Restless Cities reviewed by the Metro + Rachel Bowlby on her chapter ‘Commuting’ on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed

Listen to Rachel Bowlby speak about her Restless Cities chapter, ‘Commuting,’ on Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed.

The Metro’s review says:

Very few of the essays in this collection about today’s urban metropolises carry much visual or physical detail – about buildings, famous landmarks or, heaven forfend, tourist attractions. Instead they concentrate on the more abstract ways we negotiate the cities in which we live. Geoff Dyer’s poignantly witty piece inscribes his various periods in cities across the world with the same early-morning ritual to seek out the best doughnut in town. Michael Sheringham looks

at how writers and artists from Dickens and Victor Hugo to Italo Calvino have reimagined urban places into new states of being. David Trotter looks at the quasisinister role phone boxes have played in real and imagined visions of the city. Throughout, the urban metropolis emerges as more a state of mind than a fi xed landscape, and at the mercy of the subjectivity of those who live in it. Yet cities – as Chris Petit attests – also occupy a state of endless reinvention. From pot plants to the daily commute, this is a richly alternative guide to city living.

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Oliver Stone, Tariq Ali and Mark Weisbrot respond to NY Times attack on South of the Border

Oliver Stone, Tariq Ali, and Mark Weisbrot respond to the attack by Larry Rohter, a one-time backer of the 2002 coup attempt, on Stone’s new film about Hugo Chávez in the New York Times:

We gave Rohter an enormous amount of factual information to back up the main points of the film. He not only ignored the main points of the film, but in the quotes he selected for the article, he picked only quotes that were not fact related that could be used to illustrate what he considered the director’s and co-author’s bias. This is not ethical journalism; in fact it is questionable whether it is journalism at all.

For example, Rohter was presented with detailed and documentary evidence of the United States’ involvement in the 2002 coup. (see http://southoftheborderdoc.com/2002-venezuela-coup) This was a major point in the film, and was backed up in the film by testimony from then Washington Post foreign editor Scott Wilson, who covered the coup from Caracas.  In our conversations with Rohter, he simply dismissed all of this evidence out of hand, and nothing about it appears in the article.

Rohter should have disclosed his own conflict of interest in this review. The film criticizes the New York Timesfor its editorial board’s endorsement of the military coup of April 11, 2002 against the democratically elected government of Venezuela, which was embarrassing to the Times. Moreover, Rohter himself wrote an article on April 12 that went even further than the Times‘ endorsement of the coup:

“Neither the overthrow of Mr. Chavez, a former army colonel, nor of Mr. Mahuad two years ago can be classified as a conventional Latin American military coup. The armed forces did not actually take power on Thursday. It was the ousted president’s supporters who appear to have been responsible for deaths that numbered barely 12 rather than hundreds or thousands, and political rights and guarantees were restored rather than suspended.” – Larry Rohter, New York Times, April 12, 2002

These allegations that the coup was not a coup – not only by Rohter – prompted a rebuttal by Rohter’s colleague at the New York Times, Tim Weiner, who wrote a Sunday Week in Review piece two days later entitled “A Coup By Any Other Name.” (New York Times, April 14, 2002)

Unlike the NYT editorial board, which issued a grudging retraction of their pro-coup stance a few days later (included in our film), Rohter seems to have clung to the right-wing fantasies about the coup. It is not surprising that someone who supports the military overthrow of a democratically elected government would not like a documentary like this one, which celebrates the triumphs of electoral democracy in South America over the last decade…

Read the full letter.

Read Larry Rohter’s original review:

In feature films about John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon andGeorge W. Bush, Oliver Stone gave free rein to his imagination and was often criticized for doing so. Now, in “South of the Border,”which opened on Friday, he has turned to Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s controversial populist president, and his reformist allies in South America…

Tariq Ali, the British-Pakistani historian and commentator who helped write the screenplay, added: “It’s hardly a secret that we support the other side. It’s an opinionated documentary.”

Watch the film at the British Library from 21 July-3 August. More information about screenings coming soon.

Verso recommends the following titles:

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Axis of Hope – Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali’s examination of the Latin American revolution against US hegemony, based on his first-hand experience of Venezuela and meetings with Hugo Chávez. He also discusses Fidel Castro, President of Bolivia Evo Morales and President of Ecuador Rafael Correa. The book makes a perfect complement to Stone’s film.

Hugo Chávez Presents Simon Bolivar – The Bolivarian Revolution

The President of Venezuela introduces this short collection of writings by the revolutionary Simon Bolivar – Chávez’s main influence for what he calls his Bolivarian Revolution.

Tariq Ali Presents Fidel Castro – The Declarations of Havana

The renowned writer, film maker and activist introduces key writings by Fidel Castro.

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Green Dreams: Heather Rogers writes for Compass, and speaks for Reuters’ Great Debate

Heather Rogers, author of Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution, will be speaking about Green Gone Wrong at 6.30pm today at the ICA. She will be in interview with Kirsty Wright, the climate justice campaigner for the World Development Movement. For more information and tickets, please see here.

Heather has contributed to  Compass – the UK’s most influential ideas and action based political pressure group with over 30,000 members and supporters across the country:

Not so long ago health food, solar panels, and electric mini cars were the purview of activists, hippies, and renegade engineers. Recently, however, a rush of fashionable responses to ecological meltdown hascrowded out the previous generation’s reaction-often characterized as strident and blaming.

The new green wave, typified by the phrase lazy environmentalism, is geared toward the masses that aren’t willing to sacrifice. The new naturalists don’t reject the free market for its reckless degradation of the air, water, and soil as the previous generation of environmentalists did. Instead they aspire to turn the forces of economic growth and development away from despoliation and toward regeneration.

The promise implicit in the changes individuals are asked to make is that global warming can be stopped by swapping out dirty products for green ones, with little disruption to daily life. Getting behind the wheel of a gas-electric hybrid is not so different from driving a regular car. Ethanol and biodiesel come out the nozzle the same as ordinary petrol. Eating organic breakfast cereal no longer feels unfamiliar because it’s coated with sugar and comes in cartoon-covered boxes. And paying a little extra for an airline ticket to cancel out CO2 emissions from a flight takes almost no effort at all. One of the most popular current tools to counteract the mucking up of the earth is the reusable shopping bag. Nowadays more people are bringing them along to the store so they won’t need new plastic bags each time. These totes-often decorated with colorful images of trees and animals, or sporting slogans like I AM NOT A PLASTIC BAG or I AM EARTH WISE-exemplify today’s popular environmentalism. There is good that comes from using them, but they are also symbols that convey responsibility while glossing over the more significant issues of what goes into those bags, how much, and how often…”

Read the full piece here.

And also watch Heather on Reuters’ The Great Debate and listen to her speak about Green Gone Wrong on Night Waves on BBC Radio 3. Rana Mitter hosts a discussion of how markets can promote or hinder environmental issues, with the author Heather Rogers challenging many of the sacred cows of environmentalism, and the economist Catherine Cameron arguing that green issues would be best left to the market.

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New NLR 63 May/June 2010

Out now: NLR 63, the May-June issue.

Some highlights include:

Michael Mann: Transatlantic Analogies

In this review of Peter Baldwin’s The Narcissism of Minor Differences, Mann questions whether, beneath the distinctions commonly perceived, Europe and America fundamentally resemble one another. Michael Mann is the author of Incoherent Empire.

Susan Watkins: Blue Labour?

Anatomy of the UK’s new crossbreed government, and the uneven electoral geography that produced it. Amid the ruins of New Labour’s economic model and spreading Euro-turbulence, what prospects for resistance to austerity’s impending axe?

Zhang Xudong, Poetics of Vanishing

Cinematic portraits of China’s breakneck social and economic transformation, as seen from street level at its provincial margins. Zhang Xudong on motifs of disappearance, demolition and mobility in the films of Jia Zhangke.

Stefan Jonsson: The Ideology of Universalism

Contending visions of universality, from Kantian common sense to the doctrine of human rights. Can a constellation of singularities emerge within the standardization envisaged by globalized production? Prompts from Musil, Gursky and the carpet-weavers of Kuyan-Bulak.

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Slavoj Zizek’s Living in the End Times reviewed by Counterfire

Duncan Simpson reviews Slavoj Žižek‘s Living in the End Times for Counterfire:

Living in the End Times contains some of Žižek’s most serious and evocative writing while still maintaining fidelity to his engrossing and at times bewildering style.

Read the full article here.

Žižek will be headlining the London literature festival
5 July 2010, 7:30pm at the Royal Festival Hall, London, UK

BOOK TICKETS HERE
Prices: £15, £12
Concessions: 50% off (limited availability)
LIVING IN THE END TIMES
“There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. Slavoj Žižek has identified the four horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide […]

Guardian reviews Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People – OUT NOW in paperback

Ian Pindar reviewed the paperback edition of Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People for The Guardian on Saturday. Full review below (not yet available online):

The idea of the Jews as a single people or race is a myth, a fi ction based on Old Testament “mythistory”, argues Shlomo Sand, a Jewish historian based at the University of Tel Aviv. It is also one of the founding assumptions of the state of Israel, and throughout this polemical, revisionist history Sand has Zionist ideology in his sights. (He is not anti-Israel, but he is “post-Zionist”.) In essence, his book undermines the moral right of the state of Israel to define itself as exclusively Jewish and how you respond to it will very much depend on your political views. Sand admits none of his findings is new and there are no revelations, but what he offers is a radical dismantling of a national myth. He can find no evidence of any Jewish exile, and without exile there can be no right to return. However, even if it is founded on a myth, the state of Israel exists. Sand wants it to abandon ethnic nationalism and to modernise and democratise, and as this controversial book was a bestseller in Israel, perhaps there is hope that some Israelis want this too.

For more information about The Invention of the Jewish People, visit the book’s website here.

Posted in Israel, Palestine, Shlomo Sand | Leave a Comment »

Daily Telegraph reviews Jose Saramago’s The Notebook

Tom Payne reviews Saramago’s The Notebook for the Daily Telegraph on Saturday:

So is there a point to this book? Yes – it is a plea for civilised discourse, humane values and, for all Saramago’s anger at injustice, deceit, populism and Berlusconi, he is innately optimistic; or at least, he wants to be positive, and holds out a hope that people will do the right thing. He is strict on Obama, for example, but doesn’t rule out that he might make progress on health care reform. (He got that one right, and lived to see it.)

Read the full review here.

Posted in Jose Saramago | Leave a Comment »

The Levellers at Putney Church – the Putney Debates relived!

The Levellers are back in Putney Church

The Putney Debates, 5pm Saturday 3 July 2010, St Mary’s Church, Putney, London. The cast of Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, by Caryl Churchill, reenact the Putney Debates in their original setting. With an introduction explaining their historical importance by John Rees and followed by a Q&A with director and cast. Entrance is free.

Programme of events supported by Verso Books (see www.versobooks.com for more details).

More than 360 years after the great debate about the settlement of the English Revolution between the Cromwell and the Levellers took place in Putney Church the whole event is to be restaged in the original location on Saturday 3rd July.

The cast of Caryl Churchill’s play about the revolution, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, are staging the sections of the play that depict the Putney Debates ahead of the play opening at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney on 14th July.

The performance will be preceded by a introduction to the debates by John Rees and there will be a Question and Answer session after the performance.

St Mary’s Church in Putney is the original site of the the Putney Debates in 1647 at the height of the English revolution and has a permanent exhibition dedicated to the events that took place there.

The Debates were one of the most dramatic moments in the English Revolution, pitting the Levellers and the Agitators, the elected delegates from the regiments of the New Model Army, against the Grandees, as Cromwell and his supporters were called.

It was in these debates that Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, the most senior officer to support the Levellers, uttered his plea for democracy that has echoed down the years: ‘For really I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he; therefore truly sir, I think it is clear, that any man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under it.’

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire at the |Arcola Theatre, Hackney,

14th July – 7th August 2010
Starting time: 8pm
Matinees 3pm 31 July & 7 August

There will be a special Gala Night at the
Arcola Theatre, 21 July 2010, 7pm for 7.30pm
With Tony Benn, Billy Bragg, Kate Mosse and Geoffrey Robertson
Includes the show at the Arcola Theatre followed by a reception of food, drink, opinions and music.

Tickets are £48 with all proceeds go directly towards securing the production.
To book your gala ticket or to make a donation towards the production, please ring 020 7503 1646

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

After years of bloody conflict, an exhausted England is in the hands of radical extremists. Consumed by a burning religious passion, Parliament’s soldiers decide to kill the king. Theirs is a war to establish heaven on earth.

This is the story of the most terrifying decade in our history. Desperate to make sense of the horror surrounding them, a group of ordinary men and women cling to the belief that they will be shown a glimpse of an unspeakable, transcendent glory.

Written by Caryl Churchill Director Polly Findlay

Designer Hannah Clark

Lighting Designer Matthew Pitman

Sound Designer Gareth Fry

Casting Juliet Horsley

Cast Philip Arditti, Jamie Ballard, Christopher Harper, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Helena Lymbery, Michelle Terry

Arcola Theatre

14 Jul – 7 Aug 2010 8pm

31 Jul & 7 Aug 3pm & 8pm

£16 (£10 concessions)

020 7503 1646 | www.arcolatheatre.co.uk

Posted in Caryl Churchill, Geoffey Robertson, Levellers | Leave a Comment »

Slavoj Zizek’s Observer profile and the Guardian review of Living in the End Times

Sean O’Hagan interviews the “political provocateur and an absurdist prankster” for the Observer:

Despite, or perhaps because of, his iconoclasm, his tendency to contradict himself, and his general political incorrectness – which may, one suspects, be more mischievous than heartfelt – Žižek is to today what Jacques Derrida was to the 80s: the thinker of choice for Europe’s young intellectual vanguard… To witness Žižek in full flight is a wonderful and at times alarming experience, part philosophical tightrope-walk, part performance-art marathon, part intellectual roller-coaster ride…”

Read the full interview here.

Steven Poole praises Žižek’s new book Living in the End Times for the Guardian:

a compendium of long passages of fierce brilliance … Žižek is consistently penetrating.

The full article is available here.

Žižek will be headlining the London literature festival

Read Full Post »

Guardian reviews Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People – OUT NOW in paperback

Ian Pindar reviewed the paperback edition of Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People for The Guardian on Saturday. Full review below (not yet available online):

The idea of the Jews as a single people or race is a myth, a fi ction based on Old Testament “mythistory”, argues Shlomo Sand, a Jewish historian based at the University of Tel Aviv. It is also one of the founding assumptions of the state of Israel, and throughout this polemical, revisionist history Sand has Zionist ideology in his sights. (He is not anti-Israel, but he is “post-Zionist”.) In essence, his book undermines the moral right of the state of Israel to define itself as exclusively Jewish and how you respond to it will very much depend on your political views. Sand admits none of his findings is new and there are no revelations, but what he offers is a radical dismantling of a national myth. He can find no evidence of any Jewish exile, and without exile there can be no right to return. However, even if it is founded on a myth, the state of Israel exists. Sand wants it to abandon ethnic nationalism and to modernise and democratise, and as this controversial book was a bestseller in Israel, perhaps there is hope that some Israelis want this too.

For more information about The Invention of the Jewish People, visit the book’s website here.

Read Full Post »

Daily Telegraph reviews Jose Saramago’s The Notebook

Tom Payne reviews Saramago’s The Notebook for the Daily Telegraph on Saturday:

So is there a point to this book? Yes – it is a plea for civilised discourse, humane values and, for all Saramago’s anger at injustice, deceit, populism and Berlusconi, he is innately optimistic; or at least, he wants to be positive, and holds out a hope that people will do the right thing. He is strict on Obama, for example, but doesn’t rule out that he might make progress on health care reform. (He got that one right, and lived to see it.)

Read the full review here.

Read Full Post »

The Levellers at Putney Church – the Putney Debates relived!

The Levellers are back in Putney Church

The Putney Debates, 5pm Saturday 3 July 2010, St Mary’s Church, Putney, London. The cast of Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, by Caryl Churchill, reenact the Putney Debates in their original setting. With an introduction explaining their historical importance by John Rees and followed by a Q&A with director and cast. Entrance is free.

Programme of events supported by Verso Books (see www.versobooks.com for more details).

More than 360 years after the great debate about the settlement of the English Revolution between the Cromwell and the Levellers took place in Putney Church the whole event is to be restaged in the original location on Saturday 3rd July.

The cast of Caryl Churchill’s play about the revolution, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, are staging the sections of the play that depict the Putney Debates ahead of the play opening at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney on 14th July.

The performance will be preceded by a introduction to the debates by John Rees and there will be a Question and Answer session after the performance.

St Mary’s Church in Putney is the original site of the the Putney Debates in 1647 at the height of the English revolution and has a permanent exhibition dedicated to the events that took place there.

The Debates were one of the most dramatic moments in the English Revolution, pitting the Levellers and the Agitators, the elected delegates from the regiments of the New Model Army, against the Grandees, as Cromwell and his supporters were called.

It was in these debates that Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, the most senior officer to support the Levellers, uttered his plea for democracy that has echoed down the years: ‘For really I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he; therefore truly sir, I think it is clear, that any man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under it.’

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire at the |Arcola Theatre, Hackney,

14th July – 7th August 2010
Starting time: 8pm
Matinees 3pm 31 July & 7 August

There will be a special Gala Night at the
Arcola Theatre, 21 July 2010, 7pm for 7.30pm
With Tony Benn, Billy Bragg, Kate Mosse and Geoffrey Robertson
Includes the show at the Arcola Theatre followed by a reception of food, drink, opinions and music.

Tickets are £48 with all proceeds go directly towards securing the production.
To book your gala ticket or to make a donation towards the production, please ring 020 7503 1646

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

After years of bloody conflict, an exhausted England is in the hands of radical extremists. Consumed by a burning religious passion, Parliament’s soldiers decide to kill the king. Theirs is a war to establish heaven on earth.

This is the story of the most terrifying decade in our history. Desperate to make sense of the horror surrounding them, a group of ordinary men and women cling to the belief that they will be shown a glimpse of an unspeakable, transcendent glory.

Written by Caryl Churchill Director Polly Findlay

Designer Hannah Clark

Lighting Designer Matthew Pitman

Sound Designer Gareth Fry

Casting Juliet Horsley

Cast Philip Arditti, Jamie Ballard, Christopher Harper, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Helena Lymbery, Michelle Terry

Arcola Theatre

14 Jul – 7 Aug 2010 8pm

31 Jul & 7 Aug 3pm & 8pm

£16 (£10 concessions)

020 7503 1646 | www.arcolatheatre.co.uk

Read Full Post »

Slavoj Zizek’s Observer profile and the Guardian review of Living in the End Times

Sean O’Hagan interviews the “political provocateur and an absurdist prankster” for the Observer:

Despite, or perhaps because of, his iconoclasm, his tendency to contradict himself, and his general political incorrectness – which may, one suspects, be more mischievous than heartfelt – Žižek is to today what Jacques Derrida was to the 80s: the thinker of choice for Europe’s young intellectual vanguard… To witness Žižek in full flight is a wonderful and at times alarming experience, part philosophical tightrope-walk, part performance-art marathon, part intellectual roller-coaster ride…”

Read the full interview here.

Steven Poole praises Žižek’s new book Living in the End Times for the Guardian:

a compendium of long passages of fierce brilliance … Žižek is consistently penetrating.

The full article is available here.

Žižek will be headlining the London literature festival, Southbank Centre, London SE1 on 5 July, 7.30pm. For more information and to book tickets, see here.

Read Full Post »

Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov reviewed for The New York Review of Books

John Banville praises Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov for The New York Review of Books:

The most striking characteristic of the fictional works of Vladimir Nabokov is uncanniness. In one of his many pronouncements on the art of literature the author said that “there are three points of view from which a writer can be considered:…as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three….” Certainly in his own case he qualified in all categories, a fact that he was complacently aware of and ever ready to profess—as Gore Vidal tartly observed, no one enjoyed Nabokov’s books as much as Nabokov did. He does tell a wonderful story, he does teach us many subtle and intricate things, he does thoroughly enchant. Yet when we press past the surface dazzle of his work—no small feat—we find ourselves in a world as strange and yet strangely familiar as the one into which Alice stepped through the looking-glass.

The full article The Still Mysterious Enchanter is available for subscribers.

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