Innholdsfortegnelse for 10/22/2018 i The Big Issue

Lunar-cy, Ed! I wish Edward Lawrenson all the best in whatever his new role is after leaving The Big Issue. However I have to take issue with his description of the Neil Armstrong film First Man as “boring” [Film, October 8-14]. How he could come to this conclusion is baffling. The film has its fair share of white-knuckle ride rocket scenes, but precisely what makes the film interesting is the changes of pace with focus on the family. We all know what Armstrong did and the famous words he spoke, but we know next to nothing about the man behind the story. I also have to take issue with Mr Lawrenson’s view of the death of Armstrong’s daughter as “cloying and sentimental”. In actual fact it is dealt with very…

A video game challenging players to “survive homelessness” has street paper vendors selling ‘The Daily Issue’ as one of its challenges. Players buy the magazine for 50p and sell for £1.50. Sound familiar…? The goal of game CHANGE: A Homeless Survival Experience is to find a flat and a job – starting with street paper selling. “Including The Daily Issue is something we wanted to do because The Big Issue is very much linked to homelessness and people associate the two closely,” said Danny Hayes, co-founder of developer Delve Interactive, who has experienced homelessness. “If you walk down the streets in London then you will always see Big Issue vendors so we had to include them.” It’s not the first time homelessness has been turned into a game – a…

What a great time to be a John Carpenter fan, or indeed be John Carpenter. The successful revival of Halloween – a stylish, reverential 40th anniversary sequel to the cheapskate but chilling 1978 original – has reminded the world that the rakish, cackling, hippie-haired 70-year-old essentially invented the slasher movie. He recently completed another sellout tour of the UK with his youthful band, presenting powerhouse versions of his retro-synth soundtracks for films both real and imagined. And over the next month, four early films from the Carpenter canon are being rereleased in cinemas as a prelude to some lavish Blu-ray offerings. They include his ominous ghost-pirate fable The Fog (1980), the hardboiled sci-fi doomscape of Escape From New York (1981) and the under-appreciated satanic thriller Prince Of Darkness (1987). Devised…

Loneliness is a public health issue. The great irony of the digital age is that people have never been more connected. But people have never reported feeling more lonely. The mental health effects of isolation can be devastating. The effects on communities and society as a whole are corrosive. Official government figures say that 200,000 older people living in the UK have not had a conversation with a friend, relative or anyone they know for over a month. That is a devastating statistic. Last week, the government unveiled Britain’s first ever loneliness strategy, albeit focused on England. It’s wide-ranging. The measures vary from postal delivery workers checking on isolated folk during their rounds, to GPs prescribing social activities such as dance classes for those who present as lonely. There is…

The Big Issue has taken the fight against poverty to the seat of governments across the UK. Big Issue founder Lord John Bird met with the Isle of Man’s Select Committee on Poverty and gave evidence calling for a focus on prevention. “We need to start seriously planning for tomorrow to ensure that we don’t raise the next generation of Big Issue vendors,” he told them. And Big Issue manager for Wales and South West Beth Thomas highlighted the need for early years support at the Welsh Assembly.…

RESOURCES 2 BY ROBYN FORMAN “My work is about healing, forgiveness and reconciliation,” says Robyn, who is in her late fifties and lives in Brighton. “I came from the school of hard knocks. A recent diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis on top of my bipolar is difficult, however art has rescued me. The artistic process gives me relief from the difficulties of managing my health issues.” Street Art is created by people who are marginalised by issues like homelessness, disability and mental health conditions. Contact streetlights@bigissue.com  to see your art here. BUY STREET ART! You can buy prints of some artworks featured in Street Art through bigissueshop.com At least half of the profit from each sale goes to the artist.…

One of the seminal moments of my life was at 16. I discovered the mountains. On a visit to my grandfather in Dublin I climbed one of the Wicklow hills you could see from his back garden. Then the train back to England took me round the north of Snowdonia. The sight really caught my imagination – I remember looking into the valleys between the mountains and wondering what was at the end of the valley. I persuaded a school friend, Anton, to come with me and climb Snowdon. We tried to climb it without any of the proper gear and we were avalanched off and slid quite a long way. Fortunately we weren’t killed. I found this incredibly exciting and exhilarating; Anton found it anything but. I knew I’d…

Spy dramas have come in from the cold. The high-gloss, beautifully shot BBC adaptation of The Night Manager won three Golden Globes, three Baftas and two Emmys, and now Sunday nights are again being handed over to John le Carre. Anyone wondering whether The Little Drummer Girl will match up to its 2016 predecessor for exquisitely executed espionage has their answer in a single scene. At the Acropolis of Athens, Alexander Skarsgård’s character Becker attempts to seduce wide-eyed actress Charlie (Florence Pugh) in shots captured by a drone circling the ancient citadel. This was the first time the Acropolis has been filmed from these angles. Everything beautifully lit, the actors are a vision in bold colours, and an on-screen relationship based almost entirely on lies and…

I’m a sucker for any book that uses resonances between the past and the present as a central theme. This week we have two very different books in style and content, but they both give a wonderful sense of the continuation of human interaction with the environment over time. The first is the succinct and sublime Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. Set around 20 years ago, it tells a seemingly simple story of a group of archaeology enthusiasts who spend some time camping in the Northumberland wilderness, attempting to recreate as much as possible the Iron Age way of life. The novel is narrated by teenager Silvie, whose father is an amateur expert, a bus driver by day and a keen historian by night. Also in the group are Silvie’s…

There’s a joke in the – really funny, you should watch it – new Sharon Horgan comedy Women on the Verge (W, Thursdays 10pm) – in which the character Katie’s parenting skills are criticised by her ex’s new partner. She tells her that her daughter would rather come round to her house “because you just watch the Bake Off and look at your phone”. I have to say, I felt that burn like the singed edges on a biscuit chandelier, because that describes my weekly happy hour (and 15 minutes) with my son. We’re both at a difficult age – he’s 11 and growing alarmingly tall, gangly and deep-voiced, and I’m 46 with unpredictable mood swings like a faulty trap door in a ghost train – yet The Bake Off…

Online streaming stats have long since become the dominant metric in the music industry to such an extent that something akin to Massively Big Number Fatigue has started to set in. Close to two billion streams on Spotify for Drake’s One Dance featuring Wizkid and Kyla? Big deal, they’re probably mostly sympathetic clicks by Drake’s mum. Almost six billion YouTube views for Luis Fonsi’s Despacito featuring Daddy Yankee? I’m stifling a yawn here. Thirty trillion hits across all online platforms for DJ Fannypack’s Trouserquake featuring MC Featuring? I made that one up, but would it matter if I hadn’t? Streams are of course more or less entirely free to listen to, and so don’t always tell the full story as to an artist’s success in building an active and engaged…

At 9.10 pm last Wednesday, my niece Karen died of cancer. She passed away in the elaborate and supportive arms of the NHS, on a life support machine, in an induced coma, and loaded down with expensive and complex medical interventions. Born soon after Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson came to power having promised the “white heat” of technology, she died in the days of Facebook and Amazon, of Trump and Brexit, making her 53 years seem like a big lump of important history. We had not been much in contact the last 20 years. The death of her father – my favourite brother – growing up, seemed an obstacle to us seeing each other. But it was also that she was growing up into a young punk, and I…

MELMOTH THE WANDERER by Charles Maturin A bizarre gothic romance – written by Oscar’s great-uncle – about a damned soul, vainly seeking release from his diabolical contract. After leaving prison Oscar adopted the alias ‘Sebastian Melmoth’. AURORA LEIGH by Elizabeth Barrett Browning A semi-autobiographical novel in free verse; Oscar thought it one of the three greatest works in English literature (together with Hamlet and Tennyson’s In Memoriam). LOST ILLUSIONS by Honoré de Balzac Oscar claimed that the death of the novel’s leading character – the poet and dandy Lucien de Rubempré – was one of the great tragedies of his life: “It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.” INDIAN SUMMER by William Dean Howells Oscar considered the “delightful”, witty and perceptive Dean Howells…

In the 1980s when goth titans roamed the pop charts, The Mission and The Cure were backcombed, globe-bestriding giants. For some of us they never went away. But now, in a twist strangely fitting for the head-swirling spirit of 2018, they have joined forces in an extraordinary new ‘goth supergroup’. It is Beauty in Chaos, an unlikely ship of vagabonds captained by Michael Ciravolo, boss of Schecter Guitar Research and founder/guitarist of US band Human Drama, who made (dark)waves Stateside supporting the likes of Jane’s Addiction and The Psychedelic Furs. Invoking Queen’s ‘no synthesisers’ rule and doing all guitar parts himself, Ciravolo enlisted collaborators from across continents: Ministry’s Al Jourgensen, South Africa-born darkwave superstar Ashton Nyte, Robin Zander of Cheap Trick, Michael Anthony of Van Halen, Body Count rapper-turned-TV star…