The News Caravan

Tag: Spaces

  • I once argued fiercely for child-free spaces. As a mother, I still believe in their sanctity | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

    I once argued fiercely for child-free spaces. As a mother, I still believe in their sanctity | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

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    This morning I did something that I rarely do, for fear of inducing a full-body cringe the likes of which I have not experienced since, aged 10, I jumped on my dad’s back in the local swimming pool only to discover that it wasn’t him: I read one of my old columns. Written nearly a decade ago under the headline “I’ll drink to child-free pubs and cafes”, my twentysomething self grumbles about the presence of kids in adult spaces.

    Fast forward and I have a one-year-old who regards my local pub as an extension of his living room. I have sung him to sleep in the beer garden and breastfed him, rosé in hand, while sharing birth stories. Sometimes, I have looked up and seen an exclusion zone of empty tables around where we are sitting. Time makes hypocrites of us all.

    There has been a lot of discussion about child-free spaces recently, with two reported plane incidents going viral. The first involved a pregnant woman being asked by cabin crew to clear up her children’s popcorn crumbs, and the second, a grown man’s tantrum about the presence of a crying baby on his flight, during which, after his fellow passengers told him he was shouting, he replied with the immortal: “So is the baby! Did that motherfucker pay extra to yell?”

    Both provoked fierce debate online that can be boiled down to, on the one hand, “Crying babies are annoying and should not be in public. Being unable to soothe them is poor parenting”, v “Children and babies are a part of society and they also cry. No one wants them to stop crying more than their own parents.” Although these factions could broadly be categorised along the lines of “childfree/childless” people and “childed” people (a word I dislike, but one that is becoming increasingly popular), many of us could see both sides.

    I couldn’t not laugh at the man’s furious logic, because I have felt that, before and after becoming a parent. But motherhood has elevated my (already high) threat responses to the point where a large, angry man shouting at me and my baby in a confined space would almost certainly make me burst into tears, not to mention frighten the poor child. To intimidate babies and their mothers like that is unpleasant, to say the least.

    Online, parents and childfree people often seem to be at war. Offline, however, in my personal relationships things feel a lot more cordial, perhaps because we love the people in our lives regardless of their reproductive status, or perhaps because all the beef is simply simmering, unarticulated, under the surface.

    Since I became a parent, I’ve been having discussions with friends and readers about what it means to live a childfree life. They have made me think more deeply and empathically about how it feels to be part of a society where parenthood is the default journey when one does not have children. My colleague Helen Pidd’s recent article about the child-free movement and its radical, pioneering spirit, as well as our series “Why I don’t have a child”, added further to my understanding. The decision to be child-free is not always painless and can feel lonely. I can understand not always wanting to be reminded of that tough choice, or having the desire to feel like you’re enjoying life unencumbered. Parents benefit from child-free spaces, too. I love to read a book alone in a pub or cafe, and my heart will sometimes sink at the sight of a crying baby when I have left my own at home for some vital alone time.

    I don’t take offence when people articulate a need for child-free spaces. When a child-free 37-year-old woman tells me that she doesn’t really want to be around children all the time, I get it. “But if you say that you have committed two massive, unforgivable crimes: not wanting kids (what is wrong with you?) and then not wanting to at least be involved with kids (you are a freak and must be a psychopath!),” she says.

    I tell her that I always try to ask my child-free friends whether I should bring the baby along or not. “Hanging out with kids introduces all the elements I struggle with: chaos, noise, endless tasks … Sometimes that’s OK and it’s fun, but I appreciate it when friends don’t assume I’ll want to do that,” she says, noting that you can never have a proper conversation with another adult when their child is around. It brings to mind the phone call with married-with-toddlers Magda in Bridget Jones’s Diary: “Bridget, hi! I was just ringing to say in the potty! In the potty! Do it in the potty!”

    Though the UK could be more child-friendly, I do still believe in the sanctity of adult-only spaces that I argued for in my past column, and, to quote restaurant critic Marina O’Loughlin: “Children shouldn’t rule the roost anywhere, frankly, but restaurants least of all. I’ve endured too many longed-for, carefully planned moments totally bollocksed by them.”

    I suppose it boils down to a need for kindness and empathy on both sides. We all started life as babies screaming from colic or explosive diarrhoea. Babies cry as a way of communicating, and being a part of humanity means that we can’t always choose which other humans communicate with or around us. But when there’s an exit that isn’t 30,000 feet up in the sky, parents can also choose to take their baby through it.

    tessa hadley
    ‘It was great to reread Tessa Hadley’s Sunstroke from a new perspective, that of ‘the warm vegetable soup of motherhood’.’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

    What’s working

    I’ve long been a fan of Tessa Hadley’s writing, so it was great to reread Sunstroke, her short story collection, from a new perspective, that of “the warm vegetable soup of motherhood”. No one writes families better than Hadley.

    What’s not

    Thanks to everyone who got in touch to recommend leak-proof night nappies: trials are ongoing but sizing up has helped. We are now on to molars, however, the worst of all the teething pains, or so I’m told. The poor baby is taking bites out of everything, myself included.



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    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • Hyderabad: Neglected open spaces to get ‘Urban Acupuncture’ makeover

    Hyderabad: Neglected open spaces to get ‘Urban Acupuncture’ makeover

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    Hyderabad: Telangana government on Sunday signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Hyderabad Urban Lab Foundation (HUL) to turn various open land parcels in the city into vibrant living spaces through ‘Urban Acupuncture’.

    This initiative aims to promote well-thought-out design solutions for informal settlements like slums, abandoned and open places, stepped spaces and places with rapid urbanisation.

    Neglected open spaces will be converted into vibrant living spaces such as playgrounds and libraries using ‘Urban Acupuncture’. All this will be taken up using low-cost intervention techniques.

    MS Education Academy

    The open spaces will be reclaimed by clearing garbage and Construction and Demolition (C&D) dumps.

    The Municipal Administration & Urban Development (MA&UD) department along with the Revenue department and Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) aim to develop them into meaningful public activities such as libraries, play areas, social gathering places, and points for economic convergence, over a period of time. 

    The project also aims to include the local stakeholders in order to promote a sense of ownership.

    Citizens are encouraged to send the list of such neglected, misused and likely to get encroached open spaces in their neighbourhoods, through Twitter @TSmaudonline or @ghmconline or contact the local deputy commissioner or the zonal commissioner of GHMC.

    An MoU was signed between the MA&UD department and the HUL foundation to promote sustainable models, tools, and best practices for low-cost urban innovation and sustainable urbanisation in the presence of minister KT Rama Rao.

    HUL, led by Anant Maringanti, will provide urban infrastructure and aesthetic design solutions. HUL shall partner with the local stakeholders, private organisations, architecture students and colleges, and nonprofit and philanthropic sectors.

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    #Hyderabad #Neglected #open #spaces #Urban #Acupuncture #makeover

    ( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

  • ‘Pure terror in musical form’: Dead Space’s composer shares its unsettling secret

    ‘Pure terror in musical form’: Dead Space’s composer shares its unsettling secret

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    What does “horror” sound like to you? Is it the slow thump of a heartbeat, gradually speeding up as adrenaline and cortisol start to flood the nervous system? Is it the wet thwack of meat on metal as something, somewhere, gets rent asunder? Or is it more understated – a soft whisper in the ear when you weren’t expecting it, half-heard shuffling footsteps, the suggestion of a breeze when the air is supposed to be perfectly still?

    Dead Space, the horror game from EA and Visceral that launched for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC back in 2008, managed to get into your head, and under your skin. Complementing the game’s extra-terrestrial, Cronenberg-esque body horror was the mental deterioration of protagonist Isaac Clarke; an engineer stranded aboard the USG Ishimura. He’s not a warrior. He’s not a soldier. He’s just some guy, on a ship teeming with hostile alien lifeforms, whose poor little brain is starting to unravel. For the entire game, you never leave his heavy, blood-soaked boots.

    “There’s a very simple technique I came up with that, to me, musically illustrated Isaac’s emotional state,” explains Dead Space composer, Jason Graves. “You can hear it in the very beginning of track four on the soundtrack, Fly Me To The Aegis Seven Moon, and it’s used throughout the entire score. It’s a slowly wavering, single note. Very anxious-sounding. That note builds and expands as the rest of the orchestra slowly dominates and overpowers it.”

    Graves’ technique for getting you to empathise with Isaac mimicked what the audio engineers were doing with the rest of the game’s sound. Dead Space employed breathing sound effects and a dull heartbeat in the background to keep you physically in-step with Isaac. The lower your health, the more ragged your breathing became. The closer to death you were, the quicker your heart would beat. You might not have noticed these things consciously … but chances are your body did.

    Dead Space’s aim was to expand the boundaries of a horror experience in gaming, taking on all the action beats of Resident Evil and Silent Hill and complementing them with the psychological thriller aspects of cinema. “Kubrick is famous for implementing classical recordings in his films,” reflects Graves. “His use of Penderecki’s music in The Shining was my lightbulb moment for Dead Space. I stumbled across the ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ typewriter scene one evening on television and thought ‘that’s what the score needs to sound like!’”

    ‘The closer to death you were, the quicker your heart would beat … Dead Space.
    ‘The closer to death you were, the quicker your heart would beat … Dead Space. Photograph: EA

    Graves explains the appeal of the scene; it was a natural, acoustic sound – a normal orchestra performing their instruments – but the techniques they were using made the instruments sound otherworldly. “Like musical necromorphs,” he laughs. “The key to this sound was musical chance, or aleatoric techniques.”

    “The point of aleatoric music is giving the player the freedom to decide what to play within a given set of instructions. It might be ‘play the highest note as loud as possible,’ ‘play random open string harmonics very quietly’, or ‘play these five notes as quickly and loudly as you can. These kinds of directions are incredibly fun for the musicians. They act like they are back in school. I had several takes ruined by laughing at the end.”

    As unlistenable as aleatoric music sounds, it made perfect sense to commit the technique to a horror game. Especially a horror game with the goal of featuring the scariest soundtrack the world has ever heard. “I spent many, many months poring over scores from the mid-20th century and studying their techniques, convinced that this aleatoric sound of cacophony and confusion was the key to unlocking pure terror in musical form.” says Graves. “After all, what is normal-sounding music but comforting repetition, proper form, tonal balance and tuned, enjoyable sounds? If you take away all those things, you are robbing the listener of every core value that makes music comforting and pleasurable.”

    Graves was intent on making you, the player, as uncomfortable as you could be. This wasn’t going to be your traditional score; the original brief he received, which asked for “modern, Hollywood action music with some horror thrown in”, had been jettisoned. This was a cold, new frontier now: “nothing repeats, there is no tonal centre – it’s literally every man and woman (in the orchestra) for themselves.”

    ‘Nothing repeats, there is no tonal centre – it’s literally every man and woman (in the orchestra) for themselves’ … Dead Space.
    ‘Nothing repeats, there is no tonal centre – it’s literally every man and woman (in the orchestra) for themselves’ … Dead Space. Photograph: EA

    Dead Space was a passion project for Graves. He devoted more than two years of his life to it, and he came away with “over nine hours of recorded technique from each individual section of the orchestra”. Control over each element was essential for how the final product would sound, and how the music would be fed into the game engine. “This kind of music implementation hadn’t been done in games before,” he recalls. “EA was using its own proprietary music engine and really pushing the limits.”

    Was it easy? No. Was it effective? Absolutely. Dead Space remains one of the most essential horror games – influential enough to justify a remake, which will be out next week.

    “All creative people have their ‘trial by fire’ moments,” says Graves. “Projects that transform how they creatively process and work from that point forward. That’s what Dead Space did for me. Literally, every decision about the score – conception, recording techniques, musicians, recording studios and implementation – were, for better or worse, up to me … Constantly trying new things and pushing boundaries, that’s how you grow as an artist.”

    The end result is an unsettling triumph, a curated, player-driven exercise in tension and technique designed to get in your head and stay there, long after you’ve finished playing.

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    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )