Karajan making his players wear wigs on this documentary.

'in the middle of nowhere'

Much contemporary public art in Britain is simple-minded, preoccupied with gigantism and populism, and intended to overshadow the more pressing social needs of the artwork's immediate locale. Hans Haacke's skeletal horse in Trafalgar Square is possibly an exception.

Given the context and that Haacke's work is based on the skeleton of a horse (hollowing out the heroic chargers ridden by the bronze and marble military men that line Whitehall), and given that almost all public art - created as it is by committee - is terrible, I'd say Haacke's Gift Horse is really quite noble.

Professor Scott King, chair of visual communications, University of the Arts, London

- letter to the London Evening Standard, 9th March 2015

The drone to me has the visual power to suggest a form of knowledge that invades.

- Dinh Q. Lê

likes of AFRICA IS A COUNTRY been on this for years but from back in the summer or so here's someone kindly put up as a .pdf Adam Haupt's 2012 article from Safundi, 'Is Die Antwoord Blackface?'

(some citations for the author.)

given this, i want to re-share Shawn Wen

We can, I promise you, bear much more than we predict

measurements on here and writing about that which is not your own are nagging somewhat (the wonderful Hannah Giorgis on the audacity of whiteness in writing with contempt and expertise springs up)

- 'white men saving brown women from brown men'

Spivak

a bunch of us went on a stag do to Cork earlier this month and since then the chorus of The Boys of the Old Brigade will not leave me.

Where are the lads that stood with me
When history was made?
A ghrá mo chroí, I long to see
The boys of the old brigade.

the bod shouting SINN FEIN out in the middle as a pub all chorused it tickled me, frankly. Us Englishmen had to sing for our supper with You'll Never Walk Alone. i've had quieter pints.

Something a mate said over java in Brixton about a passage describing a woman's eyes and hair or etc. in Laurie Lee recalled twitter user actual mango tree riffing on white writers and literature's constant representation, and another mate reminded me of similar over beers in Hammersmith or St Pancras or such last week. among other things, this reply was caught

@sailornegro Her eyes were the shape of almonds, the color of burnt caramel, and the texture of a third othering food item.

— Glenn (@justabloodygame) May 25, 2015

First Nations leaders acknowledge that violence is a problem on the reserves – which are beset with poverty, drug abuse and unemployment. But only 40% of the country’s indigenous people actually live on reserves, and activists and analysts say the abuse and murder visited on Canada’s indigenous women reflects a broader history of marginalization and abuse.

That view is shared by the United Nations, which has repeatedly called for a national inquiry into violence against First Nations women, similar to the investigation launched into the murder of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico.

The UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (Cedaw) concluded last year that the Harper government’s refusal to investigate the violence was “a grave violation” of indigenous women’s rights.

“The victimisation of native women is partly the legacy of colonial heritage where gender-based violence is linked to the lack of realization of their economic, social, political and cultural rights,” said the authors of the report, Niklas Bruun and Barbara Bailey in an email.

more here

The approach is customised depending on the market and the media in question.

boy better know

The most I’ve been stopped is three times in one day. About a year ago. The first time was at the Épeule Montesquieu metro stop in Roubaix in the early afternoon. That was the BAC. There were two or three of them, a normal stop. The second time was at the Porte des Postes metro stop around 6pm. That was the National Police. I told them I’d been stopped by their colleagues and they searched me anyway. They didn’t give me an explanation. The third time was in the street, and it was the CRS. That time I was really drunk.

from here

In focusing on Sudan with the insistent counterpoint of New York, I have tried to make clear that the increasingly globalized expression of capitalist relations of production, the tenor of neoliberal global economic restructuring, and the broad retreats from the social wage...have common local and regional effects

- Cindi Katz (2004: 259)

never not bodies, never not here for Tim Finney on funky.

always always

Migration illustrates...malice by proxy

Petrol. Meat. Industrial farming. Where have the tributaries gone? I forget. Optics too.

on the roads
they drag crosses

Garissa

Re: this recent welcome news from Paris

French authorities on Tuesday honored a Mali-born employee who saved lives at the kosher supermarket attacked by terrorists as a hero and granted him French citizenship.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve praised Muslim Lassana Bathily, 24, for his "courage" and "heroism" during a ceremony in the presence of Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

these

@sanaa_cue so gross - serve the state and its "values" and be rewarded with non-deportation and slightly less precarious labour

— Peter Ely (@asickrose) January 15, 2015

News that the 2014 summer war in Gaza resulted in the deaths of 539 Palestinian children, approaching 3,000 injured Palestinian children and now about 35 or 40% of Gaza's million or so kids are reported shell-shocked.

(via Priyanka Boghani [PBS staff page].)

In B.C. "Colonization, long-standing inequality, and discrimination as root causes" of violence against Indigenous women and girls.

'Yes, the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women and girls are a ‘sociological phenomenon’.'

This .pdf contains rolling up to date information listing current humanitarian aid projects for Nigeria, with funding status of each project.

(edited to reflect date accuracy.)

In west London, the last words of Jimmy Mubenga (killed by outsourced security personnel, carrying out British state routines) were reportedly "I can't breathe".

Meanwhile in Ohio the Cleveland police union are justifying their homicide of a child whilst expressing outrage that a gridiron player wore a t-shirt.

Reihan Salam unpacks what white privilege means (via Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brad DeLong).

'Race, class, and gender: Intersectionality between social reality and political limits' by Houria Bouteldja (via Justin LS of TMP).

Wow.

[side-note: Bouteldja's navigating through and under etc. different patriarchies reminded a little bit of Deniz Kandiyoti's patriarchal bargains*, in that case just wrt treatments of different patriarchies as a starting point, something since revised by Kandiyoti herself granted

* this may well be a whitesplaining/mansplaining** addition I realise, but just really wanted to rep Kandiyoti, pretty much apropos of nowt, to be honest

**without wanting to dilute a genuinely valuable term]

Lying is easy.

St. Louis police chief says "only criminals" were teargassed in #Ferguson, using the new definition which includes moms, kids, journalists

— The Daily Edge (@TheDailyEdge) November 17, 2014

Indigenous over-representation in custody (%)

	Indigenous persons as a percentage of total population	Indigenous persons as a percentage of total juvenile detention population	Indigenous persons as a percentage of total adult prison population
New South Wales	2.3	48.6	22.1
Victoria	0.7	10.8	6.3
Queensland	3.6	52.9	30.0
Western Australia	3.3	68.0	38.5
South Australia	1.9	41.0	23.9
Tasmania	4.0	20.0	12.4
Northern Territory	30.3	96.9	82.3
Australian Capital Territory	1.3	47.6	16.2
Australia	2.5	46.2	26.1

(source: Australian Institute of Criminology, May 2013)

When they were asked why the wall of tower blocks were to be built by Burgess Park but not by Dulwich Park, they answered "Dulwich is completely different". Yes,  Dulwich is completely different because it is full of very rich powerful people who would never allow their community to be bulldozed or their park to be destroyed like this

- Donnachadh McCarthy, Southwark News, Thursday 11 September 2014

Jessica Valenti on the actress Jennifer Lawrence, who reacted with 'absolutely justified anger' to the recent leaking of private images. There's also a eye-opening aside about the Disney Corporation and their terrible response to a similar situation that occurred several years ago, involving the actress Vanessa Hudgens.

'What one book do you wish that you had written?'

Beloved by Toni Morrison.

- Southwark council interview with Andrea Stuart, autumn 2014.


from the same piece: "Plantation life was a kind of intimate terrorism" (on the sugar slave trade in the Caribbean).

Grateful to Annabel (The Call Out podcast, with Henna) for giving me pause on my crass and wrong Talk like a pirate offerings below.

a straight consideration, mind you...

the policing/colonisation of language and what this affords bodies and their identities. What was it Hannah Black said about trauma? A stupid word for parts of yourself becoming inaccessible?

Tiyang pinten wonten kapal punika? ("How many men are on this ship?", Javanese)

Jangan lihat saya. Lihat lurus ke depan. Coba berlutut. Taruh tangan anda di belakang kepala! ("Don't look at me. Look forward. Kneel. Hands behind your head!", Bahasa)

Di mana senjata-senjata itu? ("Where are the weapons?", Malay)
- A straight consideration of Talk Like a Pirate Day

Enter RUMOUR, painted full of tongues

Rumour. Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?
I, from the orient to the drooping west,
Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold
The acts commenced on this ball of earth.
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
I speak of peace while covert enmity,
Under the smile of safety, wounds the world;
And who but Rumour, who but only I,
Make fearful musters and prepar'd defence,
Whiles the big year, swoln with some other grief,
Is thought with child by the stern tyrant war,
And no such matter? Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures,
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wav'ring multitude,
Can play upon it. But what need I thus
My well-known body to anatomise
Among my household? Why is Rumour here?
I run before King Harry's victory,
Who, in a bloody field by Shrewsbury,
Hath beaten down young Hotspur and his troops,
Quenching the flame of bold rebellion
Even with the rebels' blood. But what mean I
To speak so true at first? My office is
To noise abroad that Harry Monmouth fell
Under the wrath of noble Hotspur's sword,
And that the King before the Douglas' rage
Stoop'd his anointed head as low as death.
This have I rumour'd through the peasant towns
Between that royal field of Shrewsbury
And this worm-eaten hold of ragged stone,
Where Hotspur's father, old Northumberland,
Lies crafty-sick. The posts come tiring on,
And not a man of them brings other news
Than they have learnt of me. From Rumour's tongues
They bring smooth comforts false, worse than true wrongs.

Plenty of fine responses to the recent, woeful Economist slavery review. Will B. Mackintosh goes hard here.

Will has a interesting point.

'Why write a review that’s basically guaranteed to piss off the whole world and then waste it on quibbling over a relative detail?...And that’s why they don’t like Baptist’s book: it demonstrates unequivocally that modern capitalism was born in blood. Let me say that again: whatever else you might say about capitalism, it took on its characteristic modern forms of capital accumulation and labor “management” in the context of American slavery. For a group of journalists with a deep, largely unarticulated commitment to modern capitalism’s fundamental benevolence, this is an uncomfortable truth indeed.'

2008 archive piece from Vincent Munié concerning the CAR and "France's long hand"

What Do The Birders Know?

'Resistance'

(there's a great point about Bangladeshi garment workers in here too.)

Jayati Ghosh's latest for the Guardian, arguing that "Asia’s ‘success’ in reducing poverty uses a flawed system for measuring income and ignores food insecurity".

'BANGKOK, 3 September 2014 (IRIN) - Activists warn of a harmful regression in the World Bank's safeguard policies, claiming that proposed changes being considered this autumn could weaken the rights of indigenous people, and others in danger of displacement and abuse as a result of Bank-funded development projects.' here

Teju Cole's seven short stories about drones: here

(via JC.)

Jamilah King at Colorlines flags up a forthcoming HBO show about Brazilian sex workers.

Don't think HBO will get any joy from Latino Rebels, then. cough

re-up from last summer re: 'mysterious' Bronze Age Cretan language, Linear B

'The Celebrity Photo Hacker’s Message To All Women', by Jessica Goldstein

(via EWF)

on Limits to Growth

It seems unlikely that the quest for ever-increasing growth can continue unchecked to 2100 without causing serious negative effects – and those effects might come sooner than we think.

here

'finite planet'

Much has been said — and much more should follow — about the militarization of the police in American cities. The images coming out of Ferguson, MO these past weeks testify to the distribution of military-grade hardware, gear, guns, and vehicles to your everyday police officer.

Here I’d like to focus on just one small part of this distribution of military-grade equipment: the uniform.

here

[h/t: EWF]

28% of the market traders on the Rye Lane strip in Peckham, southeast London, speak four or more languages fluently (source: Dr Suzanne Hall, LSE).

'The high street is a space which includes those who are excluded from other spaces for economic/security reasons'.

more

---

July, 2013. 40 abortion clinics in Texas (population approximately 26 million people*).

By September, 2014. Six abortion clinics in Texas.

* not sure what counts as a person in border zones sometimes, though, granted. or, any zone.

and how many deer, or how many trees, i could not say.

(sorry, just have had this lodged in my head since it started. writing as a meat-eater, yes.)

@_jonb and I see the ways we treat animals as a resource, a “standing reserve” as Heidegger would say, informs our acceptance of capitalism
— Rank Tributes (@svejky) June 7, 2014

All bodies are sovereign.

January 2013 archiving: An amazing mea culpa from the IMF’s chief economist on austerity

June, 2011. ICTY to Ratko Mladic: 'Genocide, persecution, murder, extermination, deportation, forcible transfer, torture, rape and plunder.'

Canny youth in London gares

Europe is literally the creation of the third world. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen

- Fanon

Tiana Reid is everything [tumblr, columns at THE STATE].

Her recent dancehall mix is accompanied by this jewel. i hear it loud on cool tarmacadam and routed through hot metal in inner London.
Speaking of the four volumes of THE STATE so far, iv on Dubai.

---

Objects crystallise time, and demonstrate the work, as Caroline Osella might remind us.

yes

2011 archive re-up: DOUBLE MOVEMENT: THE RESURGENCE OF NEOLIBERALISM AND INEQUALITY

structure in the USA

(h/t: EWF)

(TY, EJ)

Jayati Ghosh archive on Unctad ("astute and progressive – so why don't developed countries like it?") here

Ness of Brodgar, Orkney, unearthed, considered once more, with feeling

Somali famine, 2011 - politics rules everything around you

Children, and Other People

mango

One from the 2009 normblog archives, A Climate of Fear by guest blogger Sean Coleman.

Decades of walled-off obscurantism and unquestioned power had managed to disguise the fact that the Irish Catholic Church had been running what was, effectively, an archipelago of brutal prison camps across the country

YOLLAND: Who's confused? Are the people confused?
OWEN: And we're standardising those names as accurately and as sensitively as we can.
YOLLAND: Something is being eroded.

there are at least four different ways of reaching a figure based on the methods of, respectively, the US Department of Energy, BP, The Oil and Gas Daily (Texas) and Middle East Economic Survey (Cyprus)

- Fred Halliday (2005)

Wet Uluru, from the Mick Hartley archives. Stunning

summer '12 fresh easy re-up NYT social determinants of health in Mississippi, Persian linkages ...

Cox doesn’t know oak trees, but she knows how to talk to people. She knows when to ask if someone cannot afford insulin, or is not taking insulin, or is not keeping the insulin cold, or cannot keep the insulin cold because there is no electricity or refrigerator. Not having health insurance is a huge problem in Mississippi, but it isn’t the only one

Bhakti Shringarpure riffs from Concerning Violence, a new documentary on Fanon, by Göran Hugo Olsson. Quoting David Macey

In a sense, it is almost absurd to criticise Fanon for his advocacy of violence. He did not need to advocate it. The ALN was fighting a war and armies are not normally called upon to justify their violence. By 1961, the violence was everywhere. It had even seeped into the unconscious.

A schoolteacher "somewhere in Algeria" set his pupils, aged between 10 and 14, the essay topic “What would you do it you were invisible?” They all said that they would steal arms and kill the French soldiers.

The children of Algeria dreamed of violence, and two of Fanon’s young patients in Blida acted out those dreams. Our prosperous societies do not have nightmarish dreams of massacres in Sétif or Philippeville or torture in their schools. Algeria had been having those nightmares for over a century.

Tokers, table football, cabbies, as many places. A day in Goma archived

"the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement"

(h/t RS)

Creating and Destroying the Universe in Twenty-Nine Nights
by David Shulman

Last spring - new genetic complexity discovered in mosquitoes

'Sex workers' rights are just workers' rights'

Guy Walks Into a Bar

from her archive: Samia Errazzouki responds to Chomsky on Western Sahara and the 'Arab Spring'

How warming impacts the Andes: one example

I think mistersloane (Jim Hollands) is superb here on District 9

Stanley Kauffmann, reply by Joan Didion

'If Philip Roth Hates Women, Why Does He Want To Have Sex With Them, Hmmm?'

On Smarm

Britain and empire: vessel of cruelty

"Short-term savings gained by drastic austerity measures should be weighed against their long-term costs".

Earlier this year, the New Scientist reported on a Greek austerity tragedy

(via the best fish.)

'Reorienting the discussion about sex work'

here

'Asked why he had not tried to leave, he said: "If we are caught, it is straight to the Palestine Branch. Anyone who goes in there does not come out."'

If, for example, you are an Aguaruna Indian in Peru, with a history of occasional revenge raiding stretching back the small handful of generations which comprise living memory (no Aguaruna can really know the extent to which such raiding was going on even a few generations ago, leave alone millennia), and if you have recently been pushed out of the forest interior into riverine villages by encroachment from oil exploration or missionaries, then your chances of being killed by your compatriots might even exceed those caught in Mexican drugs wars, Brazilian favelas, or Chicago’s South Side.

In such circumstances there would undoubtedly be much more homicide in Aguaruna-land than that faced by well-heeled American college professors, but also much less than that confronted by inmates in Soviet gulags, Nazi concentration camps, or those who took up arms against colonial rule in British Kenya, or apartheid South Africa.

If you find yourself born a boy in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in the center of the world’s richest nation, your average lifespan will be shorter than in any country in the world except for some African states and Afghanistan. If you escape being murdered, you may end up dead anyway, from diabetes, alcoholism, drug addiction, or similar. Such misery, not inevitable but likely, would not result from your own choices, but from those made by the state over the last couple of hundred years.

What does any of this really tell us about violence throughout human history? The fanciful assertion that nation states lessen it is unlikely to convince a Russian or Chinese dissident, or Tibetan.

oh

A hurricane's inequality

Caliban:
You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!

because you're a cunt

Just your typical randomised archive smear against the Met [linked to this], move along now

'It was while he in the custody area that Demetrio witnessed Harrington allegedly assault the 15-year-old, who was handcuffed. Demetrio told investigators he saw Harrington kick the young teenager in the back of the leg and, once he was on the floor, knee him in the back.

He said the alleged assault made an "echoing" sound and the teenager cried out: "I am on the floor now – you can't do anything to me. I am handcuffed and I am on the floor."

Demetrio said that medical staff were called to the scene after the teenager, whose identity is not known, began making "strange" breathing noises for several minutes.'

"a black cauldron where 300,000 Muslims will die...Europe to go fuck off and stay away until we have finished the job"

- Radovan Karadzic

Tyee archive - 'Harperland'