It’s time to welcome Delius home

Received opinion. It just keeps going round and round and round. Sometimes, instead of listening to the din, it’s worth pausing, taking a peek at the facts and working it out for yourself.

If we don’t hang on to independent thinking, we’ll lose access to the truth in the splurge of regurgitated propaganda. Believe it or not, this blog post is all about Frederick Delius.

The composer was born 150 years ago, within months of Debussy. In 1934 he died within months of Elgar. He happened to be born in England, though his parents were German. And he’s still misunderstood because of received opinion that just… doesn’t get him.

You know the clichés: ‘I can’t stand English music. Stuffy. Victorian. Pompous.

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Combat veterans

‘This is a public service announcement…with guitar!’

Those are the first words Joe Strummer screamed on The Clash’s penultimate album, Combat Rock. Released 30 years ago, Combat Rock marked a turning point for the group and for the mainstream acceptance of punk as more than just music, but as a lifestyle.

Released in May 1982, the album was The Clash’s first taste of commercial success and, on a new cable channel called MTV, ‘the only band that mattered’ entered new territory with a new media and a new caravan of fans.

While The Ramones may be credited for starting what we know as punk rock in New York City, it was The Clash – along with The Sex Pistols –

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Derby’s identity parade

While most members of the film community are in Cannes, or at least have their eyes turned towards it, discriminating Midlanders are looking ahead to another film festival: ID Fest, which takes place between Thursday 24th and Sunday 27th May at QUAD, Derby’s centre for art and film.

Now in its third year, and its second at QUAD, ID Fest is a different kind of festival from Cannes—and, indeed, from most other film festivals in the world. Because it was born into a country already heavily populated with film fests, it began life with clear ideas about what it was and was not supposed to be.

‘We felt that the UK has a number of fantastic genre-based festivals,’ says

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Short Film: The Violin Maker

‘Violin maker’ doesn’t seem quite the right term for Sam Zygmuntowicz: it suggests that, after creating a violin, his relationship with the instruments ends. ‘Violin parent’ is perhaps more descriptive, though it seems silly written down.

In the first of a series of short films about Brooklyn artisans by film-maker Dustin Cohen, Zygmuntowicz explains that he lives in New York specifically to be close to his clients, so that he can keep their violins ‘totally hot-rodded at all times’. The car metaphor is apt: he’s simultaneously race car designer and pit crew. 
 
Zygmuntowicz is an instantly fascinating figure – but no more fascinating, I am sure, than a hundred other Brooklyn residents. If Cohen can find some of them to film

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Kanye or Jay- Z?

David Samuels’ excellent profile of Kanye West in latest issue of the Atlantic begins with Samuels sidling up to President Obama at a fundraiser in New York to ask him a blunt, little question:

 ‘Kanye or Jay-Z?’

I wasn’t surprised that Obama emphatically choose Jay–Z. After all, he’d famously called his fellow Chicagoan Kanye a ‘jackass’ following the Taylor Swift incident. And Kanye’s earlier outburst at a Katrina benefit, where he called out George Bush as a racist, was all far too close to the incendiary racial politics of Reverend Wright for Obama to want to ever go there again.

By contrast — as Samuels suggests — Jay-Z’s story of being raised in a Brooklyn housing

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The ultimate film gets the ultimate screening

Most film screenings range from the irritating to the purgatorial. Some are even worse: it is only inside cinemas – forced to endure ringtones; the oblong lights of iPhones; the crunching of snacks other than mine and the sound of whispers from people other than me – that I have ever accepted Sartre’s assertion that ‘Hell is other people’.

But great film screenings are events to savour. The best are like the best meals: they depend not just on what is on the menu or on the screen but on a dozen other intangibles, including the setting, the atmosphere, the occasion, the company and the memories that are made as you enjoy it.

Last month I attended the best film screening of my life. And I watch films for a living.

The film was Citizen Kane and

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Climbing Mount Zion on Morocco Street

William Corwin’s Mt Zion has just opened at the recently relocated George and Jorgen. Though a bit off-street, the gallery seems much more at home in London Bridge than it did above the Salvo off Regent Street.

It’s the industrious New York artist’s second solo show in London, and already his distinctive visual language has emerged. We make the journey to Mt Zion expecting some kind of revelation, of course. The smell of MDF and plaster, the absence of colour, and the clean lighting immediately convey that the basic framework and the bare bones are what concern us here.

Near the entrance invisible chess boards decorate the wall; skeletal fragments of plaster are neatly arranged on clean processed wood. These simple, slightly crap objects act as a thematic introduction to the main event.

In the first

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