundations for bad laws.
The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross is a salutary lesson in this process.
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For once, the sun shone on Remembrance Sunday as poppy wreaths were laid across Wales.
This year, , officially laying a white poppy wreath alongside their traditional red one.
Aberystwyth saw an additional five white wreaths from local groups plus a purple wreath for animal war casualties.
After the official parade, Côr Gobaith sang songs of peace at the Aberystwyth Peace Tree, including Sue Gilmurray’s ‘The Ones Who Said No’, which ends with the words: ‘Cry…
There were seven of them, to begin with. Seven expensively-educated young men from wealthy families, whose decision to pioneer a new art style sparked an artistic craze which continued for decades. Whatever you know of Pre-Raphaelite art, the chances are that you have images you associate with it: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's baleful “Proserpine”, perhaps, or John Everett Millais's “Ophelia”, covered in flowers and staring helplessly at the sky. Images of women were always at the heart of the…
Imagine a place where the latent genius in all of us becomes ripe, expresses itself and communicates with others.
A place where the human mind and human creativity explore the arts and the sciences for the delight of being alive.
No certificates are awarded at this university, no prospectuses have to be printed, no students have to bribed to study, there is no fear of ‘outcomes’.
This place is also a nursery, a laboratory, a music hall and a kitchen.
Since 2014,…
These are the winners and the shortlisted books for two British radical book prizes given by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers.
The Little Rebels’ Children’s Book Award is a radical fiction award for readers aged 0–12. This year the award has been administered by Letterbox Library and Housmans Bookshop.
The winner for 2019, announced on 10 July, is Freedom by Catherine Johnson (Scholastic): ‘There’s no escape – even when you escape. Where can a slave like Nat…
This weekend, we found ourselves in the unexpected position of having to demonstrate in the streets to try and preserve parliamentary democracy in our own country.
As a system, it’s far from perfect, but I’m sure most of us agree it’s a lot better than a potential Brexit dictatorship with Johnson at the helm.
Thousands of people gathered in the streets all over the UK to witness their opposition to the closing down of the Westminster parliament.
In Edinburgh, I met a…
When the Morlan Centre of Faith and Culture in Aberystwyth asked the Arabic Women’s Communty Initiative (AWCI) to host an event, we felt ‘The Great Get Together’ would be perfect for the AWCI to invite the wider public to an Arabic-flavoured evening. The Great Get Together brings communities together once a year in events inspired by Labour MP Jo Cox, who was murdered on 16 June 2016.
The AWCI first…
Over the weekend of the 7–9 June, the streets of Aberystwyth reverberated with the sound of singing in at least three languages – Welsh, Norwegian and English – as Aberystwyth’s Côr Gobaith hosted Norwegian socialist choir SJOKK, Pales Peace Choir from Powys, and Cardiff’s renowned Côr Cochion. SJOKK (‘shock’) was founded in 1981 to ‘spread socialist and humanistic ideas and values through singing and music’.
The event was a result of a chance meeting at the 2018 Street Choirs…
This year has seen some of the most widespread actions against the demonisation and mistreatment of migrants in the USA. As institutional treatment of human beings gets worse, more and more people are singing out their opposition.
At the end of June, 36 people were arrested in New Jersey for blocking the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centre, crying out at the unacceptable conditions children are being held in.
The beginning of July saw another mass…
Music resonates in all corners of our lives. ‘It walks us down the aisle and marches us off to war.’ Dave Randall manages to sing music’s political praises while keeping his feet on the ground, siphoning the best of what has been thought about music into a book that is straightforward, intimate and downright delightful.
As a performer himself, Randall is no armchair theorist. We are with him as he plays with the band Faithless; and later pogo past him in a rave. Here in the club, we…
I started re-watching (for the fourth? fifth? time – it’s certainly been three times since watching as a child) Star Trek: The Original Series (‘TOS’ to Trekkies) when I was recovering from a knee operation.
I knew that TOS broke new ground in the 1960s. There you have, on the bridge (the starship’s command centre): an alien (well, a half-alien anyway); a Russian (in the middle of the Cold War!); a Japanese man, barely 10 years after the Second World War; a regular hunk who…
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The Shadow Collector. On 7 August 1945, the day after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Shogō Nagaoka, a geologist from Hiroshima University, began walking through the city collecting rubble. The A-bomb’s heat burned shadows of vapourised people and objects onto streets and buildings and it changed the formation of rocks. Nagaoka filled his rucksack and then his house with specimens. He believed they were vital to telling the story of…
Over the May Day weekend in Edinburgh, I sang 200 Pete Seeger songs with friends old and new. I hosted a singathon to celebrate what would have been Pete’s 100th birthday. It was brilliant.
People came and went, sang along, played along, laughed and listened. We sang songs sharing over 100 years’ worth of stories of people’s everyday lives and political engagement in the United States and around the world.
In many ways, the most enjoyable element of the weekend was the sense of…
