bigideas

Just a quickie this, inspired by a Philips missive I came across by accident this morning while looking for something else. The main subject doesn’t excite me much: the resignation of the Bishop of Rochester.

This July, Robert Kingham and Rich Cochrane are presenting the first two performances of their multimedia psychogeographic lecture/performance Align.

The term rhetoric is most often levied as a term of abuse, deployed when someone’s empty words are not backed-up by their deeds. More often than not, that someone is usually a politician, spinning a yarn.

I’ve been listening to a lot of sound poetry lately, and came across Dick Higgins’s short essay A Taxonomy of Sound Poetry on the estimable ubuweb. I was particularly interested in the boundary between this kind of poetry and music, and Higgins makes a useful suggestion that’s at least part of the story.

Charlie Brooker’s take on the BNP’s recent party political broadcast seemed to me to hit one particularly interesting nail on the head. Let’s borrow his hammer and see if we can drive it a bit further in.

It’s Longfellow who’s usually credited with the claim that music is a universal language. He didn’t know much about music but plenty of people who do have expressed the same view, especially musicians themselves.

With newspapers struggling to stay afloat, and people skipping the licence fee and just using iPlayer, has the tradiational media had its day? And if it has, what has replaced it? Or is the old/new media divide a false one?

On 28 April 2009, Miran Epstein offers to take us behind the scenes of moral philosophy.

Ought justice be rendered to the victim, or in the name of society? If so, is there a balance to be struck between gaining retribution, deterring criminality and rehabilitating offenders? Are any of these objectives realistic in the first place?

We expend much effort to reduce or avoid risks in our lives. So why are we so fond of gambling? Anthropologist Dr Rebecca Cassidy will introduce some of the myriad explanations for our appetite for risk from Freud to neuroscience, but suggest that finding answers requires an understanding of the context in which gambling takes place.
She’ll suggest that some of the social meanings attributed to games, chance, risk and luck are connected with specific notions of morality, justice and equity, using examples from Britain and elsewhere. As always, there will …