It’s hard to choose just one song from Loudon Wainwright’s skeletal, bruised, shocking – and yes, at times extremely funny – 1979 live album a live one. Wainwright is a far more versaitile songwriter than he’s often given credit for, and this collection, perhaps more than any other, shows off his talent in a raw […]
I had reservations about picking a tune so newly-lodged in my mind for the Monkeys Tunes (great idea, by the way – reviewing single songs). Ever-mindful of the ‘o.k computer fallacy’ (where Q readers voted radiohead’s then latest album as the greatest album of all time), I was more inclined to pick something sure to […]
The artist Robert Luxemburg, in the thought-provoking Steal this film II (freely available through bit-torrent – download it, watch it, pass it on), talks about the absolute fear that record companies and the film industry have that the average consumer will, with the aid of cheap technology, morph themselves into producers. With the aid of […]
Flicking around the TV channels in a friend’s house last night
PiS deputy Jacek Kurski has been forced by the courts to apologise to Agora,
The view from Gdańsk of the Lisbon aftermath is not too different from that in Bologna and, at a guess, everywhere else in Europe. My fellow monkey reports that the President of Italy said: “you can’t think that the decision of lit
An unusual choice, perhaps, given that it’s probably not the strongest song on an album – from the choirgirl hotel – which is arguably not Tori Amos’s strongest, even though it boasts Playboy Mommy and Jackie’s strength. And yet there’s something very special, and at the same time characteristic about this gentle love song. What’s great about […]
As it became apparent today that Irish voters had rejected the Lisbon treaty, France mobilised its army preparatory to invading the recalcitrant island.
In a straight news article it can sometimes be difficult to figure out where the reporter’s sympathies lie but for the careful observer there are a few clues. Take the article in today’s Dziennik about the decision to fund private third level colleges from public funds. The headline reads “Government to finance private colleges” (“Rząd […]
After the years of whinging about lack of recognition, low status and how people think that anyone who knows two languages can translate translators – at least in Poland – are finally gaining some ground on their mortal enemies: original artists. Today’s Gazeta Wyborcza reports how a translator, Hanna Szczerkowska, forced (by use of the […]
