Innholdsfortegnelse for 02-11-20 i The Big Issue

ART Never mind the result, get a fresh take on US history So what happened? The result of the US election wasn’t known before going to print but it’s probably safe to guess there has been no shortage of drama. The course of the American Dream has never been a smooth voyage, as a set of pastiches and parodies by British artist Ben Turnbull illustrate in American History RemiX. The exhibition, opening next month, explores the history of the country, from the frontier pioneers to the inauguration of President Trump. Ben Turnbull: American History RemiX, Saatchi Gallery, December 10 – January 10; benturnbull.com SHOP Buy fashionwear to help fight homelessness Backed by Big Issue Invest, The Blankfaces is a fashion label and unique social enterprise with designs either inspired or…

VENDORS Restrictions on movement are changing week to week, area to area. We recently removed our vendors from the streets in Wales after it introduced more stringent measures. Elsewhere our staff are working closely with vendors to make sure it is safe for them to be selling, and safe for customers to buy. We are providing masks and hand gel, and encouraging vendors to follow government guidelines. If you can, please support your local vendor by buying The Big Issue from them. PITCHES Towns and cities across the country are quieter than normal so our teams are moving vendors to pitches where they have the best chance of selling magazines, depending on local safety measures and circumstances. An ever-increasing number of vendors are offering contactless payments so they are not…

A new life for Phil Just before Christmas, Phil’s son died. He was only twenty and took his own life. Then Phil was the victim of a hate crime and had to leave his home of ten years and escape to a safe house in another part of the country. Suddenly homeless and without his family, his job and all that was familiar to him Phil felt isolated and alone. “When I was attacked, it was terrifying. I moved into temporary accommodation for safety. I had a small box room to live in, but I couldn’t store anything and sometimes it felt like the walls were closing in. I missed helping people through my work and I missed seeing my daughter.” But at Crisis, Phil found the support he needed.…

In a year to be forgotten Captain Tom is a man to remember. His heroics at the height of the pandemic (first wave) gave a country in lockdown somebody to look up to. In a time of unprecedented crisis, he reminded us what can make Britain great: the strength, determination, selflessness, courage and kindness of its people. Still recovering from a fall in which he fractured a hip, broke ribs and punctured a lung, 99-year-old Captain Tom Moore decided to walk 100 laps of his garden by his 100th birthday, hoping to collect £250 to treat the nurses at the local surgery with wine and chocolates. What happened next is staggering. His fundraising efforts went (I wish there were a better word) viral. Within four weeks he’d raised £38.9m. At…

What do we talk about when we talk about Islam? The usual practice is to speak in ‘eithers’ and ‘ors’. That is, either Muslims are talked about as bound by their faith to reject Western norms and values. Or they are talked about as capable of reform to make their way of life compatible with these values. The former kind of Muslim is forever doomed to be a recalcitrant foe, while the latter is either already a friend or could well be in the future. This manner of binary talk about Islam is everywhere in the West. And everywhere, these duelling narratives about Islam’s present and future take up nearly all the oxygen in the room. There is little appetite for more sophisticated analyses of what it means to be…

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse On Netflix from November 6 Those live-action Avengers films might have made Hulk-sized piles of money, but the animated Into The Spider-Verse is the only modern Marvel movie with an honest-to-goodness Oscar, taking the statuette for Best Animated Feature last February. It is easy to see why: the film’s crackling, graffiti-inspired mash-up of computer-generated animation and hand-drawn textures gives it a gorgeously tactile look, harking back to the crumpled newsprint of vintage comics. It helps, of course, that the story also feels fresh: thanks to some dimension-smashing mischief by gravelly crime boss the Kingpin, the mantle of being Spider-Man passes to a young Afro-Latino student, Miles Morales. He bravely tries to live up to the legacy of his hero with the help of some other Spider-Men…

Throughout a dark year for music there has been at least one blinking beacon of light – Bandcamp Fridays. On the frst Friday of the month since the start of lockdown, the digital music and merch sales platform, which is favoured in particular by the independent and DIY side of the industry for its ease of access and use and for its low fees, lets vendors collect 100 per cent of all profts for a 24-hour period. Bandcamp Fridays’ tremendous success has been not simply in allowing musicians and record labels to earn a little extra on every transaction – Bandcamp’s cut is only around 10-15 per cent in any event – but moreover in helping to galvanise music fans into going into their pockets again and again in celebratory…

There is a film coming called Songbird. The trailer has recently popped up online. It is utterly terrifying. It’s set a few years in the future. So far, so standard dystopia. Except in this future the world is still in lockdown, and has been for FOUR YEARS! The virus has mutated and now attacks the brain. Squads of hazmat-suited goons arrive to suck up the infected and transport them to infection ghettos. Those trying to avoid capture are shot. The conclusion of this movie is currently unknown. Unless there is a great reveal that lands on a world-saving vaccination, this is a hellscape that we can surely do without. It answers the question about how art will start to talk about the Covid epidemic. But quite who this is for…

As many as 40,000 renters could be evicted from their homes in the coming months, according to tenants’ rights campaigners who are calling for mandatory evictions to be banned over the winter. Generation Rent, part of The Big Issue’s Ride Out Recession Alliance (RORA), analysed court claims to project that tens of thousands of people in rent arrears or subject to landlord eviction notices could be made homeless. Alicia Kennedy, Generation Rent director, said: “The government must introduce emergency legislation to ban mandatory evictions and keep private renters safe from homelessness this winter.” The analysis by Generation Rent used Ministry of Justice figures from 2019 and 2020 to understand the scale of the problem. More than 11,000 private landlords applied for a Section 8 eviction notice – commonly filed because…

Soy sauce will not be cheaper under the new trade deal. It will continue to be tariff-free as it is under our current trade terms. However, it will be cheaper than trading under the default World Trade Organization terms – which the UK would have defaulted to on January 1 without the new trade agreement with Japan. In this case, the tariff applied to imported soy sauce would have been six per cent. Two subsequent tweets over the next day from the Department for International Trade clarified their claim. The first read: “Under WTO terms, the tariff on soya sauce is 6%. Under our deal, they will be 0%”. And the second went further: “To clarify: thanks to the UK-Japan trade deal, soya sauce will be cheaper than it otherwise…

There is no simple solution, Tom stresses, but at a minimum these three steps should be taken: • The government must give more support to wet-led pubs • Where hospitality businesses are forced to close by government, they must be given enough fiscal support to survive • Pub companies – the multimillion-pound businesses which own thousands of pubs that they let out to local landlords – should pass any savings they get from government policies on to their tenants…

Shakespeare seems to have come into his own in this pandemic. Not necessarily any one play, but the idea that the audience is involved in big events being played out before them. The American election seems to be dripping in the blood and sweat of a Macbeth. Or there’s a touch of Julius Caesar about the players. Or maybe some can see Richard III’s determination to survive, however desperate. In our own homeland there are northern revolters like the earls of old who reject the throne, perhaps as in King John. And among it all the figure of Falsta›f in Henry IV, Part 1 just wanting to get on with the drinking and late-night rousing. Toby Belch likewise in TwelǼth Night who simply wants licence to be licentious and drunk.…

Kabir Kareem-Bello 01 Digging to America by Anne Tyler This is a witty and multi-layered book that shows the challenges faced by migrants in assimilating and adapting to their home. It draws on the feelings of longing for the past and estrangement from the present. 02 Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah This book gives a first-hand account of a refugee in the UK. Alem’s story evokes empathy as he deals with abandonment by his father and struggles fitting into an alien and often hostile society. 03 The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini A thrilling, fast-paced novel about friendship and betrayal. Amir is forced to abandon his homeland of Afghanistan for America, but he cannot fully assimilate into his new home until he returns to Afghanistan to redeem himself. 04 Memoirs…

In 2018, Devon illustrator Jo Brown started a journal to document the wildlife she found in and around her garden – and realised it was helping her mental health. Through lockdown and beyond, many more of us found solace in nature. As a replica of her original notebook is published, she tells The Big Issue how to find calm in wild places I started the journal in April 2018. I wanted to start documenting all the wildlife I was discovering in order to have a better understanding of my surroundings and the ecosystem. On average, each page took between six and 10 hours to complete. Documenting species on to paper along with annotations tells so much more of a story than a single photograph. I have learned new things with…

From the very first days of the world wide web, engineers used webcrawlers (automated bots that move randomly between websites) to collect information about the newly created sites. But the question was how to put all the information they collected together to find the most interesting content? To answer this question, the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had an idea. They realised that the real information was not to be found in the words and pictures on the internet, but hidden in the process of hopping itself: because the webcrawlers moved around at random, and there were more links to more popular pages, the most popular pages would be visited more often. To turn this insight into an algorithm that became Google Search and made them both…

PITCH: Whistles, Trinity Street, Cambridge Every day, 8.30am-5pm I’ve been doing The Big Issue for 13 years in the same place in Cambridge and I love it. I came over from Belfast in 1987, I was looking for work. First of all I went to London but then later on I came to Cambridge and I’ve never moved on. I was 23 when I left Belfast and it took a lot of courage, leaving my home town and leaving my people behind. My mum’s still back in Belfast, she just turned 89 yesterday, but I don’t go back much. I’ve been all over the place; Coventry, Manchester, Glasgow, Bolton. But Cambridge is a brilliant place to live and a great place to work. The culture’s good and all the colleges...…

Charities in Scotland have joined forces to stop homeless people facing the heartbreaking decision to give up their dog to secure a home. Dogs Trust and homelessness charity Simon Community Scotland have created a role to make accommodation services dog friendly so homeless people can be housed without giving up the vital source of comfort and emotional support that their pets provide. Cat Birt, who has taken up the pets officer job, said: “There are so many positives and benefits to keeping people with their pets, and that’s what my role has been created to explore, progress and ultimately try and change the tale for vulnerable people and their beloved dogs.”…

The import tariff on soy sauce from Japan is 0% as it will be under the new trade agreement Under WTO terms, there would be a 6% tariff on soy sauce imported from Japan 7.7% tariffs exist for producers in territories that the EU doesn’t have a trade agreement with, including soy sauce manufacturers in China, Hong Kong and Malaysia Are men with deep voices more likely to cheat? And does being unpopular at school mean future heart problems? Read all our Fact/Fictions online at bigissue.com/tag/fact-fiction/…

The furlough scheme has ended. It helped 9.3 million people, meaning 80 per cent of salaries, up to £2,500, was paid by the government. But as furlough switches to the new job support scheme, which o›fers less money and varies according to the tier system, there are fears that jobs will disappear and redundancies grow. Ahead of the change, The Big Issue convened a RORA roundtable, the second, to focus on job retention and creation across Britain. As we have made clear from when we established the Ride Out Recession Alliance, it is essential we listen to those with experience and clear thinking. Representatives from businesses including Microsoǽt, Deloitte and Leeds Building Society joined others from the National Skills Agency, Movement to Work, Catch22, Hemingway Design and more to explore…

Cornell Toman left the army in 1988 following three tours in Northern Ireland, one tour in Bosnia under the UN and one in Singapore over a six-year spell. The 53-year-old Big Issue vendor, who sells the magazine outside WH Smith on Norfolk Street in King’s Lynn, suffered a burst eardrum following a close call with an explosion while serving in Northern Ireland and struggled to adapt to civilian life. Veterans deserve more support to help them make the transition, he says. “It takes them a while when they leave the services to adjust to civilian life. It took me a while because I was drinking and having fights everywhere and getting into a lot of trouble for a couple of years. I ended up sorting myself out because I didn’t…

Sorting through books recently, I stumbled on an old copy of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. A glance at the cover – Winnie up to her waist in sand – was enough to rekindle the dread invoked by its premise: that all our props and prattle are ploys to mask the emptiness of existence. It was strange then, days later, to open Jon Fosse’s I Is Another, and experience precisely the same sensation. Or maybe not. The title of the second part of the Norwegian writer’s three-volume work about doppelgӓnger artists is from Arthur Rimbaud (Je Est Un Autre), but its themes are overtly, self-consciously Beckettian. Like the first part, which I haven’t read, I Is Another is written stream-of-consciousness and without full stops. The narrator, Asle – a widowed painter,…

Peninsula In cinemas from November 6; available digitally from November 30 Even in the crowded rotter’s club of zombie movies, 2016’s characterful Korean horror Train To Busan was an outlier. Being set on a packed, hurtling commuter train at the outset of an outbreak gave it a claustrophobic edge, and since the otherwise savage undead remained docile when it was dark and quiet, being able to predict when the next tunnel was coming up became a matter of life or death. Writer/director Sang-ho Yeon seemingly always had plans to expand the world – there is also an animated prequel film – and here, finally, is an expanded semi-sequel. (It officially comes billed as Train To Busan Presents: Peninsula to ensure fans of the first film make the connection.) It follows…

Autumn telly is the best telly. If they put Strictly Come Dancing on in the middle of springtime it would be really depressing. Watching any linear TV while it’s light outside is symbolic of a life in dismal paralysis; evidence that you have all but given up on fighting against the endless tide of frustrations and obstacles that stand between you and the grave. But once the leaves start falling from the trees TV starts to feel comforting and wholesome – there’s nothing to do outside anyway so you might as well just stay in and watch The Wall with Danny Dyer. Regular readers might already know that I regard The Wall as the greatest gameshow of all time and its host Dyer as Britain’s most precious national treasure. I…

1. In which film did Marilyn Monroe sing Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend? 2. Bruce Springsteen celebrated his birthday on September 23. How old is he now? 3. Which artist painted American Gothic in 1930? 4. Which UK TV channel first aired in 1955? 5. Who was leader of the Labour Party between 1983 and 1992, losing two general elections? 6. Which ship made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs? 7. DeWalt power tools are noted for which two colour combinations? 8. What is the largest mountain in the USA? 9. What is the highest rank in the British army? 10. In what year does Stranger Things begin? 11. What is Heinz’s best-selling soup in the UK? 12. The Victoria Falls is on the border of which…

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