Cultural Geography Blog

After a year of releases each Full Moon , the final track on Peter Gabriel' s new album was released a few days ago. He saved the best 'til last. More people need to live and let live. Some thoughts on the song from Peter Gabriel: ‘Music can be like a box of mood pills that we can use to treat ourselves and a lot of the work of the Reverberation project is focused on that sort of idea. When someone suggested that forgiveness might be a topic to write about, at first, I thought, ‘that's not interesting to me,’ but then I remembered two things. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was the chair of The Elders and a real mentor for me, led the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa and that really allowed people to expose, report and maybe feel again some of the horrors of the apartheid era. I remember he always said that listening made a huge difference, just making sure people felt heard and recognized. Then, sometimes, it created a space for forgiveness.  There's als...

  Werner Herzog is a truly remarkable person. This BBC Sounds programme profiles his life, told in an extended interview, and was recorded to coincide with the release of his memoir, which is called 'Every Man for Himself and God against All: A Memoir', which I need to get a copy of. Werner Herzog recalls his impoverished childhood in a remote Bavarian valley at the end of the Second World War.  He says that, as a teenager, his discovery of a book about the Lascaux cave paintings was ‘like a bolt of lightning’ to his creative imagination, and led to him making a documentary film about prehistoric cave art many years later.  He describes how his films often start with a vivid or unusual image, and how he seeks to capture a sense of awe at the power of the natural world.  Werner Herzog discusses the extremely arduous and dangerous conditions in which he made some of his best known films, including Fitzcarraldo and four other films starring the temperamentally volati...