Innholdsfortegnelse for 1/22/2018 i The Big Issue

I love rock’n’roll bands from the Sixties and Seventies so I’m looking forward to the interview with Steven Van Zandt on page 16. The E Street Band are a proper band of working class people who made some great stuff – and, of course, Bruce Springsteen is The Boss. I’m also a fan of Aardman Studios – I used to watch Wallace and Gromit on the TV years ago – so I’m definitely going to try and see Early Man. Read more about it on page 20. You can find out more about me by turning to page 46.…

Smart thinking Lincoln, like many university cities and towns, has lots of homeless people partly due to the fact that most of the cheap housing is taken by students. Could universities be persuaded to set aside a few rooms in their halls of residence for the young homeless and maybe let them benefit from some of their services and clubs? Alison Goodwin, Horncastle Life lessons I was raised with my two sisters for some eight years in Dr Barnardo Homes. When coming out of care I was homeless for some 10 months in Brighton, attempting at times vital slumber in a church cellar less than half a mile away from my “parent’s” abode. However, I became a pool lifeguard where I met one of the conchitas of Madrid, who motivated…

DREAMSCAPE BY MARY VALLELY Mary studied art and design for five years in college and has been working as an artist in London for 10 years, selling and exhibiting work through Café Art and Crisis. “Art helps with my depression,” she says. “I have a history of homelessness and use day centres to access art materials. Without these I would be unable to create my work. I love using colour; it helps my mood; the sadder I am the more colour comes out; the pain becomes beautiful.” PARATROOPERS AT DUNKIRK BY JAMES SNEDDON Canterbury Big Issue vendor James has been sleeping rough since 2011. “Art has given me something positive and productive to put my energy into,” he says. “The picture of three paratroopers standing on the beach at Dunkirk…

It was a mammoth task. Telling a story of hope through football, set among Stone Age primitive people and Bronze Age brutes, overflowing with positive messages alongside gags galore. Yet the latest painstakingly put-together claymation film from Nick Park and Aardman – set somewhere near Manchester, a few thousand years BC (Before Cantona) – pulls it off with the usual panache and charm. So what can we learn from our primitive forebears? Quite a lot according to Early Man’s superstar voice actors Eddie Redmayne and Maisie Williams, who play enthusiastic young Stone Age hero Dug and Bronze Age football fanatic Goona. TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK Maisie Williams: Early Man is a typical, comedic underdog story of bravery and teamwork and overcoming the impossible. Or…

To the people who don’t see me, but see my convictions. I am writing this because tonight I signed up with a recruitment agency. My interview was going well, until it got to disclosing my convictions. As always, I was open and honest about my past mistakes. It’s the only way I know how to be. I handed over my most recent disclosure and – by the way – it clearly states that I am not barred from working with any type of person. That means that I pose no risk to the people that I would work with. The information that seems to have the biggest impact on employers, and others in authority, is from when I was 17 years old, more than a decade ago. It is a…

Music has always been immensely important to me, as crucial a part of my emotional development as books and family. As a music journalist, then a radio producer, I learned much about the world – anything from the religious rituals of medieval monks to the history of civil rights – from a record collection which went from Gregorian chant to Japanese noise. But what most fascinated and vexed me, both as a reader and a critic, was getting to the nub of how music makes you feel. How can a bunch of notes and chords, delivered by simple machines and human voices, leave our bodies vibrating with ecstasy orwretched with grief? It is a miracle. And how do you write about that? Longform music journalism thus tends to focus on…

Richard Linklater is surely one of the most prominent American directors right now. His 1991 debut Slacker helped kickstart modern US indie cinema, and, with his trilogy of Before films and the luminous Boyhood, he has made some of the defining work of the past 20 years. And yet he remains strangely out of time. His movies are full of complicated characters discussing complicated things, sympathetically attuned to the lives of ordinary folk; quietly political and engineered with a masterly but unflashy sense of craft. Linklater’s work owes more to the golden age of American cinema in the late 1960s and ’70s than the anonymous product churned out today. Which raises hopes for Last Flag Flying. Set in the early 2000s, it owes its greatest debt to that earlier era…

“Practically every orchestra now offers events aimed at families and young people” I’m partial to what I term ‘kitsch desk paraphernalia’ – others have (not unkindly) described my careful curation as ‘junk’. The collection comprises much musical tat: tape designed to look like a keyboard, a pencil covered with Warhol-like images of Mozart and post-it notes inscribed with ‘Gone Chopin, Bach Soon’ (geddit?!). (I have, at various points, been given a Chopin Liszt notepad and a Chopin board – one senses that Liszt would find the immortalisation amusing; Chopin not so much.) I recently acquired a new title for my ‘deadline procrastination desk reading’: Inspiration for Musicians by Emily Darcy. The small turquoise hardback is a gift shop staple, in which the reader doubts the authenticity of the content but…

Picture perfect This is my first time visiting UK and one of my must to-do list in UK is buying Big Issue. So that’s how I met Easton at White City station. When I saw him selling the new year edition of Big Issue I was so excited to tell him that I’d been looking for Big Issue vendors for so long. Afterwards, I drew him and hope everyone stopped by this station could buy one of Big Issue magazine. Yatta Huang, email Spread the good words Despite supporting homeless charities with occasional donations I’ve only just started buying The Big Issue, and intend to do so weekly from now on. I didn’t know that half the price goes to the seller. My only negative thought was that it’s more…

I asked my dog what he thought. And not for the first, the answer came there none. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, as he is a dog. But he is a great dog, clearly. Like a lot of dog owners, I was surprised when Ben Fogle and his pals got it wrong on the TV show Britain’s Favourite Dogs last week. Ben announced that a Labrador was the nation’s favourite, while mine, a Springer Spaniel, was number nine on the countdown. This is doubly wrong. A Springer should have been number one, and mine first amongst those. The criteria, since you ask, is that he is my dog. Always impossibly delighted to see you, he’ll give you his heart if you throw him a ball. I was asking my…

This winter has been tough. With the worst flu outbreak in years and hospitals bursting at the seams, I’ve heard innumerable stories of staff doing their best for patients under the hardest circumstances in a generation. If you, or a loved one, has experienced this first-hand, you will know something of the strain our health and social care services are under. The NHS is a grand edifice sure enough, but successive governments have been chipping away at it for decades. In too many areas of health and social care we’re relying on goodwill, dedication and unpaid overtime – far from solid foundations. A cold winter is all it takes to bring parts of this edifice to the brink of collapse. Speak to almost any health professional, and they’ll describe the…

Sponsor a room and help give a homeless young person a place to feel safe. Could you sponsor a room today? When you do, you’ll be giving a homeless young person a safe place to sleep and the chance of building a better future. Tonight, thousands of homeless young people who have no one to turn to, risk being attacked or abused. It’s no wonder 13-year-old Jack was scared. Jack became homeless when his relationship with his family reached breaking point. He was just 13 years old when he slept rough for the first time. “It was October and very late one night when I was asked to leave. I had nowhere to go so I walked around looking for somewhere to hide. I found a bench in the park…

IN 1966 THE YEAR STEVEN VAN ZANDT TURNS 16… The Soviets land a probe on the moon ahead of the USA/The BBC tunes into colour/The Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley are jailed for life When I was 16 I already had my first band, The Source. It was a wonderful time to grow up in America. We had a lot to do, a lot of places for the band to play – high schools, Catholic institutions, beach clubs, teenage nightclubs, VFW halls (Veterans of Foreign Wars). We’d only just seen the first real rock‘n’roll band, The Beatles. My parents were concerned about me being in a band but not as much as when I left school and they realised this was what I wanted to do with my…

MORPH (FROM 1977) I remember the first time I saw Morph on TV when I was 15 or 16. But I remember Aardman’s work from even earlier. When I was at film school and quite poor, they invited me for two summers to work. The first time I made props and the second time I got to animate. It was a privilege to do Morph. I used to dine out on the fact that I knew him. CREATURE COMFORTS (1989) This was a heady time. We used real interviews and put it in the mouths of animals and it caught the imaginations. I did all the animation myself in that first Creature Comforts film, which took me three months. It…

“O wad some power the giftie gie us to see oursels as ithers see us,” opined Robert Burns in the 18th century. Well, if Scotland’s national bard was alive today he’d be delighted, perhaps overwhelmed, by Burns Unbroke, a multi-arts festival showcasing artists and performers through their interpretations of his life and work. This piece, Robert Burns – Cool Scot by Greg Moodie, is just one of a range of pieces exploring his legacy from 30 visual artists across 11 galleries opening in Edinburgh on Burns Night.…

1. MIND WIDE OPEN by Steven Johnson This is a totally accessible deconstruction of how the brain works; from its evolution, to its deep-down nitty-gritty bio-chemical mechanics; with sections on how to improve personal cognitive functioning, rather than remain a slave to old neural habits. 2. I HAVE AMERICA SURROUNDED by John Higgs A compelling study of the life and work of Dr Timothy Leary – the man who introduced the world to LSD. Written by John Higgs (everything by him is worth reading) this is a romp through the blockbusting adventure that was Leary’s life; but at its core is a clear insight into Leary’s methodology regarding the use of psychedelic drugs in therapy. 3. BREAKING OPEN THE HEAD by Daniel Pinchbeck This is a rational search for spiritual…

It’s the endearing tale of history’s most unlikely friendship – Victoria & Abdul, which is out now on Digital, Blu-ray™ and DVD. The plot is based on the heartwarming and uplifting true story of Queen Victoria’s unexpected companionship with a humble servant from India. When Abdul Karim (Fazal), a young clerk, travels from India to participate in the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, he is surprised to find favour with the Queen herself (Judi Dench). As the Queen questions the constrictions of her long-held position, the two forge an unlikely and devoted alliance with a loyalty to one another that the Queen’s inner circle attempts to destroy. As the friendship deepens, the Queen begins to see a changing world through new eyes and joyfully reclaims her humanity. Directed by Academy Award® nominee…

I was nervous about writing this email. But I feel compelled to say something. My Big Issue gentlemen stands outside my local Co-op. I saw him the other day, we hugged and wished each other a happy new year. Then, I noticed his face. He had been attacked by some local people over the new year period. Yet he gave me his usual bright smile and took my hand and kissed it. A true gentleman! God bless him! Also, the best Christmas decoration I saw was when a neighbour in my road put up some lights and then also put up the front page of The Big Issue Christmas edition in their window! It made me smile... that’s what Christmas should be about, right?! Thinking of others. Cherie Marsh, email…

A Big Issue-backed care provider is helping to clear hospital backlogs by boosting the number of beds available for people aged over 65. Social enterprise Spiral Health has provided 10 extra beds to allow older patients in north-west England to be taken off wards and looked after in care homes, following a £150,000 investment from Big Issue Invest, our social investment arm. With the cash from Big Issue Invest’s Impact Loans England programme, a £5m lending scheme aimed at enabling social enterprises to access loan funding of between £20,000 and £150,000, Spiral Health has entered a long-term commitment to operate a new home, Springfield Manor Gardens Care Home in Preston. The funding has helped to provide accommodation for an additional 10 people, increasing the number of nursing care beds to…

Last summer, we reported on Danish professional provocateur Kristian von Hornsleth’s promise to end homelessness within the year by privatising it. Hornsleth’s Homeless Tracker project turns homeless people into art to be sold to the highest bidder. It was controversial – but that was the point. Despite death threats and police investigations, the project is ongoing. Six months on, what difference has it made to the lives of homeless people? THE BIG ISSUE: In July you claimed that there would be no homeless people in the UK by the same time next year. Are things going the way you expected? KRISTIAN VON HORSLETH: I’m going to need a few more months to solve this one, but things are moving in the right direction. I have sold two of the 10…

Monsieur Macron seems to have blessed us with a visitation of the Bayeux Tapestry, which must be classed as the world’s first (and longest) comic strip. I have seen it going round the walls of the Musée de la Tapisserie, in Bayeux. It is stunning. And it is truly stunning that, after the roughing up the UK has gotten over its EU withdrawal, post-referendum, we are being lent this truly great objet d’art. On Radio 4’s Today programme, it was suggested that we might want to loan the Rosetta Stone in return, dug up in Egypt by a French Army officer, Pierre-François Bouchard at the end of the 18th century, and captured by Britain soon after in the wars against Napoleon. It’s funny how having guns and armies allows you…

Sadly there is no evidence to suggest football was around during the Neolithic/Bronze Age in Europe, and there certainly weren’t any mammoths. But the transition from the Stone Age to Bronze [in the third millennium BC] is one of my favourite parts of prehistory. The arrival of new materials such as metal to Stone Age societies must have caused a ripple in the Neolithic world. Seeing that change in artefacts is fairly easy, working out what those changes meant to the people at the time is much harder. Some people probably embraced new materials and practices, others almost certainly resisted them (like Dug’s group). One thing I noticed about the Bronze Age people in the film was how groomed they were. The footballers of Real Bronzio maintained their clean-shaven appearance…

As a teen, I felt so alone in my struggles, and when I started writing around age 13 it was because I had a desperate need to tell my story, to be heard, even though I rarely shared my writing. Just getting it on paper made my existence feel more solid, more valid. Now, so many years later, that core drive for storytelling hasn’t changed much. Though the stories I write are no longer my own, they are still about teens who are dealing with way more than they should have to, as I did. They are about teens surviving sexual assault and addiction and mental illness, as I did. I write stories about teens like I was, young people who have to worry about things more complicated than romance…

Netflix are in the business of making their own big-budget feature films now. They stick them out exclusively on their streaming service for us to watch in the comfort of our own homes without the interruption of ad breaks or any corporate sponsorship whatsoever. How do they make money out of that? Presumably the plan is to make entertainment of such alarmingly high quality that it entices new subscribers by the billion. If that is their strategy – and I can’t think of what else it might be – then we are heading into a truly golden age of entertainment. No longer will content creators be pandering to the lowest common denominator in a bid to please advertising partners who are more interested in audience numbers than the quality of…