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Great John Vachon portrait – August 1941. "Farm worker in beer parlor on a Sunday afternoon. Bruce Crossing, Michigan."

[Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration]

Aretha on the Cliff Richard Show, 1970. The startling image of our host making the introduction dressed as a prat is, fortunately, brief.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWLQX2-UWPA&w=550&h=309]

Oriiginally recorded by Ben E King – written by his wife Betty Nelson – in 1962. It's a great performance from King, but maybe suffers by being produced to sound too much like his classic Stand By Me from the previous year.

Aretha, of course, makes it her own. With some great piano, too.

Søren Solkær’s video of starlings in the marshlands of southern Denmark, at dusk.

Full screen recommended.

Looking north across the river. "Skyline and boats on the Detroit River as seen from Windsor, Ontario."

[Photo: Shorpy/Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Collection]

Walthamstow way:

he was in the right and her critics just didn't understand. She's not afraid of controversy, as she showed with her Scallop sculpture for Benjamin Britten on the beach at Aldeburgh, which she defended proudly in the face of objections.

This time though she's failed, and someone should have had the courage to tell her.

Update: Susan Harrison:

#MaryWollstonecraft seeing her statue for the first time pic.twitter.com/nsSVUbNG4z

— Susan Harrison (@SueHarrison123) November 11, 2020

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

“it’s true that [the regime] is still only paying attention to ‘offensive capabilities.’” He added, “Frankly, the regime has been weak on building ‘defensive capabilities.’”

North Korea’s military, which has better offensive than defensive capabilities, appears to have adopted a strategy of maximizing destruction by concentrating maximum firepower in the shortest period of time. 

The source described the mood in the military, saying that the leadership “also knows that R&D to develop defensive systems requires a lot of money” and that “We have no choice but to pay attention to tactically deploying advanced offensive weapons capable of pin-point strikes.”

This could end badly.

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ory. I will quote what Helen Lewis says in full for reasons we will get to:

“‘I think in pre-crisis Britain, we had an idea that when fascism came, it would look again like the 1930s. It would look like a single charismatic leader. It would look like jackboots in the street and huge flags. And it didn’t look like that: it looked like social media groups. It looked like poisoning the well so that no information could be trusted.’

To make it better, you can listen to Helen here. I would urge you to do so because it will be the last chance you get.

I am sure you can guess what happened next.

Oh yes. Lewis, you see, had previously crossed swords with the trans mob:

In recent years, Lewis took issue with a classic establishment stitch-up. She criticised Maria Miller, then chair of the women and equalities select committee, for agreeing with an extreme trans position while dismissing women’s concerns. Miller called on the government to allow men to self-identify as women. They would just have to say they were a woman to become women. The government was eventually forced to retreat under pressure from feminists, Lewis included, and the Howard League for Penal Reform, which feared sex offenders would use self-identification as an excuse to get into women’s prisons, rightly as events were to prove.

To oppose self-identification was not to deny that transgender people needed help and support, and had the same right to respect and equal treatment as everyone else. It was merely to protect women against toxic men. For this, Lewis was denounced as a bigot and a TERF (‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’) when if anything she was a male-exclusionary radical feminist trying to keep men out of women-only spaces.

Claques of professional scorners follow her, and shout ‘TERF’ whenever her name appears on Twitter. Sure enough, a handful of Twitter users and contributors to a gaming forum told Ubisoft it was outrageous to give her a platform. I don’t want to exaggerate their number. It was more a Twitter shower than a Twitter storm. But the shower was enough.

So out she went.

Ubisoft duly apologised to one and all for letting controversy through its doors, and announced it was purging Lewis's contributions from the game. We will ‘reinforce our background checks’ in future, it added ominously.

Ubisoft’s behaviour is simultaneously hypocritical, pathetic and dangerous. It cannot promote a game urging resistance to tyranny and then collapse into a trembling heap. Lewis is hardly alone. I receive emails from artists and writers who have paid the price for speaking out of turn. They have had commissions withdrawn and appearances cancelled simply because, like Lewis, they are ‘controversial’.

Cancel culture’s defenders pretend they only go after powerful targets. It is simply not true. Grudges are settled and hysterical accusations given unwarranted credence because cowards in authority crumble at the first hint of controversy. All that is needed to destroy someone is a few tweets denouncing them. As Lewis found, no one checks, no one justifies, too few care, and too many run.

ard Herrmann strings start playing in our heads…. 

Whatever, the images are skilfully done, with a painterly feel to them. Click to enlarge. The bigger the better with these:

Alone Street 2018-19 © Gregory Crewdson

Funerary Back Lot 2018-19 © Gregory Crewdson

Red Star Express 2018-19 © Gregory Crewdson

Redemption Center 2018-19 © Gregory Crewdson

The Cobra 2018-19 © Gregory Crewdson

The Taxi Depot 2018-19 © Gregory Crewdson

"An Eclipse of Moths"? The title is explained by the Templon Gallery in Paris, where these have just gone on show:

"He chose the image of an eclipse of moths to evoke the phenomenon whereby the insects, drawn by the artificial lights of the city, cluster together and lose their bearings. A metaphor for our contemporary disorientation, these works subtly question the vulnerability of the human condition and the paradoxes of the American dream. Never didactic, they leave the viewer free to imagine the stories hidden beneath the surface and dream of other possibilities."

Now you know.