From the category archives:
I am not obsessed with fish.
I started not being obsessed in 2000, when I read that a tuna had sold in Tokyo for $50,000. My friends enjoyed the anecdote even though they secretly didn’t believe me. A few months later, another Japanese bluefin broke the $100,000 barrier. They believed me then.
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There’s a great joy in creation, it’s a great self-esteem booster and there’s all those things that build good people you know? And hopefully we’re just building good people, and if they put that on my headstone ‘Joe Atkins blah blah blah. Father, grew some good people’ enough said.
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As the stage is set and the violins tuned for this year’s Windsor Festival, Beat Magazine talks to last year’s winner of the string competition, Diana Galvydyte, about her musical loves, the future and what makes the Windsor Festival International String Competition so special.
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Eleven years ago Justin Miles was in a near fatal car accident. Overnight he went from being a healthy, carefree 26-year-old fitness trainer to not being able to walk or talk. It would be a long road to wellness. Today, at 37 and fully recovered, Justin prepares for an Antarctic journey.
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Ever read one of those “How To Write A Bestseller” books? No? Me neither. Nor do I intend to. I’m after bigger game, you see. I want to write a phenomenon. A freak. A bestseller that pulls down the shorts of other bestsellers and gives their chubby paper bottoms a palm-stinging spank.
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In the early Eighties though, for teenagers like me the name evoked a paradoxical naughtiness; simply because of the imagery which it conjured up and the personality who had laid claim to it. Madonna stormed through the charts as unexpectedly as her persona exploded through my consciousness.
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Breadth of work is still really important and it’s therefore important that people still believe there is a beauty, for want of a better word, in art. But, we have all woken up. We are in a bigger world, we have to run ourselves better, we have to justify ourselves better and I think we have to articulate what we want to do better.
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I want to believe that there’s a reason, a plan, for my existence. I’d like to be the culmination of a million years of a breeding program just to make someone as amazing as me. But I’m not really amazing, and neither are you. Or maybe you are. It all depends on how you judge amazingness, I suppose. And all my novels, short stories, poems, address that issue. The calculation of amazingness.
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Bob Dylan didn’t go to his audience and beg to be accepted. They found him, and when they did they found him valid, and their word of mouth spread like a cultural flash flood.
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Will Smith, the writer, comedian and star of The Thick of It, would frequently post pictures of Pierce Brosnan on Twitter, with captions such as the following, accompanying a shot of Brosnan painting in his garden with a hat slung behind his neck: You come home to find your new gardener painting your wife in the nude. Why, I asked him, is Pierce Brosnan so brilliant? “Because he’s like a walking Rolex ad,” he said. “Because of the seriousness with which he’ll put on a cufflink or pick up a shot glass. But also because he knows exactly how cool and ludicrous he is at the same time.”
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The New Goodbye is a project aimed at demonstrating to publishers the potential of new formats. With the iPad now on the market, giving Apple a reading device of yet more scope, the potential is even greater. What I personally want to show, by using the app as a platform to secure a publishing deal, is that, done the right way, these formats can create demand for a printed book, and will not cannibalise print sales as most publishers fear.
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“But we have created something, we have produced it and we’re involved in the warehousing, distribution, logistics, marketing and costing. We lift boxes, fix problems, attend trade fairs. We do absolutely everything. I don’t know how we’ve done it but the pair of us are hugely resilient, we are persistent, probably a bit stubborn, and we don’t like failure, so we put our hearts and souls into trying to make things work.”
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Taking International String Under The Wire
Tuning up for Windsor Festival
Cypress, a holiday on The Green Line
If You Ever Get To Heaven Film Poster
In Praise of Savagery, by Warwick Cairns, jacket cover
Joe and Amanda Atkins at the pre-release screening of "If You Ever Get To Heaven", at the Firestation Centre for Arts and Culture, Windsor, UK
Three Men In A Boat, To Say Nothing Of The Dog
White Waltham Primary School art workshop
Cynthia Barlow Marrs ASGFA
Ana Silvera
Warwick Cairns, author and Beat columnist
Julian H Cope - reviewed on Beat
A Moments Notice, by Dan Prescott
What, by illustrator Jenny Robins
Julian H Cope, by Richmond Harding
The New Goodbye, by Neil Ayres
Marie Phillips, by Alexandra Scannell
14/4 Literary Dinner
Robert Hudson
Shelter From The Storm, by Sid Griffin