Epic Sea Battle at Night: a Revolutionary Play with the Economic Thinking of Milton Friedman

The play Epic Sea Battle at Night was originally staged in 1967, to commemorate two of China’s People’s Liberation Army’s military triumphs over the Taiwanese navy two years previously. Produced at the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the play is an example of the exploitation of the arts as an ideological instrument, celebrating military heroism and political conviction. Stills from the play were included in, China Pictorial 11, an English language propaganda pamphlet that was distributed to Western Imperialists in order to educate them in Maoist policy. Today, these images are clear representations of ideology. More than forty years after the Cultural Revolution, the ideology under which we live, neo-liberal late-capitalism, deliberately shirks from such blatant displays of propaganda. We have supposedly the freedom to believe whatever we like in a post-ideological age, and yet core beliefs about meritocracy, individualism and competitiveness frequently go unchallenged. By juxtaposing the visual language of ideology with the text of the capitalist manifesto, the re-enactment of a scene from Epic Sea Battle at Night harnesses the aesthetics of the past so as to allow us to reconsider the alleged neutrality of the present. The design of the stage, the positioning of the actors, costumes and props of the current production closely resembled those documented in China Pictorial 11, yet the actors’ monologues belong to a completely different context. No less heroic and utopian in tone than the speech given by the political instructor of gunboat 874 in the original play, the capitalist manifesto was an attempt to give a concrete language to the shapeless ideology of the present, and to force the invisible currents that govern life today, in China as in the West, to the surface. Neither a lecture on neo-liberal economics, nor a theatrical performance of a narrative, the piece appropriated the format of the propaganda play to re-evaluate the relationship between art and politics now.

Doll Play narratives about starting school in children of socially anxious mothers, and their relation to subsequent child school-based anxiety

Background: Child social anxiety is common, and predicts later emotional and academic impairment. Offspring of socially anxious mothers are at increased risk. It is important to establish whether individual vulnerability to disorder can be identified in young children. Method: The responses of 4.5 year-old children of mothers with social phobia (N = 62) and non-anxious mothers (N = 60) were compared, two months before school entry, using a Doll Play (DP) procedure focused on the social challenge of starting school. DP responses were examined in relation to teacher reports of anxious-depressed symptoms and social worries at the end of the child’s first school term. The role of earlier child behavioral inhibition and attachment, assessed at 14 months, was also considered. Results: Compared to children of non-anxious mothers, children of mothers with social phobia were significantly more likely to give anxiously negative responses in their school DP (OR = 2.57). In turn, negative DP predicted teacher reported anxious-depressed and social worry problems. There were no effects of infant behavioral inhibition or attachment. Conclusion: Vulnerability in young children at risk of anxiety can be identified using Doll Play narratives.

p90 ribosomal S6 kinases play a significant role in early gene regulation in the cardiomyocyte response to Gq protein-coupled receptor stimuli, endothelin-1 and α1-adrenergic receptor agonists

Extracellular signal-regulated kinases 1/2 (ERK1/2) and their substrates, p90 ribosomal S6 kinases (RSKs), phosphorylate different transcription factors, contributing differentially to transcriptomic profiles. In cardiomyocytes, ERK1/2 are required for >70% of the transcriptomic response to endothelin-1. Here, we investigated the role of RSKs in the transcriptomic responses to Gq protein-coupled receptor agonists, endothelin-1, phenylephrine (generic α1-adrenergic receptor agonist) and A61603 (α1A-adrenergic receptor selective). Phospho-ERK1/2 and phospho-RSKs appeared in cardiomyocyte nuclei within 2-3 min of stimulation (endothelin-1>a61603≈phenylephrine). All agonists increased nuclear RSK2, but only endothelin-1 increased nuclear RSK1 content. PD184352 (inhibits ERK1/2 activation) and BI-D1870 (inhibits RSKs) were used to dissect the contribution of RSKs to the endothelin-1-responsive transcriptome. Of 213 RNAs upregulated at 1 h, 51% required RSKs for upregulation whereas 29% required ERK1/2 but not RSKs. The transcriptomic response to phenylephrine overlapped with, but was not identical to, endothelin-1. As with endothelin-1, PD184352 inhibited upregulation of most phenylephrine-responsive transcripts, but the greater variation in effects of BI-D1870 suggests that differential RSK signalling influences global gene expression. A61603 induced similar changes in RNA expression in cardiomyocytes as phenylephrine, indicating that the signal was mediated largely through α1A-adrenergic receptors. A61603 also increased expression of immediate early genes in perfused adult rat hearts and, as in cardiomyocytes, upregulation of the majority of genes was inhibited by PD184352. PD184352 or BI-D1870 prevented the increased surface area induced by endothelin-1 in cardiomyocytes. Thus, RSKs play a significant role in regulating cardiomyocyte gene expression and hypertrophy in response to Gq protein-coupled receptor stimulation.

"You can see some eagles. And hear the trumpets": the literary and political hinterland of T.S. Eliot's 'Coriolan'

There has been an increased amount of scholarly interest lately in T.S. Eliot's unfinished sequence, Coriolan (1932)—interest drawn from its Shakespearian allusiveness, and from analysis of this writing's particularly rebarbative, jarring poetic. Although, however, the two parts of the sequence published by Eliot are acknowledged as being his nearest approach to poetic commentary upon contemporary political ideas, little criticism exists establishing the hinterland of the political thought, with which Eliot was most familiar, as editor of the Criterion. Coriolan emerges at a time when the lure of fascism pulled hardest at Eliot's sensibility. This article reviews the full political context provided by Eliot's journal, as well as considering the connections between that political engagement and the readings of Shakespeare he was also promulgating through this forum, in order to provide a more complex sense than hitherto of the diverse pressures underlying the unsettled nature of the existing Coriolan poems.

Terminal: a miracle play with popular music from the end of the world

Terminal: A Miracle Play with Popular Music from the End of the World is a film and live performance project exploring the politics of post-apocalyptic fiction. A theatrical staging of a morality play for end times and future folk music, it recasts eschatology, as a foundational myth for a future society. Post-apocalyptic writing and cinema are grounded in an ethos of survivalism. Invoking Rousseau’s state of nature, or time before government, these fictions propose violent scenarios in which nuclear holocaust, environmental catastrophe and other disasters generate an individualistic politics of pure pragmatism, negating the possibility of democratic deliberation. Terminal narrates this familiar scenario, but at the same time questions its validity. The film, shot on black and white VHS at Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbarn in Cumbria, dramatises a series of conversations between future-historical archetypes about the needs and pressures of the situation in which they find themselves at the end of the world. The performers then gather to play worshipful songs about acid rain, radiation sickness and eating the dog, using a mix of conventional, obscure and makeshift instruments In the tradition of books such as Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker and Arthur M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, Terminal imagines artistic expression and new folk traditions for a world to come after the apocalypse. If, as Slavoj Žižek would have it, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to think of the end of capitalism, the project juxtaposes these two endpoints to test out how alternative scenarios might emerge from the collaborative practice of making theatre and music against a setting of social collapse.