Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Links

Remembering David Buckel, the Pioneering Lawyer Who Championed L.G.B.T. Rights (New Yorker)
Wolfson recounted the conversation to me over the phone on Sunday, the day after Buckel died after apparently setting himself on fire in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. It was Wolfson who had been reading Buckel’s obituaries instead.
Minutes before Buckel killed himself, he sent an e-mail to the Times. “Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather,” the message said, according to the paper. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.” Buckel was sixty years old.

Fantastic news: Legendary Documentary Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s Movies Are Finally Available Online (Slate)
Wiseman’s movies, which have been shot in mental institutions and on military bases, in hospitals and public parks, comprise one of the most monumental bodies of work by a single artist, but despite being awarded a lifetime-achievement Oscar in 2016, he’s remained something of a cult figure. His movies, which run as long as six hours, defy the rules of traditional theatrical distribution, and apart from a single PBS broadcast apiece, they’ve rarely been available to a mass audience.
That all changed today. As of this afternoon, a whopping 40 of Wiseman’s movies—nearly everything he’s every directed—are available via the streaming service Kanopy, which can be accessed through many public libraries, universities, and other institutions of the kind Wiseman has devoted himself to exploring in his work.

Beyond the Map: Spikescapes and Wild Strawberries (Places Journal)
The maps of human and physical geography can seem overwhelming; the forces at work have become too unpredictable to be easily or neatly summarized. That’s why we need to attend to the hidden places, like the overlooked zone of anti-pedestrian cobbles and jagged paving that forms the spikescape of the modern city. And why odd little places — like a traffic island in my home city of Newcastle, cradled in the indifferent arms of grinding roads — have come to feel so important.

In William Blake’s Lambeth (Spitalfields Life)
If you wish to visit William Blake’s Lambeth, just turn left outside Waterloo Station, walk through the market in Lower Marsh, cross Westminster Bridge Rd and follow Carlisle Lane under the railway arches. Here beneath the main line into London was once the house and garden, where William & Catherine Blake were pleased to sit naked in their apple tree.
Yet in recent years, William Blake has returned to Lambeth. Within the railway arches leading off Carlisle Lane, a large gallery of mosaics based upon his designs has been installed, evoking his fiery visions in the place where he conjured them. Ten years work by hundreds of local people have resulted in dozens of finely-wrought mosaics bringing Blake’s images into the public realm, among the warehouses and factories where they may be discovered by the passerby, just as he might have wished.

Is it the End of the Road for London's Historic India Club? (The Wire)
“The property was home to the single most important organization campaigning for India’s independence in the 1940s,” William Gould, professor of Indian History at the University of Leeds, explains: “It was a meeting place for some of the country’s leading Indian intellectuals, publicists, writers, and politicians. It is therefore of huge significance and importance to both the South Asian communities in the UK and to some of the key moments of British decolonization in the mid 20th century.”

Monday in Parliament: MP David Lammy criticizing the Tory government's abhorrent treatment of "Windrush" generation residents who have lived in Britain since they were children.




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