nextwavefutures

[nextwavefutures]

Lying low

Gangster’s moll Barbara Stanwyck meets the seven professors, and Gary Cooper, in a fish-out-of-water comedy by the master of genre, Howard Hawks. New post at Around the Edges.

Ball of Fire is a Howard Hawks comedy that was released in 1941, a couple of years after his great screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby. It has some affinities with the earlier film, although the characters are altogether less ditsy, and their motives, and the action, are a lot easier to follow. That might be down to the fact that the script was written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett from a…

[nextwavefutures]

‘Power and interest’ as an actor mapping tool

This is part of an occasional series here on methods that I use in my facilitation and workshop design A method I sometimes use to deepen my understanding of what’s going on in the H2 (second horizon) space of a Three Horizons map is a version of Eden and Ackerman’s ‘power and interest’ grid. It helps you to understand what is happening with the different actors involved in the second horizon,…

[nextwavefutures]

Feeding on love

Feeding on love: the Tawala Theatre Company’s take on Duke Ellington meets Twelfth Night in Play On! Is fun all the way through. New post

Play On! is a loose take on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, transferred to the Cotton Club in 1930s Harlem[1], a location that is every bit as mythical as Illyria. A lovelorn Duke Ellington finds it impossible to write songs. Viola arrives from the South with a suitcase full of songs, looking for her uncle, who happens to work at the Cotton Club. He tells her that showbusiness is a man’s world……

[nextwavefutures]

Money and nothing

In P.G.Wodehouse’s The Girl in Blue, nothing happens very elegantly and everything turns out for the best. New post.

The Girl In Blue is late Wodehouse, published in 1970, but in truth the world it inhabits could have been constructed at any time in the previous 40 years. The post war world breaks in from time to time: the strength of a large American woman is attributed to all the time such women spend on demonstrations, for example; the love interest is an air “hostess”, as they were then called. At the…

[nextwavefutures]

Greenwich Village before Bob: Inside Llewyn Davis revisited

I’m sharing some of the Dylan-related material that I’ve published over at Salut Live as part of our Dylan series there. The film A Complete Unknown is not the first time that Hollywood has wandered into the world of the early-60s folk scene in New York’s Greenwich Village.  The Coen brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis, released in 2013, is a fictionalised version of that pre-Cambrian folk world…

[nextwavefutures]

Blood on the Tracks [2]: Songwriter at work

Bob Dylan and Blood on the Tracks: The songs and the writing. The second part of my article on the record on its 50th anniversary.

The second of two posts marking the 50th anniversary of the release of Blood on the Tracks. Part 1 is here.  Dylan wrote the songs for Blood on the Tracks at his farm in Minnesota in the summer of 1974. At the time, he was distanced from his wife Sara and was having an affair with Ellen Bernstein, who worked for CBS Records. Sara had stayed in California with their children. When you read the…

[nextwavefutures]

Blood on the Tracks [1]: from Studio A to Minnesota

Bob Dylan’s masterpiece Blood on the Tracks is 50 today. Part 1 of a long retrospective article is up at Around the Edges. (Part 2 on Wednesday).

It is 50 years today since Blood on the Tracks was released—perhaps Dylan’s most complete record. This is a version of a long, long, review I’ve written for the folk music site Salut! Live—where I contribute. Part 1 today, Part 2 on Wednesday.  (Photo: Andrew Curry CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) Now that Blood on the Tracks is universally recognised as one of Bob Dylan’s finest records, it is easy to forget…

[nextwavefutures]

Understanding the so-called obesity ‘wonder drugs’

Over the holiday break Exponential View republished a piece by Azeen Azhar it had run earlier in the year on GLP-1 drugs. (In other words, drugs like Ozempic.) First time around, I’d noticed the headline, but not had time to get into the detail. But seeing it during the holiday meant I was able to give it more consideration. The Exponential View headline story is this: I reckon that they will…

[nextwavefutures]

One last big score

One last big score. Out of Sight has a preposterous plot but it works as a film because George Clooney invites you in to it.

Out of Sight was the first of several collaborations between George Clooney and the director Steven Soderbergh. It’s a slightly improbable story about a bank robber who is on the run after breaking out of jail (Clooney, of course), and Karen Sisco, a Federal Marshal who got caught up in the escape (played by Jennifer Lopez). She tracks him as he plans one last job. Actually, delete the…

[nextwavefutures]

Books of 2024–some old, some new

My books of 2024–some old, some new. New post on The Next Wave.

Before we get into the swing of the new year, I’m going to write briefly about some of the books that left an impression on me in 2024. These aren’t in any particular order, and there’s a mix of non-fiction and fiction. Dan Davies: The Unaccountability Machine Although these are not in a particular order, this is the book I’ve found myself coming back to more than the others. Davies sets out to…

[nextwavefutures]

Out on a bike

Out on a bike—from Edward Thomas to Richard Long to Alfred Jarry with the writer Jon Day. New post.

Jon Day’s book Cyclegeography is a sibling of several books about bicycles couriers that came out around the same time. I’m thinking also of Julian Sarayer’s Messengers and Emily Chappell’s What Goes Around, which both came out in 2016. Day’s book is more elegant than Sarayer’s. It is a bit more academic, and a bit less interested in the material conditions of the work, perhaps because he didn’t…

[nextwavefutures]

May you ‘fare well’ in 2025

One of the highlights of the career of the Scots dance-folk band Niteworks was being invited to do the music for the Edinburgh Hogmanay celebrations in 2020, the year of COVID-19. Niteworks, from Skye, disbanded earlier this year with a final series of concerts in London and Scotland (I reviewed them here). (Photo: Copyright Underbelly, 2020) Hogmanay, at the very end of the year, is a much…

[nextwavefutures]

The sense of home in It’s A Wonderful Life

Watching Frank Capra’s film It’s A Wonderful Life for what might be the dozenth time or so, but this time in the cinema, I noticed some things that tend to squeezed out by the high concept nature of the underlying story and the show-stealing performance by Lionel Barrymore as Potter. Repetition The first is the use of repetition. George Bailey (James Stewart) runs along the main street of…

[nextwavefutures]

12 days of winter songs

Songs of the season: 12 days of winter songs. New post at Around The Edges

Over at the folk music blog I contribute to, we have been running a series called ‘12 Days of Winter’ which celebrate folk songs about this time of the year. It mixes up religious songs, Christmas songs, and seasonal songs. The series finishes tomorrow, on Christmas Eve. You can find all the posts so far—all 12—at this link. The count down to #1. (Father Xmas in a wassail bowl, Illustrated…

[nextwavefutures]

Big Food, Big Tobacco, and ultra-processed foods

Big Food, Big Tobacco, and ultra-processed foods. New post at The Next Wave.

I try to keep track of developments in the food sector over at my Just Two Things newsletter, and Marion Nestle’s blog recently signalled a striking development in the world of ultra-processed foods. An extensive selection of the companies that make them have just been served with a lawsuit in an American court. This is the first time that this has happened. The list of defendants is quite…

[nextwavefutures]

States have a shelf life of about 200 years

States have a shelf life of about 200 years. They get worse at recovering from shocks over time. Post at The Next Wave.

I gave a talk on collapse earlier this autumn to the community of futurists that is co-ordinated by DEFRA, the British government’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It was based on an article I wrote earlier this year, and discussed here in March. The presentation slides are linked at the end of this post. One of the things that popped up in the chat while I was talking…

[nextwavefutures]

‘American Gigolo’ and ‘80s noir

‘American Gigolo’ and ‘80s film noir. New post at Around The Edges

I thought American Gigolo was a fantastic film when I saw it as a new release in the cinema in 1980. I knew something of director-writer Paul Schrader’s work and influences, and something of film noir, and it lived up to expectations. I hadn’t seen it since, and I wondered—when I saw that Channel 4 was showing it—how well it would have aged. The glossy look, the Armani suits, the Giorgio Moroder…