Indieoma

The conspiracy theorist is possibly the least respected of creative writers/filmmakers. Maligned as insane, antisocial, misinformed and untalented, the huge output of the conspiracy theorist (and web pages dedicated to conspiracy surely must nearly equal in number those dedicated to daily news) is largely discarded as a curiosity at best, at worst the ramblings of people who might otherwise be dangerous, conspiracy giving for them, at least, an outlet. Few people have made a career

Estate Italiana L’Italia era torrida. L’Italia era in fiamme. I mezzi busti di RAI24 avrebbero dovuto farsi spuntare dei busti supplementari per quella stagione. Da Milano alla Calabria, dall’Iran ad Atene e alla Cina tutto sembrava dipendere unicamente dalla forza centrifuga generata dalla nostra curiosità per una bella storia di “disordini popolari”. C’era la scena nazionale e quella internazionale e poi c’era il mondo esterno. Quel mondo reale dove ci si poteva sfinire camminando, correndo,

Announcements made on the 28th October 2009 in the Times Newspaper see the government bringing in new legislation to penalise repeat illegal downloaders on the internet, employing a number of tactics, including, firstly sending out warning letters to identified offenders (irrespective of the difficulties posed by people hiding their IP address or assuming someones elses), slowing down internet connections, and eventually suspending the internet altogether (with nothing having been said over what

Most cities are built outwards from a rivers edge, as if the urban sprawl running from shore to countryside were the fossil imprint of innumerable amphibians caught on the shore in a hubristic lunge aimed at being free from the water once and for all, their spindly limbs edging out and touching the surrounding counties. Nowhere is this more clear than in Central London, where buildings vie for attention all along the shore, new ones cropping up as if there were sporadic yet perpetual leaps made

I have to stop choking on my noodles before I can write this properly! New York is no doubt great… but you missed London off your list of possible challengers for ‘centre of the the art world’ status! I’m pretty sure London deposed New York as art world centre in the late 90’s. Berlin is a scraggly follower, attracting artists for cheap studio rents, and its got a great atmosphere. Anyhow, lets see the contributors to this weeks edition fight it out. Maybe even Rom

The familiar sound of Dad coming in from the back garden in the terrace where he, Ian, my elder brother by two years, and I, sat, lived. We barely turned from our Playstation dual – SoulBlade, or Tekken 3 – ‘the singing Cauliflowers’, Dad said, noticing that he was treading mud all over the carpet, ‘do you still want them?’, he said, looking at us with an extra poignancy in his eyes. Sort of a question asked doubly; once as he knew the answer, twice as he knew how

“I said to those Americans who were asking my advice, ‘You had this euphoria of victory, of the West winning the Cold War. You thought that you did not need any changes because everything was going so well for the West. But after the euphoria will come disappointment and you’re already seeing that it was a mistake to glory in that victory. So if you insist on me giving advice, I will certainly not give you a kind of menu or a timetable for change, but I do believe that what America needs is its

it has just occured to me that it is tricky to make judgment regarding ‘media panic’ the flu could yet get nasty, and it has officially been called a pandemic. the media may have over reacted, but flu can be a serious thing, and the main means of controlling is to encourage the ill to stay in, and everyone to to wash their hands regularly. that’s what the media told us to do. now, had the public not been aware of the worse case scenario, which could in fact still be played out,

Can we ever really know what the future holds? Of one thing we can be sure; tyranny will not be overcome by force of nature. Every generation must stake out its freedoms anew. There is little we can do to change the future, except in changing our ‘present’ situation, and ‘hoping’. Even so, we obsess about what is around the corner, as if constantly projecting ourselves forward. As philosopher Thierry de Duve has it in ‘Kant After Duchamp’, man is born premat

Every week our writers cover a different topic. This week: Entertaining Guests. From the guest that talks over a film – see Rik’s piece – to the family dinner party you didn’t want to be at, at age 12, but now wish you could emulate – Bill and Bassma’s pieces respectively, but rather differently! – to the idle chit-chat you’d rather do without, the romance that ends unexpectedly (Nuala), the party that ends unexpectedly (Nick), the power of the poem in keeping peopl

Never aim to be the cleverest person in the room, James Watson, discoverer of DNA, famously quipped. It leaves you up hell’s creek without a paddle. What’s more, the most vocally intelligent person in any group, is often part way to being the most cerebrally challenged. The wise are normally listening, even if with a well disguised disdain. Those clever but less wise, will be putting in their two-penneth-worth, only for their ideas to be reamed by the wiser listeners of the group. A

Adverts are sort of like directional signs – i.e. ‘this thing’, Mars, Coca-Cola, whatever, ‘is over here’ – only they often appear as if they are directional signs for places you have no intention of going to, or of things you have no intention of doing/eating/hearing/wearing, and so on. So, if you were to walk around Paris for a day, and everywhere you went there were signs for locations in East London, you’d probably start to get wound up a bit, especially

I once noticed, after giving exam results to a class of students, that although there was a sure sense of competition in the classroom that morning, it was one of students competing with themselves. Only once they’d squared their marks with themselves, were grades bought into the wider arena, and even then, people looked upon other people’s success mostly with reference to how well those people had competed with themselves. So it was never a case of ‘I did better than so and s

I recall at 18 or so drawing a self portrait in charcoal and chalk. It was a happy accident – a self portrait that really caught the kind of late pubescent wonderment and nerves that was perma-fixed on my face until about the age of 25. My Mum, for reasons then not entirely known to me, deigned that I should visit the local rectory and show the priest my drawing. To be fair, she was a Catholic, and I was a semi-Catholic, so it wasn’t so random as it at first sounds. Being dropped off a

Time was when courtship was all about films, paintings, songs, and talking about books as long as the bible, which were just as hard to get through. If you were really sucker-punched you might even talk about the bible, between long swigs on a mojito, or any one of those drinks you only drank to impress a lady. And it didn’t matter even if the lady liked you. If she didn’t you were either a literary or a bible nut, depending on how much you cared… Maybe you were even one of tho

Yep – Not even “do’s and dont’s’ – just ’Don’t’… at least, not unless you’re committed to sounding intelligent, like if you got a date with Carol Vorderman or the literary equivalent; Zadie Smith maybe. But even then, remember that clever people like to be entertained, not spun a load of samey lines about Tolstoy or Camus. We’ve all been there… Anyone remotely in the intellectual or creative end of the labour market, and that include

Clue: some say it’s a war on literature. Well, war is strong, but there’s always a brigade of nay-sayers hoping the worst, lest anything good should happen and expose them as the damn fools they are. Yep, the paper-fetishists are out again, ready to note how the page catches on rough fingers like towel on young wet hands. That nasty feeling. What is a book? It’s a technology for reading that will probably be surpassed when we come up with a less comprehensive way of deforest

I am British, and aware that our readership numbers people from across the world. Being British I am in a position not disimilar to that which many Americans have been in for the past 8 years. That is, I am a subject governed over by an administration whose foreign policy has been questionable at the least, murderous – by some accounts – at the worst. Our nations – together with others – now face huge economic problems, which threaten, in turn, to bring a host of other pr

First things first: fuel consumption is not solely about what you put in your car: You could choose to stop driving altogether and still exceed a reasonable carbon usage in your daily life [where do you get your electricity – from a coal-fired power plant? How far did your fresh banana travel?]. Any activity that uses fuel at some point along the chain depletes fuel supplies, thus pushing up the price of fuel and, arguably (and the arguments are fairly convincing), affecting our climate in

‘What is Art, dammit?!’ The painting tutor snorts to a bewildered class. It’s a well worn question, posed with such urgency, such a sense of pomp and occasion, as to place the term ‘Art’ in many people’s minds alongside those other institutions we’d all like to take a pot-shot at – Politics, Religion, the Law, and so on. Well, this is an admirable attitude, but it is worth taking a while to note that the history of Modern Art, starting from around the French Revolution, is principally concer

References about food in literature often relate to a lack of the former as a means of highlighting the failings of a system or regime. In consideration of this, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four comes to mind as an example that, turned on its head somewhat, offers some hope in terms of what we might achieve through our purchasing and eating choices now, in 2008. Whilst Orwell hit the nail on the head in some respects in Nineteen Eighty-Four, there is something rather shrill about his worst case pr