Anwen Crawford

In March of 1966, Los Angeles rock group The Byrds released their sixth single, a song called 'Eight Miles High'. It was, writes Jon Savage, a song that combined 'two staples of sixties minority taste: free jazz and Indian classical music'. The arrangement was spacious, but the mood was uneasy: a twelve-string guitar part evoked the sour, droning tone of a sitar. The lyrics, chiefly written by ban ... (read more)

High-Rise has been a long time coming to the cinema screen. J.G. Ballard's novel of the same name has been slated for adaptation almost since it was published in 1975: director Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, The Man Who Fell to Earth) was provisionally attached to the project in the late 1970s, as was, more recently, Canadian science-fiction director Vincenzo Natali (Cube, Splice). It has taken British ... (read more)

'I have no money and no husband,' comments Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) in Love and Friendship, Whit Stillman's adaptation of Jane Austen's novella, Lady Susan. The dilemma is common both to Austen's heroines and to this American director's: his five films have charted the romantic fortunes of young bourgeois women whose allowances won't quite support their aspirations, and whose relationsh ... (read more)

Sleater-Kinney, an American rock trio, are closely associated with the cities of Olympia and Portland, in the Pacific Northwest. In the mid-1990s, when Sleater-Kinney formed, the region was home to a thriving, if somewhat puritan, independent music scene, one in which participants prided themselves on their distance – both geographic and cultural – from the mainstream. The scene was politicise ... (read more)