Sep 30, 2004
Nottingham Open Poetry Competition 2005, Merit Prize The tractor tire, with its man-eating tread, wrestles with the wrought-iron plough whose elegant incisors blunt themselves against the chrome-stripped car door. In a poplar-sheltered hollow, these rootless things sink into the leafmould. Propane gas cylinder and knotted blue hose-pipe, bicycle seat and grinning radiator. Dragged from afar,… Read more
Jul 1, 2004
Red Pepper, July 2004 “I didn’t plan to make the film. I’m not a director, I’m an actor,” says Mohammad Bakri, describing the genesis of Jenin Jenin. “The story was like this. I was standing with a colleague of mine, an actress, with a group of Arab and Jewish demonstrators at Jenin checkpoint. It was… Read more
Jun 26, 2004
The Guardian, 26 June, 2004 Review: Why Arnold Matters: The Rise of a Cultural Icon by Michael Blitz and Louise Krasniewicz, Basic Books After Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election victory in California, no one wants to be caught under-estimating the power of celebrity. But there’s a danger of over-estimating it, and of over-simplifying it, too. Why Arnold… Read more
Apr 8, 2004
The Guardian, 8 April Forty years ago, his motto was “Money doesn’t talk, it swears …” Today, it’s “stretch-lined demi-bra with lace”. After four decades in showbusiness, Bob Dylan has made his debut in a television commercial – promoting a new line of lingerie. The advert, screening this week in the US, intercuts close-ups of… Read more
Apr 1, 2004
Mike Marqusee talks to novelist David Peace Red Pepper, April 2004 What does the left want from its artists? To be told what we already know? To have our sense of mission confirmed, to be reassured that our struggles will be vindicated? Or to have our assumptions and emotional habits challenged and our perceptions altered?… Read more
Mar 14, 2004
India Today – ITPlus, March 2004 I’m grateful to cricket for many things, and one of them is that it got me to Pakistan – with its sufi shrines and elaborately painted trucks, its virtuoso kite flyers and zesty kebabs. The most rewarding travelling combines the purposeful and the aimless. Following a cricket tour in… Read more
Jan 18, 2004
Five poems selected for Biscuit 2003 prize anthology (The Sensitively Thin Bill of the Shag, Biscuit 2003). Aesthetic Spare me the wallet-thumpers and mickey-takers, spare me the shyness of men in suits, spare me the tears of movers and shakers, spare me the hollow sound of flutes. Give me something boisterous, something bohemian something potable –… Read more
Nov 1, 2003
Red Pepper, November, 2003 Forty years ago, on 26 October 1963, Bob Dylan premiered ‘The Times They are A-Changin’’, his generational anthem, to a sold-out house at New York’s Carnegie Hall. The song is founded on a conviction that the movement for social change is unstoppable, that history will conform to morality. In its second… Read more
Oct 30, 2003
Review of Chimes of Freedom and Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions of Sin By Mark Ford, Times Literary Supplement, 30 October, 2003 “The only thing I can compare him with is blotting paper”, the Irish singer Liam Clancy once remarked of the scruffy, mumbling, chain-smoking nineteen-year-old folkie who arrived on the Greenwich Village coffee-house scene in… Read more
Oct 25, 2003
The Guardian, 25 October, 2003 A new wave of political protest has unleashed a new wave of protest music. On Bomb the World, rap artist turned lyrical funkster Michael Franti sings: “We can chase down all our enemies/bring them to their knees/we can bomb the world to pieces/but we can’t bomb the world to peace.”… Read more
