The return of nature to abandoned places

In the Guardian's obituary for Welsh artist Bert Isaac, Monday, April 10, 2006:

There was one subject Isaac made his own: the return of nature to abandoned places. From overgrown quarries to tin-shacked moors, he was fascinated by the transformation back to wilderness. His energetic marks and vital colours echoed the redemption wrought by the cycle of nature. The environments he conjured seemed metaphysical - one felt that by pushing through his veils and thickets one might encounter an impossible new world or enter a higher consciousness.

Fact-checkers approaching the metaphysical

Simon Hoggart's Week, The Guardian, Saturday March 18th, 2006 describes a conversation with Cressida Leyshon, deputy fiction editor of the New Yorker:

We talked about the magazine's dreaded fact-checkers. Like hunting dogs, they never let go. Once an American friend of mine had written a profile of Margaret Thatcher and politely asked if the fact-checker could call me. He did. Again, and again. They don't just ask about simple matters of detail, but about issues which approach the metaphysical. "John writes that on her own, Margaret Thatcher likes to cook 'simple' dishes, such as Welsh rarebit and coronation chicken. I'm all right with Welsh rarebit, but could you call coronation chicken a 'simple' dish?"

But, I said cheerily, you can't have fact-checkers in the fiction department. But they do. Apparently they ran a short story in which a character goes to McDonald's for chicken nuggets. A reader wrote in triumphantly pointing out that chicken nuggets were not introduced until the following year. In New Yorker terms, that is the equivalent of the Titanic for the White Star Line, or Nick Leeson at Barings.

Shakira's opaque lyrics

Alexis Petridis, reviewing Shakira's Oral Fixation Vol 2 in The Guardian, Friday March 3, 2006:

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[Shakira] Ripoll has provided an explanation for the cover, but then, Ripoll has a way with an explanation that makes you wonder why anyone bothered asking in the first place. This one involves Renaissance art, original sin and a desire "to attribute to Eve more reason to bite the forbidden fruit". Nevertheless, it seems safe to say that you wouldn't get anything similar passing the lips of Christina Aguilera.

Ripoll's last English-language album, 2002's Laundry Service, went platinum 13 times over, but it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that she bears a similar relation to her American pop-AOR peers as the Tropicália artists of late-1960s Brazil bore to British and American psychedelia: their sound has the same basic constituent elements, but is rearranged and amended according to some perplexing internal logic until it resembles something beamed from Mars rather than Latin America. Another way of putting it is that Ripoll is crackers.

Just how crackers is signposted the minute Oral Fixation Volume 2 hits the CD player. Anyone discombobulated by the cover image should spend a few minutes composing themselves before pressing the play button and thus being confronted by How Do You Do. The opening track features mock-Gregorian chanting by a group called Seraphic Fire, a staccato wah-wah guitar solo that bears a debt to Queen's Killer Queen and a winning chorus that you would call stadium rock were it not embellished with backing vocals sung in an inexplicable baby voice. The lyrics seem to feature Ripoll confronting God with his failings - she is angry about famine, she is angry about the Middle East and she is also angry about cats being chased by dogs. For the most part, they are so opaque that they might as well be in Latin, which indeed some of them are.

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