Author: Desmond Bullen
Review: Utopias, The Whitworth, Manchester
For a time it seemed that Utopia had lost its currency.
Review: Eimear McBride, Martin Harris Centre, Manchester
The novels of Eimear McBride, you might say, begin where she once was – enduring the loss of a brother to a brain tumour, studying drama in London.
Theatre Review: Quality Street, The Lowry, Salford
For most people these days, J.M. Barrie’s name is linked entirely with his brainchild, a figure ambiguous enough to change with the shifting emphases of popular culture – Peter Pan, the child who never grew up.
Book Review: Melting Point by Baret Magarian
In the normal course of things, the brevity of the short story can ensure that even the most elegant of constructions, the most cathartic of conclusions, can fade from the memory.
Review: The Scholar Stones Project, Yelena Popova, Holden Gallery, MMU
In order to leave its mark, art need not explode with the ferocity of the fission that catalyses both nuclear reactor and bomb.
Exhibition Review: 100 Years of Council Housing, Manchester Central Library
Manchester, a city which likes to tell itself it has always led the laggards elsewhere, was building municipal housing long before the introduction of the Addison Act in 1919.
Book Review: The Complex by Michael Walters
It was Philip K. Dick, burning amphetamines and racing for deadlines, who first staked out the paranoiac territory of fiction where rabbit holes lead to competing realities, a frontier colonised further by the likes of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. Dick, however, had a parallel career, one more down to earth in all senses of that phrase, in which the dramas were firmly rooted in the incontestable every day.
Music Review: Shakespears Sister, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
There’s always been something of the magpie about Siobhan Fahey, a pop star with a fan’s fascination for pop.
Music Review: Twin Peaks Soundtrack Live, Manchester Camerata, Yes
If ever a television series was to pass across the flat screen looking glass to haunt the reality that watched it, it would be Twin Peaks. Unlike anything else when it was first transmitted, the singular creation of David Lynch and Mark Frost shifted genre and tone, time and place, the everyday and the uncanny. If darkness could bleed through into the daydreams of a homecoming queen, if people could fall out of the world, why might not such a reality slip into this one? Why not especially on All Hallow’s Eve when tradition insists that the doorway between this world and the next is easiest to cross?
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