LeftLion

mary in the junkyard is a name I’ve been hearing for a while. Recently, they’ve played live sessions for BBC Radio 6 Music and KEXP, opened for Wet Leg on their Moisturizer tour, and formed an unlikely friendship with the Serbian conceptual artist Marina Abramovic.

Convenience is sold to us as a gift. And in many ways it genuinely is. But gifts come with strings, and the strings attached to frictionless technology are starting to pull. Some consumers are waking up to this and pushing back, not by ditching their devices, but by taking back a layer of control. Security tools have climbed significantly over the past few years, driven by people who've started asking harder questions about what happens to their data when they browse, stream, and game.

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From the moment visitors enter the gallery, it becomes clear that this is not an exhibition to rush through, for every room encourages a slower, more deliberate way of looking. It feels less like entering a conventional exhibition and more like stepping into an unfolding conversation between artists separated by centuries.

Personal Hero: Joe Strummer Fifteen years old, living in Southwell – hardly the front line of the punk rock explosion. But then at the library (ditto), flicking through the LPs you could loan out, I saw a black and white cover featuring three savage looking lads. Career Opportunities, Janie Jones, White Riot. Written by Strummer and Mick Jones. I grew to love Mick (and Paul) but was Joe’s man from the start. I worshipped him. He made me believe passion could fire a revolution.

I’m Queer, non-binary and Vietnamese-Chinese, born in London from a family of refugees. I studied Game Art & Animation and moved to Notts to work as a professional artist for a mental health app. Unfortunately, after five years I was made redundant due to AI, ironically taking a huge toll on my mental health.

The Case For The Defence Start with the genuine upside, because there is one and it deserves a fair hearing. For an independent creative working alone or on a shoestring budget, these tools can remove the grind that so often gets in the way of the actual art. The tedious, repetitive, technical middle of a project, the part nobody got into a creative field to do, is frequently exactly what the technology handles well.

It is easy to assume email is just email, but the way a message gets stored and read can vary enormously between providers. For creatives juggling client work, personal projects and the odd late-night admin session, a bit of extra privacy can make a real difference to peace of mind. This piece looks at why secure email is quickly becoming part of the toolkit for Nottingham's creative crowd.

The plot subverts traditional, glamorous spy stories and is widely celebrated for its realistic, morally ambiguous take on international intelligence. After his spy network in East Berlin is destroyed, Leamas is called back to London, ostensibly facing retirement. However, instead he agrees to go on one final assignment: where he is to act as an embittered alcoholic former spy seeking asylum in East Germany.

Opening the set was alternative rock and shoegaze band Midrift, who are based out of the San Francisco Bay Area and formed in 2022. Brothers Manoa (bass) and Kai Neukermans (drums) play alongside vocalist and guitarist Gus Mehrkam. With new album Silhouette released in early June, their sound has something more alt‑rock than shoegaze about it, still drenched in reverb but driven by heavy guitars.