As Gawain in David Lowerys new film and David Copperfield in Armando Iannuccis movie before that, the actor is bending the arc of English literary tradition around him. Photo: Eric Zachanowich / A24 Films

I see legends, Gawain says to his uncle, King Arthur, as they look around a room full of aging heroes. Do not take your place among them idly, Queen Guinevere responds. Gawain, played by Dev Patel, takes her words to heart and sets off on a quest the kind of quest that places Patel at the center of an illustrious interpretation of famous English literature. The kind of quest that has, historically, placed white performers at its center.

In 2020, Patel was set to have a banner year of playing customarily white characters. Both David Lowerys The Green Knight and Armando Iannuccis The Personal History of David Copperfield were scheduled to premiere with Patel in the lead roles. Only the latter movie did, however, months before the pulpy, ahistorical Netflix series Bridgerton, these two projects jointly kicking off renewed discussions about the obvious opportunities and less-obvious pitfalls that come with fully color-blind casting as well as color-conscious casting.

By the time of The Green Knights 2021 release, weve made it far enough along in the debate to understand a few basic downsides to Hollywoods takes on inclusive-casting strategies. On one hand, color-blind casting or casting with no professed intention of considering an actors identity, la The Great runs the risk of rendering race and ethnicity neutral, of turning identity into incidental window dressing. It can ignore the history of the notion that the best person should be cast for the part, which, up until recently, almost always meant a white person taking on roles written for their complexion along with everyone elses. Laurence Olivier as Othello, Mickey Rooney as a Japanese landlord, Charlton Heston as a Mexican prosecutor, John Wayne as Genghis Khan.

On the other hand, color-conscious casting or considering an actors identity while casting has the capacity to overdetermine race and ethnicity, particularly when a director/writer provides little substance in the final product to back it up. Take Tim Burtons casting of Billy Dee Williams as the traditionally white Harvey Dent in 1989s Batman. Burton specifically chose Williams with the hope of setting up a Black Two-Face in a future Batman film. Valiant as that idea was, Burtons interest in the black/white thing, as he put it in the films DVD commentary, turned race into a tool to further his plot rather than a lived experience for Williamss character. Moreover, in 1992s Batman Returns, Burton cast Tommy Lee Jonesin the role of Two-Face instead of Williams.

And then there is the extremely unwieldy middle ground between color-blind and color-conscious casting, wherein the practice of scrutinizing someones skin and background for an artistic endeavor is not obviously conscious or considerate. There is Hamilton, subversive to some, who hail the musical for taking race onstage and its attendant audience expectations and flipping them on their head, and pandering to others, who shudder at the guilt-free patriotism afforded to audiences watching Black and brown people playing idealized slave owners. There is Bridgerton, seemingly a color-blind show until a late-stage expositional dump that offers an eye rollinducing logic for why there are so many Black aristocrats in Regency era Britain. The Green Knight, as bold and exciting as it is, seems initially to fall within this middle ground.

Here, the decision to cast Patel as Gawain is intriguing, foremost, for what he brings to the character. Patel has a reputation for imbuing roles with boyish charm, a natural sense of innocence, and pure curiosity. His turns on the British show Skins and in the star-making Slumdog Millionaire lean heavily on these qualities, though both admittedly have a lurid interest in how a young, vulnerable Indian boy moves through the world. The Green Knight is something of a natural evolution for Patel, who plays a young man on the cusp of knighthood in a medieval coming-of-age allegory. Hes naive, perhaps too trusting, and very much driven by his id, as a handful of regretful semen illustrates. Patel plays Gawain like a trust-fund kid whose mother still washes his chainmail, whos on the precipice of something resembling adulthood more than heroism. After agreeing to play a curious Christmas game with the titular Green Knight, Gawain must pay for the fame newly granted him, and Patels face beautifully milks every second onscreen as he rides, hikes, crawls, and trips toward his destiny.

The Middle English poem upon which The Green Knight is based makes no explicit reference to the skin colors of its characters, and so, despite hundreds of years of assumed knowledge about who could convincingly take up the role of Arthurian heroes like Sir Gawain, there is plausible deniability behind the casting of Patel. Speaking to Vanity Fair about the traditionally very white story, director David Lowery said he was aware of the effect of his cast on the story, though he did not change his script once Patel signed on. When you introduce an element like this, are there any accidental subtexts? Im very sensitive to that, he said, and imagine what people might think. Not the trolls on the internet who were just going to complain; they can all go to hell. But just making sure that were not giving a message that we werent intending to give.

In The Green Knight, as well as in Armando Iannuccis The Personal History of David Copperfield, the lack of distinction between character played by an actor of color and character of color is key to the subtext, because, like many instances of color-blind or color-conscious casting before them, the narrative place of race isnt straightforward in either. Patels idealistic, scrappy, melancholic performance as Copperfield is supported by a host of British actors who were cast blindly with gleeful abandon. The likes of Tilda Swinton, Benedict Wong, Aneurin Barnard, and Rosalind Eleazar play characters related to, married to, and working with one another, all without any narrative contrivance. White Welsh actress Morfydd Clark (who most recently appeared in Saint Maud) plays Copperfields mother. Meanwhile, Nigerian British actress Nikki Amuka-Bird plays the mother of white Welsh actor Barnard. It presents a fictionalized historical Britain populated with anachronistic racial and class diversity, and thus a Britain that features no race, or at least no visible racism, at all.

In The Green Knight, there is more implicit racial math happening. British Indian actress Sarita Choudhury plays the British Indian Gawains mother (and King Arthurs sister). Gawains sisters in the film were consciously cast as a result; they are played by Nita Mishra, Tara McDonagh, and Atheena Frizzell. All of this, however, is similarly incidental to the films plot. Beyond the linear casting of Gawains immediate family, the film doesnt try to draw your attention to their race in relation to King Arthur (played by white English actor Sean Harris) and his knights, or anyone, for that matter. To be fair, that absence can be refreshing; rather than the didactic, corporate-mandated representation of, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there is something to the simple pleasure of watching a wide array of talented bodies and faces in a conventional period film.

But Patel, who received an Oscar nomination for his turn as the Indian-born Australian Saroo Brierley in the 2016 Australian bio-drama Lion, occupies a unique space in this conversation. Hes a prominent, young, undeniably hot actor of color who comes from a specific ethnic and racial cross section of the British empire born to Indian parents who were themselves born in the former British colony of Nairobi and whose two latest films adapt British history and lore for new audiences. His opinion on how his identity might factor into these roles has been somewhat vague. Around the release of Copperfield, Patel told Indiewire, What you do as an actor is, you want to be able to explore. The very nature of our job is to be able to step into different skins and be other people. Indeed, stepping into different skins is part of the job, but deciding which skin is off limits is where the trouble lurks. Patel seems to be growing tired of the topic. In a more recent New York Times profile, he said, All this talk of representation and Im here on top of a horse in chain mail, in the freezing cold, hoping I dont get diarrhea. His point gestures to the real issue: Its not on artists of color, specifically dark-skinned artists, to mark out territory for representation in their respective industries. Racism and colorism are problems generated by white, white-passing, and light-skinned people.

So where does The Green Knight stand in the timeline? Lowerys casting is inspired for giving Patel a role worthy of his talents, but it is hardly subversive and not every project that implements nontraditional casting needs to be. Lowerys film makes no indictments about British imperialism or historical conquest by way of its lead character which, as the director has stated, was never the intention of his story. Instead, Lowerys story is specific in its intentions as a meditation on fantasy, on myth, and on authorship of tall tales. Gawains journey is a test of self, a story that burrows deep inside Patels character, dissociated as he is from the epic world around him. More than anything, The Green Knight makes the case for imagination. Its Patel, playing a figure who in a later act of the movie ages from distressed and unemployed to hardened and burnt out in the matter of minutes, who handily makes the case for his credibility in the role.

The problem is that some audience members see any diversity as an antagonistic statement. (Take the backlash against the casting of Noma Dumezweni, a British-South African actress, as Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and The Cursed Child.) Speaking to Indiewire last year about traditional casting strategies, Iannucci mused, It cant be the case that a whole group of amazing actors are prevented from having lead roles, because the whole point of making these films now is because we feel the story is relevant, and we should show that its relevant by how we go about making it. Relevance may not be the exact concept he was stretching for, but Iannucci stresses the most fundamental point in favor of breaking free of rigidity and faithfulness to a text by way of color-conscious casting: What does it give the actor, rather than the story, space to accomplish?

When Patel was asked in the same Indiewire interview if he would consider another famous British role, that of the historically white James Bond, he answered clearly: I also dont want to be gifted a role, just because of the tokenistic nature of me being a garnish Lets sprinkle some diversity into this! That doesnt make me feel good either. If it works for the story, and I feel like I can bring some truth out of this role or embody it well, then thats what it should come down to. With Patel at its center, The Green Knight still plays allegorically as a tale about courage, honor, and self-determination. But, more crucially, it allows Patel to bend the arc of English literary tradition around him and affords him the room to give his best performance to date.

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The Swashbuckling Fantasy of Dev Patel in The Green Knight - Vulture

We eat out of them. We use them as currency. We pick them out of the sand on a sunny summer day, and carry them home like treasures. We hold them up to our ears. But Cynthia Barnett is actually listening to them.

In "The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans," Florida author Cynthia Barnetttakes us on a global tour of archeology, anthropology and environmental science, by way of what she describes as "perhaps the most loved objects in nature."It's clear from Barnett's exhaustive research how our deep fondness for shells can and should be our way in to protecting them and ourselves, by extension from climate change, from overfishing, from our reckless relationship with our planet. Yet this not a scolding book; it's an awestruck travelogue and appreciation of something beautiful.

I read this wise, often funny book over my own recentvacation. Iwas on Cape Cod, stayingat a spotwhere the beaches and the souvenir shops and the restaurants were awash in shells and shell imagery. With each page, Barnett's meticulous insights soon had me marveling with new appreciation if not full blown conchylomania (shell collecting madness). I spoke to Barnett recently about her work, conservation,and why shells make great fact-checkers. As always, our interview has been condensed and edited for print.

Your book has so much humor, and such a sense of marvel and delight. It was infused with a light touch aboutcomplicated things.

That is a really tough balance to strike. You're trying to write about climate change and bring people into the stories of what's happening to the sea and its life and to the earth. But I think it's important to draw people with laughter, and just remember the joy of life that animals themselves exude.

You remind me of the line where you talkabout having empathy for these "soft, vulnerable animals." You spent six years in this world. What was it that drew you to taking on such a huge topic?

In some ways it's such a tiny topic. I also teach science journalism and environmental journalism, and one thing we always talk about to young people is how to take a really small thing to tell a big story.

The way this started was not something I had been thinking about for a long time, by any means. I had been invited to a small seashell museum on Sanibel Island to give a talk about a previous book. I was having dinner with the director after the talk and I learned that they had surveyed visitors to find out how much visitors already knew about seashells.

These are mostly tourists visiting Florida with their children. The survey had revealed that 90% of visitors to this museum didn't know that a seashell was made by a living animal. This includes children, but most of the visitors thought that they were some kind of a rock or a stone. I was just so moved by that. I was disturbed by that. I kind of couldn't stop thinking about it. I had wanted to write next about the oceans, because my previous books were about fresh water. Then I wrote a natural and cultural history of rain. Tor me, this is a really nice conclusion of the hydrologic cycle. But when I heard that statistic, that night, I couldn't stop thinking about it as I was falling asleep. I think by the time I fell asleep, I knew that I was going to write this book.

I did love seashells as a child, although I've never been in an obsessive collector. I think you either have the collecting gene or you don't. That's something that really hit me because I interviewed people over these years who are really obsessed collectors. But I find, like everybody, seashells extraordinarily beautiful.

I think they're perhaps the most loved object in nature, and a really collectible object. I came to think of them as really good ambassadors for what's happening to the ocean, and also the perfect metaphor, because we've loved seashells for their gorgeous exterior rather than the life inside. In just that way, we've loved the oceans as the beautiful backdrop of life. As a postcard, without really understanding what's happening beneath the waves or without understanding the oceans as the very source of life. I really was thinking of that broader audience of people and how to bring them into these stories of what's happening with climate change and what's happening with the seas.

I didn't know that shells are a profound window into our historical climate and environmental change. Can you explain what shells can tell us?

Mollusks use biomineralization, that is, chemicals and minerals in the surrounding environment, to build their shells. The carbon dioxide we send into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels has turned the sea water about 30% more acidic than it was at the start of the industrial era. Climate change in the ocean has begun to limit the carbonate that mollusks use to make their shells. Acidic waters are also boring into some shells, pitting or eroding them. Two big things are happening to shelled animals. One is that stress from ocean acidification is making it harder to build shells.

But secondly, there's the warming oceans, and this is something I'm not sure how well people understand. The oceans have protected us from so much warming already. They've absorbed some 90% of Earth's warming in the past century. That heat is transferred to the oceans and the animals to live in the ocean. Some parts of the oceans have already become too warm for marine mollusks. More recently, in the Pacific Northwest during that late June heat wave that we had, that heat dome killed some billion marine tidal animals, including mussels, clams and oysters. It's really all around us and all over the Earth.

How did you approach this book in terms of looking at it from the archeological side, the anthropological side? There are so many different aspects of the story of shells and our own relationship to them.

I thought the human side was really important. I approached it from the standpoint of humanity and archeology and our lives with shells. There's something fundamentally aesthetic for us about seashells, something that really pleases the brain. It turns out that that has been true since pre-humanity. You might remember the fossilized mussel shells at the Solo River in Indonesia at the site of Java Man. They had those geometric zigzags that are considered some of the oldest known art. But it also represents something more. It represents that early human cognition. I open the book with imagining a Neanderthal girl collecting seashells 100,000 years ago.

That was based on science, the science that archeologists know from the seashells that have been found in Neanderthal caves in Spain. What was important about those shells is that they helped scientists overturn these assumptions and poorly conceived science that Neanderthals were dimwitted brutes. Everywhere I went in the history and in the archeology, I found that shells were great fact-checkers, because they tell a story more accurately than the vanquishers who tend to write history.

That was true in every chapter of this book. That was really true in some of the colonial history that comes with the Tano people of the Caribbean. The only written records we have are what the Spanish wrote about the Tano, but their shells tell their story more accurately than those written records. That was true of the Calusa and the Cahokia. That's a beautiful thing in both the science and the humanities, that the seashells told the best stories, or I should say the most accurate stories.

As you point out, it's the people who had the closest relationships with the shells, who had the deeper understanding of the environment.

I loved the story of the Zuni. When we think about the history of science, we so often talk about the Greeks and the Romans and what they knew and how bright and prescient they were. But from the fossilized marine animals in what is now the American Southwest, the Zuni knew and believed that the sea had once covered the land and that these were living creatures that lived a very long time ago. It was all part of their cosmology.

I found all of that fascinating. That was the case in many different cultures. We're learning that's true in so many other ways now, such as with the wildfires that have been burning in the west and are becoming worse because of the warming world. Indigenous people had ways of managing fire that we have ignored that we're finally paying attention to. I think the same is true with marine conservation and how we live with the seas and our coastlines. Shells say a lot about all of those things.

There is a store in Provincetown that sells seashells. You go in watch people clustering around shells. You take that shell back home with you and it serves as this talisman, this object of beauty. But a shell is also food.

I had to make a conscious decision pretty early on that this book wasn't going to be about shellfish. At some point I decided to organize it around seashells that have been the most iconic to humanity. The first chapter is about those marine micro mollusks that came long ago before marine mollusks. I built the chapters around seashells that were iconic to us, but some of those are eating seashells, and those include the bay scallop, the giant clam and the queen conch.

So another thing I try to do in this book is I really try to be honest and humble and not preachy about my own life with shells and with the ocean. I grew up spear fishing with my father who also collected all different kinds of conchs to eat. When my kids were younger, I always took them scalloping. Through telling those stories, I am learning about the pressure on wild shellfish, including bay scallops. I hope that I am showing the reader that there are more sustainable ways to enjoy shellfish.

By the end of the book, I'm not eating wild scallops, but I'm still enjoying the Gulf of Mexico, and going to look at scallops with my mask and snorkel and taking lots of pictures. But I don't think I would ever eat another wild scallop having written this book. I do eat aqua-cultured shellfish.

I think the important thing is to help people understand that we're in this transition, and we can do this. We can do this like we've done other big things, like stopped killing plume birds in the early 20th century. Our ethics change over time and our ethical relationships with animals change over time. This is an example of that. It's an evolution that we're experiencing. There are some really great aquaculture projects going on with shellfish that are very promising all over the world, that also represent part of the solution for conserving the oceans and for helping us adapt to climate change. My hope is that seashells help draw a broader audience to some of those really deep and important stories and those solutions.

This book makes a case of contextualizing that shells are also animals. Our relationship with them is as objects and objects desire, but they are also, as you put it, these very vulnerable living creatures.

It's so interesting, the money we spend to conserve say, sea turtles and pandas. I do think it has a lot to do with their relatability and the fact that they look at us with those big eyes that look almost human. There are these extraordinary animals in the oceans and also on the land that are equally important to ecosystems and to the earth. Marine mollusks are among those. And they do have fabulous eyes, but just sometimes they're ontentacles.

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and author of "A Series of Catastrophes & Miracles."

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Cynthia Barnett is listening to seashells and what they're prophesying doesn't bode well - Salon

"Woodstock '99: Peace, Love, and Rage" on HBO Max, directed by Garret Price, offers a thorough account outside context and all of pop culture's biggest trainwreck of the 20th century.

Everyone remembers the fires. Credit: courtesy of hbo

Content Warning: Woodstock '99: Peace, Love, and Rage features explicit scenes and descriptions of sexual assault.

Everyone remembers the fires. But do you know the story of how they happened?

Woodstock '99: Peace, Love, and Rage on HBO Max is a documentary about a music festival, but it is definitively not a music documentary. The disastrous mass gathering in central New York may have featured a genre-spanning cross-section of the top MTV artists of the moment, but the violent and filthy reality on the ground is the real focus for director Garret Price.

Threading together heaps of archival footage with new interviews from artists, attendees, and notably the event's two prominent masterminds, Peace, Love, and Rage reflects on a particular moment in history. But it goes further, too. Price's examination amounts to a searing indictment of the latent anger in U.S. society, particularly among white men, that was just starting to boil over as the 20th century came to a close.

The documentary necessarily strays far beyond the boundaries of the decommissioned military base in Rome, New York, where Woodstock '99 unfolded. We visit the White House and the U.S. Capitol. We gaze out over Times Square from the vantage of MTV's Total Request Live studio. We even spend a little time in Columbine.

That context is crucial to understanding how Woodstock '99 turned into a mud-and-shit-spattered riot that ultimately had to be defused by law enforcement. The documentary even takes some time to linger on that police response, as a crowd of predominantly white attendees including sexual assaulters and other criminal mischief-makers was peacefully disbanded.

The movie aims for the heavy lift, is what I'm saying. Price and his crew aren't content to offer a straight recounting of a single, violent weekend. The argument is that it's impossible to understand how Woodstock '99 fell apart without looking at everything from the evolution of pop music and its audience to the widespread and multifaceted anxiety surrounding "Y2K" fears.

The angry rhetoric and violence spurred from the stage by artists like Kid Rock or Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst, for example, speaks directly to what was a changing face of popular music in 1999. The progressive politics and boundary-breaking performers of the too-brief grunge era exemplified by Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and a contrite Beastie Boys quickly gave way to anger-fueled nu metal, with rockers like Durst and Rock weaving homogenized gangsta rap, and no small amount of cultural appropriation, into their work.

While Woodstock '99 crossed through multiple genres in its lineup, the headlining acts were primarily white, male rock stars who sold anger to an audience that craved it. When they took the stage, that anger manifested in the crowd's behavior. But of course, it's the promoters who planned the events and curated this lineup who own the original sin of Woodstock '99, and Peace, Love, and Rage doesn't let them off the hook in the slightest.

Michael Lang, a co-founder of the original festival who is described at one point as the "Willy Wonka" of Woodstock '99, is the idealistic half of the promoter duo that takes center stage in this documentary. His ill-conceived idea to recreate Woodstock for a new generation failed to account for what that generation actually looked and acted like.

If the Woodstock of 1969 was a reflection of the hippie ideals of universal peace and love, the Woodstock of 1999 mirrored a much darker moment. With the exception of a few seemingly token female performers and socially conscious rappers, the cross-section of artists assembled for the '99 festival channeled the anger and fear of a (again, importantly: predominantly white) generation that had lots of pent-up aggression and no strong devotion to fight for a particular cause.

The real villain of Peace, Love, and Anger, however, is Lang's co-promoter, John Scher. As the more grounded half of the pair, it was Scher who led the way, speaking to the press and speaking for the festival in 1999. At multiple points, the documentary shows us a belligerent and combative Scher talking down to journalists as they raise tough but fair questions about the state of the festival.

At first, Scher and Lang come off as just one administrative piece of the disaster that was Woodstock '99. But as the documentary unfolds, we get a clearer picture of the two men. Scher in particular is quick to blame anyone and anything other than the top-level festival planning for Woodstock '99's failures.

In Scher's mind, Durst owns responsibility for setting off violence and riotous behavior. It's MTV that owns responsibility for negative perceptions of what happened during that July 1999 weekend in central New York. Of Kurt Loder, the face of MTV News back then, Scher actually has the gall to say: "He just wasn't on the team." In Scher's mind, Woodstock '99 was a messaging failure wrought by the press, misbehaving rock stars, and "a bunch of knuckleheads" in the crowd.

Never mind the overflowing portable toilets, the dismal state of the festival's cleaning facilities, and the grossly overpriced basic necessities, most infamously illustrated by the festival's $4 asking price for bottled water during a brutally hot and humid weekend. And never mind, too, the widespread accounts many captured right on camera of sexual assault.

For any outside factors that fed the trainwreck called Woodstock '99, there's no denying that the festival was badly mismanaged and set up to fail. Credit:

Everything you really need to know about Scher is encapsulated in his take on that last point specifically: "I am critical of the hundreds of woman that were walking around with no clothes on and expecting not to be touched. They shouldn't have been touched. And I condemn it. But, you know, I think that women that were running around naked are at least partially to blame for that."

I shouted angrily at my screen when Scher just comes out and says that in the late stages of Peace, Love, and Rage. This isn't some archival interview conducted in the weeks after the festival came crashing apart, not that this kind of take would've been any more acceptable back then.

Scher knowingly sat down for a 21st-century interview and said, with seemingly zero awareness of how stupid and regressive he sounded, that the women who showed up to enjoy the festival in their own way own the blame for the way men treated them. It feels like a line you'd hear from the latest perp on any given flavor of CSI series. But Scher said it, and we have to deal with that reality.

Peace, Love, and Rage is a superb accounting of a terrible event and the context that surrounded and fueled it. It doesn't let a single person, movement, or cultural shift off the hook in laying out the failures that led to Woodstock '99. The lasting takeaway is, as it should be, that Woodstock, the brand, is best relegated to the dustbin of history at this point. The people who wield its central vision don't really understand the modern world, and they're not equipped to entertain a wide audience.

It goes back to those fires. We all remember seeing images in the news of towering bonfires, stretching up into the night sky as a horde of shorts-and-tank-top-clad white men milled around to feed the curling flames. But we never really talk about what ignited the conflagration.

It was candles. Candles distributed by a nonprofit group focused on gun control. Their well-intentioned effort was to have festival attendees stage a candlelight vigil honoring Columbine victims. But festival attendees found other uses for those candles, and so the east stage burned.

It's impossible to ignore the parallel in that irony to Lang and Scher's efforts. While neither promoter comes out of the documentary looking great, it's also clear that they did go into this thing with the best of intentions. The promoters wanted to put on a show that could potentially recapture what Lang saw as the magic of the 1969 festival. But their unfamiliarity with modern pop culture and inability to meet the moment spelled their undoing in the end.

Woodstock '99: Peace, Love, and Rage is now streaming on HBO Max.

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There are so many forms of annihilation, claims Rebecca Solnit in her finely crafted memoir titled Recollections of My Non-Existence. The book pivots strongly on one form of annihilation which Solnit navigates throughout her life the omnipresent and imminent possibility of gender violence. However, other claimants to annihilation politics are not far behind, whether these be questions of racial or class injustice, the suffering visited on indigenous peoples and generic forms of violence demonstrated vis--vis specific constituencies.

Solnit argues that the non-acknowledgment of peoples is often a prelude to an accompanying violence. It is a violence that does not harbour any guilt and takes away what rightfully is somebody elses. The United States, for instance, has sought to obscure its original violence directed against the native Americans to whom the land belonged. These examples of violence abound, as is evident from illustrations across the world. However, pervasiveness does not absolve a deep and fundamental wrongness of these acts.

An arsenal of erasure tactics is often deployed by the powerful to keep the voices of the marginalised out of sight. However, the truth is that these tactics are not always successful. Cracks show, voices break through these cracks and a single conscious voice, as Solnit demonstrates, blends with a burgeoning collective seeking a just recompense. Politics is, after all, the art of the possible.

Rebecca Solnit Recollections of My Non-Existence Granta Books, 2021

There is much that is going on in Solnits memoir. First, there is an incessant quest for patterns. Making sense of a complex world, Solnit has devised a strategy of reading sharply and discerning oftentimes the unsaid in conversations, both oral and written. She is patient and in the best traditions of journalism goes to great lengths to get her story right.

Second, she resides in awkwardness but finds an equilibrium in it. Solnit is keenly aware of the deep marks her childhood (poverty, a violent father and helpless mother) left. However, she makes coming from the margins in gender terms (notwithstanding her white privilege which she honestly concedes) her real strength. It offers her a perspective of her own where she can call out time and again the effacement of women in everyday life. Her struggles to publish her work, to find her voice and make it heard, to demonstrate professional rigour in a world of judgmental men and in her own way leave something of a legacy comes through with candour in this narrative. Solnit recognises that some stories set us free, or at least offer the promise of partial if not complete redemption.

Third, there can scarcely be a better teacher than Solnit when it comes to dissecting the forging of political consciousness. From accounts of her own political awakening through her brothers anti-nuclear activism in the Nevada desert to joining forces with feminist struggles over time while finding her own voice, Solnit documents her political evolution. None of this comes easy. She ponders, searches and finds kindred souls, sees the value of engaging those who do not share her view and compels us like she does herself to squarely contend with our phantom and real fears.

Also read: How I Became a Tree is an Ode to All That is Neglected

Fourth, Solnit opens the reader up to the many worlds of mansplaining. She recounts a story in which a man is explaining a book to Solnit herself, unaware that she is the author. There are several other instances in which being male often presumes the privilege of pronouncing from a higher pedestal. The lack of knowledge in the relevant domains has never detracted these men. Women are invariably at the receiving end of this male gaze and smugness. However, women do not find it easy to ignore or dismiss these claims even though they know that these are untenable. It took decades virtually for Solnit herself to discover recurring patterns here and subsequently call the bluff whenever it showed its unpleasant visage.

Fifth, this memoir is not only about fears but also about things Solnit loves. Reading, language, archives and researching are all part of this heady mix. Each of these activities require careful attention but there is the excitement which Solnit conveys whenever she finds herself amid any of these activities. She is not afraid to take down by a notch or two the gurus of counterculture the Beat generation for almost entirely glossing over the gender question in their quest for creative freedom. There are many more well-known accomplished male figures in her narrative who for all their genius were oblivious to the dimension of gender equality. All of this makes for riveting reading and instructive learning.

Also read: Ian Patel Essays a Relentless Timeline of Britains Struggle to Keep Itself White

Finally, this is also a plea for at least one kind of robust activism political writing. Solnit is keenly aware of botched ideas and assembles together a set of new possibilities in the most unsuspected corners of our histories. There is an irrepressible optimist in Solnit who has a penchant for identifying the many barriers that separate us. She reminds us of our obligation to work towards their obliteration but in pragmatic terms incrementally. At least two powerful drives motivate her to write politically to record her deep resentment of some trajectories in politics and second to fight and argue for what she values as sacrosanct directing all her finite energy to secure their well-being.

I can see many women (and some men) wishing that they encountered this book earlier in their life. It is a book we must share liberally with our young across genders. Solnits brilliance of mind and clarity of prose cannot but shake us all out of our stupor even if only temporarily. The challenge is to sustain this critique and politically create the conditions for transformation along the lines suggested. Quite evidently, gender, race, class equality and a casteless society are monumentally incomplete projects in circa 2021 notwithstanding some meaningful strides in the preceding twentieth century. A lot of work remains to be accomplished and Solnit offers us key insights on getting going and inching towards desirable political metamorphosis. Are we listening?

Siddharth Mallavarapu is professor of International Relations and Governance Studies at Shiv Nadar University. Views are personal.

Originally posted here:
The Importance of Rebecca Solnit - The Wire

I know absolutely nothing about the McCanns who once lived in the small red-brick cottage on the grounds of the Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin in Dublin, but I cant help resenting them.

The near derelict old house in Glasnevin which has come perilously close to collapse carries their name now McCanns Cottage its called, at least by locals and the gardeners who tend to the flowers that grow all around it. But it should have a different name, it should have my name.

The house currently being saved from ruin by the Office of Public Works was built for a Pope William in the middle of the 19th century. Popes were born there, they were reared there. And they were carried out through its wooden green door in coffins sometimes adult-sized ones but far more frequently in smaller boxes.

William Pope is buried a few feet from the gardens where he lived and worked and from the house built for him. He lies over the wall in Glasnevin Cemetery.

He bought a plot there in the early 1860s for his daughter, Margaret. She was just three when she died shortly before Christmas 1861. Her brother Patrick followed her into that grave three days later. He was one.

Five years on Williams son John died at the same age as his daughter Elizabeth Pope died four years later at just a week old. The Popes buried in the plot by the Botanic Gardens from the 1860s on were taken by typhoid and bronchitis and congestion of the lungs and a weak action of the heart.

William passed away there in 1915, at the age of 81, having buried most of his children out of that house. I mean no disrespect to the McCanns, whoever they are, but they got lucky and if the cottage being restored today was to be called after anyone it should have been called after the Popes of the Botanic Gardens.

My grandfather Arthur was one of the fortunate Popes. He lived and so did his father Paddy.

Arthur was born in the house as the 20th century dawned and it was his home until he married in the 1920s. It might have remained his home until he died in 1966 but for a questionable decision made for him by his dad.

Arthurs first child, my aunt Betty, briefly lived in the cottage which looks like a tiny bungalow from the front but extends to three floors of very modestly proportioned rooms at the back as a toddler.

She stayed there as she she waited for her mother Greta to come home from hospital with my father. And it was to that small cottage that my father christened William after his great grandfather but called Billy was brought as a newborn in the autumn of 1932.

We believe, from our books that there were three Popes employed here over 93 years, although I know that Pope family tradition has it, there is a fourth generation, the director of the Botanic Gardens, Matthew Jebb, tells me as he takes me on a walk through the gardens in the full bloom of summer.

But its probably true . . . So it must have stretched well over a century.

I dont think theres very many people in the country have such a direct line of descendancy to something so special, explains Tricia Kearns, my first cousin, and the unofficial Pope family historian.

It all started with Patrick Pope.

He left his Waterford home as a young man in the early part of the 19th century and found temporary work as a labourer in the Botanic Gardens. He left for a spell before getting apermanent job there.

He lived locally and his son, William, obviously, would have been in and out of the gardens with his father and probably learning by his side. And he then became a gardener himself, Kearns says.

William climbed the ranks, becoming a foreman and getting a house.

And his son, Patrick Joseph (also known as Paddy) grew up in that house and would have been learning at his fathers side and took over as a foreman gardener in the glass houses when his father retired. His son was Arthur, our grandfather and he grew up here.

Paddy Pope retired in 1934, three years after Betty Tricias mother was born. She is the oldest surviving branch of the Pope family tree with a direct link to the Botanic Gardens. She turns 90 this month and recalls time spent in the gardens as a child.

My father having been reared here loved coming up on a Sunday. Hed walk around the garden and talk about the trees and the birds.

More than a decade separates Betty and her youngest sister Ann but the younger sisters earliest memories are also of the gardens.

My first memories were me walking with my father here on a Sunday morning after mass. Hed bring me for a walk and hed tell me things he did as a child, he used to get into trouble swimming in the Tolka and then sometimes theyd go into the glass houses and eat things they shouldnt have been eating, rare, precious things.

So on the one hand, you have Popes caring for and cultivating new flowers and making the gardens majestic and then on the other hand, you have Popes eating them.

Morto for me grandda.

Arthurs father Paddy loved the chrysanthemums and would get up out of his bed in the night if he thought there was frost coming to protect his plants, Betty tells me.

There was one plant Paddy might have protected more than most, the one that carried his name.

His father William had been given the job of cultivating an insect-eating sarracenia from seed and, against all the odds, and without so much as a page of a book to refer to, had grown it to full bloom. So delighted was the Botanic Gardens then director David Moore that he brought his foreman to Kew Gardens in London and gave the new plant the Pope name he called it Sarracenia Popei.

Apparently it was very unusual for an ordinary person, a foreman, to have a plant named after him, Betty says.

Todays director Matthew Jebb agrees and as he takes me to meet my ancestral plant, a hybrid between two wild species from North America. He explains the honour that would normally be restricted to people like David and Frederick Moore, who were running the organisation, the lowly gardeners, so to speak, were often in the background. They perhaps werent seen or recognised but it was very obvious David Moore recognised William Popes skill at not only growing these plants, but breeding them as well. It was something that you were creating that no one else had. So this one being named after William Pope would have been a tremendous honour.

Jebb says the Popes would also have cultivated a lot of plants, and assisted with material that would have been sent to Charles Darwin although Moore would have been an ardent creationist and would have regarded this idea of the origin of species being based upon natural selection as something to be very, very wary of.

The plant world suggested Moore was wrong about the living worlds roots, Jebb says.

Evolution works by the number of rejects, it is only picking out the best and most thrilling things to survive. This is brutal, brutal evolution and to be successful, youve got to be easy to grow. Youve got to be spectacular in appearance. And youve got to be fixed, you cant start varying through time your offspring have to be more or less identical to yourself.

The heavy wrought iron gates of the National Botanical Gardens first swung open in 1795 after the Royal Dublin Society decided the Empires second city needed a show garden to call its own.

While today its seen as a pleasant place to while away an afternoon surrounded by flowers and plant, its function in the early days was more utilitarian than aesthetic.

It was there to support industry and agriculture and give landowners and their labourers a practical education. A hay garden, a cattle garden and a vegetable patch were among the attractions. But then, in the 1830s when coincidentally, it should be said the Popes arrived, more exotic plants started to make their presence felt.

It wasnt the arrival of Moore or the Popes but the expansion of the British empire that caused the shift. Adventurers endured unimaginable hardships across Africa, Asia, South America and Australia to find new plants to ship back to Kew Gardens in London and its sister site in Dublin.

But the dual functions did not end. Research was crucial to the Botanic Gardens, never more so than in the 1840s when Moore and his gardeners took centre stage and could have saved many hundreds of thousands of Irish people if not millions from horrendous deaths.

The Gardens visionary director detected potato blight at Glasnevin on August 20th, 1845 and almost immediately recognised it as a sign of calamity.

Moore was already endlessly fascinated with orchids and insectivorous plants and, according to Jebb, was studying how a tiny orchid seed was dependent upon a fungus actually attacking it. As soon as the first potato blight was found in Ireland, less than a week after it had been detected in the Isle of Wight, the first place to be hit, he started investigating. He quickly deduced it was a fungus, Jebb says.

But others were not so in tune with the ways of plants.

The powers-that-be in the Royal Dublin Society said to him, its electrical, its got to be electrical, its to do with electrical storms that are prevalent at the moment.

So rather than allowing him to treat fungus-caused blight in the first days of the famine they had him set up all these elaborate copper wires over the potato crops he was growing here, Jebb says. He said, No, no, this will be a fungus thats causing this.

Moore knew a combination of copper sulphate and lime was used to treat similar diseases in Bordeauxs vineyards.

Theres a certain tragedy in it, Jebb says while acknowledging that a faster acceptance of Moores theories would not have solved the incredible crisis that unfolded at the time, it would have at least been a faster step on the road out of the crisis.

To have actually organised the spraying of the crops on that sort of scale in that particular year [would have been a huge task] because it wasnt as though it crept up on and over several years, it was sudden, and irrevocable, and it happened in just a couple of weeks.

The Popes' role in the fight against famine is part of family folklore, and a print of the Sarracenia Popei hangs in virtually all the family houses, but the familys link to the Botanic Gardens eventually ran out of steam even though, as Betty explains, her father would have been keen to follow his father into the Gardens.

Paddy Pope wanted all the sons to go into different forms of electricity. One was in the ESB, another worked on the railways and Arthur worked in the Customs house, she says.

Did Arthur Pope ever feel like he missed out on something by becoming an electrician? Ann reckons he did.

He had this creative side that he didnt let loose until his older years when he really began to push himself, you know, in the way of gardening.

While for many people the Gardens is a lovely place to go for a stroll, Jebb stresses that it still has a much more important function which he explains by way of a question.

Who is going to feed our great grandchildren? Will it be clever lawyers or accountants? No, it will be plant scientists. It will be agronomists, people who know about the growing of plants, diversifying new crops, knowing how to get the best yield from land. This is the most fundamental question that faces humanity at any time. You think that money makes the world go round, but actually, its the fullness of our harvests. Its the harvest that is absolutely fundamental to humanitys life on this globe.

If we can make sure that five or six children a year come through those gates, and become inspired to become plant scientists of any sort, whether thats in horticulture or the naming of plants, all of that will make a huge difference to not just Irish society, but to thesustainability and longevity of the globe.

All of the gardeners and staff I speak to as we weave our way through the Gardens share Jebbs love of the place and his passion for knowledge, although many have taken a circuitous route to get here.

One I spoke to was a sound technician and musician before finding his true calling. Another started a course in software engineering before realising he hated it and retrained as a horticulturist.

Cathal OSuillivan was tending to some vividly-coloured beds under his care and looked understandably flustered when I suddenly appeared by his side asking him questions about his career and the path that led him to the Gardens. A day later he decided he had not done himself justice in his answers and in an email he described them wrongly, as it happens as lame.

In a sign of the consideration people like him give to their jobs and their lives, he answered the question a second time.

I do try to remain conscious of all who visit here, no matter the age or knowledge. I try to heighten the frequency for them a bit. I also try to bear in mind all the life connections that find their way to this place be it to refuel or renew. The bees, the butterflies, the ladybirds and the many other creatures who we are surrounded with here.

Perhaps the main reason I got into gardening was for my soul, he continues. He said his mother is living with dementia and he has noticed many like her who have visited over the Covid period. He says he has been struck by the caring tenderness expressed by their sons or daughters as they review the 86 metres-long double borders he has planted and says it is pleasing to hear their now challenged minds recognise a plant, if not the name.

OSullivan says the gardeners receive lots of compliments, which is lovely and there are also hurlers on the ditch, those who love to tell you their dislikes and whats wrong. I enjoy the banter though and of course we all have different tastes. I do my best.

He says that one of the nicest pieces of feedback he has ever received will stay with me. A grandmother and her little three-year-old grandson walking hand and hand through the borders one particularly quiet morning. The day was good, the sun was out and there was a riot of colour. She shared with me that she had taught all her four kids their colours on visits to the herbaceous borders when they were also little. I thought what a beautiful memory for all of them.

OSullivan says he ran away from boarding school as a teenager, and worked in retail and hospitality for year in Ireland and New York before finally going back to college to study horticulture.

Since then he says hes been fortunate to have worked with some great gardeners in Ireland and the UK and now the jewel that is the National Botanic Gardens.

My mini and distinctly DIY Who Do You Think You Are ends in the house known as McCanns Cottage where so many Popes were born and too many died.

I think of Jebbs words about the brutal nature of evolution and the small contribution my ancestors made to horticulture and to the work of Charles Darwin and how maybe sometimes its the luckiest who survive and not the fittest.

Had Paddy Pope succumbed to any one of the diseases that took so many of his siblings then this branch of the Pope family tree would have withered a long time ago. I look at the original plaster, crumbling now but still covered in paint applied by Popes and the cast iron firepalaces where Popes huddled to keep chills away. I stare at thick roots embedded into powdery mortar and look up at the blue sky where roof tiles once were and will be again.

Everything is being carefully restored and replaced now to allow this house someday reopen as an administrative office but even when its shiny and new, the echoes of the Popes will linger, no matter what the cottage is called by the generations of the future.

See original here:
The Botanic Gardens and me: Conor Pope traces his family tree through the Gardens history - The Irish Times

Miki Berenyi,once of Lushand now of Piroshka, is on fine form. Talking to God Is In The TV, she looks back on 4AD, Lush, why they were dubbed both Shoegaze and Britpop by music weeklies, her forthcoming memoir, as well as reflecting upon Brexit. She also talks about Piroshkas second album, Love Drips and Gathers which came out a couple of weeks ago on Bella Union.

Londoners Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson met at fourteen years of age and became firm friends. Lush formed with Berenyis then boyfriend Chris Acland on drums and Steve Rippon on bass (later replaced by Phil King )

Signing to 4AD across five albums (Gala, Spooky, Split, Lovelife, Topolino ) and numerous EPs and singles in the 90s, Lush produced wonderful sounds, pairing loud guitars with vocal harmonies somewhere in the mix. The central songwriting duo of lead singer, the flame-haired Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson carved songs crammed with passion, infectious heavenly melodies and coated in a dreamy sound that evolved from reverb-laden guitar crescendos to spikier catchy garage pop. Their trademark vocals were possessed of both a bittersweet tone and infectious hooks and were delivered with a refreshing attitude. Underrated by some at the time in an era dominated by blokes with guitars, Lush looked and sounded like forerunners for a wave of current contemporary female led acts. Lush originally split in 1997 with Berenyi abandoning music after Aclands passing, only returning in 2016 with an EP and a run of shows.

Piroshka emerged in 2018; four individuals with distinct musical identities, but also overlapping histories. Before Miki and KJ Moose McKillop were a couple (and parents), they were pivotal figures on the London-centric 90s indie scene. Likewise, Elastica, whose drummer Justin Welch was part of Lushs 2016 reunion, whilst Michael Conroy of Modern English who played for both Moose and on their last ever gig Lush.

As Lush Mark II came to an end, Justin persuaded Miki to start another band, Piroshka, which in turn reignited Mooses long-dormant ambitions.

Love Drips and Gathers follows Piroshkas 2019 debut Brickbat, Miki explains: If Brickbat was our Britpop album, then Love Drips And Gathers is shoegaze! summing up their newly expansive sound thats more eighties synth drama than nineties indie.

With more textures and synths that reminds me of early 80s European new wave colliding with the dreamy gaze of the early 90s,Love Drips And Gathers follows a more introspective line meditating on the ties that bind us, as lovers, parents, children, friends a subtler, more ethereal and enveloping sound, one whose personal themes are worn on the sleeve and invested with melodrama.

Hi Miki, how are you today?

Im fine, its so weird with this lockdown any kind of appointment feels like such a huge event. I lost my job at the end of the year, so even though lockdown is lifted Moose is still working and stuff, but Im still at home so I feel like a pensioner or something! My landscape is very flat so when something crops up like this, it sends me into a fluster.

How have the last eighteen months treated you?

I think Ive just been a spectator really, its sort of affected my kids more and Moose as well. With my job, it went, but then I got offered a book deal. So I am just trying to discover how to fucking write a book (laughs); its totally out of my remit really. Its a memoir. There seems to be quite a trend for this lately. Im slightly regretting years of slagging off music journalists because Ive realised how difficult it is, Im discovering how hard it is. (laughs)!

I saw that youve been posting images from tours and video shoots from the Lush years on Facebook. What bits do you look back on fondly and not so fondly?

I think its really jumbled up with whats good and whats bad. In the telling it has to be black and white, having loads of photos makes you realise that. Like having a bunch of photos where we are having a really brilliant time, except it was in a period that was really difficult; there were sketchy periods for us as a band. But I think within that, what used to carry us through a lot was, we were all friends. That was mainly the most important thing: there was a lot of camaraderie. Certainly, when Chris was around he was really funny and always upbeat. We often suffered difficult times that were coming from the outside.

I think its the journey upwards that is most fun and most exciting. Once you get to a certain position thats where all the difficulties come. When you start you are just like oh my God this was our first time in London or on TV or in Europe! Everything is a massive achievement and an adventure, but I think thats when the expectations go up and it gets more stressful. We were really looked after by 4AD. Of course they wanted to sell records and the important thing was the record was good, but there wasnt the same pressure to have a hit as it were.

How important was it for Lush to sign to 4AD?

I dont think Lush could have achieved a tenth of what we did if we hadnt been on 4AD. It was integral to what we did, because when we started out we were quite incompetent and aware of that and we needed a lot of coaxing and nurturing. And having an environment that was totally non-exploitive helped, there was never really any pressure to stick the girls at the front that might have been there on another label. It really suited us to be cloaked in that 4AD artwork, we were really suggestible as a band but we really baulked at that exploitation. We were quite purist in that way.

I read you started out as a punk band

When we started out we were a bit punky, shouty, gymslipsy, Hes a bastard cant you see hes not good enough for you!!!(laughs). I suppose it was indie punk but we were part of a scene with quite a jumble of things going on. You can get away with a lot if you just whack the guitars and shout over them.

I guess punk isnt just a sound its a spirit

When I first got into punk it was oh my God everyone is really working class and they were like ooh you went to private school so I didnt feel I could wear that badge with any legitimacy. You didnt want to be a sell-out band or exploiting your sexuality or whatever, although there were plenty of bands that did that. I think Debbie Harry used her sexuality in a really cool way. But as women we were just conscious that was always the temptation, certainly with record labels, that would be the first thought they would have. But we didnt want to be part of that at all. And we loved being part of 4AD.

We were quite, collecty: we liked Factory and Cherry Red. When me and Emma were going to see Xmal Deutschland were playing, so we were aware of 4AD bands, so it was good to be put into that stable especially once Pixies and Throwing Muses came along. It felt like an honour to be honest. I certainly felt way out of my depth but it was flattering to be included in that stable and it gave you a certain amount of kudos as well.

4AD has definable characteristics not just in terms of sound, but the aesthetics, the artwork

It feels like a stamp of approval to people outside. I genuinely did buy records like that too. Id never heard of the Stockholm Monsters, but they were on Factory so Ill buy that.

It was tiresome at times though especially in Europe. They expected us to live up to this very arty persona and werent very impressed when we were swigging cider. I think Robert and Liz and Simon were hardly these angelic po-faced people either. It can feel like a bit of a straight jacket but there was no question of leaving or being on another label. At one point we had another manager who was like lets just look at other labels but we were just like well, you can look but we arent going to do it.

You worked with Robin Guthrie (Cocteau Twins) on a few EPs and your debut album Gala;what was that like?

I cant remember if he had made noises that he was interested in working with us. We did the Mad Love EP first, I think. I think Ivo who ran 4AD was a bit worried about putting us in a studio with Robin for a whole album; it was a little bit sketchy. We really wanted to make the album with him. There was a bit of criticism because it was like oh, hes just put his sound over them. I didnt agree with that because we learnt so much being in the studio with Robin. There were difficultiesbecause we had to do everything his way; Chris had to learn to play on a pad rather than a drum kit. But it was really brilliant to work with someone like that; he was really engaged and on it and full of ideas. It did our confidence good because we would sit in the studio and be like Ive got a guitar part, but its shit and he would say well, just play it, stop running it down before youve even done it.

Its funny when I mention you to people, depending on their era, when I mention Lush they either say Shoegaze or they have heard of Ladykillers from a Shine compilation..

If you get a band that goes on and on, Blur were called Britpop and Blur were called baggy. My Bloody Valentine werecalled one thing and another and eventually they just become themselves. Its the fact that if we had gone on we would have outlasted those labels, but theres only a few albums, so yes you get shoved in one or other category. I get it, I shrug my shoulders and go whatever now.

In the 90s there was a lot of labelling of acts in scenes. It still happens now, Galaxie 500 was saying it has got ridiculous on Spotify with all these different made up genres

I get it, its algorithms. Back in the day it was a shorthand. Before, you had that for the music papers to go well if you like this you might like this because theyre the same kind of band. I always think bands baulk at labels because it knocks the interesting edges off you. Every band can say well weve got that song thats not Britpop or thats not shoegaze! but most of it is about the time you were making records as much as the sound of them..

If you could pick one song from your career to play to someone what would it be?

Its hard. Id probably pick something like De-Luxe which isnt even by me, its Emmas song. To me, thats like pick an obvious track and play it there you go.

Split had different sides something like Desire Lines and Hypocrite are quite different. Would you say the second album Split was an evolution of your sound?

A lot of the evolution came from different producers. Theres no doubt there was development; a lot of it came from me and Emma working with each other.

I saw you recorded some of it in Rockfield..

It was lovely, it was good fun. It was actually our manager who was a bit large and in charge I remember being dragged around all these bloody places some of them really fancy. Rockfield was quite shabby and to be honest we got talked into it. We werent well suited to a residential, we got talked into it and probably would have been better recording it in London. Im such a fucking towny and as lovely as Monnow Valley is after about two walks in the countryside I was bored. I kind of missed my mates, I didnt sit in that studio being really productive I just sat around waiting for my bit.

Would you say your last album Lovelife was your most commercial

One of the things that happened with the CD format was that we suddenly had to record so many tracks to fill up the CD with as many tracks as possible. There were so many songs you could actually look at all the songs recorded around the time of Lovelife and put together a totally different album. Some of the songs were picked as singles because it was that time.

When Emma wrote Single Girl it was a B-side as far as she was concerned but because Britpop was around it was quite an in-your-face pop song that was picked as a single at a different time,.

Lovelife itself would have been a single but that was on the album before. I think Split was a very very introverted album and it actually got a bit of a damp reception. It was out of step with the times. So we maybe did make more of a conscious effort with the lyrics to be less revealing with the lyrics and more upbeat. To be perfectly honest Britpop was old hat by the time Lovelife came out so we got sneered at with that anyway.

Lush were on Top of the Pops; what was that like?

It was quite fun! I think Chris had the best quote about it. It actually means when you get in and if they asked you if you were in a band you could say yes, and we played Top of the Pops!

Music is so much more fragmented now, but back then you had John Peel, Top of the Pops and music weeklies

There was some quite narrow bottlenecks that you had to get through radio play and music papers and Top of the Pops and it doesnt really exist anymore as you say. The internet has changed everything in some ways; there are positives and negatives. Its much more scatter gun and you have to track down what you want to listen to. If you just rely on some algorithms to chuck stuff at you that has its problems, doesnt it?

Back then you had to go searching for what you wanted; there was a reward for searching out certain records then. There was a frustration, though, that you would read about some artists you would never hear, unless you heard it on the radio or on a compilation tape, now you can just type it in and you can hear it straight away.

I suppose bands toured a lot more in the 80s. There was that, kind of, although you had these big bands that would tour albums, There were a lot of bands who just played all the fucking time. Its like if you dont catch this band on this date theyre not going to be back for another two years.

I think there was a whole structure that supported that circuit that the internet has blown apart; streaming certainly has. I can remember doing a tour for Ladykillers; for a tour of thirty dates in Britain and two months later we were out touring the album in many of the same places. Back then you would get tour support, the record company would pay that and the album would make money. Now albums dont make money either so there isnt really the money to support you going out for thirty dates and play everywhere now. I think its quite hard for smaller bands now.

With the Brexit nonsense and with festivals and Covid as well, you wonder how many festivals will come back next year

Theres a bit of me thats a little bit optimistic. Back in the 80s there werent that many festivals; we are judging it on now when theres so many. I think there will be a resurgence. I had a neighbour who used to put on a festival; I remember him telling me it takes three years before you can make a profit. It would help to have a government who would support it and recognise it as massively important that it is. Its just not on their agenda. Back in the 80s you had the GLC that actually was a huge arts fun and I can remember festivals in Finsbury Park, on the South Bank. Obviously the Tories hated it as soon as they could. Its weird because there are Tories that go to gigs; youd think they have some love. I just dont even think they are interested.

Its a bit of a culture war by the Westminster government on culture at the moment. Theres also the very little Englander attitude that wants to wrap itself in the flag and try and tell people to go home. I think its really sad and ignorant, the world is getting smaller and we want to cut ourselves off..

Coming from London thats what I remember through the 80s, it was like this sneering attitude not just if you were foreign if you were from London, if you went up to Manchester they were like oh you fucking Londoners. I remember when I was at London Poly I remember meeting this guy from Liverpool at the bar and another one and they had a fight because they were like three streets away from Liverpool. Its so weird that really specific regional snobbery.

I wonder if in future generations they will want to rejoin the EU?

I voted remain, but I think both sides are spitting venom at each other. I just voted remain instinctively, even then I didnt know what it meant. So when I see Bruce Dickinson on Twitter and everyone is like oh you idiot what did you expect? But I am like clearly not this. Obviously I didnt buy it but there are a lot of people that did, believing that there was going to be some great new dawn or whatever. Its quite a dereliction of duty not to properly explain what was going to happen and that was the biggest issue. It was just an idea with no grounding.

Piroshka have been called a supergroup because you were all previously in different bands

Supergroup is another of those terms where you think, Christ. I think it was because when we first announced our album that it got taken up as terminology, I could already sense the sneering sounds of Oh God, what are all these old has-been indie B-listers doing trying to revitalise their sorry careers by capitalising on their collective.

I suppose its just not that cool anymore to be in a guitar band. I think the real thing about us four getting together was that we actually knew each other and that it was incidental that we had been in bands before; that wasnt the driver for it. But three of us got together because we knew each other from Lush anyway.

I was listening to the album, with the combination of synths and guitars, I was getting almost a European New Wavey sound in parts of it

Quite possibly, it was quite a conscious decision to let Moose and Mick do a lot more of the production of it. Moose in particular can sit in a room fucking around with pedals and the sounds and Mick too really. I am more like this ones got distortion and chorus and this ones got distortion, I only need four pedals!

Is the lullaby-esque The Knife Throwers Daughter about family?

Moose wrote it, I think hes got me, his mum, his daughter, so its about the women in his life. He reads a lot of novels and he did remark that in the last couple of years a lot of the books he read were all by women writers. When you read back a lot in the early twentieth century is about a domestic environment and I think that was influenced by the way he was thinking about lyrics.

Scratching At The Lid is epic; it really bubbles. It sounds like trying to throw off regret

Its quite a morbid picture really, that idea of being buried and scratching at the lid and thinking, but I havent finished yet! As you get older and once you get into your 50s you can spend a lot of your time worrying about stuff. I think your 40s is quite key actually, I think thats what Moose was thinking about. You can feel like shit, Ive tipped over theres a tinge to that.

You can worry an awful lot about where you are and what you are doing, it eats into your time its better to just do and not worry about it too much. I think that was what a lot of what his regret was in that song. You can spend decades worrying, then you look back and think well what was I worrying about? Why did I spend all that time worrying? I spent most of my life being quite anxious about things, but on some level its not a terrible thing to be, it does drive you to achieve certain about things. But if it casts too much of a shadow, theres no point being too anxious about things if they spoil your enjoyment.

I read, V.O. was inspired by working with Vaughan Oliver; what was it about working with him that made it a good relationship?

Some bands baulked at that; we were signed at the same time as the Pale Saints and they had their own ideas of what they wanted on their sleeves. They were very together as a band so I dont think Vaughan used a couple of their sleeves. Whereas we were like do what you fucking like and he rather liked that. Why wouldnt you? Someone is giving you the opportunity to work with amazing artists, so why wouldnt you?

We had a great working relationship, in that respect, we let him get on with it pretty much and trusted him. Often the titles were inspired by the sleeves, Scar was inspired by the artwork. With the Piroshka stuff, Chris Oliver who worked with Vaughan, both those titles were triggered by the covers. Both Chris and Vaughan would listen to the music and discuss it and that was the direction they would take from that. I am awful with titles, I literally have people at the pressing asking me to confirm them at the last minute.

When I saw Chriss artwork it was quite poetic and I remember trawling through old poetry books. I dont know much about poetry, but I remember doing that one at O Level and I thought it was a nice line. Its difficult with titles because a lot of them have been used. I remember The Smiths having lyrics from a quote or a play and I remember thinking Morrissey probably had endless notebooks of lyrics and titles.

With Echo Loco, I was getting references to politics and social media..

That was on my mind. I think basically it was around the time of the first Piroshka album, I started going on social media. I really hadnt done it before at all. I thought if we are doing a band I need a profile on social media to be my own PR and all that. I started using it and thought wow its a minefield. I feel crappy writing a song and just saying its about the internet because, its really dull.

I think its a very prescient theme, Twitter in particular is very reactionary

When I was a kid it was often quite sci-fi fantasy thing to say, imagine if you could read peoples minds that would be brilliant! Now you have Twitter and you can read what they think. And I look at it and I think fucking hell I dont want to know what people think about this because its doing my head in!

Theres some brilliant stuff, you have to find the good stuff. There are times when I am absent-mindedly scrolling and I can feel my mood darkening. Its genuinely upsetting and depressing if people can say these awful things in response to people. Living in ignorance is better in some respects. Just turn it off, its a big thing to manage. Its brilliant theres bits about it that are brilliant but you have to monitor your mood.

Maybe what I was thinking about with that song there is this desperate need to connect with others, whether its interacting or loving the same band and relationships, but theres a desperate edge to it sometimes. Where ultimately it is virtual, you dont know these people. People confess things, Ive done it myself oh yeah Ive done that when I was 14, you tell people things that you would never dreamed of telling anyone for years. I am terrible because I overshare anyway. It does fascinate me, but I think there is a tiresome element to it. I think my first experience was the comments under a Guardian comments section if you keep scrolling for long enough every possible response will be there at some point. You almost think they are saying something somebody else hasnt said. YouTube comments are horrible!

Love Drips and Gathers is out now on Bella Union.

http://smarturl.it/ldag

Piroshka UK live dates:

Tuesday 2nd November Brighton Chalk Wednesday 3rd November Leeds Brudenell Social Club Friday 5th November Manchester Deaf Institute Saturday 6th November London Garage Sunday 7th November Guildford The Boileroom

Photo credit: Ivan Berenyi

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IN CONVERSATION: Miki Berenyi (Lush, Piroshka) | God Is In The TV - God Is In The TV - God Is In The TV

Today, Special train No. 971 took 137 Covid patients to various northeastern Thai provinces. The Special train left from the Rangsit railway station.

A cabinet resolution earlier in the month decreed that the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Public health were to arrange transportation to bring Covid patients back to their home provinces. Both ministries were ordered to cooperate with the National Health Security Office and the National Institute of Emergency Medicine.

The Special train is supposed to let patients off at Nakhon Ratchasima around 1:30 pm. Then, it will stop at the Buri Ram station an hour and half-ish later. Next, it will drop more patients off at the Lam Chi station in Surin about 40 minutes later. Then, it is on to the Nong Waeng station in Si Sa Ket about 20 minutes after 5 pm. Finally, it is scheduled to arrive at the Warin Chamrap station in Ubon Ratchathani around 6 pm.

The Covid patients are to be collected at the station by local health officials. From the station, they will be taken to hospitals.

A different, but still Special train, was supposed to depart from Bangkok yesterday with nearly 1,500 Covid patients bound for home. However, the train was cancelled when officials discovered Sunday that the patients had made other transportation arrangements. Todays train took the Covid patients that were unable to secure a non-special form of transportation. Officials cited insufficient passengers to make yesterdays train practical

SOURCE: Bangkok Post

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Special train takes Covid patients home to northeastern Thailand - The Thaiger

According to Mr. Le Ba Linh, a Vietnamese Thai who is Chairman of Pacific Foods and member of the Vietnam-Thailand Friendship Association, the 25 tons of agricultural products were transported by an express boat from Song Thuan Wharf in Tien Giang Province to Bach Dang Wharf in Ho Chi Minh City.

Mr. Cao Thanh Binh, Head of Department of Society and Culture of the HCMC Peoples Council said that the HCMC Peoples Council and the Vietnam Fatherland Front Committee of Ho Chi Minh City will distribute the goods above to localities, field hospitals and isolated areas in Thu Duc City and 21 districts.

At the same time, they will send essential goods to beloved kitchen, zero dong market in the city. This is very meaningful and precious support for HCMC residents amid the current complicated Covid-19 pandemic.

On the same day, the Vietnam Fatherland Front Committee of Ho Chi Minh City received 18 containers of vegetables, fruits, dried-fishes and essential goods from the Central province of Ha Tinh to support front-line forces at field hospitals and residents in lock-downed, isolated areas to prevent and control the pandemic in 21 districts and Thu Duc City.

By Manh Hoa, Hoai Nam- Translated by Huyen Huong

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HCMC receives 25 tons of vegetables from overseas Vietnamese - sggpnews

A vegetable handcart donated by benefactors arrived at the gate of the People's Committee of Nhon Duc commune of Ho Chi Minh Citys Nha Be District at 9 PM on July 23.

After a long day of work, officials in the commune had to unload and sort out vegetables so that they can deliver these goods to poor people in the blocked areas and rental houses.

According to Nguyen Phuong Toan, Chairman of Nhon Duc Commune People's Committee, administrators and staff members have done the work during prolonged social distancing. Since the city implemented Directive 12 of the Standing Committee of the Ho Chi Minh City Party Committee, the commune administrators had to work hard to hand essential goods over to residents.

Elsewhere in the city, District 7 reported 87 restricted areas and medical isolation areas with 13,800 inhabitants. District 7 Party Secretary Vo Khac Thai said the district has directed administrators in wards to prepare rice and instant noodles to provide to households, ensuring supplies of food in 14 days.

Along with that, the locality also distributed vegetables, fruits, and eggs donated by benefactors to each household in the quarantined area, medical isolation every three days.

The district in coordination with Co.op mart and Bach Hoa Xanh systems organized mobile vehicles to supply fresh food for blocked and medical isolation areas in the first seven days of implementing Directive 12. Women's groups will announce lists of available food items through Zalo groups summarizing each households demand of food, then deliver food to the doors of each household.

Authority in District 11 where has 128 blocked zones set up a hotline so that dwellers who need to buy something can phone to order essential items. After that, youth volunteers in the District will pick up goods at supermarkets and deliver to residents in blocked areas. Chairman of District 11 People's Committee Tran Phi Long said that the district set up a hotline for food and food supply for people, in addition to buying goods to help people.

Similarly, residents in District 1 can place orders of food through an app on their smartphones meanwhile the Vietnam Fatherland Front Committee in District 6 where has 88 blocked zones with more than 1,000 people also receives donations of food to distribute to locals. Last but not least, many unions and departments of District 6 have shopped to help people in restricted areas.

Meanwhile, Chairwoman of the District 6 People's Committeealso said that the district's community Covid-19 teams both reminded people to strictly observe the social distance rule and understood dwellers difficulties for timely support. The district also provided boxes of lunches to people in rental houses every day.

Le Thi Bac, Vice Chairwoman of the Vietnam Fatherland Front Committee of Thu Duc City, said that to ensure supplies of goods, Thu Duc City called up more volunteers. On average, Thu Duc City supports each family with five kilograms of rice weekly. Particularly, vegetables and fruits will be distributed to residential areas, ensuring people have fruits and vegetables during these days. The government in Thu Duc City will deliver ready-to-eat meals to public houses where lonely elderly people and people with disabilities are residing.

Furthermore, Thu Duc City will give each difficult household one gift including necessities and cash, medical treatment worth VND800,000 each. As of July 23, Thu Duc City has approved to spend more than VND1.8 billion to support approximately 2,300 households.

By staff writers - Translated by Anh Quan

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HCMC supplies foods, essential items to households in blocked areas - sggpnews

Utopias are not, by definition, found on this side of paradise. Yet that truth hasnt stopped visionaries and seekersnot to mention knaves and foolsfrom trying to build communities on lofty principles and quixotic aspirations. One such wonderland is Auroville, a commune in Indias Tamil south whose heady origins can be traced to the incense-and-raga days of the 1960s. Akash Kapurs Better to Have Gone (Scribner, 344 pages, $27) is a haunting and elegant account of this attempt at utopia and of his familys deep connections to it.

Established in 1968 by a Frenchwoman with a God-complex, Auroville is a place committed to human unity and fostering evolution. Its first residents comprised a few hundred people from France, Germany and the U.S. and a sprinkling of other Europeansmost of them hippie-refugees from Western materialismas well as like-minded Indians. Today, 53 years later, its population stands at some 2,500. Few intentional communitiesnow, or everhave survived that long, writes Mr. Kapur. The world militates against . . . anywhere that tries to play by different rules.

The word Auroville was derived from auroreFrench for dawnwith a convenient echo, also, of the name of Sri Aurobindo, an Indian guru born in 1872. Mirra Alfassa, the Frenchwoman-founder, became Aurobindos acolyte in 1920 and his spiritual successor when he died in 1950. Alfassa came to be addressed by everyone as the Mother, and there was even an Indian postage stamp issued in her honor.

According to the Mothers founding charter, this City of Dawn belonged to nobody in particular but to humanity as a whole. To live in Auroville, one had to be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness, and each resident was vetted personally by the Mother. Although she is still revered in Indiawhere obeisance is accorded much too easily to anyone with spiritual pretensesits hard not to regard the Mother as a charlatan. Auroville, in her words, was a place where the embryo or seed of the future supramental world might be created. And it was no secret that she craved immortality.

Mr. Kapur and his wife, Auralicea name given to her by the Mother, who asserted the right to name all children born to her flockboth grew up in Auroville. Auralice was born in 1972, Mr. Kapur two years later. Auralices mother, Diane Maes, was a woman from rural Flanders whod arrived at Auroville as an 18-year-old. Headstrong and flirtatious, she soon separated from the biological father of her daughter and took up with another Auroville man named John Walker, in many ways the books most compelling (and infuriating) character.

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Better to Have Gone Review: Dawn of a New Humanity - The Wall Street Journal