Culture

  • Life and Its Work

    A necessary part of life new life wakes me: a tiny sun with roots I must water daily encouraging them to plan their own attack upon discord. Poor little bread of solidarity, banner against the cold, fresh water for all the

  • Tinariwen — resistance of the Sahara

    Tinariwen, who are touring Australia in April, first became known abroad at the initial Festival of the Desert in Mali in 2001, now an annual event. This was also the year it started travelling to Europe. Until then its music was for Tuaregs across the Sahara, an outlet during their resistance struggle, when forced by drought into exile in Libya or south-eastern Algeria in the 1970s.

  • Abolish the secret police

    ASIO: The Enemy Within
    Written & published by Michael Tubbs, 2008
    275 pages,$25
    Available from the Search Foundation, lvl 3, suite 3B, 110 Kippax St, Surry Hills, NSW
    Ph 9211 4164, fax 9211 1407

  • Not quite Brideshead

    Easy Virtue
    Directed by Stephan Eliot
    Written by Stephan Eliot and Sheridan Jobbins
    With Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes, Kristin Scott Thomas & Colin Firth
    In cinemas

  • Superheros or super-villains?

    Watchmen
    Directed by Zack Snyder
    Written by David Hayter and Alex Tse
    With Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Billy Crudup

  • On the box

    Revolucion: Five Visions — A breathtaking visual exploration of Cuba reveals five decades of revolution though the lenses of five Cuban photographers. SBS, Saturday, March 28, 3.25pm. The Atheists — As best-selling books rail against religion,

  • Brecht songs in Manila

    With the world food crisis shading into the world financial crisis, food prices seemed to settle down. Some financial analysts said the food crisis was over: all the basic food prices had come down — except rice and sugar.

  • Sir Bono: the knight who fled his own debate

    As Counterpunch and Rock and Rap Confidential disclosed in September, last May U2’s Bono confronted Irish journalist Gavin Martin and myself in the lobby of Dublin’s Merion Hotel.

  • On the box

    Guerrilla Girl – Isabel is an educated young woman from a wealthy family in Colombia who has decided to leave behind everything she knows to join the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). SBS, Sunday March 22, 11.10pm. Living Black –

  • A materialist critique of pseudo-science

    Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present
    By John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark & Richard York
    Monthly Review Press, 2008
    240 pages, $33.95

  • Thinking like a Bolivian

    The glory of being “the other”. The pride and punishment of not being “like them …” Not being white, being Indian and being half cast … That is the harsh but ultimately glorious destiny of the Bolivian.