Musical Women of the North

A small, rough-and-ready zine I made at GRSNI & UsFolk: Zine Workshop as part of Belfast's International Women's Day celebrations (9th March 2019). The zines made in the workshop were based on the theme of women that inspire you, so I chose to focus on some of the wonderful female acts on the local NI music scene.

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Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt - John Frusciante

Dedicated to Clara Balzary, bandmate Flea's daughter (Source: wikipedia.org) "My smile is a rifle, won't you give it a try?" The first time I listened to Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt was in the back of my family’s campervan parked in Calais after we’d just been robbed. I hadn’t listened to it – or any of Frusciante’s narcotic haze of nineties releases – since, preferring his more polished offerings of To Record Only Water for Ten Days and Shadows Collide With People , until my sister bought me a copy of Niandra Lades for my birthday. My main memories of the album were Frusciante’s wails making me jump as I tried to drift off with my headphones in. So, safe to say, I was a little apprehensive upon receiving this gift. Although released in 1994, the first half of the album – Niandra Lades – was recorded prior to Frusciante’s departure from the Red Hot Chili Peppers during the recording of Blood Sugar Sex Magik at the allegedly haunted

Film Review: The Graduate (1967)

"Would you like me to seduce you?" Everyone knows the iconic still of Dustin Hoffman and a wedding dress-clad Katharine Ross looking relived and slightly bewildered sitting at the back of a bus. The actors’ expressions in this scene have gone on to become synonymous with Mike Nichols’ 1967 classic The Graduate . Recent East Coast graduate Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), something of an over-achiever at college, returns to his home in the shallowness of white southern Californian suburbia, unsure of where his life is heading and surrounded by “plastics”. Following a family dinner party, Ben is seduced by his parents’ friend Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), spawning the classic line “Would you like me to seduce you?”. This then develops into a full-blown tremulous affair between the married and much older Mrs. Robinson and the virginal Ben. It soon becomes clear that Mrs. Robinson is in a loveless marriage and is only using Ben for sex. Coerced by his parents,

The North is Next

'The North is Next' as it appears in print (Source: my own) “The North is Next” read the sign held aloft by Sinn F é in’s Michelle O’Neill and Mary Lou McDonald as the landslide victory of Ireland’s Repeal the 8 th referendum was announced at Dublin Castle earlier this year. Though for some, there was the underlying feeling that not all Irish women had reason to celebrate. Whilst the Republic’s constitutional ban on abortion would now be lifted, the six north-eastern counties of Ulster remain faced with some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world. In the last few years, the Republic has been a leading light across the world for becoming the first country to legalise same sex-marriage by popular vote and also electing an openly gay Taoiseach. A once devoutly Catholic state has become a liberal and progressive society, dwarfing its conservative and backward northern counterpart. The four small words that make up that alliterative slogan – “The North is Next

Kristen Sinclair

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