Joker is not your typical superhero film. It is a beautiful and dark cinematic comment on what Pankaj Mishra has termed “The Age of Anger (2017).” Easily, Joker, is the best film I have seen this year. It is too easy to say that something is a work of genius, but there is definitely something of genius pervading this movie. As someone interested in society and politics, in the events and movements that are shaping the world around us, I would put Joker on an essential viewing list. So, if you are at a loose end before Christmas, this film comes with my highest recommendation.
Is This Sexist?
iScot reproduced for its soon-to-be traumatised readership Rubens’ 1635 ‘the Three Graces,’ complete with the photoshopped heads of our Tory troika - all wearing unionist micro bikinis.
Sugar Coated Memories
It is an important image. This is a social history that must be remembered and taught. These “beaming boys” and what they evoke and represent are integral to our national story. My gripe, if that is what it is, is not with David Peat and his photographic journalism of this Glasgow in the late 1960s.
Demilitarising the Scottish Imagination
There is no avoiding the association of tartan and the bagpipes with battlefields spanning the whole width of the world. Scots regiments marched on and subdued Egypt, Afghanistan, and India. Scottish graves litter the fields of Flanders and the Somme. Scotland has made its mark on the world and left behind it a horrendous trail of misery, suffering, and blood.
Burns Night: Neeps and Tatties
A long time before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, before the abolition of slavery and serfdom, Scots were proud to say that We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s Bairns.
‘I, Daniel Blake’ Left me Bawling
Loach has rammed a wedge into the great divide of the cinema-going public; with the right writing the film off as an exaggeration, and the left gushing like loved-up teenagers.
Dinnae Gie Up Yer Mither Tongue
A huv bin spennin’ some time hinkin’ ae whit it means to bei a Scot an’ tawk oor ain leid in oor ain plot ae urth. We kin blame ithers fur the pair state ae Scotland, an’ much ae that micht bei true. Bit we hae a pairt tae play in aw this annaw.
Beyoncé said it Loud and Clear at Superbowl 50
It was a powerful statement of black identity; ironically in the middle of Black History Month, and an affirmation of black empowerment. Not getting that was racist. Protesting it is racist. What Beyoncé Knowles did was unmistakably racial, but certainly not racist. Why does it always have to be about white people?
Random Public Journal 