Innholdsfortegnelse for 10/24/2022 i The Big Issue

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @bigissueuk @thebigissue Innovative thinking One thing I detest about the 21st century is how people are getting replaced by technology. The banks continually tell us that more people are “choosing” to use internet banking, forcing branch closures, omitting to say that staff relentlessly try to get you to switch and make it so inconvenient to do your banking in person, giving you little choice to do otherwise. Automated tills replace checkout staff at supermarkets. If you phone any company these days you are inevitably answered by an automated voice, giving you a bewildering range of options, often none of which suit your needs. Tax-dodging giant corporations such as Amazon lead to the destruction…

I was very into rock music when I was 16. The late ’60s and early ’70s were a high point for rock music. There was a time just after Woodstock when the British groups like The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles were all in their prime. And American Motown acts like Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. And The Band and Bob Dylan. I know I sound like a bit of an old person for saying this, but I have a bit of confidence about it. My students, who are a couple of generations younger, sometimes they’ll bring in, say, a Simon and Garfunkel record and say, “Hey, I just discovered this fantastic album, have you heard of this band?” As well as rock, I was also an avid reader.…

It seems so pertinent, particularly with the environmental issues. It feels so completely up to date OVERVIEW Totoro, the Catbus and the fight to save nature In the middle of the forest, asleep in the heart of a tree, Totoro is snoring. Looking something like a cross between a big grey cat and a bear, he is actually “mori no nushi”, or “master of the forest”. And he’s the hero of beloved Japanese animated film My Neighbour Totoro. More than 30 years after the movie was released by Studio Ghibli – in many ways, the Japanese Disney – Totoro is stepping out of our screens for the first time, and onto the stage at the Barbican in London. He brings with him a message about the wonder of nature, and…

ELIZABETH COTTEN The enduring influence of an American original In the early 1900s in a small town called Carrboro in North Carolina, an 11-year-old girl, known to her family as Lil Sis, listened from her bedroom window to the cargo trains pulling in and out of a nearby station. Borrowing her brother’s banjo and turning it upside down to accommodate her left-handedness, she stayed up late and composed a song called Freight Train, with the bittersweet lyric “Please don’t tell what train I’m on, they won’t know what route I’m going.” Decades later, owing to an extraordinary twist of fate, Freight Train would become one of the most important songs in a revolutionary musical movement, helping to launch the careers of artists like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez and…

AURAS VASILE, 33 I’ve been selling the magazine here for more than 10 years. I like it very much, I have lots of lovely customers who have a chat with me. They ask me if I’m alright and look after me. Sometimes they give me a coffee. They know all my problems and when I am not on my pitch they ask me where I’ve been, why I’m not coming to Leighton Buzzard and what’s happening with me. They even checked in on me when I was in hospital. I’ve had a few operations to fix kidney stones, the last one was a few months ago. They are very painful. I think part of why I catch this problem is because I’m standing out in the cold all the time.…

INTERVIEW Jeff Bridges Jeff Bridges is one of the great film actors. And he has the accolades to prove it – a Best Actor win at the 2009 Oscars for his role as a country singer in Crazy Heart plus nominations for his breakthrough role in 1971’s The Last Picture Show, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot three years later, Starman in 1984, The Contender in 2000, the Coen brothers’ epic Western True Grit in 2010 and Hell or High Water (2016). He also ensured movie immortality by playing The Dude in The Big Lebowski, one of the most beloved roles in recent film history. Bridges has not worked in television for 60 years. Until now. In The Old Man, a high-quality seven-part Disney+ series, Bridges plays a grizzled former CIA operative…

A long-term strategy to end poverty will have to wait A few weeks ago, perhaps a month, I stopped working on a paper I was writing called It’s Expensive Keeping People Poor. The paper was about the lack of productivity that befell what you might call ‘the poverty industry’: that is, all of the people and apparatus and budgets that campaign for and support people in poverty. In my opinion the productivity – the outcomes – of this industry were poor. Why? Because most of the effort and money that went into tackling poverty has been spent on a resounding commitment to make poor people as comfortable as possible. It was little better than passing a beggar in the street and giving them a bit of money to help them…

EDDIE REDMAYNE After the constraints of lock-down, actor Eddie Redmayne was ready to get back to work. And when Redmayne goes to work, he really goes to work. There is the homework, the reading, but also the physical transformations for which he has become so well known, most famously in the role of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, for which he won an Oscar. Today, he is sitting down with The Big Issue in the Corinthia Hotel, a stone’s throw from the theatre in which he starred opposite Jessie Buckley in Cabaret at the turn of the year (winning his second Olivier Award). He’s here for the London Film Festival, promoting his new Netflix film, The Good Nurse – and the differences in the roles and productions could…

REVIEWS A lesson in depravity to cleanse the soul Transgressive literature has been in a bit of a sorry state lately. Back in the ’90s it felt like everyone was fumbling over themselves to make books more shocking, more disturbing, to really make the reader squirm. As a result we received some real masterpieces: Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Dennis Cooper’s George Miles Cycle series of novels. Recently, however, tastes have changed and truly transgressive literature has been pushed to the fringes of publishing with only smaller, indie presses having the gall to publish it. And thank god they do, because then we get novels like Davey Davis’ X. Set in a near-dystopia where “undesirable” members of society are “exported”, our narrator Lee is a wanderer…

I received an unsolicited package in the mail. It was a padded envelope, pretty crumpled, my name and address scrawled in Sharpie. Maybe I’ve watched too many police procedurals, but I immediately analysed the handwriting as being that of a psychopath. I tentatively slipped my finger under the gummed lip of the envelope, mindful that it might harbour traces of ricin or anthrax. I never got over that period in the early to mid-2000s where everyone was on constant high alert for powdered toxins in the post. The breathless news coverage of the time even had my poor old mum opening the gas bill wearing Marigolds, for fear that those crafty bastards over at al-Qaeda HQ might be targeting her. Anyway, this package. Inside was a slim book of less…

Celebrating the season of the witch Across movies, telly, books, music, podcasts, art, fashion, social media – anywhere you find cultural expression, witches are having a moment. In just the last few years, the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, American Horror Story: Coven, WandaVision and The Love Witch have shown witches as an emblem of female power. Across millions of #witchlife and #witchyvibes posts on Instagram, the witch has a strong connection with feminist self-care and a new paganism. On thousands of t-shirts, mugs and tea towels, the witch is an icon of defiance, solidarity and creativity. Witches are no longer just a pointy hat for Halloween. Witches have a particular resonance in a post-#MeToo world, says Claire Catterall, senior curator at Somerset House. As women all over the world rose…