Equus: Talking to director Marianne Nossair
Bestiality. Making out with horses. Sweaty, sexual intercourse fantasies atop their backs. Dreams, nightmares, and the sacred deification of them. Not exactly what I was expecting from my Saturday afternoon; but instead of being horrified or repulsed, I came out of Equus strangely sympathetic toward
Jake Bugg in Oxford: A bad review of an okay show
It’s about 10.15pm, and Jake Bugg is about three-quarters of the way through his setlist. He swaps out one of his many electric guitars (needlessly many for a series of songs with the same tunings and same guitar tones) for an acoustic. It’s that moment in the night where the tipsy ‘6 M
How to hold: Pina Bausch’s ‘Nelken’
Poster for Nelken, 1982 They bloomed before you, these 8000 carnations. You are outnumbered by flowers. You do not know whether they celebrate or eulogize. How could you know, with only one line in the programme to guide you? “For love is as strong as death, and its ardour terrible like hel
Queer love letters
Letter from Wilfred Owen to Siegfried Sassoon. (University of Aberdeen) In the enduring shadows of war, prejudice, and cultural turmoil, the resilience of queer love shines through. From the poignant letters of poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, to the clandestine journey undertak
Opposition in exile: in conversation with Ivan Zhdanov
I fiddle nervously with my computer. I’m waiting for Ivan Zhdanov, a leading figure of the modern Russian opposition, to join a Zoom call. I sit in my university bedroom, Zhdanov against the backdrop of his children’s playroom; talking about how Alexi Navalny’s murder has shaped the Russian op
From Bin to Body: The Role of Rework in Alternative Subculture
Our consumer climate creates a body-to-bin culture, making people believe that an endless stream of new clothing is needed to stay on trend. DIY subculture communities subvert this mainstream model by recycling apparent rubbish into unique items for long-term wear. This bin-to-body fashion cannot be
The cyberspace in our backyard and the gardens in our cyberspace
Up in the iCloud, innocent bubbles of data glint under the sun’s heat; from here, they slip frictionlessly into the cool vacuum of space. Adrian Mackenzie describes this new-age phenomena as one of perceived “wirelessness”: the chasmic disconnect between our screens and the moving networks tha
All Quiet on the Culture Front
To say that all politics is sex may seem like a rather pubescent position. A very radical albeit pubescent position. But it is not an unsubstantiated one, for in a social environment tainted by the ‘Culture Wars’ our politics is undoubtedly pubescent. The Western psyche seems to be in something
Constant Screaming: A Review of The Zone of Interest
“Are you sleeping well?” asks the white-coated SS doctor. “Yes,” replies Rudolf Höss. Jonathan Glazer, the man behind Sexy Beast, a heist film about a retired English gangster with skin sunburned to the colour and texture of red crocodile leather; Birth, in which a ten-year-old (graphically