Blog

class=”asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d83451ebab69e20263e96efb7c200b img-responsive” src=”http://mickhartley.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/mt_imported_image_1758338746.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”Banksybbc” />

The graffiti artist Banksy has confirmed a piece of art that appeared in Nottingham was created by him.

The work, outside a beauty salon, shows a girl hula-hooping with a bicycle tyre. It went up on Tuesday, next to a bicycle that is missing its back wheel.

Amid speculation over whether the piece was a Banksy, a screen was fitted to it. In an ironic twist, soon afterwards the screen was sprayed with graffiti.

A picture of the work was posted on Banksy's Instagram on Saturday morning.

The salon the artwork appeared outside is on the junction of Rothesay Avenue and Ilkeston Road in Lenton, a popular residential area for students.

After the announcement, people began arriving to have their photographs taken with the artwork, with about 30 people there at one point, as well as police officers.

People were seen openly weeping in the streets of Nottingham, as the news of their Banksy visitation spread. And the experts soon arrived, to provide some much-needed interpretation.

Banksy expert Prof Paul Gough, from Arts University Bournemouth – who initially doubted whether it was the real deal – said he was "really pleased" the work was by the artist.

Talking about the meaning behind the artwork, he said: "It is curious. The last four or five [Banksy pieces] have all related to Covid or something in the news. This is much more whimsical and much more of the moment. It is someone enjoying themselves.

"Perhaps that is the message: 'we are in difficult times, let's try to make the most of it and get some fun out of something which is broken'.

"The hoop is holistic. The circle is a positive and life-affirming. Even with a knackered bicycle, she is finding something she can play with."

He added: "The Nottingham picture is a different kind of [Banksy] painting to what I have seen before. There is less fluidity and a more pixelated effect, especially around the chin and parts of the face."

Yes, I noticed that too.

The big question, though: does the knackered bike form part of the artwork? Has that now acquired a value of its own?

A spectacular smoky panorama, "Mississippi River from Hennen Building", made from four 8×10 inch glass negatives stitched together by Dave at Shorpy. Click to embiggen.

Bonus – "Canal Street", ca. 1907, from two 8×10 inch glass negatives:

[Photos: Shorpy/DPC]

’s colleagues agree with her and are appalled at her treatment. But this is clearly not enough for them to risk being bumped from good positions on the front bench. They need to have a long, hard think about who would stand up for them if they happened to say something deemed unacceptable to the mob. They should exercise compassion rather than cowardice.

More importantly perhaps, men that consider themselves to be feminist allies should openly and robustly condemn the tyrannical targeting of woman who are experiencing similar treatment to Duffield. And yes, that includes high-profile and wealthy women because an often-inconvenient truth is that every one of us are vulnerable to male violence, abuse and bullying, however privileged we are. […]

The behaviour of the bullies is designed to shut women up. So-called progressive men joining in the witch hunt are adopting the tactics of the domestic abusers that Duffield meticulously described in her powerful speech.

JK Rowling, another witch they couldn’t burn wrote in a statement this year, ‘I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode "woman" as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it.'

What will you choose to do? Stand up and be counted, or be forever cowed?

c=”http://mickhartley.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/mt_imported_image_1758338753.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”Albajar9″ />
[Photos © Andrés Gallardo Albajar]

That top picture is of La Muralla Roja, seen here back in August photographed by Sebastian Weiss.

That second to last picture, of the sweeper on the steps, is surely a nod to Banksy's famous image of the maid lifting the paint up.

"Smooth as silk" says the top YouTube commenter here, and you can't argue. A consummate professional, and the great Bacaharach-David interpreter, here with her 1964 hit:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caW48rQTllI&w=560&h=315]

Not be confused with Leroy Van Dyke's Walk On By. A less sophisticated effort, no doubt, but I still love that guitar intro.

Warwick is, apparently, one of the most-charted female vocalists of all time, with 56 of her singles making the Billboard Hot 100 between 1962 and 1998, and 80 singles making all Billboard charts combined. 

Warwick weathered the British Invasion better than most American artists. Her biggest UK hits were "Walk On By" and "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" In the UK, a number of Bacharach-David-Warwick songs were recorded by British singers Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw and Dusty Springfield, most notably Black's "Anyone Who Had a Heart" which went to No. 1 in the UK. This upset Warwick, who described feeling insulted when told that in the UK, record company executives wanted her songs recorded by someone else. Warwick met Cilla Black while on tour in Britain. She recalled what she said to her: "I told her that "You're My World" would be my next single in the States. I honestly believe that if I'd sneezed on my next record, then Cilla would have sneezed on hers too. There was no imagination in her recording."

Round Hampstead and The Hill this morning:

ne”>
Irina Rozovsky – Untitled (from Island in my Mind), 2015

Ed Ruscha – Desert, 1984

Alessandra Sanguinetti – Hydrangeas, 1999

James Casabere – Blue House on Water #2, 2018

Sasha Rudensky – Schoolhouse, Serpuxov, Russia, 2005

Tim Davis – Pallettes, 2019

With their recent ruling on trans women, World Rugby finally gave women's rugby a lifeline. And the Rugby Football Union, England's governing body, have now taken it away again:

Transgender women will still be allowed to play women’s rugby at all non-international levels of the game in England for the foreseeable future, the Guardian can reveal, after the Rugby Football Union decided that more evidence was needed before implementing any ban.

The RFU’s position is sharply at odds with World Rugby, which last week ruled that trans women could no longer play international women’s rugby after a major review of the latest science concluded that the risk of “significant injury” was “too great”.

World Rugby’s new transgender guidelines do, however, allow national unions to exercise “flexibility” in determining their transgender rules. The RFU believes that more work is needed to assess the science, as well as investigating whether there are safe ways to allow trans women to keep playing the sport they love, rather than ban them from the domestic game. This position, it is understood, is supported by a number of other countries, including the US and Canada.

They're not being banned from the domestic game though. They can still play men's rugby. But playing women's rugby is of course much more fun, because trans women tend to be bigger and stronger than the women, so they get all the exhilaration without any of the nasty business of being regularly floored by aggressive and potentially dangerous tackles. They get to dish it out, but don't have to take it. 

The RFU’s decision was greeted with disappointment by the women’s rights group Fair Play for Women. “Everyone knows that in a rough sport like rugby it is dangerous for males to play against females,” said the campaigning group’s Nicola Williams. “And if it’s not safe, it can never be fair either. The science is clear. Growing up male will give transgender athletes a lifelong edge that simply cannot be fully reversed by a period of testosterone suppression.

“Sport must be inclusive of everyone, but the sports categories can’t be. The category for the female sex was invented so women and girls could be included in sport. World Rugby has put the safety of its professional female players first. If the RFU don’t do the same then thousands of amateur players will be left asking why they don’t deserve the same protections.”

Indeed. It's a cowardly response from the RFU, hiding behind this "more evidence is needed" nonsense. We'll just wait for a few serious life-changing injuries, and then if the  clamour's loud enough, maybe we'll do something.

93200d img-responsive” src=”http://mickhartley.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/mt_imported_image_1758338772.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”IMG_5539s” />

What was that old Leonard Cohen lyric?

Like a bird on the pole,
like a drunk falling down in a hole,
I have tried in my way to be free.

Like a bike on the path,
like a poet who needs a good bath,
I have saved all my ribbons for thee.

They don't write songs like that any more.

ctor of Human Rights Watch, called the failed attempt “a stunning rebuke to Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman”. US intelligence agencies have said that the crown prince, known as MBS, was responsible for Khashoggi’s murder.

MBS is also responsible for Saudi Arabia’s decision to enter the grinding war in Yemen.

“Only country not elected, shunned by a majority of the UN,” Mr Stagno wrote. “The kingdom reaped what it deserves for its serious violations of human rights and war crimes abroad.”

Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, which was founded by Khashoggi, said that Saudi Arabia had become a global pariah.

China was elected with 139 votes, a fall from the 180 it received the last time it stood in 2016. “Shows more states are disturbed by China’s abysmal rights record,” tweeted Louis Charbonneau, the UN director at Human Rights Watch.

Of course Saudi Arabia doesn't deserve a place on the UN human rights council, but China deserves it even less. It seems that the presence of a big name – Jamal Khashoggi – counts for more than the million Uighurs in the camps, or the Tibetans and Mongolians seeing their cultures being squeezed to death by the Han embrace, or the Hong Kong repression, or the threats to Taiwan…