mon 21/05/2012

psychology

theASHtray: Janáček, Carnage, and Seth MacFarlane v George Clooney

Mea culpa. I take it all back. Christoph Waltz can act, and like a dream. You know, that dream you have where Tarantino's favourite pantomime Nazi demonstrates his apparently incurable fixation on apple-based desserts, and then Kate Winslet yakks...

Read more...

A Dangerous Method

Those who are “Jung and easily Freudened” (to misquote Joyce) need have nothing to fear from David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. Yes, it’s the film where Michael Fassbender takes a cane to a barely corseted Keira Knightley, but don’t let the S...

Read more...

The Lost Lectures, Westbourne Studios

There are 300 or so people in the Westbourne Studios, although it was only a couple of days ago we knew we would be there. We are on the mailing list of The Lost Lectures, and this is the first one. Under the Westway in Acklam Road, we’re in Clash...

Read more...

Freddie Flintoff: Hidden Side of Sport, BBC One

The recent suicide of Wales's football manager Gary Speed prompted angstful outpourings about the hidden menace of depression in top-level sport, even though there was no evidence that Speed was a sufferer. But depression clearly is an occupational...

Read more...

Horizon - Are You Good or Evil?, BBC Two

Scientists, eh? You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them: they cure life-threatening diseases and they threaten life with ever more powerful weapons. And in the instance of this documentary, they state the bloody obvious and then go...

Read more...

Celebrity Big Brother, Channel 5

There were rumours – on Twitter, naturally – that Charlie Sheen was going into the House. But, alas, these were unfounded, and he didn’t. Maybe even Sheen has to draw the line somewhere. Instead, only four people I’d heard of actually went ahead and...

Read more...

Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words, BBC Four

Sigmund Freud, with a man from the BBC: the only voice recording Freud ever made was for the corporation

The only voice recording Sigmund Freud ever made was for the BBC. It was made in December 1938, at Freud’s West Hampstead home just a few months before the father of psychoanalysis succumbed to throat cancer. He was 82 and wouldn’t see out another...

Read more...

Derren Brown: Svengali, Shaftesbury Theatre

Derren Brown: Witty and urbane performer who never humiliates his on-stage subjects

Derren Brown is witty, urbane, clever and a keen student of what makes humans tick - which must come as a huge advantage when you are developing an evening’s entertainment based on kidology. He makes it clear he’s not a psychic or clairvoyant and...

Read more...

How I Ended This Summer

If ever there’s a film where the landscape itself seems to become a main character, it’s Alexei Popogrebsky’s How I Ended This Summer. Action, such as it is, unfolds in the remotest Arctic regions of Russia’s Far East, where the personal conflict...

Read more...

Ruby Wax: Losing It, Menier Chocolate Factory

Ruby Wax has packed a lot into her life - writer, actor, stand-up comic, television interviewer, to name a few. But possibly her greatest professional achievement will be her work in mental health, prompted by her own experiences of depression,...

Read more...

The Magic Band on The Real Captain Beefheart

Captain Beefheart, who with his Magic Band made John Peel’s favourite album, 1969’s extraordinary Trout Mask Replica, died of complications from multiple sclerosis last week, aged 69. In tribute, below is a feature from 2003, much of it unpublished...

Read more...

High Society, Wellcome Collection

Just say no? 'Morphinomane' by Eugene Grasset, 1897

It’s amazing what you might have found in your average bathroom cabinet 100 years ago. For those niggling aches and pains, what could be more effective than a bottle of Bayer’s Heroin Hydrochloride? Or how about a soothing spoonful of Sydenham’s...

Read more...
Syndicate content