Jenni Ajderian

I'm adding them on  Facebook . I'm reading through their  MySpace  looking for gigs in Bristol. I'm wailing along with their songs and learning to play them all on guitar. I think it's love.       Mumford and Sons ' album Sigh No More currently has pride of place in my CD collection. The London quartet, formed a scant two years ago, have been nominated for scores of awards by the NME, XFM, triple-J and probably quite a few other acronymous music awarding bodies in categories toasting New Music and Breakthrough Acts. But the music they're playing is far from new- the four bonded over a love of Bluegrass, Folk, Country... The acoustic guitar, the banjo, the references to crops and harvests are normally present in a kind of music associated with old men in pubs and slender women with flowers in their hair. So what is it about Marcus Mumford, Country Winston, Ben Lovett and Ted Dwane which gives their version of Folk suc...

There was a philosopher who once dreamed he was a butterfly, but when he awoke he wasn't sure whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man.      When Jake Sully awakes from the butterfly world of the Na'vi, where he spends his time jumping from treetops, walking through ultra violet forests and riding huge blue alien dragons, only to see the same old research shack in the mountains, his understanding of which side he's on starts to slip.      What follows is a three-hour film which can only be described as epic, and which follows the same vein as the scifi parable District Nine. It's no coincidence that the film centres on an American mining company wanting to bulldoze alien holy sites for the rich minerals that lie deep in the ground. A small programme is set up by Doctor Sigourney Weaver to use Avatar bodies to infiltrate and learn from the Na'vi,...

ca·thar·tic / kəˈ θ ärtik /  • adj. 1. providing psychological relief through the open expression of strong emotions      Examples of cathartic text being the Shakespearian plays Hamlet and Julius Caesar, as well as the entire contents of WHSmith's Tragic Life Stories section. Six shelves of books sit and document the tragic life stories of children, adults, small fluffy things probably and anyone else the author can get their hands on- sometimes even themselves. With eyesnatching adjectives for titles such as "Betrayed" (Lyndsey Harns), "Worthless" (Marilyn Hardy) and "Disgraced" (Saira Ahmed), each promises to be some variation on the theme of harrowing childhood stories of misuse and neglect; tense emotional battles in which the subject's sole ally is a kindly stranger/ sister/ author; all in all a life-changing, tear-filled tale that is, by definition, cathartic. By the time you've read it, you feel pretty happy it didn't happen to ...