To articulate what is past does not mean to recognise 'how it really was'. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

- Walter Benjamin, 'On the Concept of History'

Sandeep Parmar recording at The Poetry Archive

Now Cod fishing
In the winter time
Is very cold work.
In a Crabboat
I have known times
When it has been blowing
And snowing and freezing
And all the time my Father
Has been rowing the Boat
Up to the lines.

John Craske

260 million passengers per year the slated end figure for the burgeoning Dubai World Central - Al Maktoum International Airport.

Mark Featherstone on Naomi Klein

link to the .pdf '"When Did the Swiss Get so Rich?" Comparing Living Standards in Switzerland and Europe, 1800-1913' by Roman Studer (Journal of European Economic History, 2008)

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