Karen Jerzyk, a US-based photographer, has released a splendidly creative series of photos named Earth From Above which Jerzyk took using a drone. Jerzyk has utilised vibrant colours with creative imagery to create an eye-pleasing series of photos.
You can find more work by Karen Jerzyk here.
Based on a true story (previously adapted as the Channel 4 documentary The Wrestlers: Fighting with My Family in 2012), the film follows Paige, her brother Zak, and their loving family of professional wrestlers from Norwich, England. Together, they live a difficult but happy life running an independent wrestling promotion. One day, the family receives a phone call from WWE, the biggest wrestling company in the world, giving once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to Paige and Zak to try out for them. While they both give their all, only Paige has been given a spot in NXT, the company’s competitive training programme. Without her brother by her side, Paige has to leave her family to face the tough and harsh world of the WWE alone, hoping to achieve the dream to make it at the top of the wrestling world for her family.
With Stephen Merchant, the co-creator of the Office (UK) on board to write and direct this comedy-drama, Fighting with My Family marvellously balances the charming humour with dramatic moments throughout.
There are a couple of scenes from the get-go that I really liked, in which we see the daily life of the wrestling family. We see Paige and Zak teaching other teenagers, including a blind boy, to wrestle. Meanwhile, we also see the parents, Patrick (Nick Frost) and Julia (Lena Headey), planning a show wherein a wrestler has to take a bowling ball to the crotch. Not only are those scenes ridiculously funny, they also help us emotionally relate to the characters as a bonkers yet very humane family. When the dramatic moments appear, Merchant isn’t afraid to hold back the gags to approach them in a serious manner.
The thing that really stands out for me is the expression of loneliness and isolation in the hardships of the characters. Paige is often alone, struggling to fulfil her and the family’s dream in a completely different and tough environment. The film achieves such emotional expression not only by the brilliant writing and the direction of Merchant, but also the performances from Florence Pugh and Jack Lowden who both merge with their characters’ emotions extremely well.
The film inhabits the world of professional wrestling, and lays out the fact that it is fixed, rather than it is fake. However, the film struggles to maintain this fact throughout the film for the sake of keeping the business side of professional wrestling a secret to general audiences. Understandably, films often take creative liberties when adapting real-life stories. However, as I have followed the WWE program for a long time, I cannot help but point out that the film simplifies the development brand NXT from an exciting wrestling programme to just a training ground. As a result, the film leaves out some of Paige’s major career highlights. Her time as the inaugural NXT woman’s champion and involvement in the brand’s first network special are integral factors which bring back the excitement of wrestling in WWE at the time.
To conclude, Fighting with My Family is well crafted with humour and emotional notes. This character-driven underdog story thankfully does not require you to know about professional wrestling beforehand to enjoy, making it much more accessible to audiences.
Tom Hoying, a US-based photographer, has released a splendid series named Scenic View which explores tourist culture and the bond between the experience and photography as a tool.
Writing about the series Tom Hoying stated: “Every year millions of people visit countless landmarks, lookouts, monuments, and museums in search of an authentic lived experience. The nostalgia of place can be overwhelmingly powerful. Often the anticipation of a photographed experience, and the memories associated with the photographs produced are more potent than the lived experience itself. Scenic View is a series of photographs that attempt to explore tourist culture and the relationship photography has as a tool to mediate and document lived experience.”
You can find more work by Tom Hoying here.
Cappa, a rising name in the world of pop music, has released her single I Do. In this latest playlist-must have track, CAPPA delivers some sweet-sounding vocals and an energy that will have you hooked from the get-go. If this song does not get you excited, not much will.
Coming in with a blast of a track is Zaia, a twenty-year-old music producer who combines wonderful bass and majestic-like vocals to create a truly splendid atmosphere throughout the track BLUE. This one is for the playlists.
Fool Child, a Melbourne-based Indie Pop duo, have presented us with Bend, a melancholy driven song that utilises dreamy-like vocals with simple yet effective and ear-pleasing production. Having released Bend, we are thrilled to see what is next for Fool Child.
The final song of this Sound Selection is by Choosey & Exile featuring the beloved singer-songwriter Aloe Blacc. In this energetic and catchy track named Low Low, Choosey & Exile deliver quite the journey with top-notch jazzy production, smooth vocals and an overall vibe that will keep you listening for days and weeks to come.
What makes a bridge wobble when it’s not meant to? Billions of dollars mysteriously vanish into thin air? A building rock when its resonant frequency matches a gym class leaping to Snap’s 1990 hit I’ve Got The Power? The answer is maths. Or, to be precise, what happens when maths goes wrong in the real world.
As Matt Parker shows us, our modern lives are built on maths: computer programmes, finance, engineering. And most of the time this maths works quietly behind the scenes, until … it doesn’t. Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near-misses and mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman empire and a hapless Olympic shooting team, Matt Parker shows us the bizarre ways maths trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world.
Mathematics doesn’t have good ‘people skills’, but we would all be better off, he argues, if we saw it as a practical ally. This book shows how, by making maths our friend, we can learn from its pitfalls. It also contains puzzles, challenges, geometric socks, jokes about binary code and three deliberate mistakes. Getting it wrong has never been more fun.
From the first time he was stopped and searched as a child, to the day he realised his mum was white, to his first encounters with racist teachers – race and class have shaped Akala’s life and outlook. In this unique book he takes his own experiences and widens them out to look at the social, historical and political factors that have left us where we are today.
Covering everything from the police, education and identity to politics, sexual objectification and the far right, Natives will speak directly to British denial and squeamishness when it comes to confronting issues of race and class that are at the heart of the legacy of Britain’s racialised empire.
Christopher and Hannah are a happily married surgeon and nurse with picture-perfect lives. All that’s missing is a child. When Janie, an abandoned six-year-old, turns up at their hospital, Christopher forms an instant connection with her, and he convinces Hannah they should take her home as their own.
But Janie is no ordinary child, and her damaged psyche proves to be more than her new parents were expecting. Janie is fiercely devoted to Christopher, but she acts out in increasingly disturbing ways, directing all her rage at Hannah. Unable to bond with Janie, Hannah is drowning under the pressure, and Christopher refuses to see Janie’s true nature.
Hannah knows that Janie is manipulating Christopher and isolating him from her, despite Hannah’s attempts to bring them all together. But as Janie’s behaviour threatens to tear Christopher and Hannah apart, the truth behind Janie’s past may be enough to push them all over the edge.
She’s addicted to drugs and to an abusive boyfriend. You haven’t seen her in six months.
Then you find her busking in New York’s Central Park.
But she’s not the girl you remember. This woman is frail, filthy, terrified, and in more trouble than you ever imagined.
You don’t stop to think. You approach her. You beg her to come home.
SHE RUNS.
You follow. What choice do you have? And as you descend into the dark, dangerous world she’s lost herself in, you quickly find yourself out of your depths. Down here, no-one is safe – and now both of you might never make it out alive…
Growing up with the Deans was a fabulous training ground for many things: ignoring unpaid bills, being the most entertaining guest at dinner, deconstructing poetry. It was never home for the dog Emily craved.
Emily shared the lively chaos with her beloved older sister Rachael, her rock. Over the years the sisters bond grew ever closer. As Rachael went on to have the cosy family and treasured dog, Giggle, Emily threw herself into unsettled adventure – dog ownership remaining a distant dream.
Then, tragically, Rachael is diagnosed with cancer. In just three devastating years Emily loses not only her sister but both her parents as well.
This is the funny heart-breaking, wonderfully told story of how Emily discovers that it is possible to overcome the worst that life can throw at you, that it’s never too late to make peace with your past, and that the right time is only ever now, as she finally starts again with her very own dog – the adorable Shih-tzu named Raymond.
In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past for ever.
Ten years later, now a producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realize that there is no action without consequence.
Transcription is a work of rare depth and texture, a bravura modern novel of extraordinary power, wit and empathy. It is a triumphant work of fiction from one of this country’s most exceptional writers.
Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.
Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become far more famous than any of these five women.
Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, and gives these women back their stories.
Jules and Holly have been best friends since university. They tell each other everything, trading revelations and confessions, and sharing both the big moments and the small details of their lives: Holly is the only person who knows about Jules’s affair; Jules was there for Holly when her husband died. And their two children – just three years apart – have grown up together.
So when Jules’s daughter Saffie makes a serious allegation against Holly’s son Saul, neither woman is prepared for the devastating impact this will have on their friendship or their families.
Especially as Holly, in spite of her principles, refuses to believe her son is guilty.
Jean McClellan spends her time in almost complete silence, limited to just one hundred words a day. Any more, and a thousand volts of electricity will course through her veins.
Now the new government is in power, everything has changed. But only if you’re a woman.
Almost overnight, bank accounts are frozen, passports are taken away and seventy million women lose their jobs. Even more terrifyingly, young girls are no longer taught to read or write.
For herself, her daughter, and for every woman silenced, Jean will reclaim her voice. This is only the beginning…
The era of the LP began in 1967, with ‘Sgt Pepper’; The Beatles didn’t just collect together a bunch of songs, they Made An Album. Henceforth, everybody else wanted to Make An Album.
The end came only fifteen years later, coinciding with the release of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. By then the Walkman had taken music out of the home and into the streets and the record business had begun trying to reverse-engineer the creative process in order to make big money. Nobody would play music or listen to it in quite the same way ever again.
It was a short but transformative time. Musicians became ‘artists’ and we, the people, patrons of the arts. The LP itself had been a mark of sophistication, a measure of wealth, an instrument of education, a poster saying things you dare not say yourself, a means of attracting the opposite sex, and, for many, the single most desirable object in their lives.
This is the story of that time; it takes us from recording studios where musicians were doing things that had never been done before to the sparsely furnished apartments where their efforts would be received like visitations from a higher power. This is the story of how LPs saved our lives.
*All book descriptions are taken from Amazon*
David Esquivel, a US-based artist, has released another stunning series of artworks named New Light. It adds to a vast collection of works he has made before which all share the same minimalistic abstract style.
Writing about his work Esquivel stated: “My work has always been about time, about what was here at the beginning. A wide variety of elements coalesced and continue to live together harmoniously in these very different worlds. Those relationships are the heart of my work. It’s the same with us as humans living together amongst each other and with everything else in the universe. I like keeping the individuality of each objects/body while allowing them to interact freely with the others.”
You can find more work by David Esquivel here.
Dado Queiroz, a Brazilian-born artist who currently resides in Belgium, has released an abstract series that utilises packaging paper to create aesthetically-pleasing art pieces. Many of these pieces remind us of minimalist abstract album covers that have been released by electronic music producers over the past three decades. 
You can find more work by Dado Queiroz here.
Wonmi Seo, a South Korean artist who was born in Seoul, has released a series of dark and mysterious paintings named Black Curtain. Combining dark colours, harsh textures Wonmi Seo has created something that will stick with one for a while.
Writing about the series Wonmi Seo stated “The Black Curtain series is a portrait that exists behind the complex and trauma of Korean society.”
You can find more work by Wonmi Seo here.
Heiko Gerlicher, a German-born landscape and nature photographer, has released a series named Winter in the Woods. The series includes a stunning selection of photos illustrating the winter season in the woods with a touch of mystery and pure beauty.
You can find more work by Heiko Gerlicher here.
Entering our 54th Sound Selection is BAD CHILD with an energetic and vastly expressive track Breathing Fire. BAD CHILD, a promising name in the world of music, has delivered quite the entrance onto our radar with Breathing Fire, a track made for your playlists.
Coming in with lovely vocals and tuneful synths is the amazing salute in the track JTS. In this electronica-filled track, salute delivers a journey of a song with a wave of searing synths and lustrous bass that will have you dancing for hours to come.
Kiushu, a quickly rising Dutch duo, have released their newest project A Prayer. Part of the project Kiushu included their passionate song The Noise of Water, in which they deliver phenomenal tensity and propelling energy through classical and vocal elements. If you are looking for something more unique, then The Noise of Water will be perfect for you.
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