Festival
Battle of Ideas, Barbican, EC2, 20-21 October
The Battle of Ideas is a weekend of lectures, panel discussions and “conversations” on a wide range of subjects touching on morality, politics, art, science, gender and popular culture (to name a few). Claire Fox, director at the Institute of Ideas, states that the festival’s raison d’être is “to make virtues of free-thinking and dissent” and that its slogan is “FREE SPEECH ALLOWED”, urging attendees to hold their nerve, as no doubt “sensibilities will be offended”. The weekend kicks off first thing on Saturday morning with the question “What’s wrong with equality?” ending at 7:30pm the following evening with a panel discussing “No future: has pop lost its radical edge?” The line-up is too diverse to cover here and the speakers billed make for something of a battalion of potential In Our Time contributors, but you if you’re interested, click here for a full timetable of events.
Music
Grizzly Bear, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, Sunday 21
Jazz-camp graduates Grizzly Bear bring their egalitarian experimental pop music to the beautiful Butterworth Hall at Warwick Arts Centre this weekend, in celebration of their superb new album Shields. The former Mercury-nominated Brooklyn outfit have produced a fourth album Pitchfork refer to as their “most compositionally adventurous record”, a collection of “unvarnished shipwreck spirituals” that form an “excavation of loneliness, melancholy, and self-reliance”. The rest of the week is just as aurally adventurous, featuring the best in pop experimentation with Field Music, Efterkland (Danish rock trio performing with the Sage’s Northern Sinfonia) and singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading.
Television
The Thick of It Inquiry, BBC2/HD, 9:45pm
Mr Tickell is dead. All are culpable and Lord Leve-, I mean Goolding, wants answers. The opposition, everyone at DoSAC and the civil service are to be grilled one at a time during this one-hour special, the penultimate episode in the fourth series of The Thick of It. The listings report “Lord Goolding is reputedly a fair man, but he is not going to stand for any nonsense and neither is his team of expert inquisitors, so surely now the truth will come out. Unless someone lies, or creates a diversion of some kind, or simply pretends not to remember anything. Which they obviously would never do.”
Art
Everyday Encounters, William Morris Gallery, E17, 13 October – 3 February
This exhibition in Walthamstow’s newly refurbished William Morris Gallery pivots on Morris’s oft-quoted proclamation: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”. Members of the Society of Designer Craftsmen have been invited to create and display new work in response to Morris’s rallying call, exploring the possibilities for materials, decoration, narrative and the role of craft in contemporary life. The majority of the work is available for sale and entry to the exhibition is free.
Film
Beasts of the Southern Wild, cinemas nationwide, out today
Already this film has received an indecent amount of hype. Winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, the film has picked up awards and accolades like dead flies on a windshield, all of which will be splattered across billboards nationwide this weekend. It is the first film from director Behn Zeitlin, an adaptation of a one-act play calling upon the devastation of low-lying Louisiana to tell the story of Hushpuppy (played by Quevenzhané Wallis, only six years old when the film was shot) and her father Wink, who find their position increasingly desolate as the waters rise and Wink’s health begins to fail. “The Bathtub”, the bayou in which they live, is apocalyptic and mystical, and home to aurochs: boar-like ancestors unfrozen and released on the wilds by rising global temperatures. Tim Robey at the Telegraph produced this nifty little paragraph about the film’s protagonist: “Hush puppy is no holy innocent but a fizzy little sprite with a face like a clenched fist, facing everything that comes her way – principally the Katrina-like storm that threatens to obliterate her world – with the pugnacious instincts of a born survivor. She gets a voice-over, which applied the deliberately inarticulate lyricism of Terrence Malick to the Toni Morrison-like mantras recurring inside her head, whipping up fresh poetry from this cocktail of influences.”