Thursday, 19 January 2017
Wednesday, 11 January 2017
Sunday, 13 November 2016
LEONARD COHEN...RIP
Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen has died at the age of 82.
"We have lost one of music's most revered and prolific visionaries," said a post on the artist's official Facebook page.
No further details were released, but the announcement comes a month after the artist told the New Yorker: "I am ready to die. I hope it's not too uncomfortable. That's about it for me."
A highly-respected artist known for his poetic and lyrical music, Cohen wrote a number of popular songs including the often-covered "Hallelujah."
His 14th studio album, "You Want It Darker," had just been released on October 21.
Tuesday, 25 October 2016
Thursday, 13 October 2016
NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE WON BY BOB DYLAN
For more than six decades he has remained a mythical force in music, his gravelly voice and poetic lyrics musing over war, heartbreak, betrayal, death and moral faithlessness in songs that brought beauty to life’s greatest tragedies.
But Bob Dylan’s place as one of the world’s greatest artistic figures was elevated further on Thursday when he was named the surprise winner of the Nobel prize in literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
After the announcement, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, said it had “not been a difficult decision” and she hoped the academy would not be criticised for its choice.
“We hoped the news would be received with joy, but you never know,” she said, comparing the songs of the American songwriter to the works of Homer and Sappho.
“We’re really giving it to Bob Dylan as a great poet – that’s the reason we awarded him the prize. He’s a great poet in the great English tradition, stretching from Milton and Blake onwards. And he’s a very interesting traditionalist, in a highly original way. Not just the written tradition, but also the oral one; not just high literature, but also low literature.”
Though Dylan is considered by many to be a musician, not a writer, Danius said the artistic reach of his lyrics and poetry could not be put in a single box. “I came to realise that we still read Homer and Sappho from ancient Greece, and they were writing 2,500 years ago,” she said. “They were meant to be performed, often together with instruments, but they have survived, and survived incredibly well, on the book page. We enjoy [their] poetry, and I think Bob Dylan deserves to be read as a poet.”
Born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941, Dylan got his first guitar at the age of 14 and performed in rock’n’roll bands in high school. He adopted the name Dylan, after the poet Dylan Thomas, and, drawn to the music of Woody Guthrie, began to perform folk music.
He moved to New York in 1961, and began performing in the clubs and cafes of Greenwich Village. His first album, Bob Dylan, was released in 1962, and he followed it up with a host of albums now regarded as masterpieces, including Blonde on Blonde in 1966, and Blood on the Tracks in 1975.
He is regarded as one of the most influential figures in contemporary popular culture, though his music has always proved divisive. Speaking last year, Dylan said: “Critics have been giving me a hard time since day one.”
His own response to receiving the prize is unknown. He rarely gives interviews, and has a troubled relationship with the fame attached to his decades of popularity. However, he has toured almost non-stop since 1988 and last weekend he played the inaugural Desert Trip festival in California, alongside other giants of the 1960s, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Paul McCartney and Neil Young.
Among the musical, literary and even academic communities, respected figures expressed their delight at Dylan’s Nobel prize. The author Salman Rushdie told the Guardian he was delighted with Dylan’s win and said his lyrics had been “an inspiration to me all my life ever since I first heard a Dylan album at school”.
“The frontiers of literature keep widening, and it’s exciting that the Nobel prize recognises that,” Rushdie said. “I intend to spend the day playing Mr Tambourine Man, Love Minus Zero/No Limit, Like a Rolling Stone, Idiot Wind, Jokerman, Tangled Up in Blue and It’s a Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.”
Musician Jarvis Cocker said Dylan was a “great choice” and highlighted the 1963 track Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright as a personal favourite. “It’s a great break-up song: he’s making light of it but one or two little digs show that he is actually a bit upset,” Cocker said. “I think Dylan’s sense of humour is often overlooked.”
Thursday, 29 September 2016
FILM RECOMMENDATIONS: THE FREE STATE OF JONES
Plot
After surviving the 1862 Battle of Corinth, Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Jones County serving as a battlefield medic in the Confederate Army, deserts and returns home to his farm and his wife, Serena. While there, he befriends Rachel, a slave woman who has secretly learned to read.
Newton's disenchantment with the Confederacy grows after learning that troops are seizing crops and livestock for taxes. After helping one family resist such a raid, he is bitten by a slave-catching dog. With the help of abolitionist Aunt Sally and several slaves, he escapes to a swamp where several runaway slaves led by Moses Washington tend to his wounds.
After the Siege of Vicksburg, Confederate desertions increase considerably, and many of them find their way to the swamp. Newton organizes the deserters and runaway slaves into a militia, and leads an armed rebellion against the Confederacy. They succeed in capturing a large slice of south-east Mississippi, organizing it as the "Free State of Jones". Although they get little help from the Union, they manage to hold out until the end of the war.
Newton continues to fight against racial inequality after the war, helping to free Moses' son from an "apprenticeship" to Rachel's former master and registering freedmen to vote. He and Rachel have a son, Jason. Since they are unable to marry, Newton arranges to deed a parcel of land to her.
The story is interspersed with the saga of Newton's great-great-great grandson, who is arrested under Mississippi's miscegenation laws 85 years after the war. Since he is of one-eighth black descent, under Mississippi law of the day he is considered black, and therefore cannot legally marry his long-time sweetheart. He is sentenced to five years in prison, but his conviction is thrown out by the Mississippi Supreme Court rather than risk the law being declared unconstitutional.
Wednesday, 28 September 2016
WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU LOOK AT ME?
Watch this video and answer the following questions:
1. Why does she say muslims can be defined as an airport security-line delay?
2. What happened to her when she was 17?
3. How can she consider that being a muslim is a feminist declaration of independence?
4. Why are September 11th attacks so significant to her community? what was she doing when this happened? Ask your parents... do they remember?
5. What turned her from a citizen to a suspect?
6. What metaphor does she use to explain the role of muslims in American society?
7. Where and how do people usually get radicalized?
8. What does she compare ISIS to?
9. What happens when we are afraid?
10. What happened at the mosque when she went after September 11th attacks?
*WRITE YOUR OPINION ABOUT THIS TALK
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