pale blue dot

"From this distant vantage point the earth might not seem of any particular interest. but for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.

On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of - every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate or joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions ideologies and economic doctrines. 

Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer.

Every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician. Every superstar, every supreme leader. Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there, on the mode of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters, of a fraction, of a dot." 

Carl Sagan. Pale Blue Dot. 

Franz Kafka

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

Lucky Dates to Play Monopoly 2014

Some genius from Jonathan O'Brien - the man behind this. 
Read more here.

The first time you play Monopoly will be in the first week of January as part of a monthly board game night at a local bookshop. You will play with your partner, your best friend and their partner. After three trips around the board you will have lost or spent all of your money. You continue to drink while they play, you get too drunk and start to call them all ‘capitalist pigs.’ Everyone knows you don’t mean it but the insults bring an unfortunate edge to the atmosphere. You and your partner go home early, the next day you apologise for being so drunk. They say it’s ok, you want to believe them.

The first week of February sees you playing Monopoly with the same people at the same night. This time you make it around the board four times before being bankrupted, this time by your best friend’s partner. You laugh it off, not wanting to cause the same scene as in January but your previous actions quickly create a nervous atmosphere. You drink as they play and, although you don’t go to the same lengths as last time, a few unnecessary ‘quips’ bring down the tone of the evening.  You and your partner go home early, the next day you apologise for being so drunk. They say it’s ok, you want to believe them.

March. The monthly board game night. Your partner asks if you’re sure you want to go, wouldn’t you rather sit in and watch a few episodes of The Wire instead? You say that it’s fine, that it’s all under control. That you won’t let the evening be ruined just because you lost at Monopoly. They reluctantly agree. Your best friend, who you haven’t spoken to since last month, welcomes you warmly. They kiss your partner on the cheek. Did that kiss go on a bit too long? Is that level of eye contact indicative of something else? You push it to the back of your mind. You’re being ridiculous. You play Monopoly. This time, thanks to some particularly shrewd and clever play by your best friend, you’re bankrupt before you can even pass ‘Go’ for a third time. The evening pans out as before. They play, you drink. Nobody says anything that isn’t necessary for the game. You go home early, your partner stays behind. They arrive home late and don’t say a word as they get into bed.

In April you decide to invite your best friend and his partner over for dinner and, to put it to rest once and for all, another game of Monopoly. The dinner goes well, the evening becomes relaxed and happy. Nobody even thinks twice when you bring out the game and start to set it up as your partner cleans the table. Your friend helps as you arrange the pieces before offering to go through and give a hand doing the dishes. Once the board is ready you go through to the kitchen to tell the others only to find your partner and your friend kissing in the kitchen. They leap back suddenly, they apologise, they try to explain. You cannot think. You leave the house and go to stay with your parents.

May. You have successfully destroyed the Parker Brothers factory and are now sitting in a tree outside your once friend’s house. Your dog is barking. Your top hat is tattered and worn. You do not have a car. Your now ex is in the house. Your friend’s partner is also there. From your vantage point you can see that they’re playing Happy Families. You barge in and demand to play. Terrified, they deal the cards and, until the sirens come, you win hand after hand after hand after hand after hand.

And again...

Kate Tempest: Hopelessly Devoted 

Lonely Daze

Kate Tempest does it again.

secret books in eden

"But Tom got into a book, crawled and grovelled between the covers, tunneled in like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands."

- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

East of Eden

"Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a deep stretching yawn. It flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then - the glory - so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness and it sets each man separate from all other men. 

 I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea of God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.

 At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?"

John Steinbeck, East of Eden, pub. 1952

Ali Smith

“She looked round the room at all the books on all the shelves. A closed book on a shelf sat there quietly, not saying anything.”

There but for the

gardens

"The problem is, without community, no one feels responsible to anyone else."

this. this film. this film is important. it is also flawed - the people in it are flawed and the story starts off with a beautiful thing destroyed by a horrendous capitalist greed and selfishness that makes my blood boil. but it is an important story that needs to be told, and needs to be a lesson to us all in helping, respecting and encouraging each other to do good things and to work together to reap the rewards.

Eid

"The tractor was built during the Muslim month of Ramadan when the heat, hunger, and thirst make it impossible to do anything. Most Palestinians think Caterpillar tractors are death machines. I asked myself why they blamed this machine, when after all it is the person who renders the machine good or bad. I drew sketches of this tractor on large rocks and on paper. I may have seen one once or twice in my life, but really I remember seeing it on the internet. I thought carefully about how to build it correctly. I like these tractors, how they move, their size… This tractor is made from sawed iron pieces. I requested the iron scrap from somebody in my village, who told me I was crazy and could take the scraps. It was difficult to cut the iron as my tools were not good enough. I felt this tractor in my body and my soul."

Originally found on Bristol Palestine Film Festival

Dear Coal

This letter is taken from this site originally written by this person. Gold. 

banks

"I built it with my hands. Straightened old nails to put the sheathing on. Rafters are wired to the stringers with baling wire. It's mine. I built it. You bump it down - I'll be in the window with a rifle. You even come too close and I'll pot you like a rabbit."
"It's not me. There's nothing I can do. I'll lose my job if I don't do it. And look - suppose you kill me? They'll hang you, but long before you're hung there'll be a guy on the tractor, and he'll bump the house down. You're not killing the right guy."
 "That's so," The tenant said, "Who gave you orders? I'll go after him, He's the one to kill."
"You're wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told him, 'Clear those people or it's your job.'"
"Well, there's the president of the bank. There's a board of directors. I'll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank."
 The driver said, "Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were, 'Make the land show profit or we'll close you up.'"
"But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me."
"I don't know. Maybe there's nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn't men at all. Maybe, like you said, the property's doing it. Anyway I told you my orders."

"I got to figure," the tenant said. "We all got to figure. There's some way to stop this. It's not like lightening or earth quakes. We've got a bad thing made by men, and by God that's something we can change."

John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, Chapter five, 1939

history is a weapon

Today is the Queens big Jubilee party day.


And I don't want to talk about it.


I don't want to see another Union Jack rammed into my direct or periphery vision. I don't want to play any more. The whole unadulterated spectacle of manipulating subjects into believing they are civilians, masking harsh austerity measures with another royal escapade, dressing the event up in nationalism and patriotism and passing it off as what the people want/ need /can't live without. A big pretense to unite Benedict Andersons 'imagined community'; bringing together the sovereign with the modern nation state. Binding the state, the queen and the subject-come citizen in some kind of politically motivated forced capitalist marriage.


However, I will talk about what Jubilee really means. See point 4. 


ju·bi·lee n.

1.

a. A specially celebrated anniversary, especially a 50th anniversary.

b. The celebration of such an anniversary.

2. A season or an occasion of joyful celebration.

3. Jubilation; rejoicing.

4. often Jubilee Bible In the Hebrew Scriptures, a year of rest to be observed by the Israelites every 50th year, during which slaves were to be set free, alienated property restored to the former owners, and the lands left untilled.

5. often Jubilee Roman Catholic Church A year during which plenary indulgence may be obtained by the performance of certain pious acts.

So to celebrate I have been reading Howard Zinn's 'A Peoples History of the United States'. Sat here, with my eyes and ears firmly shut to the ringing imperialism of the royal family, I am reading horrific stories of massacre, of slavery, of racism. I am reading of the brutal and unrelenting acts of the 'pioneers' of the new world. Who, for Queen and country, transported Black African slaves from continent to continent, trading, abusing, branding, starving, suffocating and killing thousands upon thousands of human beings. 

"By 1800, 10 to 15 million blacks had been transported as slaves to the Americas, representing perhaps one-third of those originally seized in Africa. It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million human beings to death and slavery in those centuries we call the beginnings of modern Western civilization, at the hands of slave traders and plantation owners in Western Europe and America, the countries deemed the most advanced in the world."

There is a lot to be said about slavery. There is a lot left unsaid concerning slavery. Coming from a city in the UK that reaped a substantial percentage of it's wealth from the slave trade makes me question the big gap we have in our historical education. The main trade of sugar cane, tobacco, rum and cocoa were all products of the slave trade. But slavery and empire are sidelined at school for a tempered history of the United States of America, the development of medicine and punishment and World War 2. Colonisation had barely entered my vocabulary until I started university aged 21. History is a weapon that can be used for many a purpose. And often, that purpose is to shield truth from the many, hegemonically blurring the line between subject and citizen until the current situation is accepted as truth. Common sense. What else could it possibly be?


History is a Weapon. Read more about it.

International Women's Day

Today I have posted a barrage of amazing and wonderful posts and tweets and messages about some brilliant people and ideas that have helped emancipate women, inspire all and encourage change. In no specific order.


Andrew Gibson; swingset. Via my friend Nick.





Angela Davis and Yuri Kochiyama: Mountains that take wing. Via my friend Gav.





Feminists. Everywhere. Past and present. Via UK Feminista and London Feminist Network

Robin Hood Tax's wonderful posts on women in the financial sector.

"Happy International Women's Day. Marion is leading celebrations here in Sherwood. And a fact for the day: In the final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission of the US Treasury the words "she", "woman" or "her" do not appear once in its 662 pages. It is a book, like most historical tragedies, written about the follies and hubris of men."

Girls on bikes; How the Bicycle empowered Women. By Maria Popover @brainpicker

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.” ~ Susan B. Anthony, 1896

Nina Simone: I've Got Life

There is something i've got, nobody can take it away...

Ani Difranco: Fuel

Beneath the good and the kind and the stupid and the cruelThere's a fire that's just waiting for fuel 

 

ai wei wei

I have just finished a great little book: Ai Weiwei Speaks with Hans Ulrich Obrist. 


I want to write about it, but there is a milieu of things I could say about Ai weiwei. 
Mostly in regards to how the Chinese government have treated this 'dissident' earlier this year. But I will focus on this book as a window into the artist's mind. 


This little snippet of weiwei is fascinating. His personality is huge, the way he sees life is fluid and unique and he speaks with stark honesty. Especially in regards to China. 


weiwei's sunflower seeds was showing in the turbine hall of the Tate Modern when I started working there earlier this year. It is breathtaking. And the film that accompanies the installation is a beautiful story of how and why this piece came about. In fact, I almost liked it more than the tiny hand painted seeds themselves. 


I think the thing that makes weiwei so incredible is the way in which he sees the world. Art is an attitude, a way of thinking, or a way of life. His insights into the impact of the Chinese cultural revolution, his fathers experiences, his relationship with books and architecture and blogging are completely fascinating. 


"On the one hand I take art very seriously, but the production has never been so serious, and most of it is an ironic act. But anyhow, you need traces, you need people to be able to locate you, you have a responsibility to say what you have to say and to be wherever you should be. You're part of the misery and you can't make it more or less. You're still part of the whole fascinating condition here."


"And I have one regret: I feel sorry that I can't write well. That's the skill that I value the most. I think that, if I could write well, I'd give up my art for writing. For me, it is the most beautiful and effective way to illustrate my thinking"


Definitely worth a read. 

confiscated life

Extract by Don Delillo on Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo


What happens to the writer caught in the tide of round-the-clock surveillance, enforced isolation, detention without trial?


Think of a man alone in a room. This is the writer's classic condition, cruelly extended when the state locks the door to the room. Think of the writer in opposition, the man who writes against power, who writes against the coiled mechanism of the state and the entire apparatus of total assimilation.


It's the nature of language to pitch itself against the smothering oneness of the state. Words want to be free. Lui Xiaobo's crime is called "an incitement to subvert state power." This is an administrative term for the exercise of free speech - the very activity, Lui writes, that is the mother of truth.


Writers everywhere tend to feel a natural kinship, country to country, language to language. We write to be true to some urgency of self. We find identity in the lines of poetry we write, in the sentences and paragraphs of our novels and essays. We write to think ourselves into existence.








Sign the petition to free Lui Xiaobo here

sheikh jarrah

"Once you no longer have the luxury of ignorance,
 the feeling is that you have to take a stand"


- An Israeli mother who protests in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Jeruslaem, Sheikh Jarrah


If you make sure you do one thing today, you should watch these films. Incredible. 

chaplin

alice walker

This beautiful post was written by the wonderful Alice Walker, in the wake of the Museum of Children's Art, Oakland, refusing to show the work of Palestinian children.  (Following intense pressure from pro Israeli groups)


She writes:
"We can educate and increase the capacity for compassion among our children with this Art.  We can make something magical, even of the present disappointing dilemma. We can encourage ourselves, and our children, never to be afraid to feel. No one dies from compassion, is a mantra they might like.
   Empathy is a wave that need never be stopped.  If our children can catch this wave,  from the ocean of tears shed by Palestinian children, they might have a future in a more stable and saner world."


The exhibition is still rejected by the museum, but will be shown outside in the courtyard despite the museums refusal. 

ice and fire

"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination.

Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."

Eleanor Roosevelt