12 Years a Slave Despite the fact that it seems mean mouthed of me to criticise this film I will do that anyway. I had read no reviews of this film at all. I only knew that it had been made by the Turner art prize winner and that a West Indian friend of mine …
Author archives: pasdelasbas
Travelling and Value
Yesterday, a friend, as they say, heard that her partner was invited for a two week walking tour in Sri Lanka. It was immediately clear and fine that the partner would go but it left my friend feeling somewhat sore. This is then partly a short tale of a very boring moment of jealousy but …
The New Birmingham Library
I was in Birmingham today and took the time to visit the new Birmingham Library. I’d heard about it on the dreaded Radio 4 when a few weeks ago they’d run a hugely positive effectively promotional report on it prior to opening. It had opened earlier this week and as it was a Saturday today …
Bull Street Quaker Meeting House
Amazing site just of Bull Street in the centre of Birmingham. A small lane leads off the main road between to giant buildings and there hidden lies the Quaker Meeting House somehow surviving the high rise developments around it. It is however not run by the Meeting but by a private conference company who allow …
Railing
So what is the truth about the disappearance of the railings that were standard issue for (at least) late Victorian and Edwardian housing? I’ll post here a few images of those stubs of metal that prick our memories on top of countless garden walls. We hear that they were commandeered during WW1 to make munitions …
Chesterfield Spire
There is no finer spire than that of Chesterfield Church. It is the result of a mistake of course but is the finest piece of Gaudi architecture north of Barcelona. Walter Benjamin was concerned with ‘aura’ and the impossibility of meaning remaining constant across time. The ‘aura’ of this spire is maintained by it being …
desire…
Zizek’s definition of an obsessional neurotic (himself included) is someone whose object of desire is the other’s desire. So I do recall a very intimate moment in which a friend told me that he had been drawn into the eyes of a woman, he had seen in her a great beauty which was not an …
canonisation by drip feed
Sorry if this is mean but I find it annoying that so much is made of the death of David Frost. It’s not that I have anything against the man but for people who spent their lives on the screen why give them more screen time when they die? The broadcasting world is incestuous, one …
our friends the iconoclasts
Fascinating programme on Beyond Belief about new developments in Mecca and Medina. I was talking the other day with my friends Afif and Nawal and we were looking at pictures of Mecca. They were showing me pictures of the crowds of pilgrims around the Kabba and in the background you could see incredibly tall skyscrapers …
Greeks and Bhuddism
The children have been reading, no, devouring, the Percy Jackson books. The central theme of these is that there are in this world ‘real’ Greek Gods and more particularly their children, demi-Gods, who inhabit both the normal mundane world and the super-powered world of the Gods. Now being a lover of Greek myths I found …