Every month we pick a website to profile. This month it’s againstthegrain.org, a radio and web media project whose aim is to provide in-depth analysis and commentary on a variety of matters — political, economic, social and cultural — important to progressive and radical thinking and activism. We’re based at the studios of Pacifica station KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California.
So. Two people. Initially, at a point, they bumped, in a victual shop, a library, a friend’s home, an educational zone, the work place, wherever. And a magnetic simply was, drawing them, pulling them, tugging them, an increasing centrifugal incongruity propelling an inexplicable, centralising exclusivity, transmuting individuals into one.
Before the rugby. The Six Nation Rugby Competition begins today and brings to mind the fact that we have no sports writers in this blog. A culture blog with no sports section is like a house with no roof. Nearly finished but missing a fundamental piece to make it complete.
We often think of sport as something outside our cultural framework – the topic of culture being primarily focussed on the arts; culture is art, theatre, dance…. Well. So it seems from where I sit. Sport seems to have its own individual place, its own context within our lives, separate from our daily cultural life when infact it is an inseparable part of our existence, even if we don’t follow any particular team.
You will be reading this well after Christmas is over. However, I write in its wake, the season of the most delicious leftovers of the year. How I love them and next year, I promise to give you some timely hints about what can be done to convert the detritus of your Christmas dinner into […]
Cork woman Annette Buckley recieved rave reviews after releasing her debut album “the ever changing colours of the sea” with 8.5 out of 10 in Hotpress. She combines lucious vocals with great piano playing, think Bjork fused with Billie Holiday and you get a sense of her vocal dexterity and quirkiness. Having collaborated with many […]
There is a strange part of me that is attracted to Performance Art like some sort of radiator that seeks me out or do I seek it out? When I am out in the cold. Literally.
This piece of work was a sort of follow on to the work I did in Cork last November (see […]
Our father
Old people holding on to something, in old people’s homes, nearly dead, a life gone. Seeing it all disappear, grains of sand, scared
Who art
Floating off, on some kind of cloud. Relatives waiting patiently on the other side
In heaven
What are we afraid of? Being lonely, alone. This is heaven on Earth, forests, deserts, rivers streams, […]
The daily, three-phase, hundred and forty kilometre round trip was recurringly tedious. Arduously hot. It began by getting to the main road at 6a.m., to wait there, to be picked up and bumped around on a hardened flatulence of tyres bloated to the extreme in an arrogant preference for efficacy of the speed machine. Gruellingly […]
When Ronan first mooted this idea for a column I was delighted – even more so to get the chance to throw in my tuppence worth. So here it is my ‘Things I Keep Going Back to…”
Before I begin I just want to clarify something. As someone who is constantly online and trawling blindly through […]
Leaving a friend’s house the other night I noticed for the first time above the door a shelf full of bric-a-brac. Most of the items were made of glass, bottles, jars, a decanter, there were some brass candle holders, old tins speckled with rust and a few other assorted pieces. He told me he had […]
