A Kurd in Cowley
Cowley Road, Oxford, five in the evening. Behind the bright green walls and electric blue shutters of the Greece Greek Taverna, a Kurdish family group sits down to a modest selection of traditional meze dishes, a daily routine before the restaurant opens for business. Though there is a well-establis
Vorticism: The Fascist Art Movement?
As the title of its manifesto Blast! might suggest, Vorticism was a movement born out of opposition. Wyndham Lewis formed Vorticism at his workshop, the aptly named Rebel Art Centre, following a feud with Roger Fry and his Omega Workshop. Ezra Pound, who named and supported Vorticism, became involve
Company
He and his father had the same name, so it wasn’t really necessary for him to cross out the name on the luggage tag and re-write his own, but still, he felt as if he should. He was searching through his briefcase for a pen, so he didn’t notice the little girl standing next to […]
The Aesthetics of Nostalgia
A man in a voluminous fur coat riding a child’s scooter rolls towards the camera in slow motion. Behind him, a crowd of people decked out in hipster kitsch follow on bicycles, rollerblades, and rolling office chairs. This is the opening shot of the music video for ‘Thrift Shop’, Macklemore &am
Keeping House
Left alone in my mother’s house, I clean: clear dishes, fill the washer, measure soap. Its humming fills the kitchen and I hunt for silver polish to clean now-tarnished spoons that someone gave her on her wedding day. There’s so much to do but not enough to make me stop (thinking of you) aaaaaaa
Extreme Education: Inside the South Korean School System
Late at night, Seoul’s backstreets are the domain of more than just the homeless and the drunk. In most cities these particular nightwalkers would be an unfamiliar sight. From 10pm until the early morning children and teenagers can be spotted shuffling home, still in their school uniforms laden wi
Power Play: Vučić, Serbia and the West
On a Saturday afternoon in July 2008, Aleksandar Vučić organized a demonstration in Belgrade.15 000 nationalists attended, a small crowd by Serbian standards. They were protesting against the arrest and extradition of Radovan Karadžić, a former Bosnian Serb politician implicated in the Serbian g
E is for England
‘Englishness’ is a term that has grown as flat as our beer, and as meaningless as our national anthem.‘Englishness’ is something to be rolled out every four years for the World Cup in order to sell Mars Bars and Gillette Razors. It has been appropriated by the sort of people that think the p
Great British Walks: Didcot Power Station
If you have every travelled via the South-West Trains service from Oxford to Reading, you will, most likely, recall seeing the three cooling towers of Didcot power station rising out of the landscape, roughly fifteen minutes into the journey. Clumped together among a shoal of smaller administrative