Leisure is a strange idea. It’s the word that denotes ‘fun time’ as opposed to ‘work time’. We engage in leisure when we are done slaving over a computer / workbench / cotton loom / student loan application, for peanuts or pay checks.
The history of leisure has taken some twists and turns, and the word drifts in and out of use. Loaded with two hundred years of connotation, leisure is commonly understood to have begun its seminal rise during the industrial revolution as the culturally sanctioned antidote to protestant hard-work and Victorian sobriety. The nineteenth century saw the invention of package holidays along with the foundation of football leagues and the invention of Saturday as a ‘day off’. Free time wasn’t something new per se, but with machinery, work schedules and bosses, it was measured out and granted. It was a gift from the employer, who dictated time. New industries sprang to cater for this allocated free time. Now in 2010, the Leisure Industry controls a massive swath of the economy. Everywhere from shopping malls to cinemas to restaurants to Wetherspoons provide places to spend hard earned cash in the pursuit of leisure. With this, leisure has become a defining feature of how we spend our lives, time, money and also, to some degree, how we define ourselves. read the rest
Hey everybody. Happy new year . January is always a bit of quiet month, what with everyone being broke and the entire student population plagued by exams. No worries, here’s our monthly preview of what’s going on this month around Steel Town.
1. Girls Exhibition - Lord Bunn - The Old Sweet Shop
T-Shirt mogul and illustrator Lord Bunn is having a solo exhibition at indie art destination the Old Sweet Shop in Nether Edge. Called ‘Girls’, the exhibition will feature canvases of bearded men, as Lord Bunn famously can only draw men. I presume girls are what they lust after. Starts the 13th of January
2. Prism 5 - Bank Street ArtsThe last Prism went off like a shot. THE place to be for any aspiring culture vulture. Showcasing the best work of up and coming artists in video and visual arts. With an emphasis on discussion and interactions with the work, Prism is a unique and valuable event. Plus, there is a cheap bar!
Friday 29th January, 8pm onwards, Bank St Arts, 32-40 Bank St, £2 entry.
3. DQ Rebrand
Please excuse a bit of self-promo. We’ve been branching out of the world of magazines, to give our favourite club a little bit of facelift, with some spiffing new flyers. Look for ‘em around town. God knows we printed a few. The artist featured on them is Photographer Theo Simpson. He’s got an exhibtion coming up. But we’ll save that for February! The flyers should be coming out with listings each month, and will feature artwork from different local artists.
4. Kid Acne
New murals all about the place. Check out the new one on the Moor.
Every year since 2003 the BBC has climbed down the nations chimney and bestowed upon us the acts which show the most promise in the upcoming year. In the past it has belched out such talents as Mika, Lilly Allen and Franz Ferdinand. In short, by choosing artists with financial and industry backing, its always right. So how does 2010 shape up? Hayden Woolley casts a critical gaze over the musical landscape of the next 12 months.
Just for a change these guys are influenced by……… 80’s electropop. Another self-conciously arty band, the sort which the record-buying public almost never warm to. They seem like the sort of guys who have considerably more photo-shoots than songs, posing as they are in all their hautre-couteur glory . The song is of little importance I suppose, they are a band in the same way that Never Mind the Buzzcocks is ‘a quiz.’ I think its all a ploy, somewhere along the way a major label have their hand up these guys asses, and they’re tickling their prostates until they spunk money everywhere
Sometimes you get these really forward-thinking, talented young musicians who have absolutely zero money producing DIY budget-house that blows other shit out the water. This sounds like it was recorded in a bread bin and its all the better for it. The home-made percussion, the distant woozy vocals, the vintage-vinyl quality. This is great. More please.
Alan Sugar – “Right, I’m giving you lot ten grand to go start a band. I want it a bit of old fashioned razzmatazz, a glitzy affair. You’ll be required to do a PowerPoint presentation of why I should buy your product at 6pm tomorrow in front of a room of record company execs. Nick and Margaret are watching you all the way with this one, I want you to go out and make me some hard earned cash. I don’t care if its soulless shit, just get in the bloody taxi!”
Take one portion of Postal Service and castrate thoroughly, carefully removing all bones. Dilute with four parts tepid rose water and leave to soak overnight, preferably in front of a clouded window to aid quiet introspection.
In the morning, rouse, ensure subject has developed an affected American whine so rhotic the songs practically spherical, and wipe down with one of those Primary School Kids drawings Teatowels things. You know the ones. Add mandatory Casio noodlings and stir until twee-er than two ragdolls on a houseboat.
Rox is 30% more coffee-table than an entire coffee-table constructed only of Sade CD’s. In fact, if coffee tables were sentient and possessed a taste in music, this is probably what they’d listen to. This is music suitable for divorcees only. Those who can but look up to advertisers and say ‘Please Sir, target my demographic and tell me what to like.’ You may come to recognise her at the rear-end of next years Brit awards nominations. She’s the half-Jamaican half-Iranian one with a soulful voice whose this years Amy Winehouse. OK? Good.
If you’re lucky enough to have a Dad with a well-established beard then he might take you to a real-ale festival. At that real-ale festival you might witness a jovial bunch of musicians who tour around rural pastures playing old-fashioned songs for old-fashioned souls to nod their heads in appreciation to whilst sipping their pint of Bishop’s Todger. With banjo solo’s and bovine-songs, that band are Stornoway. What the fuck they’re doing on this list is anyone’s guess.
I’ve noticed a trend lately in British city centres. Alien architectural forms have been appearing amongst the dirty sandstone Victorian halls and glass and steel redevelopments that make up the 21st century urban centres.
When you’re arriving in Sheffield by train from the North, as you skirt the old steelworks and mills in the basin of Attercliffe, you get a view of the central skyline that has something very out of place about it. Amongst the familiar shapes of the Arts Tower swathed in plastic, the top of the Town Hall, the bright white rectangles of Hallam University, the brick red smudge of the Moorfoot Building and the grey spires of churches, the smooth circular crest of the ferris wheel on Fargate emerges clearly above the mass of the city. This bizarre shape came by itself, but recently the whole centre has periodically found itself filled with fun fair rides, appearing apparently out of nowhere and disappearing just as suddenly.
City centres have always used their public spaces as places for recreation and leisure, but before recently the garish and noisy excitement of the fun fair was never allowed to enter the heart of the city. This trend probably began with the London Eye, but since then almost every city centre in the country has hosted it’s own ‘eye’ for a while, and brought a host of other carnival rides with it, presumably to keep it company. read the rest
Perhaps a week or two late, here is Article’s Monthly Culture Briefing for Sheffield this December. Just a look at some stuff going on around steel town.
1. Black and Silver @ Archipelago Works
This month’s exhibion at the Archipelago Gallery has seen the commission of 20 prints by 20 different graphic designers and artists. The only rule was that each piece had to be in black and silver. The prints themselves are diverse as the names involved: Kid Acne, TDR, and Club Pony’s own Robin Beck to name but a few.
2. Royal Stock, Season Two
Exceptional home-grown t-shirt label, Royal Stock has launched its stunning new line. With the aim of providing ‘walking canvases’ for artists of various noteriety, this line of Royal Stock features works from Geo Law, Phlegm, Tom J Newell as well as shirt by founder Lord Bunn.
3. FrenchMottershead @ Site Gallery
The ongoing FrenchMottershead exhibition at the Site Gallery compiles a year long project by collaborative artistic team, Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead. The exhibition consists of images and videos made in shops all over the world. Their work explores the premise that local shops have much to reveal about their communities. We will post our interview with the team later this month.
Leeds City Council is good at self aggrandisement. £4 million is being spent changing the name of Dark Neville Street to Light Neville Street. In lieu of a trite local symbol - think Liverpool’s docks or Henderson’s Relish in Sheffield - the council have come up with a slogan, plastering LEEDS: LIVE IT, LOVE IT over every hoarding and public notice. Currently, the hype machine is surging ahead, canons blazing with the council’s darling project, the creation of Holbeck Urban Village: A chance to create an entire self contained community from scratch. Before the plans for HUV were first mooted, the area was little more than an abandoned non place between the railway station and the marginalised suburbs of Holbeck and Beeston Hill. Consisting mostly of a disused car park and some empty warehouses, it had become a notorious red light district. read the rest
Anyone who didn’t happen to be John Aldridge in 1988 is going to have a pretty hollow feeling in
the pit of his stomach when he hears the following two words put together: Scouse Rap.
Yes, those jaws will be clattering onto the pavement when I go on to reveal, coyly, with one cheek
embedded in my shoulder, that this isn’t Liverpool F.C. bending their knees to-and-fro in front of a graffitied wall. Nor is it your many-throated Pavarottis warbling their support at the Kop stadium. Or the Beatles on a hallucinogenic mishap. Or Tin’Ed caught up in a drive-by shooting. Really, Scouse Rap isn’t quite what we’re used to at all - and yet if a sector of Myspace is to be believed then this improbable genre stands aloft as an art form in its own right. read the rest
Entering the bike shop with its array of gadgets, alien lingo and Lycra clad leg shavers was too daunting an undertaking for this self-conscious teeny-bopper: both literally and metaphorically I didn’t have the bollocks.
