Apr 2006

Acting Up

Back in February, actors starring in Michael Winterbottom's politically-charged The Road To Guantanamo were held by British police under anti-terrorism legislation on their return from Berlin where the film premiered. One of the actors, Rizwan Ahmed, said he was verbally abused, had his mobile phone was taken away, told he could be kept in police custody for up to 48 hours without access to a lawyer. He also claims a police officer asked him if he planned to star in any more "political films".   Read More...

News Junkie

If you’re a news junkie and you’re working at home and so you listen to the news at intervals during the day, you can sometimes see it evolving, from the moment a fresh item first arrives until it’s been properly incorporated into the ideological agenda. This happened last Monday with a press conference by Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, except that they couldn’t quite cope... Read More...

Bach in the slums

This is what they get up to in Venezuela... and Washington's scared... Read More...

Detroit sold for scrap

From The Onion: Detroit Sold For Scrap : Read More...

An event that didn't quite happen

Been to see 'Greenwich Degree Zero', the installation by Rod Dickinson and Tom McCarthy at the Beaconsfield Gallery in London (and later, Rod tells me, in various other venues), which reconstructs an event in 1894 when a French anarchist was killed when the bomb he was carrying detonated outside the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Except that in this version, he also succeeds in blowing up the Observatory, which he didn't achieve in 1894 (assuming that's what he was aiming to do). Read More...