May 27, 2020

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May272020

Punk is defunct: Long live de funk

Music Cinema & BooksMay 27, 2020

by David James I have a confession to make and I would appreciate it if we keep it between ourselves. Tell no one. OK, here it is. When I was a teenager I used to spend hours listening to Slade. I even owned a Slade record at a time when owning records was a big deal. I would sing along to lead singer Nobby Holder’s musical chunder – and, yes, I really got into it. True, there wasn’t much else to do in Bennettswood, perhaps the closest thing in the known universe to nowhere in particular. And, in my defence,…

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May272020

A tribute to Bond Stott, late of BC/AD

Poetry Letters & HumourMay 27, 2020

by Patrick McStuttles Your Theobogan has on a black T-shirt, a tennis racquet held like a guitar and a sneer. Let’s rock! OK, it’s not my remit (come to think of it, what is my remit?) (what even is a remit?). News Wiggly covers music superbly with master muso David James. (Sorry, Dave, for bumbling into your studio!) Rock ’n’ roll, with its posses of posturing poseur practitioners, oozing braggadocio and misogynism, is surely the most narcissistic, self-absorbed, pretentious artform ever seen. Until, along comes Rap, and um … this column. My favourite band of all time is BC/AD! Your…

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‘The hours have lost their clock’

History & PhilosophyMay 27, 2020

by Brian Coman A REFLECTION ON THE MODERN POLITICAL ORDER IN THE WEST PART ONE OF TWO PARTS (You can read Part Two here) My title is not original, but comes from a translation of a poem by Vicente Huidobro, a Chilean poet from the early part of the 20th century. I have no idea of the original context but, for my purposes, it serves admirably to introduce a discussion on the loss of meaning and the loss of the notion of truth in the modern West. In a recent two-part essay in News Weekly (the March 7 and March…

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May272020

The willy-nilly manufacture of rights

PoliticsMay 27, 2020

by Lucy Sullivan It was with a feeling of relief that I read in Terri Kelleher’s article (News Weekly, August 10, 2019) that the United States, of all the apparently unlikely places, is making a move to control the untrammelled manufacture of “rights” of the last few decades in which only to lay claim to some condition has been to have it accepted as a right and put it into law. A system of law that protects the citizen from oppressive restrictions has not been enough; there must further be a proactive enablement of oppressive restrictions on others’ behaviour if…

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