After an aeroplane crash, a large group of pre-adolescent English schoolboys are stranded on an island. It appears to be the boys’ utopia: coral reefs, pink rocks and sea birds “like icing…on a pink cake,” dense green forests, a large rock pool, fruits in abundance, all surrounded by azure sea. There are no restraints...
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“an intellectual, is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.” Promiscuity, drug use and the growing obsession with youth are beginning to define our status quo. Today, Huxley’s novel Brave New World is regarded as one of the most innovative and sinister works of literature ever published. Written in 1932, Huxley...
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Cormac McCarthy’s work does not shrink from the uncomfortable and the unpleasant, and hisnew novel, TheRoad,is no exception. It is set in a post-apocalyptic America and charts the journey of a nameless father and his son, as they travel south in a desperate attempt to survive the oncoming winter. They are faced by many...
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Music is always played harmoniously alongside the bleakness of warfare. Whether it is the marching music used to maintain the rigour of the soldiers’ step, regiment bands, patriotic and nationalistic songs sung by soldiers fighting or those left to defend home, there seems to be a definitive framework to categorise warfare songs of the...
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My regard for Sibelius as the-greatest-composer-that-ever-lived really only began last summer, following a rousing performance of his Second Symphony in Ripon Cathedral. Usually I find that to be fully captivated by a performance I need already to know the piece inside-out, but with this it was different. It was, in fact, love at first...
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We are told heaven has a beautiful soundtrack: usually harps, the odd trumpet and a heavenly choir are on the bill. Few have mentioned silence in heaven – perhaps it is less than ideal. Meanwhile, back here on Earth, music has rarely been an overt exploration of utopian ideals. The easiest medium in which...
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The music of Alice Coltrane just needs to suggest a place name to transport the imagination elsewhere. Pieces such as Journey in Satchidananda, Galaxy in Turiya, Stopover Bombay or Lovel Skyboat allude to Hindu philosophy in a way that connects names of places or people with flights to almost otherworldly states. No surprise, then,...
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Build a museum. Aside from the technical tinkering that keeps a building standing and allows it to function as a museum (consider the contingencies of crowd circulation, security, climate control etc.), you’d be much preoccupied with its public face. This ‘face’ is, of course, constructed by the way in which the museum arranges its...
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I believe architecture should be a retrospect of the human past, where distinct spatial and temporal contributions can be observed. The architecture should embody a tactile, concrete aesthetic biography. Aesthetic then, if applying strict etymology, is a derivation of the Greek aisthesis = sense perception; things that are perceptible by the senses, not things...
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From its inception as the eponymous fictional island in Thomas More’s novel of 1516 to modern-day Disney films, utopia has led a primarily literary existence. A hybrid of two Greek derivates (‘no place’ and ‘good place’), More’s Utopia is a place of perfect social, legal and political systems. Our contemporary equivalent of such an...
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