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Showing posts from August, 2013

Waterfall

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A song which you think initially, speaks of America's global dominance, the infiltration of British culture and a determination to break away, to run free from those haunting 'American satellites'. Yet the Roses never were nationalists, and Squire's bold cover-art here , a Union Jack splattered with the American stars, is about the closest the group ever came to acknowledging any kind of national identity. 'It's not where you're from, it's where you're at', of course, and emphatically, 'The British Empire? Just a bunch of public schoolkids playing about!' The latter offers a strong idea of exactly what Ian Brown and John Squire thought of imperial nostalgia. To me the song pens a beautiful tale of a ceaseless battler, the woman tirelessly threading a man's greatness and finally rising, stealing 'that which she never could own', and the immigrant 'racing from that hole' he calls home, lunging like the desperate

The other place

Yesterday’s sandy Empires melt into the gorgeous warm air: a chewed fabric of me and you, them and us. Tales of revolt and domination: of slavery and struggle, salt and spice, of Che. Sugar canes wail and weep, and we dance alongside them. We pour ourselves into a glass filled with wine reddened by the gentle blood of everyone we ever loved, hated, feared and dreamed. I gaze at a pit of naked destitution, a soul of roaring fear advancing, spiralling towards me out of a television screen. And I see sadness, madness, joy and community. I see utopia.

The decay of University

A spectre is haunting not only our beloved school of Economics, yet indeed, the entire sphere Western education: the spectre of the 19th century priest, Cardinal Newman. A prominent thinker of his time and a prolific writer, it was Newman’s notion of the university: an institutional embodiment of the exploration of ‘universal knowledge’, a building site the intellect could turn to for the tools required to ‘perfect’ its very own ‘powers’, upon which the concept of a university was founded (Nichols, 2004: 262). And it is my belief that the real essence of Newman’s idea lies fossilised upon today’s grounds, an ancient ragged, ruptured remnant of the evolution of contemporary higher education. For the university system has abandoned the pursuit of understanding and knowledge, its chief propeller now engineered in the aim of, as the American cultural critic Henry Giroux (p. 110) describes, the ‘commodification of knowledge’: students find themselves playing the content role of